I did all of chapter 7 in Disgaea 3 tonight, though there wasn’t really much notable about it. The story has devolved into some touchy-feely garbage about Mao’s true feelings, and character progression has been fairly straightforward.
There’s only something like four fights left to go, so I should be able to finish it off early tomorrow. Then I can start focusing on the real powerlevelling…
Today I finally set off to explore more in EQ, and I figured I’d pick up where I left off a long time ago, in the Gates of Discord areas. There’s supposed to be a giant ship you can take from the Nedaria’s Landing zone, but after waiting a while I guessed that the boats are broken yet again and used the Magus nearby to teleport to it instead.
On the ship I discovered some quests for unlocking some expansion-specific parts of tradeskills, and went through the necessary intro steps for blacksmithing and jewelcrafting, but left it at that since it gets pretty tedious. I did spend a little while working on raising jewelcrafting a bit further, as apparently the cap has been raised to 300 now (was 250 before), and managed to gain 8 points. That cost me about a thousand plat in materials though, and I decided to leave it at that. There were some progression quests as well, but I’ll have to leave those for now since they all pretty much require groups or raids.
Moving on, the zone of Natimbi was next, but it’s pretty plain and there was hardly anything my level, just a bunch of grey, green, and light-blue monsters. Boring.
After that was Qinimi, which was sort of a fairly small hub zone connecting to a few others. Again, not much here of real interest to me, just a bunch of light-blue monsters.
And then after that I stuck my nose into Barindu, which had a much more consistent mix of blues and light blues. There was an annoyingly long corridor at the entrance, but it eventually opened up on the garden area below, and I think I’ll try fighting a bit here the next time I’m on.
I don’t want to let my time in EQ lead to neglecting other games again, so tonight it was back to Disgaea 3 for a while, and I managed to finish off Chapter 6. Nothing too notable along the way though, aside from a slight plot twist at the end involving the butler… This chapter also really ramped up the “you’ve got to rely on your friends to help you along” theme so common to JRPGS. Mao, of course, isn’t having any of that. Yet.
Once the chapter was done though, I checked the newly spawned chests in the ‘town’ area and one of them had an extremely kickass axe. It was 8 ranks ahead of the one my fighter already had, and was Legendary to boot, and in the end it over doubled his ATK. He’s going to be a force to reckon with from here on…
I also unlocked a couple more school clubs, including one that lets me choose which teacher is used in homeroom, and one that adds belts to the store. I created a new gunslinger character, but her only real purpose right now was so I could put her in the club (you need at least one person in it for the belts to show up) rather than one of my main characters.
I only spent a little time in EQ tonight, but it was still enough to earn 4 more AAs, despite dying once when an unlucky break had three monsters beating on me. I’ve bought up three levels of the INT-cap-raising skill, getting me nearly 300 more mana, and should probably start looking at other skills to focus on as well.
But first, I should explore a bit. It’ll get boring rather quickly if I just sit in Plane of Storms and solo the same frogs over and over again, and I might be better off somewhere else anyway. Looking through the guides to each expansion tells me how to get to all of the new zones, and I’ll try and see as many of them as possible. I don’t know how much I’ll actually be able to do in a lot of those older zones, though. A lot of them have progression steps, and there might not be enough people around those old zones to make going through the progression practical. Especially when most of the loot is obsoleted by the newest couple of expansions anyway.
But I should at least drop in and say hi…
Tonight’s session in EQ was the one in which I actually started killing things. But first, I had to stop off and pick up one of the new mercenaries, which essentially gave me an AI-controlled duoing partner. You can select either a tank or a healer, and there are five tiers of each type, each higher one costing more than the others (there’s a one-time hiring fee and an ongoing every-15-minute continuation fee), though it’s not really exactly clear what the differences are. I picked a tier III dwarven healer and headed out to the Planes.
The most effective way to solo as an enchanter is through charm soloing, which is simply charming an enemy and sending it against other enemies to do your killing for you. Of course it’s not quite as easy as that — the charm can be resisted, it’s of random duration and could break at a bad time and leave you dealing with two enemies after you, some enemies will summon you directly to them and beat you up anyway, dealing with caster types can be a pain, it can drain a lot of mana very quickly, etc…
I was never really all that great at charm soloing before, but tonight it almost felt too easy, even though I’m severely out of practice. The healer merc gave me the HP buffs I normally wouldn’t have, it kept me and the charmed critter topped up so that I didn’t have to worry about HPs being worn down, and she kept me alive during the charm breaks that took a while to bring under control again. The healer even kept me alive through a really bad fight where a summoning giant somehow drained all my mana away and I was frantically looking for that restore-to-full veteran ability while charm broke at the same time, and even if I had died, the merc would have given me a rez.
I even made 5 AA points in only 4 hours, just practicing on light blues and a handful of dark blues in the Nightmare, Disease, and Storms planes. That’s crazy-fast compared to the rate I remember getting them before. I’ll mainly be spending them on the AA skills that raise the stat caps for now, since I’m severely capped on INT and that’ll get me more mana fairly easily. Beyond that, I’ll have to do a bit of research on just what the useful new AA skills are.
Today I finally got back into EverQuest in earnest. I started out by actually creating a whole new character, a gnome magician, and taking him through the new tutorial. Nothing really new was revealed that way, but it did get me used to the controls again. After switching back to my enchanter, I then spent a while fine-tuning the controls and UI, setting up windows, setting hot keys, creating spell lists, etc. The setup I’d used before is long gone, and I doubt it would have done me any good anyway.
I also grabbed a few map packs from map collection sites and installed them. They’re not nearly as pretty as WoW’s, but they’re still pretty much essential.
Somebody asked in /ooc how to get to some zone I hadn’t heard of, and my curiosity was piqued, so I followed their directions and headed there myself (via a stone-activated portal in the guild hall), and wound up in a rather spooky-looking part of the Depths of Darkhollows areas. It was all dark and underground like the fungal caverns of Luclin, but populated by mind-flayer-like creatures and weird, twisty paths. I might have to come back later for leveling, since the enemies were blue to me.
Back in PoK, I ran across an old guildie friend and we chatted for a bit, and then it was off to the bazaar to see what was available. I was afraid of what inflation might have done to the market, but managed to pick up five pieces of defiant silk armour that boosted my stats considerably, for not too much money. My HP went from 4352 to 5030, my mana from 5756 to 6263, and a bunch of other stat and regen increases as well. I’ll have to keep checking back for other good pieces, especially as I (hopefully) sell off some of my own stuff. Update: And I wound up selling my LoN booster deck for 55k plat, which should get me off to a pretty good start.
Next up, I’m going to have to get one of those fancy new mercs and get practicing on my charm soloing…
Getting back to actually progressing, I finished off Chapter 5 of Disgaea 3 today, running into a literal class war between the sophmore and senior students of the academy, meeting some new NPCs like one of the Diez Gentlemen (in rather Nazi-esque attire), and gaining Mr. Champloo as a recruit.
The last fight in the chapter was actually fairly tough, even though I’m a bit overlevelled thanks to the earlier grinding. The problem is my healer — it’s tough to keep him alive since he’ll often die in one hit, but you can’t keep him too far away from the battles either or he won’t be in range to heal…
Back in Disgaea 3 again, I repeated level 5-2 a couple more times, and then decided to finally delve into the Class World for my zealot, since he was still lower level and it would be fairly safe. Class World is a lot like the Item World, except you subdue ‘dropouts’ instead of ‘innocents’, and boost the character’s stats and skills instead of an item’s.
It was slow going since I wanted to clear out all of the geoblocks on each of the 10 maps, which earns you bonus mana, and in the end I got quite a few levels for my lower characters thanks to the xp-heavy bonus meter, raised some of the aptitudes (the rate at which stats increase) on the zealot, transferred a female healer skill over to him, and got thousands of mana points on him. That was far more than I’d ever gotten before, so I splurged on a whole bunch of magic skills for him, making him my best healer right now even though his level is still lagging a bit.
I also unlocked the female archer, beast master, and magic knight classes along the way, and had enough leftover mana to create a good magic knight character. They’re supposed to be pretty good at both melee and magic, so I’ll have to try and get her caught up to everyone else…
And then, getting back to Disgaea 3 after that weird little detour, I started Chapter 5 tonight. I didn’t get too far into it though, thanks to level 5-2. No, it wasn’t too hard, in fact the problem is that it was too easy and I couldn’t resist the temptation to grind it a handful of times.
With all of the exp gained there, my main characters are in the 34-36 level range now, and I also had enough mana to reincarnate my armour knight and heretic (they were too low to really help out much right now anyway), unlock the honor club and geo master class, and create a few new characters of other unlocked classes.
No time for EQ tonight, since I took a sidestep into the weird. Today was the release of Noby Noby Boy, by the same guy who made the Katamari games, and it’s certainly…different.
It’s not even really a game, as there’s no goals or missions or anything to it. It’s basically an interactive toy, where you guide the aforementioned boy around various levels, stretching his snake-like body out, jumping around, knocking stuff over, gobbling up items and people. But there’s no score or anything, and you can move on to the next map anytime you want. It’s really just about having fun controlling him and interacting with the environment.
About the only kinda-gamelike element to it is that you can report the length you’ve stretched the boy to the servers, where it’ll be added to the length of a similar girl that’s stretching away from the earth. All other players are also adding to her length, and there’s a leaderboard of total length added by each player so far. Supposedly when she reaches certain distances, new planets will be selectable with new kinds of maps.
I doubt I’ll actually play with it much since it’s only fun for a little while, but it was only $5 too, and my curiosity is satisfied.
