We Are Uber Now >> DING 65 <<

We got to exping on Sunday night. Seems like we ran out of targets after a weekend of raids. No problem for us, we were playing around and then got invited to exp a bit with Sparkes and Fayeth. We really like them, they are nice, they exp efficiently without stressing and pressing. And we manage to amass a good bit of loot as well. There are few people who understand the game as well as Sparkes. He was telling me about this different version of Tactics that gets loaded sometimes. The spawn rates and times are different. Wow. As the puller, this is the sort of stuff he would learn. I have probably as deep a knowledge of the Desert in PoS, where we go when nothing is open, but he is a really great player as well.

You may notice that enchanter, cleric, druid, ranger, no tank. With Sparky, tanks need not apply. He will charm something, haste it, maybe even give it weapons if he is feeling bold. The baddest trash mob in the pit of Tactics is the War Boar and that is what he uses. I estimate that it is doing about 500 DPS (i.e., about 6x my melee DPS, 2.5 times my TS archery DPS). Exping with them is more dangerous, probably a lot more dangerous, but more fun. There are also Young War Boars. They are low enough a level that Bianca can charm one. So Sparkes will bring her a present, Tash it and then let her charm it. She then shrinks it so it's really small. Very cute. She walks around with this little baby boar, that is good for 100 DPS, maybe 150. My job in all this is to snare the pets when charm breaks. Gives them a chance to get far enough away to let Sparkes reTash it and Charm it or stun lock it while Bi charms it. A setup like this gets us about 10-15% exp an hour.

All was going well and then Ripert showed up. Ripert is a necro, and I don't know a whole lot about high end necros, but I have seen them in action and they are awesome. There must be a downside somewhere, but not that I have seen. He quickly added a Tortured Soul (undead) to our arsenal of pets. That was good for 250 or more DPS. After that, we were killing boars and wraiths on the "crunch it, they'll make more" plan. They lasted about 1 minute each.

So, before we knew it we were close to Dinging. I was about 5% behind Bi thanks to the 5 death TZ raid, so she had to go AA for a bit so I could catch up. Then we Dinged, for last time, one mob apart. Very cool. The group, though tired, stayed on another 20 minutes to pad our level and finish up the AA Fayeth was working on. All in all, after shutting all things down and checking on the boys, I got to bed at 3am. Ugh.