Lets turn some of dem essences into heads. I am sure most of us have a toon or two who can get to SH by now. We can do a complete run (with multiple meets) of clvl ~20 difficulty first for some low lvl twinks. Then repeat at clvl ~30 and so on for higher lvl twinks.

Preferably before the Abyss comes out

I can be on around 5 PST tonight if that's good for everyone, or else we can plan for tomorrow (Saturday).

KoP

The title says it all. Answer the above question!

As of this morning, me (FoxBolt) and Attika (Featt) finished the first known Ironman game with a never before done pair of Rogue and Mage.

We spent a lot of time redoing games on dlvl1 over and over until we got a PS; that was the only thing that would make this game possible. We found our PS on one, then I joined the game with a fresh mage and bought my town purchases without consulting him (as he already knew what had dropped on 1 and I didn't).

This game was VERY friendly with books and staves. I found THREE books of Lightning, a book of Firewall, THREE books of Mana Shield (one went to Att for 16), 2 books of heal, 1 book ho, and 1 book hb for Diablo. We had one death this game, and it was at the very end, but Attika managed to finish Diablo without reviving me, so we saved all 7 of our Res scrolls for Nightmare. We also found a BF on 4 which gave Attika the ability to solo and save lots of potions. I don't know how many reds he has left, but I carried over 20 small blues, 12 small yellows, and 11 big yellows.

Here's the story of Dlvls 15 and 16.

Level 15.
Enemies: Soul Burners, Balrogs.
Drops: Split-Skull shield, Naj's Puzzler, Executioners Blade, Ring, Ring Mail-20. 2 cauldrons.

Compared to 13 and 14, this floor was a nightmare. Once we cleared the first area (which had no cover), we used teamwork for the entire level. Attika killed single soulies using shish-kebobs, and brought all Rogs to me (some came 4 at a time or more!) to zap with Lightning. Thanks to the PS I could stand my ground against 2 or 3 rogs at a time (and I had to intercept them to have a clear shot anyway), but I was visiting the PS after almost every battle, and we had very little resist to work with (topaz 13% ring).

Jade gave up Exe blade, Vex gave up Split-Skull, and Laz gave up Naj's Puzzler (we ID'd after 15 was clear) which turned me into a powerhouse with 20% resist all and +20 magic. I believe Bloodlust gave up a Long Sword. Other than that, no noteworthy drops.

After 15, we used the Glimmering shrine on all of our best items, and our jewelry. We ended up with:

Mail of the Tiger +44.
Awesome Armor.
Awesome/Tiger armor.
Sword of Speed.
Sword of Vampires.
Shield of Absorption -3.
Red Amulet of Might. 11/8.
Amulet of the Moon +7.
Topaz ring +12 all res.
Pearl ring +25 magic res.
Accuracy ring +11 dex.
Saintly/Wolf Breast plate.

We also used one of our 3 remaining ID scrolls on the Naj's Puzzler. Brought me to 370 mana.

Level 16.
Enemies: Usual.
Drops: Amulet, Small Shield (Indestructable), Long War Bow (magic), book MS.

A long hallway effectively quarted the level. I needed 420k to lup while att needed 480k. We decided to try and share kills as much as possible. Att killed BK's after I tagged them with my TK stick (35 charges), and I roasted Advos with my Firewall spell. I reached Lv23 by the time I started on outer Quad 3 (cleared outer/inner 1 and 2, and outer 4 first). I cleaned the rest of outside quad 3, then threw the lever and Att cleared inside 3.

Then we marked Diablos position and I set directly south of the cage. Att threw the levers and bailed out of the first TP while I led Diablo (Mana Shield with 300+ mana) to the center of Quad 2. He almost had me a few times, but I had Naj's Puzzler (Teleport charges) to stay ahead of him, and I teleported straight to the long hallway as soon as he was in the center...right into a BK sandwich. I managed to break free, but they damaged my armor severely and it was no longer usable. Had to go to unid'd Aut Leather.

We began clearing bodyguards. Once Att had reached 23, I decided to burn my 2 Apoc scrolls on the cage. I killed a few and lured the incoming BK's to att. He then finished the cage off, and there was no last drop.

We went to town, packed up, loaded our belts with pots, and got ready for the final showdown. Screenshots of my stats will be available at the bottom.

We went to Quad 2 and burned one of two infra scrolls to see Diablos exact position. I had Attika set in the northwest corner, then I lured Diablo into her swing. As soon as it was safe, I swung around Diablo, threw up a Golem and began opening up with Holy Bolts. Unfortunately, after about 30 bolts I stopped paying attention to my mana and drank too late; my MS went down before it registered. Diablo threw an Apoc and I died instantly (Only had 40 life because of the -25 from Puzzler). Fortunately, my Golem stayed in attendance and Attika finished him 5 seconds later.

That one death was the ONLY death we had for the entire game.

We got booted to the channel sporting dots, then we made a game for the free res, heal, and ID from grateful townsfolk. Some of the items we got were absolutely amazing.

Sword of Swiftness.
Lapis/Moon Breast Plate. (35/5)
Knights Staff of Golem (33 tohit, 24 charges). Good for tagging.
Ring Mail of the Stars (10 all).
Dragons Amulet of Wizardry (58/29)!!!

With the amulet, mail, and Naj's puzzler, I have almost 500 mana. The knights stick will allow me to tag enemies in NM for a while, at least until I (hopefully) find a book of TK.

So that's it. The first ever recorded IM victory with a Rogue/Mage duo. I want to continue this game to nightmare because of the great equipment, but Attika doesn't want to. Attika, if you don't want to continue this game right now, AT LEAST save the character so we can keep playing at a later time. I really think that this is a game that we can take all the way to Hell mode, and I'd hate to throw it away after we did so well. Let me know your thoughts.

Here's some random screenshots of our game.





This was an AWESOME set on 11 that allowed Attika to clear half of the level from (Frost Chargers and Blood Claws).



My stats prior to defeating Diablo.



My beautiful Naj's Puzzler.



Me and Attika ready and willing to slay Diablo and go home.



Me and Attika doing our thing. See her blade in the corner?



That is not funny, but we have VICTORY! Blood-spewing animation.

Final note: Although I had the PS and numerous books at my side and a PS/BF plus many bows for Attika, I feel that we would not have survived the game without Attikas amazing scouting. Attikas scouting is the difference between one baddie and 6 baddies, which is what I usually end up drawing. Attika made this game winnable, no doubt.

Great game!

KingofPain: I'm wondering if this tale is good enough to get posted on the Ironman Forge section, since it's the first one with this character combination. Let me know. =P

We have a brand new statutory holiday here in Ontario - Family Day. The problem is, not everyone has the day off. My husband did not.

So, what can you do as a family activity without Dad on a day when half the city is out 'doing family stuff' together. Line-ups were going to be immense at any of the 'good stuff'. So the Royal Ontario Museum was out. So was the Science Centre. And so on....

So, we went for a boat ride. Oddly enough, there were no line-ups for this.
Here's hoping you all had a great long weekend too.

The level of conduct on Alliance chat has gone from questionable to weak in the past few months, and I can't seem to find any RBers that think otherwise. As far as I can tell, there's extremely little inter-guild pugging going on anymore, it's basically become an occasional chat channel. While YoHo isn't exactly promoting alliance events, I think the problem more is that RB members aren't comfortable with the gaming culture of these allied guilds. We aren't doing them or ourselves any favors by pointlessly sticking around if that's the case.

There are some who would rather see a better alternative before going anywhere though; to that end I have been looking around at some other alliances, but we need to have some idea what as a guild we would want out of an alliance.

- random chat/pick-up-groups: for many alliances, ally chat is just a place to get groups of strangers that average better than the local sector. If this is a high priority, large alliances have an appeal. They still need some level of quality for our guild though, or else you get the current situation.

- Friendship: this can be trickier unless you get guilds together that have a similar culture, but possibly more valuable than having a large group of strangers to draw upon. In this manner you get alliance chat used as a more comfortable shooting-the-breeze tool, and more inter-alliance groups form spontaneously without the need for grand planned events. If this is most important, then we'd need to go with people we already know well, which is sadly not too many for our members. For example, many of our members love Kindred Knight of Phoenix, but the recently joined Heaven's Royal Knights (who finally left ZoS), so there is question whether we could fit with them. Others we know are Kurzicks, which is it's own dilemma.

- Conduct: while our guild has worked pretty well with a minimum of rules, this tends to be the exception rather than the norm. (ie I'd say it's rare to find our quality without some more structure) This means thinking of ceding the freedom to say absolutely whatever on alliance chat in exchange for insulation from low-quality guilds. Alot of alliances that I've found which look decent tend expect at least respect between alliance members, and are not fond of frequent profanity, low humor, spamming for trade/pricecheck/etc. Personally I'm all for acting cleaner to keep out the trash, but then you all know I am a bit of a prude. HRK for example appears fairly strict on a G-rated channel, others like Seryia's GWTP seem looser but still expect family-friendly chat.

- Democratic Involvement. I actually think over-involvement in Ally politics is what got us into the ZoS mess, and I don't believe we have the critical mass of care to make it in a truly "peerless" alliance. That said we'd probably prefer having some level of say in who stays and goes.

- Trial Evaluation. Some guilds are able to join an Alliance they know just a bit about, try it out for a week or two, and then have the organization to move on if it isn't working. Given the amount of lethargy/apathy we've historically had towards Alliances, I'm guessing this isn't going to work so well for a guild, and there only seem to be a handful of alliances we are well acquainted with. I'm willing (and hope I'd get some help) to try and set up joint gaming sessions to get to know guilds from an alliance before taking the plunge.

- Luxon or Kurzick. Those of us playing Alliance Battles have been buildling up our Luxon track for skills, but the majority of the game's guilds are Kurzick, which means when sorting for the proverbial solid alliance in a heystack of lacklustre ones, there's defenitely more to find in the Kurzick camp. Also I haven't seen too much Alliance Battles of late anyway, and maybe some others wouldn't mind working on Kurzick track if they could get the bonus for donating. But it is a setback for those of us who have ground out our luxon titles, since you can't AB for the opposite faction of your guild, and luxons generally have less wait time than Kuzricks anyway.

- PvP. I know we're mostly a PvE guild looking for PvE alliance, but a few of our members might be interested in getting together for an organized outing from time to time, be it AB or GvG.

- There's also the Alliance-less option, but given the lack of political involvement, leaving ally chat off is just about equivalent.

For those who feel more apathetic about the current situation, I'd ask you to try and stretch your imaginations, and think "what if?" Our experience with past alliances may have been lukewarm to rotten; but what would an ideal alliance look like to you?

So I tried a small impossible as Meklar vs Mrrshan, Alkari and Silicoids.

I didn't have ANY controlled environment tech in my tree, the Mrrshan didn't research any and the Alkari only got Barren (but there were no barren planets, just tons of inferno,toxic,radiated with the odd dead.)

This meant I had to have a Huge bomber with repulsar beam flying around pounding all the new colonies the silicoids were making into the ground (although I could only just keep up!)

I loled when I saw Atmospheric Teraforming tech in my tree. (Although Meklon got radiated from an industrial accident, so it wasn't compleatly useless, just mostly!)

Just wanna share some fun screenshots. Some of them were actually kinda frustrating at the time, but they are now kinda funny afterwards when I look at the screenshots again.

Like this one... you might have ran into this situation before. That Legendary/Unique item just out of reach. This one popped when I killed Lord Mielmight. I was so mad at that time, I decided to not use the Sedative, so I could go back and kill him again... and again... about 50 more times. LOL. His dead body was littered all in one tunnel, and his names filled up a big portion of my screen. (Should've taken a screenie of that...)

Hey everyone,

The guild Legion of the Forgotten has applied to join the YoHo alliance, and I'm supposed to cast RB's vote on whether to let them in. I completely missed the get together on Feb. 9th, and so haven't met any LOTF members - have any of you done so? If so, any opinions on how to vote? You can PM me if you don't want your remarks visible in the forum...

Cheers,
Hawkmoon

So the Psilons in this game are runaway, with too much gropo tech and computer tech for me to be able to get any tech off them. They have the Klackons as allies and I have the humans and darlocks, and as Silicoids with no-one with radiated bases I have a lot of systems, so I should be able to get a council vote win if I can hold them off till +120pop tech.

They built a new design which was massacring my fleets, a large with 2 hellfire torpedoes, 9 shield and repulsor beam. My best shields is 5 and so the hellfire missiles rip though my large ships while my small ships are worthless against the repulsor beam.

However, the AI THINKS that the hellfire missiles can penetrate my planetary shields, but they can't.

This means their ships simply fly next to my bases and keep firing for 50 turns slowly being wiped out (I only have damage 10 missiles vs 9 shield!)

Since the hellfire missiles do 25 damage to all 4 shields and do half damage as its against a planet they can only penetrate 12.5 shields, while I have X+V=15. The computer seems to think hellfire do 100 damage though!

Its a bit of an exploit, but I can't really not use it since you can't run missile bases away!

Has anyone else noticed this before?

Just a link for a new version (new to me me anyway) Smoke on the water with a whole new sound

http://www.videofantastica.com/view_video/31903/