The Totally NEW Team Corwin Thread

That Khyber went down so quicky is in my eyes no random thing.
To me, it feels as if something was trying to kind of enforce my original intention not to participate (and get some sleep), because Khyber went down the very seconds after I had written into the chat (as a /tell) that i wanted to come in, "but not to 5 in the morning". BOOOM "Your character has been booted from this server".


Secondly, I had no access to the RPGWAtch forums afterwards, either, so communication was stalled.

And Khyber reopened after I had made the decision to indeed go to sleep, simply because I did not know when Khyber would reopen again.

I've had things like this a few times. Like writing a very provocative post here in the Watch forums - next thing I knew was that there had been a server crash, and my reply was gone. Happened to me 2 or 3 times here in the Watch.

We had the same issues with the Watch; ended up waiting for 45 minutes until the servers came back up. The Watch came up a little bit beforehand, which made for a really strange coincidence.

We went ahead and ran Sharn 15's, as well as the Cogs, taking level 18.

As a side note, I've spent the last four hours selling crap, organizing my gear, and putting it down in a spreadsheet that hopefully I won't lose this time (or quit updating). I'm almost half-way through, and had to buy two more shared bank expansions and a crafting bank expansion. To point out how much old, outdated and useless junk I had, I've gotten around 700k plat from selling so far. Probably 10k from spell components that I no longer needed.

I did go ahead and make a build template as well, so I'll be keeping those in the same spreadsheet. Got my Frenzied Warchanter Trapper build partially entered in; I have another version that's more Bard but loses the trapping capability. I'll probably be setting up a couple of alternate builds first before planning the TR though.

Spreadsheet gaming for the win!

I think I'm going to leave Phuury with the group when we TR. Shadohe's pale master run will be as a solo or maybe a Friday alt sort of thing. Phuury needs to knock out some divine lives so he'll either be a cleric (likely that death cleric mess I keep rambling on about) or maybe a FvS. Either way, he'll be a divine caster with solid healing/buff and probably less-than-solid offensive spells of some flavor.

Was in the Cogs for the very first tome with another char. I was kind of shocked by the sheer size !

Thaks to the help of … Brialle ? Sorry, but my name memory is particularly bad - I did the Web Of Chaos chain on elite dofficulty until its last part with Alrih, which made her getting level 18 - which i then took.

My other favourite char, the Paladin, who was in the Cogs today, did the Mad Tea Party today, and I was astonished upon its options and how long it takes.
Next for her would be Sealed in Ember, of which I have very horrible memories from our group run there … or maybe my memories of it are woirse than it had actually been.
I plan to get through the whole Ravenloft chain with her, minus the raids.

Sadly I haven't got any good looking gear from Sharn so far, that's whjat I'm looking for most - apart from the gear quality. The look of gear is always importabt to me as well.

I think I ended up working for a good 6 or 7 hours total yesterday doing inventory and still have three characters to go through. This is why I don't do my inventory very often; it takes forever.

I ended up buying two expansions for my shared bank, and 1 for the crafting blank. Managed to finally shift all my crafting mats, including the GS stuff, into it as well as other random stuff. I found out I could have crafted a couple items from Slave Lords at this point, and outside of the shards of power, I can make at least 1 dual shard and a single shard or 3 single shard GS items. Plat increased by over a million; Mirys alone had over 100k worth of crap I sold off. Guess I need to buy some more Shroud mats before she hits the plat cap again.

OK then… A summary of options, if you will, not necessarily in any order:

TD - cleric/FvS buffer with casting
Az - mutt trap monkey / Usain Bolt mutt bard / TBD
Peter - fire sorc / DPS pally
Corwin - arti trap monkey / TBD
JM -
CM -
Alrik - dropping group?
Fuzz??? -

As quickly as we're advancing, this discussion may matter sooner than later. Please advise.

Do you mean the next round of low-level characters ?

I'm not completely be dropping group. I will, however, take a break when I feel that i need it.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Do you mean the next round of low-level characters ?

I'm not completely be dropping group. I will, however, take a break when I feel that i need it.

Click to expand...

Yes, it's the same question that was asked about a page ago- planning for the next group once the current mains are done (likely level 21 or 22 based on Ye Olde Book).

I get the break thing for you, particularly given the ridiculous time our session ends up being for Europeans, but understand that too many breaks will lead to us running some stuff without you. A week here or there, every couple months, we'll hold the group and run alts so you stay in sync with everyone. No problem. But if it's a last minute decision each week, that's going to pose a problem. So far, with you being a first-lifer, there's been no issue with your toon being left behind on levels. The "penalty" is missing out on content you might want to play and gear that could be sent your way. If you're OK with that, then we're good.

I want you to run with us, so I'm just laying it out there so you don't feel abandoned. It's too hard to coordinate what everyone is running if we end up repeating quest chains or portions of quest chains. As long as you're good with that, we can all be flexible.

I fully understand you. It's not an easy decision for me, either, because I do like running with you.
It's only so that I and my body need recovery time from hectic weeks as well, plus that I might lose some of my own time (meeting with people, for example) because i rather need that portion of sleep during the day, then.

The more serious point is when my father decides that he needs me. That won't happen as often during autumn & winter, but I can't say "no" every time to him, because he is old and stubborn.

Of course I will try to stay within the group. And of course I will try to plan ahead, I mean, trying to find out how my weekend will be, as early as possible.

I feel kind of torn between my wish to do stuff online with the group and the need to give my body its needed time to recuperate, plus unexpected family life.

I just fear that if I don't give myself time to recover from a heavy week, that then I might just go kaputt.

As a compromise, I propose to limit my participation to 4 am local time. I'd be more happy with 3 am, but you all need my help too.
5 am is rather too late for me, to be honest.


Regarding the new group I still stick to my ... proposal : Cleric or Wizard.
Cleric would mean, I fear, that you would be more dependent on my help (although I personally prefer Anti-Unlife Clerics against Healer Clerics. It's just more fun for me to battle Undead Ones )

Caster, on the other hand, would be something I'd really like to try out because i have only limited experience with that, and you wouldn't be so much dependend on me as a healer. Of course I'd have to work so that my caster would have at least some sort of survivability of his or her own.

So, as it stands :

- Wiita, Wizard at level 4, but with 2 levels of Rogue
- Cinderheart, Cleric at level 3
- Kriita, Cleric at level 4

You can bring whatever type of toon you like. We've gotten to the point where we don't need a designated healer in each group in order to succeed. Between the secondary healing we usually have and healer hirelings, we'll be fine on 99% of the quests. Trap monkey is really the only role where I prefer to have at least two players with abilities and chances are pretty good we've got that covered between Corwin and Az. The ladies also run a lot of trappers, so we might be swimming in trap monkeys before it's over.

If you want to do a wizzy, by all means that's what you should do. Then the next question is what flavor(s) you prefer: pale master, fire, ice, electric, acid, or sonic? Totally up to you, but it does help the rest of the group plan if you have a general idea. This isn't a binding contract, so you can always change it up later if the mood strikes you.

Wiita would work, but you'd need to give us a few weeks to catch up to you. You could also start a new toon from scratch if you wanted.

Remember- this is a game. If the time frame or the commitment don't fit into your life very well, then it won't be fun for you and you shouldn't do it. Defeats the whole purpose of playing a game and I won't be a part of something that keeps you from your family.

In other news... I found a build online for a death cleric that looked good. It actually starts out as a "light side" cleric in the low levels and then respecs over to the "dark side" at level 10. This goes a long way toward solving the problem I had with the lack of decent necro spells/SLAs at low levels. It still tops out radiant servant to get the aura, too. So I should be able to do the heal/buffbot thing while still contributing a little bit to the kill count. The only thing I've got to figure out is how to use a mirror of glamoring to create a cosmetic armor of rags of some sort.

Was going to bring my Druid around but we need some front line. Think I will bring one of my Paladin fighters around.

If you want to run the druid, run the druid. Our front line in the current group consists of a bard, and, ummmm, yeah. We've managed well enough and we've run challenging content. We could always put Corwin's arti-dog and your druid wolf on attack and call that a front line. The reason we have to coordinate is for trap monkeys and to make sure we don't get too many folks trying some sort of gimp toon, like my death cleric, at the same time. We're covered. Besides, JM might want to do a pointy stick toon for all we know.

TD - death cleric
Az - mutt trap monkey / Usain Bolt mutt bard / TBD
Peter - fire sorc / DPS pally
Corwin - arti trap monkey / TBD
JM -
CM - druid / pally
Alrik - wizzy / cleric
Fuzz??? -

Brought Paladin around. Are we running them up to level 3 or waiting at 1? Either is fine with me.

I think it's better to run them up to at least a high level 2 if not 3 first as we can all run the basic Korthos crap without help. 3rd lifers will obviously be behind 1st and second, but not by enough to cause concern.

I won't be positioning much since I'm running the same toon in this group and the next group, but let's see what makes sense here for the rest of y'all.

The plan for the current group includes a little epic work at the end. After all of Sharn plus Hound and VoD, I expect everyone will be approaching the cap. We've got a special request to do IQ2, which should get any stragglers across the line even though that chain is stingy with XP. After that, we're going to knock out epic Keep to farm out some basic epic gear (BtA) for the folks that don't run epic that often. Then we'll come around. Since we will have just got done running Keep, I won't do that chain on heroic this life.

Soooooo, what does this all mean? I'd probably position the toons like Corwin said- high 2 or just into 3. Milk Korthos heavily, catch the solos, maybe do explorers and rares in Cerulean Hills. We'll roll into the Harbor 2's as a group.

With Cm as a paladin I think I will turn around my sorc and do another fire sorc life. He will take a fast trip to 30 before TR'ing.

Is it so that we are not doing quests together before the Harbor level 2's? Doesn't that indicate we could be level 4 if we want to? Then I can offload quite a bit of my daily roll XP stones and skip the explorers and Korthos.

I never skip Korthos except for the Peak as I like getting all the easy favour!!

Peter Stauffenberg said:

Is it so that we are not doing quests together before the Harbor level 2's? Doesn't that indicate we could be level 4 if we want to? Then I can offload quite a bit of my daily roll XP stones and skip the explorers and Korthos.

Click to expand...

Yes, getting to level 3 will be done individually. We won't group until the Harbor 2's. I might regret that since I'm returning the same toon, but so it goes.

Technically, we could be level 4 but most of the time that doesn't make sense. First, there's just not enough content to get all the way to 4 prior to hitting the Harbor without boosts of some flavor. Second, there's so much content in the 2-5 zone that the "head start" will usually end up with you at the wall for several quests. So I guess it's up to you. I don't see much value in jumping ahead- it's not like the extra firepower will be needed and when you inevitably hit the wall you'll have spent resources on XP early just to take 0XP on quests later.

I still have a mule-like Iconic Scoundrel (= Bard ) sitting over there at the HCL with level 1 (even Iconics start there with level 1 !), but I have no information yet as to when transfer is possible.

Death Cleric is out of discussion for me, simply because I just don't want to play anything death related, like Pale Masters, too.

I'll try to sort it out this weekend.

Update : This Thursday there has been an update, and the announcement says that with it it is possible now to transfer from HCL to the live servers.

Edit : The Patch is bigger than I thought. Needs a few minutes on slow connections.

The forever pots are available at the mysterious rem. vendor as well this weekend only.