Lair of the Beast

Mornings are starting to become an exercise in cat juggling.  We have one cat that is significantly older than the others, and has special dietary needs.  As a result we have been trying to get her locked into the bathroom with us as we shower so we can feed her a can of special food.  The problem is… the other cats and her alike have now come to expect this.  So before I do anything in the morning… I have to shut her in the bathroom… go into the kitchen and set out some wet food for the other two cats… then return to feed her.  Hungry cats are very good at dive bombing your legs… making it extremely hard to walk when already groggy.

Bagmaker in Chief

Over the last few weeks I have had quite a few friends become active over in Rift.  Other than answering questions and getting them into the guild I am in..  I have been trying to provide for their gear and equipment needs as well.  As a result I had set aside yesterday evening to try and farm up enough Lanzan cloth to make a set of 24 slot bags for Rylacus (or Rylakus as he had to go with in game…  apparently the other name has become popular).  It seems like I go through cloth like water, and the 14 bolts requirement is pretty hefty to be able to make a single bag.

I expected to be farming most of the night to make his set.  Funny thing is… apparently Rift has done the same thing that WoW did.  They have made it so that cloth drops so much faster when you are farming it on an outfitter than when you are on anyone else.  The only negative is that this meant I needed to do the farming on Belgrave my bag maker.  Since the release of Storm Legion, I made one small push to level him… ran into issues chewing through the mob hitpoint pools and have not really tried since.  As a result his specs were somewhat in a state of disarray.

I quickly pulled together a very rudimentary Ranger/Marksman spec and proceeded to start playing again like a WoW hunter.  Luckily this seemed to work better than the last time I tried it, and I could shred mobs and manage to keep my pet up at the same time.  Sure enough the drop rates were considerably better than when I had tried this little exercise on my warrior.  In roughly an hour and a half I accumulated enough cloth to make a full set of 4 bags.  Additionally I crafted Ry a set of 19ish leather gear for him to grow into, though since I taught him how to play the “scratchers” game he has managed to stay fairly well outfitted in planar goods.

I still want to find a time when both Rylacus and Thalen can be on, and anyone else we can manage to gather up.  Would be fun to run them through a couple of dungeons… even though Thalen is now over 50 at this point and Ry is not even 20.  I guess this is the reason why the mentoring system is in.  I think it will be interesting when Ry sees Rift dungeons.  So far it has been a very eye opening experience for him.  He has until now been pretty much a wow loyalist, other than a jaunt into SWTOR.  Now he finally gets why I say that Rift is hands down the best of the wow-like games.

The Keymaster

After gathering up the materials and crafting some bags, I pinged my friends over IM and decided that we would make another push and finishing the Gatekeeper requirements for Rae.  Once again I was playing the part of Shinobi Belghast, and after checking her achievements… we determined that the only thing she was still missing was the achievement for Elite Hell Eternal.  This is one that we specifically avoided the night before last, because of the time commitment it took previously.  When we were running elites regularly, Hell Eternal had several bugged fights and usually took the longest to get through.

Fortunately all of the buggy moments have been ironed out and the experience was extremely smooth start to finish.  I really love the Hell series of dungeons and the story they tell.  I have always been partial to the writings of Clive Barker… and the story of Theodore Wicker definitely parallels some of these stories.  I could see this tale fitting as a footnote in the “Great and Secret Show”/”Everville” series.  Not to mention that the hell skinned weapons are hands down my favorite in the game… so I am always game to collect more of those skins.

I have been enjoying the Shinobi skin immensely.  There is just something fundamentally wrong with running around in a ninja costume with a rocket launcher strapped to your back.  It is this great juxtaposition, and pretty much represents what happens when I attempt to play a stealth class.  I attempt to sneak around and ultimately end up just pummeling the opposition with superior force.  There is something so satisfying about watching a rocket fly off towards the target, and this is all the more satisfying seeing a ninja fire it.

We wrapped up the dungeon rather quickly, and Rae was off to her date with the Gatekeeper.  We had set her up for the harsh reality that we experienced when each of us did the trial.  At that point, hands down the hardest was the dps encounter… and of the five of us… only 2 of us even attempted the fight.  Either they have nerfed the encounter a bit, or Rae is just fundamentally better than we were.  It took me 20-30 tries to get through the encounter, and Waren two days of attempts…  last night Rae managed to beat the Gatekeeper on DPS mode in less than 20 minutes.

Lair of the Beast

Instead of starting in on the nightmares last night we decided to take an alternate path.  In our absence from being active in the game, Funcom had introduced quests for all the various monster lairs.  So we made our way to what we perceived as the “starter lair” in Kingsmouth.  Upon entering the burnt out region on the map, we were greated with a brand new visual effect announcing the lair.  The edges of the screen became roped in the veiny filth graphic and a title appeared in the center of the screen announcing the lair name (which I cannot for the life of me remember).

The lairs themselves are just as difficult as before.  We started off working on them with just 3 players… 1 tank, 1 healer and me as the single dps.  We were able to chew through the equivalent of “trash” but when we attempted to fight a Draugr they tended to rip us a new one.  Now this might have been that we were not quite used to the various mechanics to avoid… but in any case as we got our 4th and 5th player the experience became much more enjoyable.  Essentially the first two lair quests that we did were the standard kill and collect type fair, but it gave us a sense of purpose as we wandered around the dangerous area.

It was getting late when we wrapped up the first two quests… and picked up phase 2 of one of the quests and unlocked a harder one.  Since we were standing near the exit to the area… and based on the late hour… we decided to tackle the other two missions at a later date.  Previously when we had made an attempt at the various summoned lair bosses, the drop rates were abysmal.  They seem to have improved this, as we were getting a summon boss part on almost every other kill.  We designated one player to collect the bits, and he die an amazing impression of a pack mule throughout the night.

We seem to have slightly misunderstood the goals however, as we were thinking we needed to get all the parts of a specific kind of piece… aka Beta, Theta, Xi.  But it turns out that each monster is crafted out of multiple named pieces… and in any given lair there are 3 different monsters to summon.  We were feeling rather disheartened as we had 3 of one type, 2 of another, and the rest were singletons.  However I would be wiling to bet that after last nights journey, we should be able to summon at least one complete monster.  Hopefully we can get together tonight and give it a shot.

Wrapping Up

In the time off from The Secret World, it seems as though they have made a not insignificant number of changes to the game to tweak the abilities and the overall balance.  As a result I think we are all really enjoying the game more than we did before.  Each player has finally found a spec that they seem to enjoy, and of the five of us… only Ash has yet to completely abandon the concept of playing anything melee.  That is still a major shortcoming of the game to me, the way it unfairly punishes players for  attempting to melee.  I gave up long ago and switched to Shotgun/Pistol for instances over my beloved Shotgun/Blades.

If you were like us and had not seriously done much group content since early in the game.  You definitely owe it to yourself to give the elite, nightmare and lair content another look.  Our little group has been having a blast, and for the most part the game feels very fresh.  I find myself looking forward to getting into group content each night, and that has been a feeling that has been missing for a few months.  Anyways… the time is ticking on and I need to be really wrapping up instead of rambling more.  I hope you all have a great day and relight whatever spark has been dimming for yourself.