Temporarily M.I.A.

Please allow me to start with an apology for the lack of posts lately. My only excuse is that work has been interfering with my ability to do any sort of creative writing.

Not that I spend my day at work screwing around doing other things, but there are some things I like to do during what is supposed to be, by law, the breaks and/or lunches afforded to me, and every other employee in the State of Colorado.

Except that my company, and most architectural firms within Colorado, tend to ignore the law whenever convenient. Which might explain why the architecture industry has turned into one of "practice by litigation."

At any rate, for whatever reason, my firm finally decided to pull themselves up out of the dark ages and finally switch from Novell GroupWise and it's supporting networks to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange and a Windows network. Whether you agree with the decision or whether you have any well-founded arguments about the security of Novell, the fact remains that in the practice of Architecture, a Windows network is better because Autodesk, the developers of AutoCAD and Revit, are allied with Microsoft, which means that Novell interferes with the operability of our "mission critical" software.

Let's just say that trying to run Revit on a Novell network yields the same results as that NASA mission that sent what was supposed to be a lander to Mars hurtling well past the planet.

So, as a result of the commotion of change in our office, I've had little time to blog this week.

You should hear all the architects crying over how things have changed too much.

My initial responses to them are "Your what hurts???" and "You have sand in your where???"

After all, they're the ones who demanded a faster and easier to navigate network, and to have email and calendar software that actually connected to their multitude of mobile devices. All I can say is that they brought it on themselves, and they have no one to complain to but themselves.

Whiney bastards!

I, for one, have embraced the change wholeheartedly. I even appreciate the imposition of strong/complex password policy. I'd been asking for a better policy since I started with this firm over three years ago. But, as I said, most everyone else around here has sand in a sensitive piece of anatomy, and it hurts, so they have to make sure *everyone* else knows about it.

At any rate...

Wednesday evening, I logged in with Sarge and joined Belzur, Eliak (Tanision/PuddinTan) and DasCool (Bashal/Stonehands), in an earnest attempt to earn Sarge his Level 11, and his ninth Cleric level, and to help Belzur finally earn his Level 13.

We'd decided to turn to a favorite quest for many players, Trial by Fire, out in the Ruins of Gianthold. Although it's a Level 13 quest, with the right mix of characters and a good strategy, it's a relatively easy quest that can be run quickly, for some decent XP and some nice loot.

In fact, PuddinTan can now solo the quest on Normal.

It's amazing what a well-built Sorcerer can do in this game.

Still, there's a point of diminishing returns. On our first run through the quest, PuddinTan earned but one, that's 1 experience point.

Because he'd run it so many times.

But DasCool and Belzur had run it quite a few times, too, and were also taking some penalties for the number of times they'd re-run it.

Which meant that we had to increase the difficulty of the quest just to ensure we were all earning a little *something* for the quest.

Of course, on the second run through, PuddinTan switched over to Eliak so that he wasn't power-leveling the rest of us. At which point we also decided to bring in a couple of PUG players to round-out the party. And we then ran the quest a couple of times on Hard, grinding out as much XP as we could. But we were all beginning to suffer from repetition penalties. So, we decided to see if we couldn't make the last run on Elite.

Mind you, the quest, on Normal, is a Level 13 quest. By the book, increasing the difficulty to Elite increases the level of the quest to 15. As anyone who's played the game for a while should understand, though, the reality is that the challenges the monsters your characters will encounter are often a Level 16, 17 or even 18 equivalent at that point. For a group of Level 10-13 characters, entering the quest probably wasn't the best idea. Opening the quest on Hard was already a sufficient challenge. But, we did it anyway.

It didn't take long to realize that an Elite difficulty was beyond our abilities. Especially once Sarge had depleted his supply of Raise Dead scrolls.

To add insult to injury, both Belzur and Sarge were just a bit short of the XP they'd need to earn their next level.

But, it was late enough that everyone needed to log for the evening anyway. So, it was decided we'd wait to complete the task another time.

Except that we didn't want to wait too long.

Belzur has been working his tail off to earn his way to Level 13 so he can participate in the upcoming Demon Queen raid. Since it's being hosted as a 13-16 raid, he wanted to level-up so that he would still earn maximum XP for his participation, rather than being power-leveled by all the Level 16 characters that we'll have in attendance. If we waited too long to help Belzur over the Level 13 hump, he might not be able to join the rest of us when raid day rolls around.

That's why we decided to try to knock out the remaining 6500 XP last night.

Back out in Gianthold, of course.

But, this time, we decided to run a quest we hadn't ransacked yet; we chose Cabal for One.

We were lucky, though. We were able to bring Elmmonk and Rambow, friends from the Lifetakers and Heartbreakers into our group for a little help. The last two slots we filled with some very helpful PUG players.

In fact, it only took us two runs through Cabal, on Normal, to earn the required XP.

But, I'm glad we chose to run only on Normal.

On our first run through, we didn't have any casters in the party. Just Sarge, the healer/trapsmith, one Fighter, two Monks and two Rangers.

Not that the composition was a bad thing. But that, as Rambow had pointed out, the end-boss, King Bendix, had learned a few new tricks in the last update, and he is now much more difficult to dispose of.

Which Sarge found out about the hard way, the first time through the quest.

King Bendix now has the ability to cast Blade Barrier.

Mind you, I did warn everyone that it was not Sarge's Blade Barrier they were playing in, but they couldn't just let him be, as he likes to heal himself, too.

The problem was that where they were all positioned on the other side of the doorway, I had to reposition Sarge to keep healing everyone attempting to melée the tyrannical king.

On *my* screen, it appeared that Sarge was well clear of the Blade Barrier, by a good six feet. But, that didn't stop the Blade Barrier from cutting Sarge down in just two strikes.

The good news was that no one else died while our PUG Ranger hauled Sarge's stone back to the shrine. And, in fact, the others managed to subdue the king before Sarge could make his way back to the group. It was actually a rather efficient run through the quest. I was quite pleased with the result.

After we completed, though, we Finished out so that everyone could use the shrine right outside the door, only to realize that the mobs right outside the quest had respawned, and they heard Sarge's less-than-stealthy exit from the quest from a mile away.

And came to investigate.

We had to fight our way *out* of the quest, too!

Fortunately, we managed to keep everyone alive and took care of the Fire Giant and his minions before shrining and recalling back to the camp at Gianthold.

While back at the camp, we were fortunate enough to have our PUG Monk decide to switch over to his Sorcerer to join us for the second run. Which was actually much more efficient than the first. It's amazing how much easier a quest is when you have Haste, some crowd-control and a Maximized/Empowered Wall of Fire...

Yep, made the second run even eaiser than the first.

Which also earned both Belzur and Sarge each their next level.

Congratulations, Belzur! You're now in the "sweet spot." You can run with anyone from Level 10 through 16 without power levelling or being power leveled by anyone. The high-end quests present some very interesting challenges.

:-)

Keep it fun!