Lanzan Hunters

This is the second day in a row where I woke up on my own automagically.  I find it more than a little spooky, but it furthers my general theory that my body seems to want roughly six hours of sleep.  Going over causes me to get completely groggy, and going under the same result.  This morning I sat up in bed, and had roughly five minutes until the alarm, so I just walked over to the other side of the room and shut it off.  Essentially this is my failsafe to make sure I get up… otherwise I would likely just turn the stupid thing off or hit snooze all the time.

Lanzan Hunters

Yesterday morning after the tips I had received I accepted the Guardian guild quest to close 100 experience bearing Rifts.  I had all intent of working on this when I got home.  Instead I logged in and a guild member, Tibuant asked if I could give him a boost into the Storm Legion content.  Essentially his account was hacked ages ago, and the hackers got it banned.  He went through the long and drawn out process of getting the account back and getting it unbanned.  Upon playing it he realized that they had deleted his cleric character, so he had to get that restored as well.

When they restored the character however they kind of just dumped some miscellaneous gear on him, which was not that amazing for leveling.  So I said sure… I can always use some time to farm more Lanzan as I like to keep a stock of 24 slot bags in the guild vault for various characters.  So I told him to meet me in Iron Pine Peaks, where we both took the port to Cape Jule.  We wandered from that Porticulum to Tulan and let him get that one… then finally on to our destination.

Tarne’s Perch is in the North Central area of the Cape Jule map and is pictured in the above screenshot.  So far this is the best place I have found for grinding out Lanzan cloth.  The area is loaded with Storm Legion troopers of various kinds, and each of them can drop between 2 and 4 Lanzan a piece.  The only negative is that it feels like roughly 1 in 3 troopers actually DOES drop the cloth.  So needless to say it involves a lot of slaughter.  They are spaced out far enough apart that it does not make the area an ideal AOE farm spot… but then again I have yet to find one of those.

Essentially by the time you work your way to the top… you can jump down to the bottom and the path will be fully respawned.  We did a few loops with Tib and I before I needed to afk for a bit and eat dinner.  When I returned Rae joined us, and the three of us wrecked the place several more times.  All in all we spent about an hour and a half farming.  I managed to get roughly 110 bolts of Lanzan in that time and crafted another 8 bags for the guild vault.  Additionally Tib managed to get from 48 to 50 and we were able to outfit him in some proper starting Storm Legion gear in the process.

Rift Wrecking

Once we had dinged Tib, I spent a little time crafting him a set of level 50 gear… or at least the pieces I could actually make.  Eventually I swapped over to Belglaive with the intent of closing some rifts to help push us over the guild quest of 100 total.  By this time a mixture of guildies had managed to knock out roughly 50 of the 100 rifts.  Over mumble I mentioned what I was doing.. and before long we had a long list of people aiding in the cause.  We mentored down to 20 and took to Freemarch, thinking it was easiest to move between tears in that zone and there was always a higher likelihood of a zone invasion.

Fynralyl and Psynister made it back safely from their trip, and even after driving for either hours… they were on and willing to help out the cause.  Longtime Stalwarts Atonal and Tibuant also chimed in pretty much ready to wreck anything.  So we wandered around the zone wrecking shit together.  I would set a way point and we would all barrel towards it.  Earlier in the evening Vox Populi…  which is neither original nor after Bioshock Infinite really a faction I would aspire to be as a guild… was roaming around the zone opening Fire rifts and abandoning them if they were not the special Invasive Species Defiance crossover.  As a result much of the evening was simply running around cleaning up their Fire rifts.

Additionally when we found an unopened planar tear, we started letting Tib open them since he had the Fire Lure.  I figured we might as well maximize our potential for getting people Hellbug mounts.  Unfortunately while we closed several… and pretty much everyone completed the Ark Hunter title achievement..  we only managed to get a couple of the Red pets to drop.  About halfway through the grind a Water invasion started up, and the above image is of us taking down the final boss.  Pretty much during the course of the evening every single member of the group managed to get a ding.

Twisted Artifacts

That is one of my favorite things about mentoring in Rift…  they have managed to make it worth while to both the person being mentored… and the mentor themselves.  Knowing everyone is going to get something from the activity really reinforces the benefit of dropping your level and running around en-mass, and then this also helps your lower level characters catch up.  By the time we had reached 87 rifts closed… we were all dragging a bit.  I was starting to do my sleepy talk thing where I jumble the words.  Additionally Fyn had driven eight hours that day and was just about beat.  We set our sights on hitting 90 and then calling it.

At that point I logged to go for my evening walk.  By the time I got back, I decided to go upstairs to cool off.  When I logged in they had finished out the last 10 rifts and were needing the quest turned in and the next one selected.  I grabbed the collect 100 artifacts quest, turned on Quantum Sight and decided to make a few looks of Stonefield.  I was online another thirty minutes or so, and in that time we had managed to collect roughly 50 artifacts.  When I logged in this morning, someone had stayed up and finished off the quest. 

Now unfortunately we have the win 20 Black Garden and 20 Codex quest… and I really do not see us completing that before the reset tomorrow.  Delevax was a juggernaut in grinding out the other one… but as a rule we are just not PVPers.  When I turned in the artifacts quest this morning it dinged the guild level 4, so I think that is pretty damned good for us only starting this branch of Stalwart last Thursday.  I did a count last night and we are a little over 20 actual people in the guild.  There are a few more people that I know will be joining us… but it feels awesome that everyone has gathered up so quickly.

Wrapping Up

I need to be wrapping this up.  Today is trash day, so I need to gather that, pack up the laptop and get on the road.  Last night was a complete blast and I hope we can pull that sort of thing together on a regular basis.  Hopefully everyone enjoyed themselves as well, and based on the regular dings it seemed like everyone got benefit from it as well.  Additionally this last ding allowed us to purchase the ever nifty Cache Finder perk… that gives you bonus dungeon and rift currency.  Anyways… I hope you all have a great Tuesday and a great rest of the week.