Category: Uncategorized

Of changes great and small …

by Tharius

I think that today’s post will be a short one.  I want to take the time to single someone out for their efforts, someone whose focus in the game is unrelenting and also counter to the general culture of the game.

Without further ado I wish to applaud Loril.  Loril is, without argument, an outstanding champion of the new player.  I do not simply mean that she is helpful to new players, but rather that she actively and rabidly promotes the new player experience on the Realms of Despair.  For many of us the new player experience ends long before we hit avatar, when we begin thinking about buff gear and running with other avatars.  To try to recall 6 months down the road what things were important to new players is near impossible … never mind for those of us who have been around since prior to the Shattering.

Returning after a long hiatus I assumed that to some degree I would have a new player experience.  I have spoken with many other returning players and there is something that I discovered.  You can’t go home again.  You return to the game remembering where you left off, recalling the things you used to do.  Even after all the time away I had a tremendous recollection of commands and equipment.  I could look at someone else’s character and tell you what pieces were new after the time I stopped playing without referencing rodpedia or any other site.  That somehow Loril has actively maintained an eye for those gameplay elements that are important to new players is remarkable.

As a guild leader I genuinely desire to teach new players about the game.  Not just “how do I gear them up so they can go to Seth” … because runs have rarely been my primary source of entertainment in the game … but rather how can I be a comprehensively good player.  My idea of that means having as good a time checking out a level 10 area as an avatar one, not for the mad lootz but for the fun of figuring out the puzzles and seeing the creativity that people have put into the game.  I have sometimes failed but every time I talk with Loril I find this spark reinvigorated.

Does she remain an enigma to many players who are baffled by her focus?  Sure.  Those who simply play the game to experience a small amount of the content and amass text wealth to the exclusion of community and comradarie will have a hard time understanding how someone can spend so much time working with people under level 10.  Understand her or not her efforts continue to benefit new generations of new players, whether chasing sigil making bots out of the halls of knowledge or adding exit descriptions to the connecting forests and areas around Darkhaven.

To conclude today’s sermon from the mount, thank you Loril for your efforts.  I am certain that a great number of people benefit from your assistance and have no idea that you’ve provided it.

The Botpocalypse … aka wasted talent and effort

by Tharius

So why don’t we talk a little about the whole botpocalypse and laws scripting.

It seems to be all the rage to drone on about this ad nausem and maybe it’ll bring me some traffic! 🙂 No, in seriousness I don’t want to talk much about it but what I would like to talk about is some of the issues that I feel motivate players to automate leveling.

For the record, I have written this article multiple times and deleted it avowing not to go on a tirade. I hope what follows is more well reasoned than my previous attempts.

First the idea that some people just hate leveling is entirely fine by me. Some hate pkill, mkill or any given aspect of the game and I am not one to tell anyone that they have to conform to any style of game play. This situation has long been addressed by paying someone else to do it for you. Hating leveling is a motivation for scripted leveling due to the profit it brings the leveler.

The profit found in leveling is accentuated by the fact that a number of the most popular leveling mobs give fairly decent gold return. Without surprising anyone at all I’ll point to Crab Guards, many of the mobs in Mithril Hall and almost all the mobs in Spectrum. I imagine the goal was for low level characters to be able to get some gold and buy some supplies while they adventure. If a leveler makes the effort to maximize their gold/experience gain in their mob selection the profit for leveling sharply increases.

So I’m sure at this point we can agree that the motivation for the leveler is quite clear. It is a service in demand that pays very, very well.

Why do people tend to hate leveling so much? It is simply because it is repetitive and tedious. Almost nothing you do while you level makes a whit of difference to your end product, no gear is worth keeping, no quest adds anything interesting to the avatar to be. More on this later.

Ultimately it is the demand from players though that drives the supply. So let’s touch on a few aspects of that.

Players desire to have multiple characters in order to participate in all the game’s content. It’s no accident that some classes are nearly useless at certain mobs. Nor is this undesirable. Why should every class be able to efficiently destroy every mob? I strongly agree that class balancing needs to be visited to make the classes more generally effective, however, I argue that if we blur the lines too much, we may as well simply have a single super class. I would suggest that not only is this particular motivation normal, but it’s even healthy. Try the game from different points of view.

Some players will desire multiples of the same class in order to be able to go out and gather area pops or kill particular mobiles repeatedly (farming) or to repeat other repetitive tasks such as brewing. Let’s take that sentence apart a bit.

In item farming, whether area pops or from mobiles, there are different motivations. Some items are farmed because the item is always useful, it’s consumable and needs to be harvested en masse. Other items are farmed because the item has a large level range and are particularly valued in lower levels. Things like the apples of life and the low level pops in Coral Depths come to mind though there are a tremendous amount of examples. Other items have variations that people are trying to overcome, whether it is micro-optimizing for the higher average damage Justice or trying to get devout scales from Justice.

Lets address the en masse farming, especially prevalent in area pops. This isn’t a conversation about whether farming is good or bad, I’m only acknowledging what is. There are a few main strategies being used to discourage farming that encourage people to have a mass of character. In the case of the multi-tinker ores they appear at reboot … so the strategy is to blanket the Realms with characters that can farm at 6am in multiple areas simultaneously. Or we can make the time random like the Skulk and encourage the same strategy with a trigger to log into the area each repop and check then log out. Or can we make it appear in random rooms and put some aggro mobs wandering about to make it a pain in the arse? Or we can set a mptag on the character to prevent them from gathering too many of the pops within a particular online connection time like apples of life … can you level a character to an apple farming level faster than the tag rots off? Can you farm apples on your tinkering gnomes and rotate through them to maximize the apples gathered without missing ip8 tinker times?

For mob farming the fact is that after so many kills it gets boring. Once you’ve developed a strategy that works well and are able to repeat it without fail then scripting makes sense … Now, if you’re already at this point and bored with the mob, why would you want to split the gear and increase your kill totals by taking someone else if you can use multiple characters – either directly by being ip+ or indirectly by killing for a while on one, then logging out and loading the next mirror image of that character in to overcome things like equipment damage or ridiculous numbers of heals and so on. I’m not even really pointing to mobs that you’d sell the gear from, this is stuff you’re trying to get for yourself. The rarer the item with the desirable properties is though the more the motivation to perfect this and sell the items. Or you can make the mob ip1 and keep the rare pop rate until people decide that a harder run with a better rate is more worthwhile. Why run Cato when it’s a lesser time investment to get a Veil of Divine Wrath than a Catastrophe for the same number of runners? Especially when it seems that Seth’s Fortress is a far smoother and more perfectible run than Cato’s randomness allows.

Builders have begun to address this issue … I’ll note the Shadowstalker and the barbarian neckwear: SS provides an item that is used to manufacture the neckwear in the alignment you desire, yet no comprehensive effort has been observed to revamp some of the older areas to keep them relevant, often the effort required to get a small improvement is simply not deemed worthwhile by many players… why get the Nevermore neckwear which is modestly better than devout scales when the scales are so much easier to get?

To briefly address the repeatable actions comment, at one point we had armies of clerics brewing heal potions en masse. This was very profitable since flasks were about 4k coins each and heals could be sold at 10k each. To remove the motivation for doing this empty flask prices were brought in line with the store bought heal prices. When all the profit went away, so did the motivation for these armies, but there are other player generated consumables that continue to encourage armies, at least some of which could be sold from shopkeepers and provide, if nothing else, a minor gold sink … of course zomg you can’t sell demonskin potions in Darkhaven rabble rabble hurp durp.

So up to this point I’ve provided some motivation for the armies … which is one of the causes of spam leveling. I think it’s fair to say that army owners don’t care at all about how the characters level, so long as they level. They’re interested in the end result only a character of appropriate level for their farming (note: not all farming needs to be done by avatars!) This is only a part of the demand … and I argue it’s not even the majority of the demand, but I wanted to try to provide a comprehensive overview of this issue.

Why does the AVERAGE player buy into and provide demand for leveling? The simplest explanation is the quest for better character bases. Re-rolling is linked here but I’m going to avoid that conversation for the moment – let’s say that for now, if you invest the time you can get the ——-> stats <——- you want, though perhaps for particularly hard to roll combinations you need to go to extreme measures including but not limited to distributed re-rolling (to avoid ip spoofing) or even directly to ip spoofing for re-rolling to actually pull it off (“perfect” based half orc or half ogre vampires anyone?). Of course that’s the easy part isn’t it? It’s the base after leveling that motivates people to keep trying for yet another character.

My experience is that the average gain per level needs only fluctuate a tiny amount to have a major impact on the avatar bases. Let’s think about a thief’s hit points since this is one of the prime examples. Per level your gain is 12-17 hit points meaning a theoretical range of 608-853 which averages to 731. Now … an average based thief is in the 720-730 range but an exceptional one is in the 750’s. To be fair I have heard of exceptionally few thieves in the 600s or the 800s. It is clear that leveling trends towards the midpoint by design.

If you average 14 hit points per gain you will get a character with a base around 700. If you average 15 it goes up to around 750. So it is also clear that it’s a very sensitive thing that any ham-fisted changes will unbalance things.

Next it is important to say that a 700 hp base thief is entirely playable, but to make those 50 hp up would be a substantial investment in glory or require a trade off in equipment. An example of such a trade off would be changing out 2 Collar of Abyssal Servitude for 2 scales of the alpha and omega. Of course, since people expect to see the 4 luck from CAS’ in the builds, the other thief equipment choices become restricted and the motivation for an 18 luck base is only increased. These options are really fallacies however and they have been espoused for so very long without a real justification that they are, in my opinion, absurdities. In both cases I can level a new character and see an immediate and often substantial gain. Every ounce of effort I put into overcoming a bad base with equipment or glory can be put on a better based character to keep the gap alive.

Let’s pause here and say that some of thing things that influence bases are not random. They are also not reported to you while you’re leveling but many of them are common knowledge. You have to max your con. As far as I know that’s the only officially listed in a help file advice you’ll find. Next is that you want to have good luck … statistic, not fortune … but … some claim that 19 luck seems to go better than 20, some say it doesn’t matter at all. You want to try to avoid having all the leveling spells on at once. Stoneheft’s said as much on channels that maxing your stats by equipment instead of the spells gives you a better chance. Does having sanctuary on penalize you? What other spells might cause a penalty? Is the Blessing of Thoric killing my low level hit point gains since I made efforts to get lots of level 2 con gear? Does killing the same mob too many times in a row bestow a penalty? Does wearing gear that is far below your level penalize you outside of making killing things harder? Does being ip+ globally hurt you? Are my guild bots killing my level gains? Having too many characters in the same room on the same ip hurts experience gain, but does it kill my hit point gains too? The only answer you get when you try to investigate these questions are “you do not have a sufficient sample size to be able to understand it”. So be it, we overcome randomness with high sampling. That’s science folks, no more magic hand wavy pretend statistics. We may still come to wrong conclusions because of an incomplete understanding but we’ll get much closer than we have before with data. With scripting most of the variables that we can control are held in check and even with laws scripting it is clear that ATTENDED scripting will continue as it always has.

Ok, so we’re almost getting ranty again. Time to change the channels. Whether you think the base on a character is important or not is irrelevant. Enough people do think so who create a demand for mass character creations.

*click* On this channel are a few ideas of how we can help tame the motivation side of the equation. If we want to alter behavior we can probably best achieve this by acknowledging the motivations and seeing if there are acceptable changes and yet still maintain some variability between characters and some “risk” element to leveling. Many games do not consider hit point bases as something that should be variable between characters, level playing field and all, that the player’s actions should earn them the advantages instead of some arbitrary factor. I happen to agree with that sentiment but it is not my decision to make on Realms and I will only mention it here in the event that someone who does make such decisions may consider it. It’s interesting to note that even if everyone’s bases were exactly the same that it would still be a monumental task to accumulate even the most popular collection of characters … a few mages, a couple clerics, a couple thieves, a few barbs, a warrior or two, a paladin, a nephandi, a fathomer maybe an auggie, a druid, a few rangers and a couple vamps … never mind a complete army that takes having coverage in most races and alignments into account.

Ok so let’s address some of the points I made earlier and while I am looking at this as a “big bad avatar” to borrow Loril’s turn of phrase, I will use my experience as a Newbie Councillor under Julie and Sarah back in the day to try to help flavor my solutions as being neutral or in favor of the one new player trying to make their character.

Reducing the motivation to level for other people can be achieved by making it less profitable. This will hit the golders who use mobs like crab guards but the solution is to level out the gold across pre-avatar mobs so that there is no great motivation to fixate on mobs that give both good experience and good gold. Why in the heck wouldn’t you hit crab guards while leveling except for competition? There are what? 17 of them at 100k gold each per repop? Well, duh. Toss in the eels and you can crack 2m per repop in an area that turns over rapidly. My argument here is not that the guards need to have their gold or experience downed but that it is the disparity between these guys and clearing out (let’s say) the entire area of Sentinel that puts pressure on Coral Depths and causes conflict between characters focused on the same area. I suggest that a comprehensive revamp of areas targeted towards levelers be done, with an analysis of things like xp per hour — the sorts of analysis that is now utterly common in all sorts of games (Diablo comes to mind). Players can start this analysis but only an immortal review by expert builders can give a true picture — and if done by immortals the analysis can be done by an automated script that looks at the area files themselves and applies knowledge about the experience gain formulas.

Ok. So that’s part of the project and it will help with the next point about the repetitiveness and tediousness of leveling. I would be able to go check out new areas without feeling penalized for it and while there will always, always, always be “optimal routes” you will have to invest time and effort to find them and your reward will be faster leveling. Many people will simple not expend that effort and will investigate areas more freely. The question “where is the best spot to level” will be asked, but will be less relevant. Right now there is a disparity between the right areas and the wrong areas that could result in a 100 hour difference between a new an experienced player creating a single character … and the new player probably won’t be happy with their character in the long time when they get told their base stinks (more on this later, since that’s an age old complaint!). So that’s a part of the tedious equation but the fact is that not everyone likes to explore and further that ultimately builders can only produce so many areas before “it’s all been done before”.

The second part of reducing the tedium can also be tied into some of the other comments I’ve made. Some experiments have been made with automated questing on Realms to varying degrees of success. Some of the quest provide a nifty leveling item, often owner tagged, or some amount of experience. Both of these are great rewards and nothing I’m about to suggest should take away from the continued growth of these quests though I suggest that they be a little more tied together so that achieving some of them eliminates others. The current quests are very hardly variable at all. There are a very limited number of permutations that once accounted for encourages automation. To utterly randomly generate such quests removes too much control from the builder and can introduce ridiculous combinations yet to build any substantial amount of quests by hand is a daunting task as well. The solution here is a permutation engine where a builder can provide sets of items to be permuted. Choosing 2 items from a set of 6 where the order is important and repetitions are not allowed produces 30 combinations. So … you can tell a character to go retrieve item 1, ah good you’ve got it, go get item 2 30 different ways with only a variety of 6 items … and if you set up your programs smartly so that the item is NOT a stock Realms item but can only be obtained by a mob that reads your mptags you can also vary the mob that people retrieve it from. If there are 3 potential mobs that these 6 items might come from then suddenly you have 90 potential quests. If you want to overcome enumeration you do it by overwhelming options. Math FTW. What sorts of rewards might make this level of questing worthwhile?? I would utterly ignore such a system that ONLY provided experience or a leveling item. Glory is inappropriate as a reward during leveling, perhaps. Why not have some of these quests trigger when a player has a sub-par hit point/mana/movement gain and allow them to make up some of the missed opportunity? Remedial leveling? Holey moley, better bases through interesting dynamic content instead of repetitive combat of the RNG. Will you have to work for it? Darn right you will! Will you be rewarded? Sure will! So uhm, how to prevent abuse of it? Well, maybe you lose the opportunity to regain the lost hit points (whatever) when you hit your next level? That is, you can’t simply blow through the levels as fast as you can and then go do a bunch of quests to make it up. You have to go level by level BUILDING YOUR CHARACTER … holy craphats Batman! Imagine also applying this to stats so that people could do remedial work on their stats and consider how this might help remove some of the reroll motivations.

I said earlier that nothing you gain while leveling is worth keeping at avatar. I stand by that. You could av and dt and not even feel a pinch because it’s a free recall. Now take what I’ve proposed about questing into account. Not every quest has to be for remediation … what if some of the quests helped you build up an item that was useful to you from level 2 to 50? When you hit avatar you actually had gear that was useful for joining in runs and going to earn more, better gear? What if after 49 levels at least one item was worth keeping even if you joined a great Guild that ran all the time and could GIVE you great gear? What might that item look like? Could it look different for EVERY PLAYER based on the choices they made? Is it a way to fix bases without actually adjusting the person’s base? A permanent object maybe? Certainly at least owner tagged … well… I hope you’re getting the idea here.

I make no comment on having a variety of characters or building an army. I think these are avatar issues that put pressure on the leveling problem but ultimately aren’t the cause. Likewise the farming issue is part of this demand but a thorough review of the areas can address a great deal of this and really, should be addressed separately but people should be aware that no matter what anti farming practice you put into place it can likely be circumvented by overwhelming numbers of characters.

Maybe the quest system idea is way too far out to get an immediate result. Let’s try something simple – remove the minimum gains from characters except as a penalty. It will not raise the maximum achievable bases but will modestly move the lower end towards the average and make some average a bit better. A string of 12’s and 13’s on these thieves is really discouraging and feels like a penalty for getting good gains otherwise … if I see a 17 I almost smell the 12’s coming as the algorithm tries to massage me back towards the average.

I’ve argued why I believe bases are one of the major motivating factors. You can feel free to disagree but the fact is enough people believe it to create a demand that is increasingly being capitalized on by the clever.

I also assert that though there is absolutely no intention on my part to suggest that every possible penalty towards level gains needs to be exposed to the Realms community so that we can optimize our leveling behavior, it is clear that whatever changes are made need to encourage the behaviors that give better results or to allow us to be aware of what is penalty and why is poor gain (simple example … have the mob in the Halls of Training tsk and you and tell you that the aura of magic surrounding you is so heavy that it is no wonder the fates can hardly reward you … or whatever … just to hint that wearing all leveling spells is bad).

Ok guys and gals, I’ve been typing for hours now and I’m sure you’re all sick of reading. I’m not telling anyone what to do. Maybe there are good reasons why a lot of this won’t work. I openly admit I might have my head up my ass on a ton of this stuff, but in a fairly straightforward way I’ve tried to present the problem as I see it and attempted to address both leveling and re-rolling together. I hope that we can have constructive discussions around this topic, I have no energy left for any whining however.

If you just want to piss and moan, go pound salt.  Don Quixote has left the building.

… Darkfire talon falls to the ground in scraps …

by Tharius

This isn’t just an attention getter, this was my experience Sunday morning.  I decided to solo Set before I had to get ready to head out the door and figured it wouldn’t be too terribly hard to do.  That was the result of sharing the item with another character, but not repairing it before I put it away.  This is not a rant about scrapping equipment, rather I thought I’d try to point out some good habits that players should probably take up.  I’m happy add more to this list, but here’s just a few.

Scrapping happens, but it should only happen to lights and containers …

There is really no excuse to scrap an item off your character unless it’s a 1 AC item.  I know, I just scrapped a bloody DFT, but there is no excuse for it.  I use triggers that will remove gear once it reaches a low AC level.  They’re not the simplest in the world but they’re the advanced version of a simple idea.  It requires a little foresight because you have to have the AC of your items at hand from identify.  These triggers are absolute core of not scrapping equipment.  Better to die because the triggers just stripped off your weapons than to scrap them… you’re carrying other weapons anyways arent’ you?  I’m getting ahead of myself.  The first habit you should get in to is repairing immediately after you recall.  Don’t start shuffling things around or putting loot into storage – repair everything, then shuffle.  This habit would have prevented my disaster.  If you don’t have time to run to <insert cheap repair mob here>, don’t, pay full price and do the repair.  How many repairs do you have to do at the cheap mob to save the same value in coins as your gear?  If you just supplicated your corpse – repair.  In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t take long to repair if you’re trying to run back to the fight, you probably took longer forgetting to type stand the first time or running back to one of the visitation deities to gain favor.  Which brings us to …

Never leave home without enough favor to supplicate …

I would say supplicate corpse, but there’s no excuse for leaving home without at least recall favor.  There are two deities who are so easy to favor to supplicate that even if you die during a run you can spam the favor and get back on the same repop.  Some of the other deities are tougher but most will respond to bury or dig on corpses … probably more strongly at low levels than high ones.  If you have one character that gains on bury and one that gains on dig, well aren’t you just ready to go?  I have had this sort of thing bite me in the butt where I’m sitting out 3000 rounds of curse because I don’t have a remove curse potion/scroll or enough favor to supplicate.  When this happens I invariably don’t have a way to dispel magic and I’m out of recall scrolls too… nothing short of trans is getting me out of there … or recall by mdeath.

If you stay organized and stocked, you can be spontaneous with less stress …

As the king of disorganized I’ll reiterate that this advice comes from years of not doing it right.  If you are anything like me your main is packed with all sorts of miscellaneous crap scoured from all over the Realms… notes, guides… stuff that if you emptied your pack and a crash hit would probably not amount to much of a long term loss (as a famed DT’er take my word that you’ll get over it in time).  I am not saying that you can’t hoard, I’m saying don’t hoard on a character you want to leave Darkhaven with.  One of my ordermates has a very good routine that I hope to be able to emulate, one day 🙂  He’ll drop off all run loot from his characters to his main and sorts his main out when he gets near 500 weight.  I can do this for short periods of time but inevitably I end up at 998/999 and stuff piles up.  When you do this sort of thing the next step becomes easy… go restock your potions on the character you just used.  If you’ve already gone and repaired and favored well hey, your character’s pretty well ready to go back out the door.

There’s no excuse for not having the basics …

There are easy ways to do things and harder ways to do things.  The harder ways usually give you reduced weight items or higher spell level items or some advantage, but the easy way items are just fine for most situations.  You should be able to cast sanctuary, elemental shields, fly, sneak, hide and invisibility on yourself.  Get an item equipped in each wearloc to help cut down equipment damage overall (even if you dispute that the code punishes you for not having each wearloc equipped, having items in face, back and 2 ankles it’s 4 more items for the code to pick from).  Some of these are stone easy… sanctuary, fly and invisibility come off a number of simple stock items or can be brewed and bought easily.  Sneak and hide are sometimes tricky to get on a good item, but they can both be found by level 5 on basic items so that you can move between areas without being attacked.  Basic ac only items for each wearloc are easily obtained.  The basics are just that, basics.  Get them.  Upgrade them when you get the chance.

Adept the skills and spells on your character …

I’m not too bad for this one because I’ve incorporated it into my leveling so it’s not such a chore at avatar.  It is frustrating for anyone running with you to watch your skill or spell fail repeatedly and it’s slowing you down when you’re soloing.  Some skills are a pain in the butt to adept but you only usually have to do it once per character … if you use triggers and keep them it cuts down the work.  Fighting styles are a pain, find a mob that’s immune magic and wield magic weapons … the weapon skills can be easily adepted by level 10 if you poke around for different weapon types.  If you’re stuck on something, send me a tell … some of the answers are good quest training … go adept cook and practice for Destre to let the sausage maker out.

It’s taken no time at all to make this a long post… I’ve intentionally left off run etiquette because it deserves it’s own post.  I hear “I’m bored” a lot and you discover later that the same person is also unprepared.  If you can make some of these things habits you’ll remove some of your obstacles to excellence.

I’m of to adept writing short notes, clearly I’m not yet proficient …. 🙂

Seth’s Fortress and the Chaos Maze (or … My Adventures in Imm CR’ing)

by Tharius

I’ve very recently developed a desire to relearn how to map the Chaos Maze.  This is something I used to know back in the day but as a matter of course it’s been changed over the years.  I used to take the Guild of Druids to Magus of Evil (the equipment works well on an evil druid) and to Jade (who doesn’t need a couple of strands?).  As I’ve become the Second of the Guild of Thieves getting out to Jade seems more imperative.  After all, thieves need strands to make Falcon sets, in addition to their general usefulness on their own.

So I sat down last night, thinking myself well prepared.  I had some help and notes to guide me and I set out.  I share this litany of mistakes with you in part to remind myself any time I get thinking I’m good at this game of where I’ve been and also so that you can learn from my mistakes.  Had I been a little more careful, there would have been no need for an imm to CR 3 of my characters (thanks again Romani!!).

Did you know there’s no obvious way to get a Paladin to hide?  Me either!  The chaos hound just before the maze reminded me about it.  Ok, into the maze … you know … if you forget to hide someone and switch to another window, sooner or later you’re going to have to CR the first guy right?  Off with the weathered boots and on with the moccasins.

When I’ve seen people map the maze in the past I see them come back with a bunch of charmed chaos creatures in tow, put them all to sleep and away we go.  I’d love to know how they do it because every second or third creature my dominate would fail and I’d be fighting.  Sure, just relog … oops, there goes the charm on the other mobs.  Kill it off!!  Ok, not bad but you’ve got to watch that your alignment doesn’t drift too far or zapski!  Not only that, but if you kill them, you’ll be dealing with them next repop.  Not the end of the world, but one more thing right?  Why deal with them?  Well … false fires, pick up coins and finally a private room that will stop you from spamming in the directions once you have them.

Oh and since you’re on a vampire, keep an eye on that blood 🙂

Ok so they’re dealt with at last (you got the rats too right??) so now it’s time to try and figure out the path.  There’s a lot of room at this point to spin your wheels and get nowhere.  Especially if your clues about how to solve the maze are wrong.  Over the years the solution to the maze has changed but the overall idea has stayed the same.  It’s a testament to creativity in how this maze can be tweaked and re-tweaked and yet stay so similar.

So … after 3 or so hours of using the wrong directions, assuming that I was messing something up, I found out I was using the wrong method.  Seems my notes are at least a generation too told 🙂  Oops.  Oh well.  With a different method I was at the divine protector in short order.  Bitty boppity boo and the whole crew is through.  Down the hallway, past the slavering beast (thanks hide!!) and I’m parked outside the door of the Magus of Evil.  Ok, 1 am on a work night?  I’m told it was well past time to get to bed (thanks mom … hun!  No seriously… I’d just stay up and have to drag all day long, I can be bad that way…)

Ok fresh morning, and ready to go… hey .. log in and do a quick kill, catch a repop and then I’ll have an hour to map the maze.  Let me stop you right here.  This is the first BIG mistake.  No matter how good you think you are, no matter how fast you’ve mapped the maze in the past … this is a no supplicate area with lots of multi-avatar mobs.  MAP THE MAZE FIRST!!  If you’ve successfully mapped the maze twice in the last 10 years … read this whole paragraph one more time!

Magus of Evil is not a tough kill.  I’ve racked up lots of kills here, but never multi-solo.  Not to mention my auto-quaff triggers and such aren’t set up on all my characters.  Mistake number 2, take the time to prep properly.  Being over-eager to jump in and kill will usually end badly.  When my thief, paladin and warrior all dropped I really realized this.  I was of sound enough mind to flee my remaining thief and move back into the hallway with my mage and cleric.

Ok time to CR.  Well … I have a surviving thief, so I’ll relog him so Magus will not be aggressive and then I’ll loot the corpses.  Quit … oh wait!  Do you see it?  When you quit you break your group.  This rookie move is what put me behind the 8 ball.  I had a mage and cleric standing around doing nothing and who were not in combat.  Walk them in and cr, redistribute the weight as much as possible, drop potions if need be and recall… a nice calm response.  Remap the maze, pick up the potions and start over.  Quit… damn.

Well that tears it, I’ve got to get the maze mapped post-haste.  No time for charming, if I can get a char back through grouped I can dump stuff on the floor if I have to.  I almost made it too.  With 5 ticks remaining I had the maze mapped, now I still had to get re-grouped and get back to Magus’ room without another incident.  I might have made it… 5 minutes or so… 3 corpses…  If it had been 1 corpse I would have gone for it.  If I lost it … ok.  3?  Chickened out!  Now I had already checked if anyone was around in the order who could help out and when that failed I gave Romani a heads up just in case she was thinking of going for a relaxing coffee and coming back to the keyboard in 20 minutes 🙂  I’m grateful she hung around 🙂

The cost of the cr was a maddening voices and two essences of the kundalini … a bit pricey but much better than the alternative.  Given the Nasrs, Justices, rings of the ancient gods and other goodies in the corpses it could have been worse.  Some people were commenting on how expensive it was … immortal cr’s are not a right, they’re not hard coded like supplicating is … you rolls the dice you takes your chances.  If you don’t like it, there’s still 5 ticks …  I just wish it hadn’t been the same wearloc on two dev chars … my storage can re-equip one, but I had to loot one off another character.  That’s my only beef, two of the same item can be a bother.

So that’s it.  I did get two kills in on Magus bringing home a couple of sets of low cost gear.  I gained a ton of experience, learned a lot and it only cost me a moderate amount … a lot better than the dt’s I used to hit while learning!