Who watches the Watchdog?

Woof!  Woof woof woof! *pant pant pant pant* You hear someone’s death cry!

These words can only mean Gorog’s Watchdog is out … or in this case a Watchpuppy!  What’s the difference you ask?  The number of avatars required to kill the critter is the main thing and correspondingly the rewards are not as large.  For those who aren’t familiar with the rewards there is a reason the word “goroggles” enters into every conversation about top of the line characters.  The “doggy ear” is a nice devout piece and an ok all around piece with aff fly being maybe the most interesting thing about it.  Somewhere along the lines the “dewclaw” got added, a nicely statted ankle piece and finally making a debut not too long ago was the muzzle, a statted face piece which is decent but gives thieves an interesting dilemma.

Now, no one is saying you can’t get goggles off the puppy but no one has seen a pair off a puppy yet.  There have only been a handful of puppy kills so there’s no way to even really speculate about possibilities … oh and since they could be changed at any time without warning, it’s pointless to bother.

Aleq did a great job of being the cheerleader, with others like Mephie contributing to help get mass established.  For my part Arca and Ravith came and got a hold of me and I almost didn’t bother.  These things can drag on for hours and hours before we get mass and even when we have mass it can be a mess 20 different ways to Sunday.  Still, I figure if you don’t log in and help out you have no reason to bitch when you want other people’s help getting mass.

We made a few kicks at it and wiped a few times.  Mass came and went.  Someone commented that if we didn’t get a few more people that it would take a little imm pity (downing the doggie) to get a kill in.  Around midnight we said “one more try”.

Whether the stars aligned or whether we got some pity or a bit of both we managed to get a dead puppy.  I had joked earlier in the night that it was a nice birthday gift and when I saw that I had a kill blow it sure felt like a gift wrapped present.  Prior to this the closest I’ve been was 2 spirals from the kb.

I almost didn’t log in.  Instead I logged out with a dewclaw.

Goes to show that you have to keep in touch and just keep trying even if you think you have no chance.

Around the Realms in Twenty ^MORE Questions

Not so long ago I posted about Ceir’s Twenty Questions standing semi-quest.  It’s been a bit of a mind twister that requires a lot of luck but has some strategy to it as well.

This round of Twenty Questions will go to Aimeric unless I’m mistaken, he, Klaatu and I were all teleporting at the same time and it turns out with the same guess in mind.  The disadvantage I had was that I had posted the last question and had to wait until one of them posted before I could take a guess.

One of the tricks to this is to ask questions that narrow the field of possibilities down without completely giving it away to the other people who are guessing.  In this round I had it down to 2 possibilities, both of which fit the criteria.  I like to go and find the item in game to verify that the database I’ve looked at has the stats correct.  I could find a fairly obscure broom in Dunhill but couldn’t get the squirrel’s tail in Wyvern’s Tower to pop so I went with the broom as my first guess.  As I say, a lot of strategy and a lot of luck need to come together to win this thing and congrats to Aimeric.  It’s nice to be there at the finish line even if you fall a little short.

So teleporting around looking for one room is in an of itself stunningly boring.  Many times it took up to 4 hours of non-stop zombie eating triggers to find the room.  Sometimes it was the 4th candy.  Welcome to RNG.  To make it more interesting I’ve been spending some time investigating the puzzles inside Vast Horizons.  There are a lot of spots that seem disconnected; isolated rooms that feel like they are there for the purpose of theme.  Some of them might be and others might in fact hold clues to other rooms, it’s certainly far from cut and dry.  Some of the zones are clearly mini areas with small puzzles.  For example finding the butterfly wing within the lighthouse or the golden buckle in the well.  Many of these items have fairly high values set on them so some may be there to defray the cost of teleporting while others clearly interact with other parts of the area.

This time through I’ve managed to take out Jimmy da Fence a couple of times and come away with Jimminator!s, worked up a pile of radiant garnets, shy emeralds, stirring spoons and rays of the sun.  I’ve also become motivated to try coming through on a pre-avatar character and try some of the puzzles that aren’t open to avatars.  In addition I think trying some other races will open up some of the puzzles I can’t access.  When you can’t squeeze your large frame any further down a corridor it’s a clue that there’s something else to be done.

I want to thank everyone who worked on Vast Horizons.  It’s a fun, strange area that by and large gives clues when you’re doing something wrong.  Unlike other builders who expect us to dream up the solution to the puzzle out of the ether and pick the one correct race, class, gender and alignment out of the 1,638 possible combinations (double that if it’s a clear pre-av/avatar only puzzle … the math gets too hard for morning coffee to figure out if it’s a specific unknown level).  The puzzles are challenging and open to a huge range of players with luck of the draw becoming the great equalizer.  Sure you know the room.  Sure you know the solution.  Can you get there next?

Happy adventuring!

Goodbye Zach

Today Kali posted a note that saddened many of us.

(1033) Kali 03/24/15 Zach

Recently we have learned that the Realms of Despair has lost one of its young
bright stars. The family of Zach has contacted the immortal staff, as well as
some of his mortal friends who reached out, to let us know that Zach has
passed away. Zach has been a long and devoted player of the Realms.
He recently joined the immortal ranks and inspired us with his enthusiasm and
vigor for bringing positive changes to the game for his fellow players. We
are sad to have lost a vital player, but more importantly, we are
devastated to have lost a good friend and a good person.

As a tribute, we are promoting Zach to level 56, True Immortal, at which point
we will move him to retired status. As a lasting tribute, the pedagogic
spirit in the Umbrageous Ruins will be renamed to the pedagogic spirit of Zach
so that he may teach and train all those would follow his ways. In this way
his memory will live on.

I don’t have a lot to say.  It is always sad when we lose someone from our community.  Some of us have been through this before, I’ve written about losing Marie years ago.  Some of us keep a distance online, even me not that you’d know.  When people quit playing without a word I know that some of us used to worry a lot about what happened to them and I think because of that a lot of us put up that distance.  “Realms friends”.  When 9-11 happened we lost players, one of them was a long time Guild of Druid person who we all presumed died, she resurfaced a couple years ago, alive but needed to totally walk away from everything in their life for a long time before being curious about Realms still being online.

It’s a hard subject.  I think lots of us struggle with appropriate ways to deal with our feelings in the first place.  I encourage you to reach out to the people around you and let them know you appreciate them.  If they’re off game/on game, doesn’t matter.  In the age of Facebook a lot more of us are staying connected.

To my Realms comrades: to the people I adventure with, the people I share my evenings and stories with – thank you for being there.

Good bye Zach – our community is diminished by your loss.  The PK community has lost a stalwart advocate, a tireless recruiter and a valued teacher.

Around the Realms in Twenty Questions

A new Vast Horizon feature, for the regular readers of Ceirana’s Window to the World is a new noteboard for a game of 20 Questions.  For those not familiar with the game the basic idea is that the host will pick something and you have 20 questions to figure it out with your guesses at the answer counting towards the 20 questions.  For this incarnation the question has to be a yes/no question.

I managed to figure out the first mob (yay) was Weeping Willow in The Keep of Mahn-Tor by a process of elimination.  A couple hours of running around looking at mobs and maps.  All in all it was pretty fun, I encourage you to look for it the next time you’re out telescanning.

Some hints for players:

  • keep your questions simple… yeah you want to get the most out of it but if it doesn’t give you info in both the yes and no it’s not so good (example: is it a male? Good!  is it a male or a horse? Bad! a male dragon isn’t a horse, of course!)
  • try to use your question to narrow the field … we had every mob in Realms to pick from, narrowing it to non-male non-humanoids who wore no equipment and were aff sanc or who could cast it made the list so much more manageable
  • be specific: the question “Is it in the Forgotten Woods Geo?” could mean the area that when you type where you see the Forgotten Woods or it could mean any of the areas IN the Forgotten Woods
  • don’t be too specific: asking a question that applies only to a very narrow field of choices doesn’t help.  If you get a yes then you’re golden, but it’s more likely you’ll get a no.  “Does it have brown hair?” is perhaps not as good as “Does it have hair?”

Ok … happy adventuring.

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!

Farewell Arete

Oh hello there, I didn’t see you come in.  Won’t you make yourself comfortable?

There’s been a lot on the go since I last wrote and I thought it was well past time to got down a few lines.

Some of you will recall that when I returned to the Realms of Despair that I joined the Order of Arete.  The order was formed primarily by a group of players who were unhappy with the way Dragonslayer was being run at the time.  The details depend on who you ask so I won’t put myself in the middle of it, I wasn’t here at the time.  It seems that in the next little while the order will be shut down.  This is a pretty rare thing in the Realms, the only other order to be decommissioned was Maidenstone.  I’ve written before about the drama that led to my decision to leave Arete and that a number of players came with me back to Dragonslayer which was under new management.  The whole thing was triggered by Raveyn and Jaxxon disappearing, effectively vacating the Leader and First positions and it seems that exodus is part of the death knell we hear tolling today.  I applaud Alex and the others who have been involved with trying to keep the order alive and for what appears to be a substantial effort to close the order in a very fair manner.

Some of you noticed I’ve also left Dragonslayer.  Less drama around this decision but I would say that the new areas being introduced and no one around to explore with was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  I see they’ve been recruiting members of GoO again and running S/O and I wish them well.  I’ve seen this exact pattern before and the people recruited ended up going inactive after getting discouraged by maybe this time it’ll be different.

I’ve come to the point of my game playing now where I’m interested in having fun.  If I can’t figure out how to have fun I may as well quit and go do something else with my time.  I have been playing a great deal on my own and I’ve been having fun with adventuring but ultimately I returned to the Realms to have a bit of a social aspect to my game.  My Diablo clan had reduced itself to a few guys who only wanted to run top tier stuff and wouldn’t help anyone who was beneath that play level.  Similarly I see a lot of people on Realms with the attitude “it’s not worth the effort to run it, just buy it off auction and gold when you’re bored”.  If this is how you play can I suggest that there are other games where you leave your browser window open and the gold total ticks up and every so often you have new events available you can watch… and if the gold ticks up too slow you can go all hax0rz on the Javascript and just put whatever total you want in.

As an applicant to Ascendere I’ve encountered a group of players that go and kill things and gear their characters themselves.  They adventure and learn and poke into corners of the Realms  just for fun.  I’ve been to a great number of mobs lately that “aren’t worth the effort, just buy it off auction and gold to get more gear”.  I’ve had a lot of fun actually knocking these things down and seeing how they’ve been written.  There are some less fun aspects to some of these fights but they’re unique challenges.

There is a lot of effort going into recruiting new players.  Last time almost none of them stuck around.  Attitudes are contagious, yours might kill.  If you have a bad attitude consider that just because you’ve been there and done that doesn’t mean others have.  Maybe if you’ve been there and done that to death it’s time to just retire and stop pretending that you play… or maybe you can find a way to put that vast experience to work in a positive way.  Build something, write a quest … try something you haven’t done before, you might find a new measure of reward.

Zap! Poof! It’s gone! and other tales from GoO

Over the last while a few things have been going on in the Guild of Origin and during the runs a number of comments have come out that I thought I’d share since I think they’re worthwhile.

First … one of our members needed help replacing a jade strand.  Turns out he had been doing something in Shattered Refuge and a firebat aggressively attacked him and caused him to zap.  The hobgoblin miner thought he’d won the jackpot and started picking up equipment.  Our guildie killed the miner for such affrontery and promptly autosac’d him.  Autoloot doesn’t help you much when your hands are full.  Another reason to have autosac off when adventuring, it’s handy for favoring but it sure can go horribly wrong.

Next, we’ve been talking a bit on guildchat about what can be killed and where people like or don’t like to adventure.  Some people have expressed they won’t adventure in no supplicate areas.  Some think that using double heals is a sloppy way to get a kill on a tough mob.  Some like green potions, some like ambrosia.  Yet others like apples.

I’m going to say that the most challenging and rewarding parts of the game continue to be added with no supplicate flags.  You can argue that you’ll just buy the equipment by running lesser challenges or by amassing gold.  It’s possible.  Or you can get 20 glory and go adventure yourself.  20 glory comes pretty easily and isn’t a great investment in effort… I doubt you could trade 2 hitpoints worth of glory for a Seth set for example, yet that 2 hp can give you a safety margin if you wanted to actually try to adventure for that Seth set.

I generally dislike farming and apples have been farmed to the point that people felt it necessary to put anti farming programs.  Ambrosias won’t work for everyone, worshippers of Kardis don’t abound and farming triple heals takes a very long time.  I would like the idea of finding a recipe that you take to a mob which would allow you to buy them.  I rather imagine the program to be a fake brew … you buy them but then you have to wait for them, maybe even 100 at a time or whatever.  More interesting than straight farming.  Any which way, if you need to use doubles to make something happen, especially while learning, I say go for it, but tend to agree that they shouldn’t be needed to make a run work.

Oh well, that’s the news at this hour! 🙂

Greetings Silvermoon Outpost

Silvermoon Outpost is one of the new areas imported early today and I’ve had a little time to explore it, warning, the below may contain spoilers.

As some of you know I don’t rush into new areas because I’m in no hurry.  Things will stay there waiting to be found another day.  I went to find Silvermoon Outpost because I’ve been mapping west of Darkhaven and I wanted to see if I had to modify my map or if I was ok as-is.  Turns out I’m okay as the Outpost has been located in the extreme southwest of the area.

The area I’ve explored thus far is fairly small, the main floor and a cave but is overall well written, lots of small details such as the paintings and doilies to examine.

It doesn’t take long to understand the meaning of the paintings and in short time you find yourself fighting a flame blasting red dragon.  The dragon goes down fairly smoothly but the flame blasts are non-trivial, lots of hitpoints.  Your reward for dispatching the red dragon is a key to the cave and the red bands of the ancient, an interesting looking evil only sorcerer/shaman armwear.  The 55 mana and 2 str on it makes it particularly attractive since the next nearest alternative is the Sleeves of Power with 15 and they’re anti-druid.  Not too many people have spare sleeves of Kahl for the 25 mana and 1 str from them, so this item surely has a place.

The key is a poof on use key, a rather annoying anti-staking feature because if you have a hard time killing the black dragon you have to restock/cr quickly or else face the red dragon again.  I imagine this will be less annoying in time as we get a little better at the kills but for now it’s just a minor annoyance.  If you kill Khisanthal, the black dragon you may be rewarded with a Dagger of Entwined Hearts, a very excellent evil sorcerer weapon that is clearly targeted at nephandi with a bonus of 5 to damage of qlip.  I say may because I don’t know if it’s a pop or not at this early stage of things.

We were unable to kill the black dragon a second time due to 300-500 damage lightning blasts every round in the subsequent attempts.  Since the mob was purged after repop (and has not purged since) we were wondering if someone had upped the mob after our first kill.  To be fair the mob was pretty straightforward the first time but now the blasts make it a royal pain.  I survived 7 of them back to back using single heals and found myself soloing 😛  So more quaffing power is needed! 🙂

Beyond that I noticed what I perceive to be a couple of Dragonlance references in this area.  Mithian blood ale from the Isle of Mithas, the home of Dragonlance’s minotaur race, I had hoped Dagarak Singlehorn would respond to it but alas.  Bupu the gully dwarf, the rescuer of a spellbook of Fistandantilus from the black dragon’s hoarde who also takes on a few characteristics of the gully dwarf who goes to live in the Inn of the Last Home in the second generation’s adventures, likewise didn’t respond to the ale, even when emptied on the floor 🙂  A blind mage fits a reasonable interpretation of the description of a post-Legends Raistlin Majere.  The name of the black dragon in the Dragons of Autumn Twilight where Bupu appeared wasn’t Khisanthal, but it was Khisanth which is close enough 🙂   I’ve got nothing regarding the inspiration for Talinka or Matthias.  Talinka is the name of a town in Russia, a modification of the name “Tika” who was a barmaid in the Inn of the Last Home, the name of the lead character in a series of children’s adventures (Tina Talinka) or maybe just something from the mind of Romani.  Similarly the best I could come up with for Matthias is that aside from some fan fiction, google tells me someone named “Matthias” is currently reading one of the Dragonlance books, according to his amazon.com profile :>

Regardless of the inspiration, it has been put together in an original and entertaining area.  Thanks Romani!

Mapping the Realms of Despair

Lots of people set out to do this and many of them choose to make a link between areas so that each one appears in it’s own graphic. There’s good reason to do that, it makes individual areas easier to find and helps to modularize the mapping process. One thing it doesn’t represent well is how the areas fit together on the continent.

I have previously mapped a lot of the Realms using zones but for my currently project on realmsofdespair.info I want something different. Having only taken the time to map New Darkhaven I’ve already come across a number of challenges. I’m sharing them with you because if it’s your first time trying to map the Realms, I think these issues will crop up regardless of which software you choose.

A map of Darkhaven
New Darkhaven

As a bit of background to SMAUG a room is the basic unit of measure of space.  There is no way to specify the size of a room though there is some limited support for expressing the size between rooms.  More on that later.  Rooms are the places the action takes place and exits let us move between rooms.  I will assert here that there is no established coordinate system in Realms that we can tie into to make our life easy, so we have to come up with our own.

I want to point out 4 particular difficulties that will pop up before you’ve finished Darkhaven.  There are more but that’ll give us something to talk about later.

  1. Either the distance between rooms varies or the rooms aren’t the same size.  You can’t rely on just counting off the steps in a direction and evenly spacing your rooms out.  Proof: As soon as you enter the game you can move up 1 room to get to ground level for Darkhaven.  If you move east you’re in a small shop.  Now if you move west, north, east, south and west you might expect to be in that same shop but you are actually in the bank.  This is the simplest example of this but you better get used to it.  Try squeezing the Warehouse into the map without accepting it 🙂
  2. Diagonal directions cause some tricky geometries.  To get things to line up “just so” you will either have to accept that every link is not going to be perfectly straight or you need to be prepared to fuss over moving rooms around until they click perfectly.
  3. There is an implied terrain grade that has nothing to do with up and down exits.  What?  It means that you can walk and without moving up or down anywhere you can be looking up or down at a room you were previously in.  Proof: Exiting Darkhaven’s southern gate you can follow the trail northwest until you eventually reach the Crumbling Bridge.  If you had instead gone northeast and followed the Darkhaven River you would have followed a path that lead to a spot below this bridge.  Simply move up and down yet stay on the same map level.  This is one of the most difficult discrepancies to reconcile … most maps can visually represent it but if we’re going to try to apply good mapping techniques we have to understand what sort of physical reality might cause this situation.  In fact it’s not a problem of a real representation but rather it’s a problem that crops up in computer science all the time.  We’re trying to assign discrete, fixed, defined levels to something that were it real would be a continuous reality.  So once again, wha?  Up and down exits are jumps in elevations, not some unusual change in level.  The terrain itself may have some grade that imperceptibly slopes upwards or downwards in a way that isn’t so drastic that climbing is required.  In this case the river slopes downwards or is even beneath the regular grade and when our characters travel it they gradually travel below the street level of Darkhaven.  Eventually it becomes noticeable enough that you’d have to climb up to the bridge to get back on top.  Thankfully this is a short stretch and it peters out, but it sheds a light on the fact that you can’t assume that because something has the same number of ups and downs, or has no ups and downs at all, that you’re on the same level.  Street level in Darkhaven is a different altitude than the ground level in the Southern Mountain Range … or is it?
  4. Paths will irreconcilably cross one another.  Try as you might to keep your map nice and neat and clean, paths will cross one another.  Proof: The first occurrence we’ve already discussed.  Go directly south of Darkhaven to the bridge.  There is no up and down exit here, so no direct path down to the river, yet the river’s gonna pass right under it.  Okay, maybe we’ve explained this one already.  What about the path from Miden’nir to Moria crossing with the one from Darkhaven to the Southern Mountain Range?

 

Hey, so that’s enough for now, stay tuned for more exploration and additional maps.  You will be able to follow my progress on realmsofdespair.info but first I need to settle a couple of technical questions about how to display them.  I’m pretty happy with the early test setups but it’s not quite right yet haha.

Merry Christmas!

To the Thieves Guild and beyond!

You say 'i am ready'
Deliess Whurgirn, the Guildmistress of Shadowport says 'So be it, Lareawan. Good luck.'
Deliess Whurgirn, the Guildmistress of Shadowport brandishes a wand at you.
You feel yourself transported far away from the security of the Thieves Guild...
The Falcon exclaims 'Ah, I see my lovely lady has sent another would-be adventurer to risk life and limb in the search of gold and gear. So be it!'
The Falcon's backstab _demolishes_ you!

For the last little while I have travelled to Shadowport, keeping in touch with Deliess about the possibility of fighting the Falcon for his mask. Every 2 hours or so, when I remember, I run down there and find out if it’s time to fight. 3 times I’ve been rewarded with the sweet, sweet words telling me to prepare. The first time I didn’t notice that sanc ran during the fight, just as the difficulty ramped up. The second time I went LD just as I was reciting razorbait, damn unstable connection. This time … this time though …. The Falcon is DEAD!!

Twice during the fight he caught me with a gouge before I could hit true sight, scary moments where I was down to a couple hundred hit points …

Someone parries your attack.
Someone parries your attack.
Someone dodges your attack.
Someone parries your attack.
Someone thrusts its foot out and kicks you.
Someone's kick jolts you!
You dodge someone's attack.
Someone thrusts its foot out to kick you but is unable to connect the blow.
Someone's stab gashes you!
(something gets damaged)
You wish that your wounds would stop BLEEDING so much!
You feel seasick as murky waters rise from someone's hand.
Lareawan * * (408/1760h 622v |S|Someone is you're blind!)sty eva

It’s been a while since a fight got my pulse pounding but this one did it. Much the same feeling as playing Diablo 3 hardcore on a higher level.

This fight to me was more about the accomplishment than the reward but I won’t turn down the reward, the mask is quite a handy item that allows me to swap out the spaulders for leader sleeves, a dr less but 30 more hit points, which is a decent trade.

If you are planning to do this, all I can suggest to you is that preparation is the key. I spent a fair amount of time rampaging Olympus for ambrosia before setting out, living near Thoth in the Blasted Lands for triple heals, got my shockstone from Nevermore, Tree of Life for glyphs, made sure my equipment damage triggers worked and renamed the duplicate pieces if I could so they’d track better … and on and on. Any advantage I could give myself to help me out.

Ultimately the 131 dr didn’t do the job, the 1760 hp didn’t do the job, but staying cool when things went sideways was the real key. Even being very careful about curing blind if the gouge would outlast the true sight wasn’t a guarantee that I wouldn’t end up blind, I ended up gouged twice after true sight dropped due to sitting in a bash or circle lag, but reacting while blind and dropping to evasive and then healing to full as quickly as I could after the blind was critical. I was lucky that I didn’t get gouged again before I got the next true sight or have a huge damage round.

Lareawan *|* (1660/1660h 580v |A|The Falcon is almost dead)
The Falcon parries your attack.
The Falcon parries your attack.
The Falcon parries your attack.
The Falcon parries your attack.
The Falcon dodges your attack.
You dodge the Falcon's attack.
The Falcon thrusts its foot out to kick you but is unable to connect the blow.
The Falcon thrusts its foot out to kick you but is unable to connect the blow.
The Falcon thrusts its foot out and kicks you.
The Falcon's kick brushes you.
The Falcon attempts to distract you with foolish swordplay.
The Falcon lunges forward, striking with its blade.
The Falcon's swordstrike grazes you.
The Falcon leaps into the air and kicks you on the chest with both of its feet.
The Falcon's leap scratches you.
The Falcon vaults through the air and crashes feet first into you.
The Falcon's vault scratches you.
The Falcon says 'Your skills may be strong, but I am a true master!'
The Falcon tumbles out of the way and takes on an aggressive stance.
The Falcon's backstab _cleaves_ you!
(Set's ring of Power gets damaged)
That really did HURT!
Lareawan * * (1117/1660h 579v |A|The Falcon is almost dead)

A 500 hitpoint round like that would have finished me off when I was blinded, I went to around 400 hp twice, but a little luck saved my bacon. There’s other ways to deal with blindness, like blind fighting on humans or whatever but those weren’t options for me (dang it, I just got used to using optometrum on a ranger again …) .

Your circle hits the Falcon!
The Falcon is DEAD!!
As The Falcon falls, his most prized possession falls from his face...
The Falcon says 'You have done well to best me, Lareawan... You are a true master.'
You hear the Falcon's death cry.
You get 10895913 gold coins from the corpse of the Falcon.
You get the Mask of the Master Rogue from the corpse of the Falcon.

For those who haven’t seen the mask before:

Object 'the Mask of the Master Rogue' is infused with your magic...
It is a level 50 armor, weight 2.
Locations it can be worn: face
Special properties: dark unique
Genres allowed: rogue
This armor has a gold value of 23532.
It is one of the pieces of the set 'Guise of the Falcon'.
Owner: Lareawan
Armor class is 10 of 10.
Affects dexterity by 1.
Affects luck by 1.
Affects affected_by by hide.

Seeing as there is only one face wear location I’m not sure how much use the unique flag is here, but a bit of future proofing I suppose. The big thing to notice is the 10 ac. This thing can and will scrap, and though the quest tag can rot off so you can get another one, apparently it takes so long as to be practically never.


You take a closer look at the Mask of the Master Rogue on your body...
The master rogue knows the advantage of covering his or her face in the
midst of a sly deed, and this mask looks like a perfect solution. This mask
is also imbued with magic to enable its wearer to see much which cannot be
seen.

The mask has a small picture icon on the inside, along with the word:

Falcon

In conclusion, yes it is possible for a stock thief to do this, with a fair bit of luck. The shorter you can make the fight, the better, and that’s where extra dr will come into play. I did this with a Lifebane and a Darkfire Thrasher, not entry level but not ‘blivs either. With 500 hitpoint rounds not only possible but regular extra hitpoints will not hurt a darn thing. Overall, just have supplicate favour and don’t be afraid to go and try.