An Odd Request

In the mad rush to get folks ready for Friday night's Titan raid, I wound up with an odd request on Tuesday night. I was asked to bring Trinarius into a group.

Honestly, I love to play Trin, but I rarely have the opportunity while I and many of my in-game friends work on bringing lower-level characters up to speed. This is particularly true with Obsydiian now standing on the threshold of possible "completeness" with the possibility of pulling the Seven-Fingered Gloves from the Warforged Titan's end chest. With the gloves, Syd would finally negate the remaining 15% of Arcane Spell Failure he suffers as a result of the Adamantine Body he was forged with.

In fact, that he's now in-range for running the Titan raid is the whole reason I decided to host the raid in the first place. The potential problem here is that most guildies and allied guildies are used to me running one of my Clerics in the majority of our groups. In order for Syd to pull the gloves, though, *he* has to be the one to run the raid, as the gloves are a bound item and cannot be traded. But I do feel bad asking someone else to bring a Cleric to the party just because I want to try to pull a set of gloves for Syd. It's a bit of conundrum for me.

As a result of my not running any of my Clerics in the various groups where I've been attempting to prepare Obsydiian for the Titan raid, other guildies have been hopping between characters trying to get theirs ready, but also taking turns with who's privileged enough to bring their Cleric instead of the character they'd prefer to bring. Which meant that, on Monday night, Stonehands volunteered to bring Segna to the party when we were running Hiding In Plain Sight.

HIPS, as it's more commonly known, is the quest that opens the area of The Restless Isles to players through the airship cruise director at the base of the Falconer's Spire. Without a HIPS completion, players instead have to rely on a Sorcerer or Wizard with Greater Teleport to carry them out to the Foothold, from which players can then access the two raid prerequisite quests, Bring Me the Head of Ghola-Fan! and Slavers of the Shrieking Mines.

Because Bashal had brought Segna to the HIPS run instead of Stonehands, as he'd originally intended, we were left in a difficult position... Obsydiian doesn't yet have the ability to use the Greater Teleport spell, neither by memorized spell nor by scroll. Without another Sorcerer or Wizard in the group, it's rather difficult to transport one of our tanks out to the Foothold for the subsequent quests. So, on Tuesday night, Stonehands asked for a quick zerg through HIPS to help mitigate the problem.

Now, you ought to know that, when I logged into the game on Tuesday, I was also on the phone at the same time with one of my old Army buddies who's packing his house for a big out-of-state move. I was trying to make arrangements to get together with him before said departure. But, he and I can be rather long-winded. Which meant that I was communicating with the guys in-game through party-chat only.

Obviously, that can make things a bit of a challenge, since I wasn't immediately aware that we were going to zerg through HIPS for Stonehands. In fact, when PuddinTan logged over to Tanision, I thought he was simply logging over to grab some supplies of some sort before we jumped into whatever it was we were about to take on.

It wasn't until Tanision had typed into the party-chat panel that we were going to run HIPS real quick that I realized what was going on.

And, then it scrolled across the screen...

"Hey, Syd, can you bring Trin? We're gonna need a trap monkey."

Huh?!?

Trin?

Trinarius???

Trin, the unwitting guild leader?

We're talking about the same character here, right???

Oh! Trap monkey...

Now I get it!!!

Heh!

Trin!

You know, if there's one thing Trin *can* do well, that's disable traps. He may be neither the best Ranger, nor the best Wizard, but one thing I've been sure to keep up with is making him the best possible Rogue I can. Every single level with him sees new ranks spent in Search, Disable Device and Open Lock skills. Coupled with a high Intelligence, and buttressed by skill-enhancement items, Trin can find and disable just about any trap in the game.

It was a curious situation, though...

I could've been asked to bring Aequinox or PEBKAC instead of Trin, and Tanision could've brought Rendel instead, or simply remained with PuddinTan. I mean, with proper buffs, both Puddin and PEBKAC could've easily navigated the traps on Normal with little risk of casualty.

[We don't worry too much about Stonehands; he has so many Hit Points, it takes at least two, sometimes three, full Heal spells to completely refill his red bar. Besides, he's more of a crack-whore than a buff-beggar.] :-o :-P ;-)

Still... Trin...

Actually, I had a great time running Trin. It was actually only the three of us. Belzur wasn't able to join us, and we just wanted zerg on through, so we didn't bother to PUG-out the remaining slots in the group; we simply jumped-in and made a bee-line for Hazdill.

It was pretty funny from my end, though. I could see that Stonehands and Tanision were chatting with one another over the voice channel, thanks to the way their character names light up in green when they're talking. But, I couldn't hear a thing, save for my telephone conversation with my Army buddy. But I was also paying sufficient attention to the quest that I managed not to stray too far off the intended path, and was never prompted to disable a trap. (We'd run HIPS the previous night with another group, so I remembered where they all were.)

Mind you, I wouldn't call it a record-breaking run, but with two Level 16 characters and one Level 13, the Level 9 quest didn't offer too much challenge. If I had to guess, I'd say that it took us only about twenty minutes to get through all of it, if that. Which left plenty of time for us to take on an interesing run of Slavers of the Shrieking Mines...

Alas, I have to get my work day started, so I don't have time to delve into that run, but...

I had the opportunity to run Trin for the first time in ages.

And, I was *asked* to run him!

Wow!!!

It was fun. I hope I have that opportunity again in the future. I'd nearly forgotten how entertaining it can be to play trap monkey. But, I have to perpare Obsydiian for the Titan, first...

At any rate, keep it fun!