The Totally NEW Team Corwin Thread

azraelck said:

Modem fried again, so we'll have to see if I'm in. I do have 1 LDS IIRC so that's covered.

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What kind of modem do you have? Something must be wrong if your connection keeps frying multiple modems. If that happens then I wonder if something is wrong with your internet or power connection. Maybe signal or power spikes keep frying your modem. Regular use of the modem should not fry it.

It ran fine through the Shroud last night, then in EDA it froze a couple of times. After that, it went to hell. I couldn't even load a plain text site for a time.

I think it may have been something to do with my brother running a splitter off of the cable, since I'm also paying for tv now (they upper the rate, and it's cheaper to get basic service with internet than just internet. Comcast must be losing customers). We'll see what happens with the next modem with no splitter. He had just set it up yesterday, before I was on the computer.

Overheating ?

What a pain. Hopefully you get it sorted or they do.

@ Dte....Yes, pull out the book and lets us know what is writen for today.

I had Comcast cable internet back in Indy. I had troubles a couple times. It was very sensitive to signal strength. I'd say there's a very good chance that splitter is a big part of your problem. That electrical stuff is all black magic voodoo to me, but I'm told there's a wide range of quality (basically, signal loss) between various splitters, too.

Das Skejool:
Red Fens flagging quests, Red Fens finale, take level 12

News on Mabar : http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=4743861&postcount=352

This means that the servers will be down - on Monday, as a planned thing, and later the week, as a patch for Mabar.

A tiny bit more specific : http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=4743886&postcount=357

Edit : An leaving announcement by (seemingly) the main Fatesinger dev : http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=396357

A few news :

Cordovan said:

Get a 31% boost to Heroic XP, now through October 31st!

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Source : http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?p=4744103#post4744103


The newest DDO Chronicle : http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?p=4744269#post4744269

Cordovan said:

The DDO Game Servers and http://myaccount.turbine.com will be offline for maintenance on Monday, October 29th from 06:00 AM to 12:00 PM Eastern (-4 GMT). The forums and wikis will remain up, but players may not be able to log in. Thanks for your patience, and we'll see you back in the game soon!

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Cordovan said:

Nah, this is systems-wide maintenance. It's when our IT folks do stuff with fancy names. I think they're calibrating the quantum reactors, refreshing the Z-extrapolators, making sure the polarity of the warp engines aren't reversed, taking a toothbrush to the insides of all of the cables in the building, that kind of thing.

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Source : http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?&postid=4744036#post4744036


Edit : A peek at Update 16 : http://www.ddo.com/u16-avatar

Edit : A personal view : DDO then and now : http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?p=4744440#post4744440

Sorry I had to skip out Friday evening. Had to go to Disney on Ice with the kids. I am waiting for GiantHold to go on sale so I can buy that. I have about 600 TP points so far so hopefully I can get it on sale. I did see that Necropolis was on sale but not sure if its worth it since I'm already at level 13.

At this stage, Gianthold would be better. The Desert and Gianthold are 2 essential packs.

I always call Gianthold "Fallout". When you are there, you'll see why.

As expected, among the "spooky adventure packs" there are - seemingly - the Necro packs, too.

Since I have everything except Necro 3 they don't show up in my DDO store, except Necro 3.

The other pack I saw was ... I think it was "Harbinger of Madness", but I'm not sure anymore ...

Edit : The DDO store even lists them :

Catacombs

Delera's Tomb

Necropolis, Part 1

Necropolis, Part 2

Necropolis, Part 3

Necropolis, Part 4

Harbinger of Madness

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They are all 35 % off, so.

I'm thinking of buying Necro 3 - it isn't worth much, everyone says, so why should I pay more than this discount ? I thought.

I think I must buy points again, because Harbinger Of Madness is said to be quite good, too ... And this Wraith companion ...

(The word "Harbinger" always sounds to me like an Bavarian name ... )

Well, now Skype is fried. I've reinstalled, to no avail. It either hangs on sign in, or signs in and becomes useless and unable to contact anyone. So I'm uninstalling it again.

This is what happens when Microsoft gets ahold of something.

Ha, just wait till Win 8 takes over!!!!! Then you'll REALLY be in strife. Sounds like it's time to take a GBH to your rig and start over.

Alrik, H of M is an excellent and FUN series. I highly recommend it.

I won't be changing to Win8. I'll stick with 7, and if I'm forced to set up a new computer, then it's to Linux I go, without looking back. I refuse to use a closed operating system.

I still use WINXP.

My TP is something in the mid-200s, so I can't say whether I'll be able to buy Harbinger. I'll see.

As a notice, doing The Red Fens twice in a weekend is too much for me. I notice it. I feel kind of exhauusted and almost burnt out from this weekend - I really can't say how much I'll play within the next days, but enough is enough - I need a pause of several days.

I did Enemy Within with a PUG - which was VERY exhausting. On elite difficulty, of course *sigh* - and they got me by surprise just after I had finished my Cleric's level 12 levelup.

I died several times. In traps. By frost shamblers. Without the Druid it would have been a wipe, I guess.

I was taken by surpris that I couldn't turn these "Frost Shamblers". It made me angry, too. I had invested SO MUCH into being ableto turn anything undead AND THEY RESIST ME ??? Finally I had to battle them in close combat. And died because of some BEEEP arcanes of their kind. And the traps, of course.
Defeating the end bosses (don't want to spoil anyone reading here) was relatively easy, compared to that. Which had surprised me, too.

Then the group wanted to do Dreams Of Insanity. Sourcerer had to go soon, so we evaded everything until we were in the building, then he gave us lots of buffs (very noble, I must say !), and then went away.

The quest was a moderate success. No deaths until … everything went wrong. 2 survived.

But instead us carrying us to the next resurrection shrine, they all dropped. OIne after the other, the half-zerger first. The the ones with low health. Then the dead ones. Last remaining was me and a ggood Rogue, both dead, and we chatted a tiny bit on how surprised we were that they all had left. The quest would have been a success if they had carried us to the shrine I could see on the map (it was already halfway behind us). But no, they dropped instead.
Then I got the red connection error sign, added him to my frioends list, told him how sorry I was that it had turned into a nightmare, and that I'd have to restart my whole PC. He was okay with that and then I restarted.

This was the "PUG time" I had told about before going to the Fens to have been *very* exhausting for me. Therefore I just didn't want to use skype. I'm a little bit more sensitive, and needed a bit more time to recuperate from this. The use of Skype would have just added to the sensory overload and I'd have to drop much earlier.

Now, the main thing I'll be doing today if fine-tuneing my Cleric, and doing the levelup for my Artificer. And get his end reward.

Thank you all for the run yesterday - it was very fast and very smooth. I apologise for having started The Stand a bit too early.


Edit : A dev's view on the Mabar Bug : http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=4745267&postcount=422

Edit : A little bit more : http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=4745413&postcount=443


Edit : Was barely able to buy Harbinger, thanks to my Artificer's Red Fens run.

Running a PUG is like opening a box of chocolate, you never know what you get. I try to limit my PUG runs because you can easily get into a group with people who don't know what they're doing. Since I'm running mostly on elite it means the group can wipe if it makes a mistake.

My experience with PUG's is that the bad ones are NOT about the characters being under-geared or poorly built. No, the bad runs come from the PLAYERS don't working as a team. You have to be patient and let the rogue / artificer deal with traps in trap heavy quests. You don't wander off from the main group and expect you can get away with it unless you're a TR with all the gear you need.

Often I see PUG's with no leader. That means the players move off in all directions and die here and there. If you have a good leader who give instructions you can get people to follow. But even a good leader can't make everyone follow. So if you get chaotic players in the group who can't take directions then you're in trouble.

Knowing the quest before helps a lot. That is one reason you see that our guild runs almost never wipe, even though we have to use hirelings. The only exception was the Xorian Cipher. That quest is one of the hardest in the game at level and we hadn't run it for years. So we didn't know what to expect. It was very trap heavy and you need a strategy to win.

So I can understand you getting exhausted and frustrated from running many PUG's. That's probably why Corwin stopped pugging some years ago.

PUG groups will become a bit better at mid / high level compared to low / mid. One reason is that the worst players tend to drop off because they get to high level.

Yes, you are right, I guess. I ave had absolutely horrible PUGs (rare) bad ones (seldom), better ones (more often) and more or less good ones (regular), but excellent ones is rare as well.

Perhaps I'm spoilt a bit, because *usually* my experiences with PUGs are quite good.

And yes, in future I will join them only when I already know the quest.

Downloading Skype again now.

I had a pug run, and this is how you can tell it'll be a bad one. I was on my Cleric, and was just starting. Joined a Water Works group, and the first thing out of the group leader's mouth was 'we got a healer, we can do elite!'

Bad sign. I didn't speak up, or drop, so we entered. Group was a Ranger, 2 Rogues, Barbarian leader, and myself. At the intersection with the fire trap, the Barbarian went straight- through the trap. 1 Rogue went left, the other right. Leaving me and the Ranger standing dumbfounded. Barbarian shorty comes screaming back, screaming into the mic about the 'stupid f*@%ing healer' and other such pleasant descriptions. He runs into the trap again, survives, but dies to a long range lightning bolt. Both Rogues died alone. Me and the Ranger tried, and managed to clear the trash the Barb had drug back, but I was nearly out of sp, and the rest of the group had, after cursing me out for not rushing through an elite trap and being able to go in three directions at once, dropped.

This was maybe a week after starting to play. After a couple of runs like that, I about quit DDO, but happened to wander in here and joined the group.

Of course, on the other hand, I had a Vision of Destruction run in which the entire group made it through the Sub with only my aura healing them; I was free to destruct/implode stuff. At the raid itself, the tank was kept up with the odd heal scroll; his healing amp was so high, and actually had AC to match. He took very little damage, usually clearing it up himself. Again, most of the damage done by trash and AoE spells was handled by the Aura and Burst. Even acting in an offensive capacity, I still finished with half my sp bar. This was pre-U9, so no Divine Punishment.

Another good run was when I healed Hound of Xoriat on my FvS. First raid I had ever healed. The more experienced divine there taught me about Quickened Mass Heal's efficiency, and they even insisted on sending a Lorrik's Necklace my way.

So like Peter said, it's really a throw of the dice when you join a pug. I usually don't pug save for raids, since I build self-sufficient characters designed for solo/make stuff happen in case of wipe.

Xorian Cipher I think only JM really knew. Then we had a somewhat bad split, with a melee-heavy group and a ranged heavy group. And Arrows aren't really good against skeletons. Add in that it was on elite, and not exactly an easy quest in the first place, and it was a recipe for a wipe.

After reading similar reports with elite difficulty PUGs I really came to believe that the Bravery Bonus / streak is ... at least inflicting damage to the "PUG scene". I only see LFMs for "elite" nowadays, nothung "normal" or "easy/casual" difficulties anymore.

The DDO forums community has found this as well, and the discussions spread.
As much as people would like to see the "streak" thing to remain intact, they also see tht especially Newbies appear to go in in that difficulty at once - without having run the quest before, without knowing it, only because they don't want to break their streaks. "Elite" has become the new "normal" now - but was never designed this way.

The newest incarnation of the many, many BB/streak - themed discussions is this : http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=396455


Bys the way, thanks for reminding me to take a look whether my Cleric has now an aura or not ...

As far as Windows 8 goes, avoid it if you play DDO. So far its crashed quite often on me after a fresh install on a new SSD. Usually right when I start a quest! I have a feeling its in regards do dx10. I'll try it again on dx9 when I get a chance and see if it helps any. I only installed it to see if it is an improvement, performance wise, compared to my old XP with the 8 GB of RAM. It definitely is much faster at doing almost anything compared to XP but it has a learning curve and no START menu!

I think Turbine made a big mistake introducing hard and elite streaks. It means people won't drop down to hard or even normal on certain difficult quests. If you're on a 5 elite streak it means you get +50% XP for doing elite in addition to +80% for first try elite and XP tomes / pots.

Let's say you do a difficult quest on normal. That means you lose 50% XP on the quest you're doing. Worse is that you lose the streak so you lose 50% on the next quest, 40% on the quest after next until you've done 5 elite quests to get the streak back.

So the consequences for dropping in difficulty on a tough quest is so bad that people just do elite for their first time play through. If you see normal or hard runs now it's people repeating quests for first time normal and hard bonuses.

If Turbine had removed the elite streak then I think people would be more inclined to do quests at a lower difficulty. E. g. we could have run Xorian Cipher first on normal or hard to re-learn how it worked and then do it on elite for favor. Since we didn't want to lose our streak we decided to try it on elite.

Our groups are more powerful than average PUG groups so we can get away with that, but pug's often wipe because they're forced into running at a higher difficulty than they're capable of.

I also see plenty of times where people joining a group try to argue to bump the difficulty up to elite. I don't feel like running a quest for the first time on elite because you can easily mess up and then you wipe. On normal you can learn where the traps are, which monsters to fight, how the endfight is etc. You can recover from setbacks and still beat the quest.

I saw a thread about the reason for less PUG's being formed now. One reason is the dungeon scaling. It means it's easier for a strong TR toon to solo the quest with a healer / rogue hireling than being in a full group. So the best players will tend to solo or play with their friends. They won't risk being in a pug.