Blackrock Depths and Shadowforge City

Our last run into Blackrock Depths got us as far as the detention block and the Ring of Law.  For our second run we were once again headed to the detention block and the Ring of Law.  The detention block to catch Moronae up on the Mangi Bronzebeard quest line and to speak again with Marshal Windsor, and the Ring of Law because pretty much everything else we might want lay on the far side of it for now.

Blackrock Depths map – Most of the instance is past the Ring of Law

Our lineup for the run was:

• Viniki – level 55 gnome warrior
• Skronk – level 54 dwarf priest
• Ula – level 54 gnome mage
• Moronae – level 54 night elf druid

I did make one gear change on Viniki before the run.  My pally had gotten Uther’s Strength, a trinket that has a 2% chance to cast Holy Shield on the wearer when struck, so I sent that to Viniki and traded it out for the Diamond Flask to see if prevention would be better than a little healing.  Yes, the Diamond Flask is on the “best in slot” list for warrior tank trinkets, but the 6 minute cool down means I always hold back on using it, which means I never use it.

In a bit or warm up before hand with Moronae the new trinket seemed to proc all the time.  Once we got into the instance it didn’t proc for ages, leading me to wonder if there was some “do not proc in dungeons” flag set.  As time went on it did begin to proc though.  But I was worried for a bit.

In the instance we once again cleared a wide path through the main open area at the start, just in case Mashal Windsor wanted to get out of the place.

Open spaces

We had to get to him because one of the first drops we got was a crumpled note, which is the continuation of the quest line for him.

A crumpled note

That represents the optimism or daring or carelessness of the WoW devs back in the day.  The quest chain just drops, and you have to go in and get a drop to carry on.  I am sure the drop rate it cranked up to make sure people get it, but there is still the possibility people will miss it, or won’t click on the note to actually re-start the quest chain.

We fought our way up the short path on the east side of the detention block loop to Windsor.  He bade us carry on, but seemed content to hang around in a cell.  I would have left on the first rescue attempt.  Though, he might be sparing us the part of the standard escort quest where your target suddenly decides they cannot leave until they collect all their belongings from deep within the instance.

Marshal Windsor in his cell

That done, we turned towards the cave branch that led to the ring of law, where we quickly got ourselves in over our head.  We were taking one group when a pack of dogs that wanders up and down the cave showed up and joined the fight.  We basically got et’ by the dogs.

The dogs got us

First wipe, which meant a ghostly run back from Thorium Point.  On this run we figured we might as well try just jumping down into the lava rather than threading all the chains down to the platform that leads to the instance.  That seemed a slightly quicker route.

Once back and in the right cave again, we got back to business and finished off the remains of the groups that did us in.  At least we had thinned them out before wiping.

We reached the Ring of Law, but I wanted to carry on as there was another boss, Lord Roccor, down the cave a ways.  So we cleared our way towards him.  However, he nicely wanders up and down the cave, so he met us half way, meaning we didn’t have to clear everything.

Here he comes

His was a short sharp fight.  He dropped a shield, which I was hoping for, only to discover that my first glance assumption that it would be an upgrade was wrong.  He also dropped some Rockshard Pellets, ammunition for guns, which I claimed, being the only one who has a gun in the group.  Also, I was running low on ammo for pulls, so it was a timely drop.

We then turned back and made out way into the Ring of Law again.  Skronk had prepared us some nature resist potions in case we met up with Hedrum the spider, who wiped the floor with us last week.  We got in there and our first fights were not with spiders but with worms.  And they nearly did us in.  But we made it through and had a moment to eat and drink to be ready for the boss.

The worms down, the boss is coming

This time around we got the Eviscerator, a wild worgen.

His name is what he does

He wasn’t a walk over… he kept stunning me… but a single target boss is almost always an easier fight for us than a pack of non-elite mobs where aggro can get out of control.

With him down the out gate opened up and we were able to move deeper into the instance.  You go through the gallery of spectators and wind up at a T-intersection.

New areas to stalk

Once we cleared the group at the bottom, the patrol that goes through, and the groups on either side, we had a choice of directions.  But we could see Pyromancer Loregrain off to the left, so figured getting in another boss kill would be good.  Despite having to helpers, we managed to take his group down pretty quickly, which left us standing before the monument to Franclorn Forgewright.

There we were

The statue has a cog wheel, so you can click on it which puts up a quest completion dialog.  But in order to complete the quest you need Ironfel, and item that drops from Fineous Darkview, who is further on in the instance. (Location 9 on the map above.)  Otherwise this was a dead end, so we turned around and went the other way, only wandering straight into trouble a few times.

I did not see those fire elementals until I wandered into aggro range

This is where trying to follow the map gets a bit sketchy.  Blackrock Depths is very much a three dimensional dungeon with ramps up and down.  So we pushed on as best we could.  Clearing our way through an areas calle The Domicile we ended up getting what I predicted would be the best drop of the run, a Traveler’s Backpack.

16 slots, does not bind

Even with Ula able to make use 14 slot bags now, I was pretty happy to see this guy.  Bag space always was an issue for me in vanilla WoW and remains so in WoW Classic.  I know I still have a few of these still on alts because you could pass them along.  I was glad to win the roll for this item.

We carried on from there and came out in an area that was identified as Shadowforge City, which is above the boss Lord Incendius and in the vicinity of The Vault.

Gonna go down to Shadowforge City, where the dwarves are iron and the loot is pretty

The Vault was right there on our path, so we set about clearing mobs away, until we were left with just the boss and his dog, Warder Stilgiss and Verek.

A dwarf and his dog

We managed to take them pretty handily, at which point we were left with some options for the vault.  It seemed like we had collected enough relic coffer keys to unlock all the lock boxes and spawn the boss in there.  Or we could look at that covered portrait on the wall next to the entry into the room with the lock boxes.

We looked at the portrait.

The picture revealed

That spawned Dark Keeper Bethek and four elite guards behind us who walked up and beat the crap out of us.  We wiped without taking even one of them down.

Note to self: Do not look at the portrait

That meant another ghost run back from Thorium Point.

Once back in and up we decided to just give The Vault a wide berth and carry on past it.  We slipped past the vault door when Bethek and his crew were at the far end… they just march back and forth inside the vault… and skirted another group off the corner and through a passage into some more caves.

There we ran into Fineous Darkvire, just the dwarf we were looking for.  We had at him once we got him in the clear.

Fineous walked right into us

We managed to take him down without too much trouble… no adds or any mishaps.  He dropped the Senior Designer’s Pantaloons… so to speak, which Skronk took just based on the name.  He also dropped Ironfel, the item we needed for the Franclorn Forgewright quest.

At that point we had been at it for a while and my wife was cooking something that was making me very hungry just from the smell, so we decided this might be a good place to wrap things up.  We could just run back to the Franclorn Forgewright monument, finish that quest, and be done.

So we started running back, ran through the passage and straight into the group we had previously skirted.  Then, recoiling from them, we managed to setup too close to the door to the vault where Bethek and his crew came running out to give us another pounding.  Another wipe.

We ran back again, only this time we had to clear some respawns that had shown up back in the main area.  But there were not too many.  We were able to get past those, through the Ring of Law again, and down the path to Franclorn Forgewright’s statue to turn in the quest.

Quest done, key obtained

That gave us the Shadowforge Key, which gives us access to other paths through the instance.  That mission accomplished, we recalled back to Ironforge.  We will return again, as there is much left to do.

End of a Vision

I was shocked tonight to see the announcement that Brad McQuaid passed away.  I first saw the news from the Pantheon MMO account on Twitter and wondered if it was real, it seemed so out of the blue.

It is with deep regret we share that Brad McQuaid passed away last night. He will be deeply missed and forever remembered by gamers worldwide.

Thank you for bringing us together through your worlds. Rest in peace @Aradune.

VR offers our deepest condolences to Brad’s family.

But it appears to be true.  There are reactions all over the MMO space, including some words from the EverQuest team.

From the EverQuest Teams,

We are devastated to hear of the passing of Brad McQuaid and are eternally grateful for the EverQuest Universe he was instrumental in creating. His effect on all of us, the gaming industry overall, and fans of EverQuest and RPGs is immeasurable, and been life-changing for so many.

Continue your great quest, Aradune. May your next adventure be even more grand than this one.

I am kind of in shock.  I’ve been dismissive of his vision and pretty hard on how Vanguard turned out, but without him there would have been no EverQuest and the landscape of the MMORPG genre would have been very different.

Always the guy with the flaming sword

I played with him on TorilMUD back in the day.  It is hard to believe that was more than 20 years ago, that EverQuest is now past 20, and that he is gone.  He even dropped by here to comment a few times, always in his long winded way. He had an impact on the industry that will carry on.

Other reactions:

• Massively OP
• The MMOist
• PC Gamer
• MMORPG.com
• Reddit Thread

 

Two Hundred and Ten Million Skill Points

I thought I was done with these skill point progress posts.  I said at 200 million skill points that I probably had enough skills trained on my main and that I should start working up an alt because you become completely spoiled after a while by having every primary and secondary skill trained up to at least IV and usually V for any fit you want to fly.

And I stood by that for maybe seven months, turning off training on Wilhelm and running up skills on an alt I could leave behind in Delve for things like homeland defense fleets while otherwise deployed.

And then CCP added more ships to the game and my goal of being able to fly all the subcaps reared its head yet again and now I am another ten million skill points up on my main.

As I do with these posts, here is my skill point journey so far, broken out in ten million skill point increments.

• Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred million – rolled right past with the battle cruiser split
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
• One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
• One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
• One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
• One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
• One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016
• One Hundred and Seventy million – January 2017
• One Hundred and Eighty million – August 2017
• One Hundred and Ninety million – February 2018
• Two Hundred million – August 2018

And here is where I stand on skill point distribution.

Spaceship Cmd  70,558,541 (66 of 81)*
Gunnery        19,565,141 (36 of 52)*
Drones         17,036,708 (22 of 26)
Fleet Support  13,351,107 (14 of 15)*
Missiles       11,111,853 (22 of 26)
Navigation      9,660,314 (13 of 13)
Engineering     8,939,855 (15 of 15)*
Electronic Sys  8,159,689 (15 of 15)*
Scanning        7,168,000 (7 of 7)*
Armor           6,131,137 (13 of 13)
Shields         6,074,039 (12 of 13)
Science         5,714,282 (21 of 39)
Resc Processing 4,756,183 (22 of 37)
Subsystems      4,096,000 (16 of 16)
Trade           3,821,020 (10 of 14)
Neural Enhance  3,810,275 (7 of 8)
Targeting       3,207,765 (8 of 8)
Rigging         1,944,630 (10 of 10)*
Planet Mgmt     1,612,315 (5 of 5)
Structure Mgmt  1,446,824 (6 of 6)
Production      1,157,986 (5 of 12)
Social          1,130,040 (5 of 9)
Corp Mgmt          24,000 (2 of 5)

~Total 210,477,704

Items with an asterisk changed from last time I checked in.

My skills broken out by levels.  Lots of level V skills now.

 Level 1 - 1
 Level 2 - 3
 Level 3 - 38
 Level 4 - 90
 Level 5 - 224

As usual, Spaceship Command got the bulk of the last ten million points, rising by about 7.5 million points since last check in.  The Triglavian menace drove quite a bit of that.  I can now fly all of the Triglavian ships from Damavik to Leshak, including the Tech II models in the middle.

A Damavik and a Vedmak

I’ve only flow the Damavik in combat so far, back when DBRB had his Triglavian roam, but I have a Leshak sitting in my hangar for structure shoot ops.

I just make a “bzzzzzzz” sound in my head when I see a Leshak burning something down

I also made sure I could fly the Monitor… not that I plan to be an FC, but just as a completionist skill.  I want to be able to fly ALL the subcaps dammit!

Likewise, the coming of the Triglavians and their new weapon systems meant that gunnery also got a boost in skill points.  I didn’t go tech II across the board there, just where I thought it might be required.  Again, Leshak is ready on that front.

In the other areas… I guess I tuned up a few skills to level V.  The only other one I remember clearly is Armor Rigging V, which I trained out of my reserve of unspent skill points, when I realized that my Guardian would go slightly faster if I had that trained.  We were on an op with Asher and listing out all the skills that might make ships go faster for the armor Ishtar doctrine we were flying and that was the only one I did not have maxed out.  I will spend skill points freely for a bit more speed.

That all got me pretty far along for the ten million skill point milestone, but I was still short.  So I trained up one silly skill.  I trained up Capital Ships V.  So, when it comes to the age old question… or at least as old as I have been writing this series of post… of how far I am from flying a titan, the answer is now “under two hours.”

It only took me a dozen years to get from about 168 days to under two hours.  That is real government project level efficiency there.

And now I am back to training up that alt.  He is nearly done with tech II logi skills.

Quote of the Day – But Can You Do It Like This?

No one is attempting to do what we are doing, in the manner we are doing it, nor being as open about as we are.

Chris Roberts, October Letter from the Chairman

As reported over at Massively OP, Star Citizen having crossed the $200 million mark for crowd funding go a message from Chris Roberts about reaching that milestone.

In his post he warns people not to reduce his project down to just that $200 million number, though that is the attention getting headline for most news sites.

He spends some time going on about the current state of alpha and the upcoming sixth anniversary event of the end of the original Kickstarter campaign (and the fourth anniversary of failing to meet the project deadline set by that Kickstarter I suppose) before getting into thanking everybody for believing in him and his project.

But the paragraph that stands out the most for me is the one that ends with the quote above.  Something about it does not ring true to me.

Is how you build a video game so important that you want to call it out?

I mean, I suppose there are extremes to compare it against.  Mark Pincus has told the tale of all he did to promote FarmVille, a game idea which, among other things, he pretty much stole from another developer.  So I guess saying you’re not as shitty as that is good, though if you’re selling inaccessible real estate and pictures of ship models people might be able to fly at some future date for a game that is in alpha, you are not exactly going to come of as a paragon of virtue, no matter how pure your intentions.

But I don’t think that is what he meant.

I think he was more about how they’re doing this whole project in front of a live audience, sharing details, promised, setbacks, and the reality of software development.  I guess that is something to brag about, though so is writing a novel while on a unicycle or while sitting at a desk while it is on fire.  That you can complete the task is interesting, but you have to ask if it was a method that yielded the best possible output.

People are impatient, the world is changing around you, and most of the audience has no idea how programming remains much more art than science these days.  Sometimes it is better to go off and work on something for a long stretch, then come back when you have some sort of solid foundation.

As for nobody being as open, I think Mark Jacobs and the Camelot Unchained team might have some words on that.

Rushed to the Lone Lands

Back to the LOTRO Legendary server.

Just going to be in every Legendary post

It has been long enough since I have played the low level game in LOTRO… still the best part of LOTRO to my mind… that I have lost some of the “feel” as to where I ought to be for a given level.  I have to take the game’s word for where I ought to go next.  I last left off heading to the Old Forest.

Very atmospheric, but the fog machine only covers some of the zone

I was rolling through there, slaughtering as usual, when the game popped up a quest for me pointing me at the Lone Lands.  I had just hit level 19 and was starting to level out of the Old Forest, the quests having all gone that aqua blue color.

Visit the Lone Lands

I still had the Barrow Downs and Tom Bombadil to see to however, the latter being part of the main story line, so I figured I would put off heading out for at least a level while I worked on that.

The leveling and quests have always been a bit off, but with the experience reduction set for the server it was more on track than it has been for a while.

40% of quest sale

And it did seem pretty spot on as I moved through the opening quests out of Thorin’s Hall.  There is that odd set out of Gondomon where you’re level 8 or 9, get a level 12 quest in a chain, but then the quest after it goes back to level 10, but for the most part I was on track through there.

Things seemed to get a little off the rails in Bree, though I suspect that gaining experience through harvesting and crafting wasn’t helping me.  I can’t remember when harvesting and crafting started giving you experience.  It wasn’t there at launch… I don’t think it was.  Anyway, it showed up at some point and the Blizzard copied the idea for WoW.

Anyway, I left some quests behind in Bree and a few more in the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs.  Some of them I didn’t mind.  I wasn’t going to chase Lalia all over again.

Must suppress this memory…

I did run up to Hengstacer Farm to do the quests up around there.  That wide range of open and almost empty land around Nen Harn is something I couldn’t pass up.  Then there was that odd quest that asked you to speak to Elrond in Rivendell, which I figured I would pick up and look into later.  I don’t recall Gandalf teleporting you up there, he not being all that big on overt magic.  But there I was!

Wait, I just skipped a few chapters I think

But eventually I ran down the quests up at the north end of the zone of the Bree fields and wrapped up things in Rivendell. Having hit level 21 along the way I was feeling a bit worried about getting too far ahead, so I started out for the Lone Lands.  Soon the Forsaken Inn was in sight.

Still have to fix that roof

Of course, on arriving I found I was anything but too late.  The first couple of quests were about on level, but most everything to hand was three or four levels up from me.  I ran through a few… being a guardian means I can take a punch and keep going, and the Forsaken Inn drops a good dozen quests on you right away… but eventually I started thinking that maybe I had missed something along the way.

Then, looking in my quest log, I found that quest about getting to Trestlebridge.  You get that as part of the intro quest lines on your arrival at Bree.  The mayor seems almost indecently eager to send you on to some other jurisdiction, like he thought I was there just to… well… I guess I was there to cause trouble and murder the locals.  He might have been on to something.

Anyway, that quest was already fading into blue so I figured maybe I ought to go up there and get a few levels before getting stuck into the Lone Lands.

Of course, on arriving there, I found the quests equally above my level.  I knocked out a few, managing to level up myself, before deciding to head back to the Lone Lands to just see what I could do.

Back at the Forsaken Inn, I started cleaning up around the area, ending up with my friend Pengail, who cannot bear to see a living goblin.

Still better than Lalia

At that point I had fallen behind the curve with everything but the main story.  So I made my way around to Candaith’s camp and helped him out with his work around Weathertop.

That put me ahead, to level 24, so when I was done there I could start clearing out the quests at the west end of the Lone Lands fairly steadily.  I did notice that experience started to taper off noticeably at about that point as well.  That was bad timing as I was really at a point when I felt I needed a bit of a boost to catch up to the zone.

I supplemented my experience gain with the local task quests… I was bypassing those… and carrying on with trade skill harvesting and processing.  I also took another ride around to the North Downs to run down some quests there for a bit of an additional boost.

Still, as noted, the guardian is a strong solo class.  My guy does decent damage and his mitigation skills keep him from taking too big of a hit from higher level mobs.  And, of course, the Lone Lands are practically like home to me.  I know where to go, how to get there, and generally where to find the things in the zone.

As of last night I stand at level 26 and am facing the quests between Ost Guruth and the Trollshaws.

The Lone Lands, little flags marking where I have been

Keeping with how things have gone, the quests are levels 29 and 30.  I’m tempted to put that xp boosting item in my pocket for a couple of levels.

Continuing on with the same “too early” trend, in Ost Guruth you immediately get the quest chain that eventually sends you off to Oatbarton, at the far end of the Shire, which starts you off towards Evendim and Annuminas.  That, too, is an area in which I very much enjoy questing.  But I will hold off on that… the starter quest itself is level 30… until I’ve finished up in the Lone Lands… and maybe the North Downs as well.

On the plus side, I have managed to stick with my second character so far.  I do tend to alt like crazy at some point when playing LOTRO.