DDO Weekly Event (On Hold)

not feelinng well so out for tonight

Hurm, butts kicked. That's disappointing, in that it seems we'll need to recruit other people to even learn the abbot. I was hoping we would be able to master it six-manned. It should be easy to recruit more bodies, though. It has a reputation for being hard, so posting an "Abbot Training Run" LFM tends to attract people.

So, the short version:
Once we beat down the abbot, he retreats, and opens three portals. These lead randomly to three puzzles. In each puzzle, are 2 sarcophagi that must be shattered in order to kill the abbot, and widget(s) that may be useful later.

What makes the abbot the most macho raid in DDO are the three puzzles: they are all non-combat trust/cooperation games.

The puzzles are:
1. Asteroids. (actually, its missile command)
You are on a small circular platform in a field of stars. There are 4 piles of rocks on the ground. Pick up a pile of rocks, equip them as a weapon, turn on mouselook and get ready to play FPS.
Asteroid begin approaching the platform. You must throw rocks at the asteroids to blow them up
Each rock that hits the platform does 200 damage to everyone on it. You cannot heal or cast spells on the platform.
Note 1: Normally people form a cross and face inwards, covering rocks coming in from behind the person opposite you. This gives you a better field of view than facing outward.
Note 2: If you are an "extra" person in asteroids, and 4 people already grabbed rocks, stand in the middle and go to /sleep to avoid obstructing line of sight.

2. Ice
Before you is a non-maze (linear zigzag path) over deadly icy water. Touching the water brings death. There are two wands for you to pick up. The wands create an ice platform on the water that you can safely stand on. Minor problem: the cooldown on the wand is slightly longer than the duration of the ice platform. So two people must alternate using their wands and play leapfrog.
Note 1: The cheap way: The cleric capstone prevents you from dying, including from deathly ice water. The cheap way to do this puzzle is to send Alaistair to divine intervention first the scout, then himself, and swim.
Note 2: Save the wands. You need to use them in later rounds of combat or the raid wipes.

3. Tiles
Number one most superfun thing in DDO!
Before you is a gaping abyss. Between you is a wall of force. Before one of you is a pair of magic goggles. Over the gaping abyss is a maze of appearing and disappearing invisible tiles of force.
The magic goggles let you see the tiles ON THE OTHER SIDE of the wall of force.
The person with the goggles needs to guide the person on the other side across the invisible tiles.
On the other side, is another pair of goggles, switch roles and repeat.
Note 1: Most raids fail at tiles one or more times.
Note 2: People who can do tiles are leetsauce.

Once all puzzles are either completed or failed, portals back to the middle open. Anyone who died in a puzzle ends up in the main platform. When you go back, you fight the abbot again, just like in part one, except he gains some new special abilities.
Two new special abilities are important:
1. He now encases people in rocks. You can use the throwing rocks from the asteroid puzzle to break people free.
2. He now conjures an inferno. Inferno is bad news for people on the platform. To survive the inferno, someone with an ice wand needs to make an ice platform, and everyone jumps on it.
(I was kidding, "everyone" never makes it to the platform. 95% of Abbot wipes happen because noone or only a couple people made it to the platform.)

If you completed 1-2 puzzles, after awhile he will retreat and open new portals, until you win or wipe. The portals will be re-randomized.

Normally, you assign 3 people to scout the portals, and then pick 1 person to do ice and 2 people to do tiles. Everyone not allocated goes in asteroids. The scout who ends up in the asteroids puzzle yells over voice (for example) "LEFT IS ROIDS! LEFT IS ROIDS!" and everyone so allocated runs into asteroids. The other two people quietly type their puzzles. This is because the asteroids start descending on the platform as soon as the scout walks through. The other 2 puzzles are not so time-sensitive, although the platform does become increasingly inhospitable as more undead spawn to encourage you to go to your puzzle.

I will be away this weekend. Litany of Ascension 10/02?

TBD:
Litany of the Dead -> Abbot
House Cannith

I want to apologize to everybody for the failure last night--it was totally my fault.  Chris did a fabulous job healing that last fight, especially after Mike went down.  We should have won.

Top reasons for the failure:

1. I did not realize the adds were buffing the Boss, especially the Fire Mephit causing his health to regen, therefore I stopped killing the mephits and tried to burn down the Boss, a tactic that often works in other fights, but was clearly the wrong choice here.

2.  I forgot the Boss was immune to ice spells and did not have my spells set up for the fight, leading to a lot of wasted time trying to cast.

3. I did not have a good selection of non-ice spells.  I've corrected this problem and now have Cloudkill, Acid Rain, Acid Blast, Meteor Swarm, and Greater Shout.  The two persistant spells alone will help a lot.  As an ice savant, my fire spells are greatly neutered due to the fact my effective level casting fire spells is 11, except for Meteor Swarm which is not affected by level.

4.  When Mike asked me to raise Ariande, I didn't do it right away, thinking it would be better to burn the boss down.  The primary reason for this is I didn't have Raise Dead scrolls in a place I could get at them easily, another costly mistake.  By the time I realized the Boss wasn't going to die, a couple more people were down.  If  I'd gotten Ariande up earlier, then used a Heal on him, things would probably have gone differently.

5. I kept wasting heal scrolls on the boss, because he is undead.  Trying to heal yourself when you have an undead targeted doesn't work very well.  This caused me to waste time recasting to heal myself and to run out of scrolls.

We ran through the quest quite efficiently after the first phase, so I have no doubt we can beat it next time.  When the mephits appear, everybody except the healers need to focus fire them down (not just me).  I know others were doing that.  The mephits are Lieutenants, so they take a while to beat down.

We DID finish the quest, which means everybody gets 50 draconic shards.  Remember, you can use those to but the Syberis and Khyber Dragonshard Essences.  That way, we will only have to do Prey on the Hunter to get the Ebberon Dragonshard essence to reflag.  The only good thing about this, is Prey on the Hunter drops a Tempest Rune (the second tier runes) rather than an Eldritch Rune (the first tier).  You can transmute three Essence Runes into one Tempest, and three Tempest Runes into one Soverign Rune (the third and highest tier rune).

If people need their Draconic Runes for other purposes, we can rerun all three quests if necessary.  If people want to do something different, I'm amenable to that, but my foolishness left a sour taste in my mouth.  We actually did pretty well dealing with what is a fairly challenging quest and I'd like a chance for redemption.

How to figure out what you need to do to flag for Litany.
1. Find your sigil frame.
2. Its probably in your bank.
3. Open it up and see which boxes are empty in the bottom row.
This will tell you which quests we need to run. The drops are semi-random, so we may need to do a quest more than once to get all the pieces.
4. If you are missing (read left to right) part 1: Temple of Vol, part 2: Fleshmaker's Lab, part 3: Inferno of the Damned, part 4: Ghosts of Perdition.
If you are missing parts 5-8: Yay! They are all random drops and you can get them from any of the above.
5. Once everyone completes and turns in their sigil, we need to do Litany 4 times to flag for Acursed Ascension. Its ok, there are 4 different versions, so its not the same thing 4 times.

Once again, everyone did a great job adapting to the reaver run.
BTW, I've never 5-maned it or run without a clr/fvs before .. I just know a bunch of hardcore done-everything vets wouldn't flinch at doing it that way .. so I was holding us to a pretty high standard there ;)

In a word--no.

If you don't object to spoilers, here is my reasoning:

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=78845

On the other hand, far be it from me to stop any exercise in futility. I'm willing if everybody else is. Heck, maybe I'll be proven wrong. That would be just fine with me...