YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES FUCKING YES

I finally have everything I need for Obsidian armor for my necromancer!

60 Platinum, 350 Tanned Hide Squares, 35 Elonian Leather Squares, 105 Obsidian Shards, 105 Globs of Ectoplasm, 2 Perfect Salvage Kits, 4 Vials of Dye [Red], and 2 Passage Scrolls to the Fissure of Woe. Everything I fucking need to get to the forgemaster (plus backup in case of a wipe on the first try), craft it, transfer all my existing armor mods, and make it look even more awesome.

Oh and I joined a new guild that's actually active. Double win.

Many thanks to the random Margonite that dropped armor containing a Superior Vigor rune which went for 16 Platinum at the rune trader.

I feel violated.

The account name "eckstee" is taken on Twitter.

In related news, I now have a Twitter account.

this is supposed to be hard, isn't it?

Just in case anyone reading this doesn't know, in Hard Mode in GW, if you kill every enemy in the zone, you get a bonus and progress towards your Vanquisher title for that continent.  Hard Mode makes enemies move and attack faster, as well as giving them higher levels and faster skill activation.  Theoretically it's supposed to be hard, and in most cases, it is.

Not so much in the Desolation area of Nightfall.  There you have access to the powerful Junundu worms, which have 3000 health and a specialized skill set.  Enemies in the Desolation are balanced for humans and not Junundu, even in areas where you have to be in the Junundu to travel there because if you're not, you'll die.

The Sulfurous Wastes is one such area.  Perhaps most popular for being the area where you can farm Sunspear and Lightbringer promotion points the easiest (in Hard Mode), the vast majority of the zone can be cleared while in Junundu.  Even some of the enemies in areas of rocky ground, which Junundu can't tunnel through, can be lured close enough to the edge of a cliff where Junundu can take them out.

The rest, including a boss group, require a little strategy.  Since it was just me with heroes and henchmen, I took advantage of the ability to disable certain skills in each hero's panel to disable the one that makes them leave the Junundu.  Normally when you go into rocky terrain or use Leave Junundu your heroes and henchmen will leave their Junundu as well.  Disabling the skill on my heroes prevents them from doing that.

Also since Junundu have some close range skills, I disabled those as well.  I then flagged my three heroes near the edge of the one rocky terrain area containing the only groups I had to pull close to the edge to kill them, including the boss group.  I then got out of my Junundu and the henchmen followed suit (just as planned, I'd flagged them back as well so I could go pull).

Pulling was largely a success.  There was plenty of death when we got to the boss group, because I had to kill the boss twice since I neglected to take out the only enemy with a resurrection skill first.  It ended up being just me and the three heroes alive.  I ran back to the nearby wurm spoor and got back in my Junundu and we steamrolled the group.  Zone vanquished, half of the party dead.

Now might be a good time to mention my party composition.  I was playing my ranger.  I had three ranger heroes.  The henchmen were (in order going down the party window) dervish, elementalist, ranger, and paragon.  No healers!  Though the paragon henchman can heal somewhat, it's a losing battle.  On top of that, my primary purpose for being out there was to level up pets, and given that Junundu have their own skill set, I neglected to have real builds on myself and my ranger heroes.  The four of us only had Charm Animal.

Hey, what can I say, it works.

And here's a screenshot, taken just after I finished.  I was lolling too hard to get a screenshot with the HM vanquishing helmet on the screen, but you can see where I got the bonus and have the gold HM status effect instead of the red one.

Here's yet another screenshot. I was bored in a zone devoid of enemies, so I got out of my Junundu and ran out into the desolation to die. The desolation area puts the Sulfurous Haze environmental effect on you, which gives you maybe a couple of seconds to leave the desolation before it kills you. Also on your screen you see the text "No mortal can survive the Sulfurous Haze.", which is the entire reason for this next screenshot. As you can see, the pets are still alive. In the desolation. Whee.

lol.

yay AVGN's back

With Action 52, one of those shitty multicarts. Except that this one isn't your typical multicart with bootleg versions of actual decent games, this one is a total shitfest. Where does he find this stuff?

He also has a nintoaster. A working NES in the form of a toaster. Just watch, you'll see.

The episode's almost 27 minutes long, so make sure you've got some free time before watching it.

Enjoy it here.

so lol

Chahbek Village came back up as the zaishen mission, so I went and re-re-re-re-re-did it in HM on all my characters.  Pocketed the 740 Copper Zaishen Coins, which I converted up through Silver to Gold to get up to my sixth ever Gold Zaishen Coin.  Man, this Heavy Equipment Pack is never going to happen.

Especially because I spent two of them on an Elite Ritualist Tome so I could get Signet of Spirits on my ritualist.  Talked to my local Kurzick Bureaucrat and got Summon Spirits, and put myself together a spirit spammer.  Basically, what you do is, you use Signet of Spirits to get three attack spirits, then you add in Vampirism, Bloodsong, and Pain to go up to six.  Then right after that you have Painful Bond, an area-effect hex that increases the damage your spirits do to the hexed foes, and Summon Spirits, which makes all your spirits shadow step to you, and heals them.  The remaining two skills can change depending on whether or not you're soloing, but that's the gist of the build.

I'd seen people discussing spirit spammers and mentioning them as a viable solo build, but I had my doubts.  The spirits have low health and low armor, deal fairly low damage (high teens, low twenties), and have to be moved manually (i.e. using Summon Spirits to move them all in one cast).  After seeing them rip through enemies courtesy of Painful Bond, all doubt was gone.  That fairly low damage is first multiplied by the number of spirits you have (in this case six), and then Painful Bond just about doubles that.  It's pretty awesome.

back to guild wars I guess

I tried all last week to get 15 Naga Skins for Nick the Traveler.  He was taking them 3:1 for gifts of the traveler, max 5 gifts per account per week.  Doing as many runs through Boreas Seabed which has a fairly high concentration of them as I could, I only managed seven all week.  I took my two gifts and went to sleep.

This week seems to be easier, this time it's 3:1 Dredge Incisors.  The main thing is that there aren't any enemies in the zone hostile to Dredge, whereas there were groups of humans that would fight off the Naga in Boreas Seabed and take kills and drops.  My first run through the ones in Ferndale I got 5 incisors and killed several bosses, one of whom dropped two of the incisors.

I had a secondary goal for being in Ferndale.  I recently came across this team build for speedbooking with heroes and I want to set it up, since it will make getting the EotN reputation titles easy.  Naturally I don't have everything necessary to set it up, so I set out getting the three elite skills it needs that I didn't have.  The first two have been easy caps so far.  Moebius Strike was only tough because the boss with it also has Dancing Daggers and Factions bosses deal double damage, so it spikes people down really quickly.  The other one, Signet of Spirits, was the entire reason I was in Ferndale.  Secondary to that was that Ferndale contains tons of Dredge.

Anyway, being a ritualist skill, I needed to change my secondary to ritualist so I could cap it.  I figured I might as well run an old favorite build of mine, called Splinter Barrage.  It takes advantage of a ritualist weapon spell called Splinter Weapon that deals damage to foes nearby your target whenever you attack your target.  Barrage is an elite bow attack shoots arrows at multiple targets.  So if you picture me using Splinter Weapon and then Barrage and seeing a massive cloud of damage numbers pop up on screen, you're on the right track.

Anyway, as it turns out, Signet of Spirits is linked to the same attribute that Splinter Weapon is, so I had points in it and essentially had a second elite skill while I cleared out the rest of the Dredge.  Normally you're limited to only one elite skill on your bar, but if you do what I did and capture a second one, you can use both until you leave the zone you captured it in, then one will disappear.

What exactly does Signet of Spirits do that makes it elite?  It summons three ritualist attack spirits.  They can pump out the damage, and will attract the enemy AI since they're low armor targets, resulting in the party having an easier time clearing things.  Between the damage they put out and the reduced aggro it was a breeze clearing the rest of the Dredge.  Did I also mention that the spirits stay alive for 60 seconds and the skill recharges in 30, and being a signet it has no energy cost?  If it was a spell that costs 25 energy, activates in three seconds instead of one, and takes 60 seconds to recharge (or the spirits only lasted 30 seconds), it wouldn't be elite.  But then it would suck, and the name would be wrong since all signets in Guild Wars don't have an energy cost.  Some of them take energy from the caster as a part of their effect, but they cost nothing to activate.

So now I'm off to get the third elite skill I need, Signet of Ghostly Might.  It boosts the attack damage of spirits within earshot.  Then it'll be back to genociding Dredge until I have 15 incisors.  Since I'm already 33% of the way there after one run, hopefully it should go better than Naga Skins did.

Wait, was the rit elite my primary reason for being in Ferndale, or was it the Dredge?  I'm confused.

Edit: got enough Incisors for my five gifts, in as many runs.  Why can't they all be like this?

random bullshit (lol i haev imaginayshun)

So all that time we spent not playing Tales?  Yeah, it's coming back to bite us in the ass right now.  We're about two thirds of the way through the game and we have maybe two or three weekends left.  In before Tales weekend.

As far as Guild Wars goes, I'm still working my way through the Eye of the North dungeons.  I've actually had that on a bit of a hiatus due to too much shit happening in real life, but I'll get back to it.  I got my 100th ecto last night, which means my necromancer is only 5 ectos away from having obsidian armor.  Then I just need to find a party that can stay coordinated long enough to reach the forgemaster.  I also need to leave the inactive guild I'm in and join a more active one.  Perhaps I should do that before attempting the Fissure of Woe.

CAINE's trying to actually have its shit in gear, and as such is already planning for recruitment in the fall semester.  We're trying to solve some of our biggest problems, namely our lack of visibility in the activities fair.  We have a monolith planned that should put us on the map, and crazy people with tools and the free time to put it together.

The driver's side seatbelt in my car has been acting up lately.  It's one of those automatic ones that were all the rage circa 1990 before Americans got all American and started bitching about other people telling them what to do.  Either that or idiots kept strangling themselves with it.  Anyway, any time it's warm and humid (haven't had a warm dry day to try and separate those two factors yet) it has a chance of just not working.  As in, it stays in the forward position and doesn't actually act as a seat belt.

It's supposed to move back when I turn on the car and have the door closed.  Most of the time it works fine, but coming back from sakura matsuri a few weeks ago, and again last sunday coming back from a party at Tom's place in Waynesboro, it decided it was going to act up.  The weird thing about the most recent one was that it didn't happen right away.  It waited until I got back to CAINE house to drop people off and then it failed.

Going back to CAINE, because my mind is all over the place and that's why I've been posting less recently, another thing we're doing to try and make people feel more at home in the club is allowing any member to propose a presentation.  If it sounds like a good idea they can prepare it and educate the rest of us about something.  The first instance of this was a western comics presentation.  That's another area that CAINE is trying to expand to (or really, get back into).

Anyway, I have an idea for a presentation, but I don't know if I want to be solely in charge of it.  It's basically about importing stuff, which a number of us in CAINE do on a semi-regular basis, so I'm sure I could get some help.  Really I only had the idea so I could have an excuse to bring in everything I own that's been imported from Japan and show off my weeaboo level, but whatever.  I can't envision it being a bad idea for a presentation if it has structure.