Tip Toe, Through the Tulips …

Ahhh, spring is in the air … the smell of serious funk … wait what?  Someone parked an ogre east of Darkhaven and he stinks up the joint!  All the tulip scented fabreeze in the Realms won’t cover that up.  We’ll keep dumping boo-kays of flowers on him anyway until he goes away and makes up with his wife :>

This quest brought out my thinking cap a few times … how to obtain the tulips is one problem and which to hand in is another.  Finding them boils down to telescan until you’re sick of it then do mkill farming till you’re sick of that, then traffic for ones you’re missing and repeat.  Ok maybe not quite that bad but … well … ok.

So the pink, red and coral tulips can be found by telescanning.  As Akael noted, tulips also appear in areas that are non-teleportable, but beyond running through the areas a few times a day to check your mainstay is going to be the ones you can find by teleporting.  Gnarish is making out like a bandit, I’ve rotted the teeth out of a few characters eating zombie candies and scanning all over hell’s half acre.  In the process I’ve hit my totems on the right characters multiple times, hit Window to the World noteboard and also hit a new Twenty Questions noteboard – more on that in a minute.

So the twist with the pink, red and coral tulips is that they’re increasingly rare.  So by the time you’ve found enough corals it’s likely you’re overflowing with pink and reds. As much as I appreciate the idea of a sliding difficulty scale, I wonder if just having them closer in rarity wouldn’t have achieved the same… you still have a ton of randomness because of the teleporting aspect.  Oh well.

Next come the violets and silvers which you get from mkill.  The violet mobs are pretty soloable.  The son of a gun of it is that both the violet and silvers are pop items.  So you find the mob and kill it and maybe nothing.  For the violets, well, oh well.  For the silvers which are multi-av mobs … yeesh!  That’s mean!  Think about this, for a full turn in of 35 sets you needed 21 of each tulip on a multi-av mob which might not pop … how many kills do you think you’d need to get a group of 3-5 a full set?

Some of us noticed that 2 of the mobs were much more manageable … Dennis Moore is a good 2 man run and with the right set of characters Zyla can be soloed … when this is the more manageable …

The CM mage crew at Zyla
The CM mage crew at Zyla

 

So how do we leap to 35 sets means 21 of each flower?  Ahh this is where the maths comes in.  A quick visit to Math is Fun gives us the chance to set up a combination of pink, red, violet, coral and silver tulips.  Repetitions are allowed {silver, silver, red} is ok but order is not important {silver, silver, red}, {red, silver, silver} are the same.

Combinations with repetition (n=5, r=3)

List has 35 entries.
{pink,pink,pink} {pink,pink,red} {pink,pink,violet} {pink,pink,coral} {pink,pink,silver} {pink,red,red} {pink,red,violet} {pink,red,coral} {pink,red,silver} {pink,violet,violet} {pink,violet,coral} {pink,violet,silver} {pink,coral,coral} {pink,coral,silver} {pink,silver,silver} {red,red,red} {red,red,violet} {red,red,coral} {red,red,silver} {red,violet,violet} {red,violet,coral} {red,violet,silver} {red,coral,coral} {red,coral,silver} {red,silver,silver} {violet,violet,violet} {violet,violet,coral} {violet,violet,silver} {violet,coral,coral} {violet,coral,silver} {violet,silver,silver} {coral,coral,coral} {coral,coral,silver} {coral,silver,silver} {silver,silver,silver}

If you’ve done it right you got this list. For the die hards who started early and managed to get all 35 sets, my hat is off to you.  I got about 26 sets and I can’t even stand one more Zyla kill right now, even if you told me that in the final hours the pop rate goes to 100%.

A good quest overall, a bit long though.  4 types of flowers would have given 20 combinations, so all in all drop the 3rd telescan type, make red a tiny bit tougher to find and I think maybe it might not have felt so bad by the end.  Still as with many quests I got out and killed Zyla for the first time, never mind the first time by myself.  My scripts for telescanning and for CM mages got a great upgrade but now it’s time for a few days of something else 🙂

Cheers!