The 2 Hour, 22 Minute Hero

Jencla
Retired from the world of Lost Souls to paradise at level 50
A female kobold adventurer, about eight and three tenths dimins tall, two and three fifths dimins wide, and thirteen twentieths of a dimin front to back. She was a member of the Brotherhood of Wine and Song and the Stalkers of the Gate. She left Lost Souls on Karmina 3, 559.


This was my first kobold hero (as well as the first adventurer I've heroed since the level required to hero was changed to 50), and it took me all of 2 hours, 22 minutes of playing time to get. As far as I can remember, the play-by-play went something like this:

Hour 1: Wake up in Sanctuary as an Amberite and vivi to kobold (I picked Amberite to have the extra skill points as well as the possibility of vivisecting into a dakshin or something at level 200 if I felt like going that far). Next, go do At'Lordrith's Riddle, get a ring of flight. After that, start working on training up lockpicking on the Losthaven sewer grates, and get a bit of training in lockpicking from mouser. Dump all gained attribute points into dex, and spec lockpicking to 10 (I forgot that kobolds get an autodidaction point).

Later, joined Brotherhood of Wine and Song for the extra lockpicking spec.

Hour 2: Pick locks in Liathyr. Realize that footlockers can be picked too. Realize halfway through the hour that I would make better time if I joined stalkers, so that I wouldn't have to fly all the way between Liathyr and ST. Set portals in Liathyr, ST, Discordia. Got to around level 44 by the end of this hour of play.

Last 22 minutes: Pick locks in Liathyr and ST, portaling between the two. Lockpick skill at this point was in the 250-300 range. Started feeling a bit guilty over being an insufferable munchkin. Heroed at about 2 hours, 20 minutes. Heard a couple of "woot"s and "LOL"s over OOC, and retired the character.

All in all, I have to say that I like lockpicking XP, but that it seems like it might be a bit much. After all, my kobold was getting about 30k experience from picking one door lock (and about 4k for a failure) by the time she retired, and even Porphyria, a level 227 mazikah (with -15 assim) gets around 4k for a success, meaning she can make somewhere around 200k xp just by spamming shadow tower with her Jinx lockpick.

Goodbye Tavern Hopping...

I read the changelog today to find out that tavern hopping has been taken out of the Brotherhood of Wine and Song. So with them losing that, and having lost the ability to identify items a long long time ago, the Brotherhood becomes yet another association that's nothing more than some decent spec access and a trainer.

Oh well.

Of course, I can understand that the tavern hopping ability was pretty much illogical, but it was still a useful ability, and its removal eliminates yet another shortcut between points of interest. At the same time, other methods of traversing the world without necessarily needing to hit the amazingly-barren overland map and type 'go 160 n' to reach the nearest point of interest have gone largely unrealized.

Scrying changes.

Changes to the way scrying works went in yesterday. So goodbye, crystal balls & mirrors of revelation. All in all, I'm pretty impressed by and happy with the changes. The one negative I would pick out is that the whole process takes a lot longer to accomplish, so it's not really possible anymore to scry every named mob on the MUD in ten seconds or less. On the other hand, it seems to take a lot less spirit, and doesn't rely on hard-to-obtain and/or expensive items anymore. Plus, the entertainment value of being able to scry using an aqua frizzante is alone more than worth any added difficulty. ;P

Spiderwood

I had my first chance to check out Spiderwood (the new 'dungeon' area) today. Fun place. I took my witch through it for a bit first, but didn't fight a whole lot past the first few levels, since she couldn't use her spear very much (needing to keep a torch in-hand due to all the webbing). Eventually, I turned her invisible, and ran her through to the end of the dungeon. After that, I ran Porphyria through a bit (her celestial claw makes her pretty much immune to webbing), since I wanted to try fighting some of the monsters at the end of the dungeon. She had an easy enough time with the rhax, but couldn't put much more than a dent in the gigantic spiders there... May have to come through with a group sometime. I tried to have Porphyria kill the critter at the end (I won't spoil the surprise for anyone by telling what it is...) whereupon she had her ass squarely handed to her. Porphyria lasted about 4-6 rounds before I had to take her out of combat, since she had had both wings disabled and had been taken down to 100 chest (out of a maximum of about 650)... Ouch. I might try it again with a proper group together, but I wouldn't be too optimistic about the group's chances.