The Tales of Galtero Ironhand - 2-23-2011
When we last left our paladin, he finished the Depths instances for House Deneith and got hold of a new adamantine shield, though he ended up dying several times through the final two instances, with one infamous death being to a goddamned wraith.
I had used up pretty much my entire supply of healing potions through the run, so I had to buy more. After dumping the Traveler-related new items that were given to me as well as the envelope (since I wasn't interested in another egg hunt like my other characters), I got to work in trading in all the shit that I'd gotten off my various quests, and ended up getting myself several lesser undead bane weapons, including a crossbow and a mace. And this led me to Problem Number One: I didn't have enough fucking bag space for everything. After sticking what I could into my bank (it was getting rather full at this point). I wanted to sell off some scrolls that I couldn't use. Unfortunately, as the server was busy as shit going through a major change, my selling-off wasn't working. I later found out that I did indeed sell off my stuff, but it was being slug-slow throughout the entire thing. Nice.
So after going through that little piece of hell, we finished our trading, and ended up getting a very nice Wand of Cure Moderate Wounds and 3 Cryptmoss poultices (basically herbalistic versions of Cure Moderate Wounds potions) that ended up going in my item bar, I ended up heading toward Jasper Cruikshank to take his quest, which I had previously done as Isariona (my new two-handed paladin on Cannith), It involves fighting a lot of Hobgoblins, Ogres, Black Wolves and Bugbears, plus several Hellhounds. I hit upon the idea of going through the instance with a hireling after my runthrough of the Depths instances with Isariona, where I ended up hiring Maloren, a level 4 Cleric hireling you can enlist at the Marketplace, who ended up seeing my lady paladin through battles that killed me on my runthrough with Galtero and left Arlonan half-dead. I even got through the Landslide fight with little problem because of him. Since I would need to kill these bastards quickly in order to avoid getting swamped, I switched to the Greataxe.
Archer Point Defense is one of those instances that it is inadvisable to attempt without a party. In addition to the aforementioned mobs that you have to fight, you also have a time limit in which to kill 45 enemies and the Hobgoblin Chief before they can regroup, and if you've allowed them to regroup, the mission is over. Not only that, but if you should die at any point in the instance, you can kiss your chances of going through the rest of the instance successfully goodbye. Why? Because every second you spend away from the instance (like, say, recharging your HP and your MP and repairing your gear at the tavern) is another second lost on the mission, and unless you have some generous people at the tavern willing to refill your HP, it could easily take several minutes before you're back into the action and you won't be able to complete the rest of the instance in time, and you'll have to do the whole goddamned instance ALL OVER AGAIN. I only had to redo the instance once with Isariona after getting slaughtered on my first run, but with Galtero, I had to redo the instance TWICE, the second time because I had apparently forgotten where the goddamned Chief was so Maloren and I could finish the instance.
On my last run through Archer Point, I made pretty good time until Maloren went down in the middle of the battle (and it is NEVER a good thing when the cleric goes down in a heated battle) and I got damned close to going down again myself. I ended up using both my Lay On Hands to survive the battle, because I was DAMNED if I was going to have a repeat of my last two failures on this quest. I raced back to the shrines that we ended up clearing the path to first with Maloren's Soulstone and ended up using a Resurrection shrine for the first time in order to bring him back. After resting up, we continued on. We ended up killing both Ogre Shamans (only one of them, near the Hobgoblin Chief, counts for purposes of objective completion), and after a bit of looking, we found and took out the Hobgoblin Chief and his crew with less than two minutes to spare. FINALLY.
We ended up getting some nice armor out of the instance, similar to the stuff that Arlonan wears and also quite paladin-ish, and so we said goodbye to the Paladin armor and sold off the other stuff I didn't need. With that done, I looked through Free Quests on the DDO Wiki and saw that there were two more fifth-level quests in the House Kundarak enclave that I could take on at the Ever Full Flagon, so to the enclave I went. I soon found out that there were three or four quests that I could take on in that tavern (one of them was sixth level, which I wasn't going to fuck with until later). I ended up taking the one nearest to me, the Chamber of Insanity, which had me battling the undead again, which as a paladin was right up my alley. After hiring on Maloren for another time (since I wasn't really crazy about going for a true solo of this instance) I started the quest.
As it turned out upon starting this particular instance, I had to fight wraiths again. Four boss-level wraiths. As I may have mentioned in my last entry, I despise wraiths. Boss-level wraiths are always a bitch to fight, but here, they came with an extra dose of Fuck You. You see, the chamber that each one of them are in requires a lever to be thrown before the boss can appear. Throwing the lever also floods the room with Strength-sapping spider poison, which can play utter havoc with your ability to actually fight the fucker, especially when combined with a wraith's regular incorporeality canceling out virtually every other hit I made. Each wraith boss drains a different attribute (Constitution for the Shade of Agony, Intelligence for Shade of Hatred, Strength for Shade of Despair and Wisdom for Shade of Madness). Maloren did aid me with his Nimbus of Light spell (which I've taken to calling the Hikari Ni Nare after Gao Gai Gar because when an enemy is killed with it, it...well..."turns into light."). I also had to fight two Human Necromancers, as well as Wights, Wight Priests and Armored Wights. There were also Zombies which were promptly frozen into place by my Turn Undead, allowing me to lay the smackdown with ease.
After taking down all the wraiths, a new area opened. We went inside to be faced with three Arcane Skeletons and a brand new enemy -- a Spectre boss called the Soulless One. If you thought Wraiths were bad news, Spectres have them beat hands down. In addition to doing pretty much everything a wraith can do, it can also inflict negative levels on you, which severely weakens you, and can kill you if you rack up too many during the fight, which happened to me in my first major battle with him. Upon returning to the instance after healing up, I found out that Maloren was no longer with me (either his contract expired or he just wasn't up to fighting the bastard another time), so I was on my own. Fortunately, the Soulless One was the only bastard remaining to fight, and he was down to roughly half his HP. During round two, I used the greataxe and my mace of undead bane on him, and even got off a Smite Evil, but ended up having to burn through both of my Lay On Hands and a good number of charges of my Wand of Cure Moderate before I finally brought him down. I ended up getting nothing but a dagger of potency (which mainly ups the damage of first-level spells, which I had no use for because I am a frigging PALADIN).
So after that little nightmare, I repaired my gear and sold off the dagger as well as the other stuff I got from the instances. I got a nice new +2 shield which was a nice round shield. Since we still had a good amount of stuff we didn't need, I dug all the excess items (pretty much everything except the Dragonshard fragments, Lhorne's Blade and the Ember Longsword) out of my bank and sold them off. which got me up to 700s in platinum. I then went to the auctions and got myself a new +2 longsword and a +2 suit of plate armor, which I ended up having to get an armor appearance kit for in the DDO store using the Turbine Points I had gotten through my regular questing and favor points, since I wasn't at all satisfied with how it looked on my paladin. After selling off the rest of my stuff, I logged off for the day.
Next time, I'm going to tackle the Lair of Summoning, and judging from the preview on the DDO wiki, I'm going to need the Ember Longsword again, because there's going to be some more trolls to fight. I also plan on getting a party for the party quests that I missed, such as Kobold Assault, the Irestone Inlet, and especially the two party quests of the Marketplace, one of which I tried soloing earlier with little success at all. After that, if I'm still short of the XP needed to reach level 5, I will start redoing instances on Hard mode in order to get the XP I need, as well as running through the Cerulean Hills and the Waterworks for some more orc, kobold and troglodyte slaying.
I had used up pretty much my entire supply of healing potions through the run, so I had to buy more. After dumping the Traveler-related new items that were given to me as well as the envelope (since I wasn't interested in another egg hunt like my other characters), I got to work in trading in all the shit that I'd gotten off my various quests, and ended up getting myself several lesser undead bane weapons, including a crossbow and a mace. And this led me to Problem Number One: I didn't have enough fucking bag space for everything. After sticking what I could into my bank (it was getting rather full at this point). I wanted to sell off some scrolls that I couldn't use. Unfortunately, as the server was busy as shit going through a major change, my selling-off wasn't working. I later found out that I did indeed sell off my stuff, but it was being slug-slow throughout the entire thing. Nice.
So after going through that little piece of hell, we finished our trading, and ended up getting a very nice Wand of Cure Moderate Wounds and 3 Cryptmoss poultices (basically herbalistic versions of Cure Moderate Wounds potions) that ended up going in my item bar, I ended up heading toward Jasper Cruikshank to take his quest, which I had previously done as Isariona (my new two-handed paladin on Cannith), It involves fighting a lot of Hobgoblins, Ogres, Black Wolves and Bugbears, plus several Hellhounds. I hit upon the idea of going through the instance with a hireling after my runthrough of the Depths instances with Isariona, where I ended up hiring Maloren, a level 4 Cleric hireling you can enlist at the Marketplace, who ended up seeing my lady paladin through battles that killed me on my runthrough with Galtero and left Arlonan half-dead. I even got through the Landslide fight with little problem because of him. Since I would need to kill these bastards quickly in order to avoid getting swamped, I switched to the Greataxe.
Archer Point Defense is one of those instances that it is inadvisable to attempt without a party. In addition to the aforementioned mobs that you have to fight, you also have a time limit in which to kill 45 enemies and the Hobgoblin Chief before they can regroup, and if you've allowed them to regroup, the mission is over. Not only that, but if you should die at any point in the instance, you can kiss your chances of going through the rest of the instance successfully goodbye. Why? Because every second you spend away from the instance (like, say, recharging your HP and your MP and repairing your gear at the tavern) is another second lost on the mission, and unless you have some generous people at the tavern willing to refill your HP, it could easily take several minutes before you're back into the action and you won't be able to complete the rest of the instance in time, and you'll have to do the whole goddamned instance ALL OVER AGAIN. I only had to redo the instance once with Isariona after getting slaughtered on my first run, but with Galtero, I had to redo the instance TWICE, the second time because I had apparently forgotten where the goddamned Chief was so Maloren and I could finish the instance.
On my last run through Archer Point, I made pretty good time until Maloren went down in the middle of the battle (and it is NEVER a good thing when the cleric goes down in a heated battle) and I got damned close to going down again myself. I ended up using both my Lay On Hands to survive the battle, because I was DAMNED if I was going to have a repeat of my last two failures on this quest. I raced back to the shrines that we ended up clearing the path to first with Maloren's Soulstone and ended up using a Resurrection shrine for the first time in order to bring him back. After resting up, we continued on. We ended up killing both Ogre Shamans (only one of them, near the Hobgoblin Chief, counts for purposes of objective completion), and after a bit of looking, we found and took out the Hobgoblin Chief and his crew with less than two minutes to spare. FINALLY.
We ended up getting some nice armor out of the instance, similar to the stuff that Arlonan wears and also quite paladin-ish, and so we said goodbye to the Paladin armor and sold off the other stuff I didn't need. With that done, I looked through Free Quests on the DDO Wiki and saw that there were two more fifth-level quests in the House Kundarak enclave that I could take on at the Ever Full Flagon, so to the enclave I went. I soon found out that there were three or four quests that I could take on in that tavern (one of them was sixth level, which I wasn't going to fuck with until later). I ended up taking the one nearest to me, the Chamber of Insanity, which had me battling the undead again, which as a paladin was right up my alley. After hiring on Maloren for another time (since I wasn't really crazy about going for a true solo of this instance) I started the quest.
As it turned out upon starting this particular instance, I had to fight wraiths again. Four boss-level wraiths. As I may have mentioned in my last entry, I despise wraiths. Boss-level wraiths are always a bitch to fight, but here, they came with an extra dose of Fuck You. You see, the chamber that each one of them are in requires a lever to be thrown before the boss can appear. Throwing the lever also floods the room with Strength-sapping spider poison, which can play utter havoc with your ability to actually fight the fucker, especially when combined with a wraith's regular incorporeality canceling out virtually every other hit I made. Each wraith boss drains a different attribute (Constitution for the Shade of Agony, Intelligence for Shade of Hatred, Strength for Shade of Despair and Wisdom for Shade of Madness). Maloren did aid me with his Nimbus of Light spell (which I've taken to calling the Hikari Ni Nare after Gao Gai Gar because when an enemy is killed with it, it...well..."turns into light."). I also had to fight two Human Necromancers, as well as Wights, Wight Priests and Armored Wights. There were also Zombies which were promptly frozen into place by my Turn Undead, allowing me to lay the smackdown with ease.
After taking down all the wraiths, a new area opened. We went inside to be faced with three Arcane Skeletons and a brand new enemy -- a Spectre boss called the Soulless One. If you thought Wraiths were bad news, Spectres have them beat hands down. In addition to doing pretty much everything a wraith can do, it can also inflict negative levels on you, which severely weakens you, and can kill you if you rack up too many during the fight, which happened to me in my first major battle with him. Upon returning to the instance after healing up, I found out that Maloren was no longer with me (either his contract expired or he just wasn't up to fighting the bastard another time), so I was on my own. Fortunately, the Soulless One was the only bastard remaining to fight, and he was down to roughly half his HP. During round two, I used the greataxe and my mace of undead bane on him, and even got off a Smite Evil, but ended up having to burn through both of my Lay On Hands and a good number of charges of my Wand of Cure Moderate before I finally brought him down. I ended up getting nothing but a dagger of potency (which mainly ups the damage of first-level spells, which I had no use for because I am a frigging PALADIN).
So after that little nightmare, I repaired my gear and sold off the dagger as well as the other stuff I got from the instances. I got a nice new +2 shield which was a nice round shield. Since we still had a good amount of stuff we didn't need, I dug all the excess items (pretty much everything except the Dragonshard fragments, Lhorne's Blade and the Ember Longsword) out of my bank and sold them off. which got me up to 700s in platinum. I then went to the auctions and got myself a new +2 longsword and a +2 suit of plate armor, which I ended up having to get an armor appearance kit for in the DDO store using the Turbine Points I had gotten through my regular questing and favor points, since I wasn't at all satisfied with how it looked on my paladin. After selling off the rest of my stuff, I logged off for the day.
Next time, I'm going to tackle the Lair of Summoning, and judging from the preview on the DDO wiki, I'm going to need the Ember Longsword again, because there's going to be some more trolls to fight. I also plan on getting a party for the party quests that I missed, such as Kobold Assault, the Irestone Inlet, and especially the two party quests of the Marketplace, one of which I tried soloing earlier with little success at all. After that, if I'm still short of the XP needed to reach level 5, I will start redoing instances on Hard mode in order to get the XP I need, as well as running through the Cerulean Hills and the Waterworks for some more orc, kobold and troglodyte slaying.