DDO: From Tobasco to Denise and Super Mario

Still crunch time at work — ugh! Was working at home until 10PM last night. Gaming has taken a severe hit, as has writing, and most of the time when I DO game, it turns out to be something like a Facebook game. Right now I’m hooked on the EQ2-themed Fortune League. Fortune League fills my need for a game I can play with a spreadsheet, as I no longer have an EVE Online sub. There’s probably another article about FL in our future, now that I know more about how the game is played (with a spreadsheet).
I don’t know what I’d do without my Sunday dungeon excursions with my fellow delvers from the Legion of Cannith!
Since last I wrote, we finished the Delera’s Tomb arc twice and other related quests in House Jolasco (Tobasco) many, many times. We’ve moved on to the Sentinels of Stormreach arc given by folks in House Deneith (Denise). This was a surprisingly short arc, especially compared to the epic nature of the Delera quests.
Sentinels of Stormreach pit you against pirates, pirate zombies, pirate skeletons, and murderous pirate kobolds as well as our old traditional favorites, pirate minotaurs. Stormreach totally unbalances the prized pirate:ninja ratio — I think it stands at about 1,000,000:0. So little love for the ninjas. Or maybe they are just so GOOD that I just never see one!
The twist in this arc has you collecting crafting components as you adventure. You’ll need three sigils — one each of goat, lion and dragon — as well as a broken piece of gear that you can combine with the three sigils to create a unique item of surpassing power.
Too bad these sigils are not a guaranteed drop. At the end of the arc, I had just one — the Sigil of the Lion. I’d redone part of the arc and even done the Super Mario dungeon a couple of times, but no luck. Completing the main arc and the Super Mario dungeon got me a choice of sigil rewards, so I picked the Goat, and now I’m just one shy. I haven’t gotten the broken armor piece, though.

Super Mario dungeon?
Yeah. That’s Team Spode’s name for a dungeon that consists mainly of jumping, swimming, puzzle solving and traps. We first encountered this sort of dungeon back in Three Barrel Cove. This dungeon, “The Blood Road”, is the setting for the quest “Spies in the House” and is essentially a cylinder about half a mile high. You unlock the path to the next floor up by solving puzzles, killing monsters (skeletons, elementals and necromancers are the main dangers) and carefully positioning yourself in front of steam jets that knock you into hard to reach places.
I’d done the dungeon a couple of times solo during the week so I had a pretty good idea of how to work through it (after spending four hours figuring it out my first time through). Knowing how little we liked the Super Mario dungeon back in SBC, I didn’t think this would make a very good group dungeon, but after the very short final quest in the Sentinels arc, we had some extra time and so soon we were bouncing up and falling down in the Blood Road — on Hard mode.
It was a lot of work; we NEARLY wiped a couple of times, but we always managed to recover and the last encounter, where gargoyles wisecrack as you sneak by, seemed like vacation time. And what a lot of experience, too — almost 6,500 XP.
That leveled me. Spode needed 1.2K more for level 9, so we did one last quick dungeon which pushed him over.
When I leveled to 8, I took a level of fighter in order to gain access to some dual wield feats and a wider weapon selection. This latest ding to 9, I returned to rogue, so that makes me a 9/1 rogue/fighter. Gleek is a 10 sorceror, Spode the newly-9 paladin, and Ulan is still fighting at level 8.
I’m not really sure what’s next for Team Spode. Gleek has been keeping our schedule; I suppose I should go have a peek. I guess I’d like to do Sentinels over again on hard and try to finish the sigils.
The boom gnome has his own write-up of our recent adventures!!!