The event, which involves flying from the Luminaire system to various points around New Eden, has had its ups and downs. A few years back I referred to it as the great shuttle abandonment event because capsuleers decided that the most efficient way to run the race was to just go one way in a cheap shuttle, jump out, then self-destruct their capsule.
One page of many shuttles
The “racing” aspect of the event was always a bit dubious. Putting a timer on people makes them anxious and a one way race inevitably means you’re out in the sticks and need to get back home. There is no hearthstone in EVE Online… well, there are jump clones, but there is a 19 hour cool down on that even at max skills.
This year there are some fresh destinations. With the March update on Tuesday several new monuments were introduced into New Eden. This year CCP wants to send you off to see some of these new sights, as well as some older landmarks.
To get started you need to fly to the Luminaire system in Gallente space, then warp to the Federation Grand Prix start line beacon. Once you land there you will claim your first prize point and get your first destination on the tour. For me it was the Project Discovery Phase Two monument in Pakhshi, just a few gates away.
The Project Discovery Phase Two monument
Of course, my first question on arriving there was “Who puts advertisements on a monument?” Must have been a Caldari contractor.
In the heat of the moment
Overall the tour isn’t bad, though I do have a few nits to pick.
First, the destination systems are not exactly called out in bold, flashing text. It isn’t so bad when the system name is in the name of the monument, but for other… or the occasional waypoint destination… you have to look in The Agency to get the system name.
I underlined the destination location in red
Speaking of Molea, there isn’t a beacon for the memorial that I can see. I happened to have bookmarked the location in the past, so I was able to zip in and out, but a new player might be at a loss.
And then there are the usual “I hope your overview is setup correctly” and waiting for somebody to complain about one of the dangerous locations being camped by people harvesting kill mails. Welcome to New Eden.
After you run through the basic, untimed tour of New Eden, you can go back and do time trials for more prizes. The details about that are in a forum thread.
There are, of course, a set of seven daily login rewards to collect over the next twelve days.
Login Rewards Again
There are the familiar SKINs and skill points and a couple of boosters that increase your ship velocity or warp speed, all divided into alpha and omega. But the day one reward for everybody is an Expert Systems pack, CCP’s latest scheme to help new players that also came in with the Tuesday update, that allows players to fly interceptors, which are nice rides if you’re doing the event. I dragged out an alt on my main account that I created back in 2008… I think I ran him through some then new iteration of the new player experience and then never used him again… to see how the whole thing worked with a drastically under-skilled character.
Redeemed
It is only a four day boost I guess, not the seven day kind you have to pay for, as it expires on the 15th. But it did appear to give my ancient untrained alt the ability to fly an interceptor hull.
The skills added
Of course, he cannot fit much on the hull, being from 2008 when CCP gave you very little in the way of skills… I am surprised he has Caldari Frigate IV… but he can warp fast I guess.
Anyway, it worked. He has the skills for a bit. I hope somebody will find that useful.
I did also try it on an alpha clone character and they too got the skills, though it does warn you when you mouse over them that you need to upgrade to omega in order to train those skills permanently.
CCP has also put the popular Federation Police SKINs back in the New Eden store for the event, including some for new hulls.
Won’t be buying many with my 1 PLEX
So off you go. There are prizes to be claimed, rewards at login, and some SKINs to buy. Since the main event is a loop now, there should be far fewer abandoned shuttles along the way. Wrecks in low and null sec systems though… we’ll see.
One does not just walk into Uldaman… at least you don’t if you want to complete all the quests.
Uldaman seems to be to be clearly designed for multiple visits. It has a noticeable step in mob level/difficulty part way in, it has a side door like Gnomeregan, and, the clincher, you cannot actually wrap up the quests for the instance in one go. There is one that sends you there and, upon turning it in, sends you back again.
But first you have to get all the quests, and that too is not just a matter of “grab and go.” The project leading up to the weekend was to find and collect the quests we could. The wiki helps, of course. You can get a list of quests. But you still have to go out and do things as several of the quests have precursors.
So you start in Ironforge by picking up a couple. Then you fly off to Loch Modan to pick up and advance a couple. Then it is off to the Badlands, where there is no Alliance flight point, so you walk all the way.
Now entering the Badlands
The color palette changes from greens to oranges as you cross over into the zone. Even the map is in the right colors to depict the place.
Welcome to the Badlands
I didn’t have to go very far out of my way while doing some of the lead-in quests in order to fill out most of the map.
Probably the most burdensome quest on the list was Badlands Reagent Run. This starts in Thelsamar in Loch Modan and sends you off to the Badlands to procure a few items. The ten coyote teeth are easy. The drop rate isn’t high, but coyotes are practically the signature mob of the zone, so they are everywhere. Rock elemental shards are not too bad either. There are not a huge number of rock elementals, but the drop rate is very high, so you only need a few.
And then there are the buzzard gizzards. The drop rate is low and buzzards are few and far between in most of the zone. I was struggling on this stage until Ula mentioned that there was a place where they seemed to congregate. There was a bunch of them around what looked to be an abandoned orc structure.
Where the buzzard collect…
That done, it was time to trot back to Loch Modan again in order to turn that in and get the quest for the instance. So much running. Of course, some people had been saving their coppers for a mount.
Ula on her mechanochicken
Viniki is still about 20g shy of a mount as I write this.
Mechanostriders are not cheap
But after all that running about I had the six quests.
Ready for Uldaman
When I was done with that Moronae showed up and we shepherded him through that as well, guiding him to the buzzard spot and such before finally getting everybody together at the meeting stone. The lineup for the evening was:
Ula – level 42 gnome mage
Viniki – level 42 gnome warrior
Moronae – level 41 night elf druid
Skronk – level 41 dwarf priest
From there we headed to the front door where, as the title suggests, the whole adventure stirred up a lot of vague or half forgotten memories. Fortunately there was just enough of a tickle in the back of our collective brains to steer us in mostly the right direction without getting too lost.
As with a lot of the classic instances, there is a whole outer area with elite mobs and a couple of the quests get updated there, as well as mobs dropping items for another. We wandered around the outer area for a bit, then headed in where we faced Revelosh.
He went down pretty easily. After that there was a side are… we knew there was something significant about a side area… where we fought our way to Erik, Baleog, and Olaf, the lost vikings.
Not the last appearance these guys will make in WoW
There was a quest turn in there and we read a book and then I picked up an item from a chest, which seemed to be important.
From there we wandered further into the instance to the wide open area with the model city. Clearing that out we were left with an item that wanted the Staff of Prehistoria. None of us had that, but Skronk remembered that we had to assemble some pieces, and I had the pieces, so we were able to summon Ironaya.
Ironaya approaches
Ironaya is one of the more memorable bosses in the instance for me. Probably the only one I can recall clearly, but women wearing tall boots often have that effect on me. Memorable or not, she went down.
Ironaya done
From there it was a bit of a tour of the mini map as we ran along the edges of the instance to find the bosses. There was the Obsidian Sentinel, which we needed for a mage quest for Ula.
There he is
That was a fight we only remembered once it started. The sentinel starts spawning adds, getting smaller as he does. So we killed the adds then him, collecting Ula’s update.
Further along was Galgann Firehammer and his helpers.
Getting ready for Galgann
While there were three of them, we were able to knock them down with much drama.
Then we worked our way around to Grimlok. He has quite the array of wandering troggs before him and is in the end of the instance where the trash mobs start to scale up in levels a bit. We were a bit more careful with our pulls there, and manag
I sued to do pretty well with that. Grimlok himself is part of a foursome. The plan was to kill the caster, lest we find out that he was also a healer, then move on toe Grimlok. Ula would sheep the warrior and Moronae would pacify the pet basilisk. And, in the end, that worked out. We slew the caster quickly and moved on to Grimlok.
However, there came a point when the sheep popped and the basilisk broke out of his spell and the rest of the crew was trying to get that under control that I started feeling a little lonely out in front with Grimlok pounding on me.
Hanging on with Grimlok
I survived, though I had to use a potion, long enough for the DPS to get back on the big guy and burn him down. Then the warrior and the basilisk got their turns.
At that point, with some of the pre-instance quest work, we were starting to get to the end of our time. We started about midway into Sunday afternoon, but dinner time was approaching. We decided to go check out at least one more boss. We didn’t think we were up for Archaedas, but there were a couple other named mobs in the instance.
The first one we ended up at was Annora, who is the enchanting trainer in the instance. You cannot fight her. So we started working our way towards the Ancient Stone Keeper. And it is along the way that we had our one and only death.
While bosses did not seem to cause us much problem, there are a number of points in the instance where you end up fighting a sizable group of non-elite mobs, like pits full of scorpions.
Scorpion trap unleashed
We were able to handle most of them, but they were often harder work than some of the boss fights. Again, I think it is the missing DPS player slot in our group that makes these a bit of a challenge. Viniki’s taunt has a cool down and his one AOE in defense stance needs a lot of rage to use, so the mobs always get away from me. (I might just be a bad tank in this.) So the burden tends to fall on Ula to AOE these mobs, but she can quickly pull aggro on the lot of them and it becomes a race to save her.
One group of mobs around the Ancient Stone Keeper managed to win the race and Ula went down. But it was just that one fight.
She died up here, above the Ancient Stone Keeper
The Ancient Stone Keeper himself… well, he has a gimmick at least. We learned quickly to get out of the whirlwinds that appear around him. But with that bit of knowledge we were able to knock him down as well.
He ended up dropping a pair of gloves for me.
Stone Keeper Gloves
I am not sure that +10 spirit was the stat for which I would have wished. However, I was still wearing mail gloves, so the armor was a boost, and the defense and stamina stats were to my liking, so I took them.
And then it was time for a screen shot of the group.
Done with the Ancient Stone Keeper
Before we recalled, Skronk wanted to go track down a paladin’s corpse that was earlier in the dungeon, around the first troggs. It was something related to a quest. However, when we found him there wasn’t anything we could “do” with the paladin, so opted to recall back to Ironforge.
There, in turning in some of the quests, we got the update from one that sends us back for that paladin. So just one trip to Uldaman won’t do. Also, we have a lot of drops to get still. But at least we know where that pally is for next time.
Ula has put together another great video of our first Uldaman run.
She captured all of our boss fights very well. I especially like the sound effect when Ironaya runs up to Viniki at the start of the fight and punts him. Also, apparently there was a problem with Viniki’s animation for a while, so instead of the running animation, he was just walking very fast. I could not see this on my client, but it is visible at some points in the video. I caused great hilarity as I ran around.
There are also a couple of post-credit scenes, including one with the scorpions and another capturing Ula’s death at the Ancient Stone Keeper. She also captured a lot of the drops we got from bosses.
We will be making a return trip of course. We need to level up, if nothing else, before thinking beyond Uldaman.
Right now Viniki is close to 43, as is Ula I imagine. Skronk made it to 42 and Moronae is probably close there. Looking back on our group composition from our first victory over Archaedas, we were a group of five that were levels 43 and 44. We might still give Archaedas a try next time. That will further test the “bad then, better now” theory of our abilities I suppose.
Back when Pokemon Go first launched, two and a half years ago now, I thought there might be some advantage to my wife, my daughter, and myself all being on different teams. The game was new and raw and clearly was going to develop over time.
And, it was always possible that it might not stick with us. In fact my daughter, the Team Valor leg of our family team triad, stopped playing not too long after the game launched, never to return.
The surprise was more that my wife stuck with it. It has become something we do together and really the only video game my wife plays with any regularity.
But by the time I figured out that she was going to stick with it and that being on different teams wasn’t going to given much in the way of advantage, I was already far enough in that I did not want to wipe my account and start again from scratch.
We still played together, me on Team Mystic and her on Team Instinct, seeking out Team Valor gyms to take down. But then only one of us could take over and be in the newly conquered gym.
We tried fiddling with using each other to clear out a spot in gyms already on our teams. She would knock out a somebody in a Team Mystic gym so that there would be a spot for me. However, Niantic seemed to be wise to this idea and there was quickly a lockout timer that would keep you from joining gyms under attack.
Actually, that was probably just to keep people from piling right back in a gym as they were knocked out, but it prevented our scheme as well.
So on we went, playing together on two different teams.
And then Niantic finally announced a way to change teams. Back in February they posted that a new item would soon be available from the in-game store, the new Team Medallion.
Team Medallion close up
The Team Medallion was going to cost 1,000 coins and could only be used once every 365 days.
The time limit wasn’t a big deal, as I only wanted to change once so my wife and I could be on the same team. And the cost… well, as it happened I was closing in on that many coins as they announced it. There is a gym at our office campus that I get in almost daily, so I earn coins pretty regularly. I was saving up for the gift box with all the incubators they had at one point, but this was a bigger deal.
So I bought the token and did the big switch. Then I had to change my outfit, which was pretty blue, to something more in keeping with the new team. Team Instinct is all about the yellow.
On Team Instinct Now
Yes, Team Instinct has a bit of a reputation, to which I have alluded in the past.
General view of Team Instinct – July 2016
But that doesn’t matter so long as my wife and I can go drive around together now and take down gyms.
It did take me a few days to get used to not seeing the blue of Team Mystic as my colors… I tend to be very opportunistic about jumping into gyms that have a free spot… and my change clearly messed up the cycle of the gym at the office. There used to be a regular point in the day when Team Mystic would take over, but now I need to either kick them out or find my own time slot to jump in.
Other than that it has been the usual routine for Pokemon Go.
I did luck out recently though. Niantic released a new Pokemon, Smeargle, with a new catching mechanic. You have to use the new camera item… yeah, I needed something else taking up space in my bag… to take AR pictures with some of your current Pokemon. When you do that there is a small chance that Smeargle will photo bomb your picture.
Smeargle photobombing Allakhazam
When that happens Smeargle will show up around your area on the map and you can catch him.
The luck was that it happened for me on the third try.
My wife is still taking pictures of Pokemon everywhere, but no Smeargle so far. I cannot help her with that, even if we are on the same team.
