Saali in Taborea

Changes

I updated http://saalintaborea.typepad.com/blog/2012/06/about-saali.html to reflect the new me (change in guild and levels).

Again I got a completely silly stat (MA/PA), this time from using Ancient Mementos. These kind of events are what brought me to be around less (and also write less to this blog). I certainly have stopped buying any diamonds and spending them. I think I might retire once I run out of golden repair hammers. That would be sad, but it is quite likely.

At the moment you can become level 77, but I'm thinking I should make my knight side level 72 first, so I can equip all the items I have. I wonder if anything decent comes out, but I fear that tanking will never be possible.

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The Hall of the Seven Heroes - Hard

Ressurection

Ressurection

While walking through a rather hostile area I came across a body lying dead next to a ressurection spot. I decided to ressurect her myself, but unfortunately nothing happened. However, after several minutes suddenly the body came alive, to instantly die again immediately afterwards. It was quite sad.

The Hall of the Seven Heroes - Hard

Hard it is. Especially the first boss, which took several deaths. People need to get oil, and torches, and things get dark and light. People carrying torches sometimes get a debuff that I need to cleanse, which otherwise does a lot of damage. I'm not sure what went wrong when things went wrong, but we eventually got past it. The next boss was a boss where you had to hide behind shields, and I was way too slow, as I didn't expect the boss to drop in health as fast as they did. It meant a lot of debt, but I also completed the entire place, where I had never been before. I'm very happy with the ex-Bteam members for being so patient with me. A lot of other things have happened as you can probably image, given the long delay between posts, but I might bring you more up to date over time.

The saddest part was that I wasn't very useful. I should've listened to other people that had been there before, and gained some knowledge. I knew about the fight with the torches, as that was the first one and I investigated it, but I should've investigated the others as well. People have been in there before, after all. Now I just added some healing, and also was able to use soul bond and ressurect people after they died, but it would've been nice if I didn't have to slow people down as much.

An overdurable version of my "Hero's Bones" wand dropped, but I decided to pass on it, as there was another priest who I felt did a lot more during the fights (including giving me hints). Of course, I was also not looking forward to plusing and tiering the item.

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Debt forgiveness

Ancient Treasures

You get here by taking to Ange Rassa. You can get to her through a quest on Varanas Plaza. Once inside, you talk to the man standing there and hand over 30 Phirius Token Coins. Go through the doors, and you end up in room 1. If you're low level, use hide to avoid the knights, and snipe on the dogs.

Room 1: go to the brazier and acquire the flame, avoiding the enemy walking around. Once you have the flame, go to the "cave ghost" (basically a force field) and touch it, which will make it disappear, giving you an opening to room 2.

Room 2: this room will have an unlit brazier and a dog. Go to either lit brazier (room 1 or room 2) acquire the flame and light the unlit brazier. In the wall through which you came into this room are other openings with cave ghosts, either to the left or to the right. Go tot he farthest one and touch it. This gives you an opening to room 3.

Room 3: go to the brazier (or the one in room 2) and acquire the flame. Go to the other exit from room 3, which leads o a room very similar to room 2, which is room 4.

Room 4: this room will have an unlit brazier and a dog. Go to either lit brazier (room 1 or room 2) acquire the flame and light the unlit brazier. In the wall opposite to the one you came in through will be one opening, open this one and head to Room 5.

Room 5: This is a small circular room with an even smaller room in the middle. There is also an unlit brazier. Light the unlit brazier and the dogs and knights and everything will soon go away. A door to the inside smaller room will open. Go through and open one of the chests. This will give you the 30 Phirius Shells you so desire.

The chests on the left and right also contain Phirius Token Coins, which can be useful, and guild donations. The chests at the back contain useless runes. The chests to the front are only there if you completed the treasures fast enough, and give you pieces to build one of two different types of awesome 30 day mounts.

Course of Terror

The Course of Terror is approached through Malatina on Varanas Square. It costs 30 Phirius Token Coins to enter, which are taken once you say yes while inside. Make sure you have a Potion of Unbridled Enthusiasm active, or other ways to speed up your movement. Once it shows "Round 1" move forward, the doors open and move inside. Don't move too far, as you could get stuck, stop before the edge of the tiles.

Once you're inside, click on a green tile (bush). It will change in a bush. Gather a branch from the bush and light it in the fire. While doing this, identify where the yellow tile (key) is. Look for a column leading to the back that contains as few brown tiles (gate) as possible. Ideally you find a path that has two. Make sure that one of the two blue tiles (cannon) on the first row is at most one column away from this row. Click on this blue tile, and use the cannon that appears to shoot the farthest brown tile. Click on the other blue tile on the first row, and use the cannon that appears to shoot the closest brown tile (second row). Now proceed going through that column handling the tiles as they go:

• Red tiles (ghosts): don't kill the ghost, kill the container they spawn from.
• Cyan tiles (gateways): wait for them to completely appear, and walk over the edge on the left or right.
• Green tiles (bushes): burn them with the burning branch you should already have. While it is burning, get a new branch by gathering wood from another bush and lighting it in the brasier.
• Yellow tiles (keys): click on them and gather the key. You're required to get all of these.
• Blue tiles (cannons): use these to first clear any additional gates, second to clear green tiles and third to clear red tiles. Occasionally you want to use them to get rid of gateways, if they block access to a key (you can't gather a key horizontal from a gateway, or burn a bush. You can, however, kill a red tile that way).

The strategy above can be used in most cases, however, sometimes you'll have to be creative and find a better path, or opt for a path that goes by a number of cannons rather than the keys, so you can use the cannons to free the keys.

Tricks:

• The gates can be killed. For me this takes a long time.
• Don't open the chests until you did all four rooms (the Phirius Shells is the most important thing to get here, you get 50 for completion).
• You can be slower in the first two rooms than in the last two, because the last two give special keys that give transmuter charges if you get them.

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Cheap stats

Cloak

Apart from making some nice low level gear I started working on my cloak. I was thinking of filling it with Stamina/HP and Stamina/Defense stats, so it could be useful for my knight side as well. Getting Stamina stats is slightly trickier, because there really is only one good stat, Stamina/Defense. I pulled Stamina/Physical Attack. This is good in a way, as it can sell, but it involves fusion stones, and makes things generally tricky. I also have a Stamina/Defense blue stat from the ants outside Kulech's Bone Nest, so I'll get there eventually. I might just add Stamina/Wisdom as well, as some wisdom can't hurt (although the cloak already has Wisdom/Magical Attack, so really not much additional wisdom is needed).

Hacks!

I've talked about the thing called "Siege" before (it's officially called Guild Wars Beta), which is an activity where a random number of people on both sides appear and start beating each other up, with some strategy in collecting merits, becoming herald and building defenses, as well as healing gates (which I find a very strange concept, but it works and gives me something to do, so I'm not complaining). In other guilds than the guild I am they often say "Hacks!" when the other team beats them. The first time this happened (with the now defunct Purple Haze Dream guild) I investigated thoroughly, and came to the conclusion there was no hacking at all, just clever use of item shop items and skills. I wrote about this in Playing To Win. I'm not saying there isn't any hacking during siege, I just think it can't be as prevalent as people think.

My reasoning is as follows: hacking in siege is a high risk, low reward action. It is high risk because:

• Other people are present to witness the hacking.
• You need to be high level and have good gear in order for any hack to be useful.
• Contrary to popular belief, if one opens a ticket on these kind of things with supportive evidence, they do get acted upon quickly.

It is low reward because:

• The only thing you win is siege, which gives you a few meaningless orbs, some guild contributions, some quest items and some level 50 blue items. Most of these you also get when you lose.
• There is no real satisfaction in actually winning, because you know you cheated.

It is much more likely that hacking is used in other areas, like gold farming or quest item farming or XP farming or TP farming, as these are mindless, solo (no one to observe that you're cheating) and have high rewards.

Unfortunately, siege is still "beta" (as the name indicates) which means that many things happen that might seem hacking, but are actually just a result of issues in the world. There is for example something called "lag", which can cause people to jump from location to location instead of moving gracefully. You could call this a hack, but more likely they are suffering as on their side the issue is even worse: they attack someone that is clearly there, but they are being told that the person isn't there. Of course, they could call this hacking too. Then there are the large variety of abilities, potions and spells in that very few people know, many of which aren't used in normal travelling through Taborea. Some of these look very similar, and people could confuse them, thinking that someone cast a particular spell that they shouldn't be able to cast, or performed an ability twice in a short time when there is supposed to be a cooldown. Finally there are many ways to mitigate damage, combined with the possible lag in updating the amount of health people have, which results in thinking that they didn't take damage, even though they did, or people suddenly dying without knowing why.

So next time, instead of saying "Hacks!" just say that it was fun doing siege, and that next time you'll do better. Or ask them what techniques they used to beat you. Both of these are far more productive.

Debt forgiveness

Kulech Bones Nest Easy became easy again. For some reason the stunning ants were a fluke, and I ran it successfully with my husband and a few friends yesterday, until I had enough stats that I could stat my necklace, which I'll probably show you tomorrow. I can now confirm that the last boss indeed drops pretty good stats, I saw both a Wisdom/Health (which I used for my necklace) and an Intellect/Magical Attack. There were a few deaths, but many were complimenting me on my healing, which I felt good about.

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Kulech Bones Nest Easy

Cheap stats

What's to like about statting?

I enjoy statting a lot. If you look into the history here, you'll find many articles on statting, where I should how to do basic dirty statting, how to do single fusion stone statting, how to stat an item by using only five fusion stones, how to replace the green XII stats with yellow VII stats on easy mode items from instances, how to stat an item and make it tier 6 at the same time and how I'm still working on my special tier stones that will allow a limited form of statting at the same time. If you haven't read these, and are interested, I recommend looking them up. They don't, however, explain why I enjoy doing it. It is a bit strange, as it slightly (but not completely) contradicts my statements yesterday from preferring activities that you do together.

One of the reasons why I enjoy statting is because I wasn't able to do it in my previous life. In my previous life you could add gems to gear (similar to the runes that you can add) and you could enchant the gear, which would add a specific ability. You could also disenchant gear, which did something similar (it destroyed the gear) but didn't give gems, but instead materials that could be used for enchanting. All in all it was rather limited, and the freedom of statting is quite enjoyable from that perspective. It also allows all sorts of hybrid options, which, together with the ability to have two classes at the same time, opens the possibility of hybrid play. Of course, hybrid play probably requires more intelligence than I possess (I'm a very standard healer) but it is still fun that the possibility exists, and who knows: eventually I might investigate it. The sheer number of possibilities that statting gives you to customize your gear is staggering.

Another reason is that people enjoy statting. This is where other people come in: I can stat something, and it would make someone quite happy to receive the statted piece. I know that with a few of my tailored and statted items a level 26 can kill the bear Borrofar, something that without such help would be impossible. It is still risky, but at least it is doable. I don't wish Borrofar any harm, but it seems these low level people spend time among bears and ents and Borrofar does enjoy approaching you from a long distance and chewing on you, so I see both perspectives.

Statting is also expensive. The fact that it is expensive gives you a way to try and do it cheaper, which is what most of my articles here are about. There are the stats themselves, which can be quite expensive (although with Kulech Bones Nest Easy it got a lot more affordable) and there are the fusion stones (which exist at different price points, three stat fusion stones obviously being a lot cheaper than the purified versions). Finally there is the arcane transmuter charge that is required, which is often forgotten but in reality costs around 100000 gold. It also means that it can be profitable, although I haven't yet really tried to make money with statting. I should, perhaps. I have some times I might list and see for how much they will sell.

There is also the puzzle aspect. Like the Course of Terror, statting requires you to use your brain (and I've made a few mistakes, which confirms this). I love puzzling, and although it has lately become easier, there are still some items that I look at and wonder how I can approach them better. I recently tailored a beautiful level 28 pair of pants, with runes slots, nice overdurability and no stats on it yet. I will make it very pretty. Something for an offensive druid, perhaps. I might even post it here, although I doubt you'll be very interested. It will make me happy, and that is what counts.

Single

Taborea is a place where many people live together. That is what makes it a great place, the interactions between people are always interesting. There is Phesnom (normally I don't use names in blog posts without permission, but in case of Phesnom I doubt he has a strong objection to it. And even if he does, I doubt I care), who enjoys making blunt statements in ghetto world chat that people then respond to, causing all sorts of verbal mayhem. I think he got banned once, which was good and sad at the same time. My gripe with Phesnom is mostly that he refused to wear clothes in the Hall of Survivors (which meant that he didn't quite survive) but he is alright to be around at times.

In my previous post I tried to focus on things you could do with other people. In that sense the Course of Terror is one of the saddest parts of the game, in that you're forced to do it by yourself. It still has a bit of an entertaining challenge, but really, why would you go to Taborea if not for the other people? You might as well be a Commander Shepherd and save the universe, instead of just a small continent. However, clearly there are a lot of things you can do by yourself. Statting is like that, I guess, as is tailoring, although for both statting and tailoring I always think of others. Especially with tailoring it is fun to imagine someone else wearing the things you make, and making them as pretty as possible. I still haven't found a good way to share these, though.

It confuses me, this loneliness. I mean, I would heal you, even if it isn't useful for me. It is just fun to follow someone around and keep them alive. So if you need healing, just ask me.