Left the Heavens and entered the Sands

I left 12 behind this Sunday and entered the Sands finishing the undead side – netting about 40k doing the big one, in what seemed like an hour long endeavor. I must say however that I had more intense fun doing the other 2 quests in the area since for some darn reason one of them were infested with reapers coming around corners, with shambling zombies, ghouls and the odd Mummy.

It was awesome. At 13 you won’t have quite an arsenal by Warlock standard, but I fired how half a blue bar worth of web and black tentacles and managed to melt a bunch of zombies in well aimed acid breath attacks.

The Wiz king was more of a hamster chase really; trying to make the hireling rogue to undo traps before the rest ran through all of them. Not to mentioned drop through floors and all manners of ways to make stupid hirelings go poof.

Wiz King of course is nothing compared to the burning city and Chains of Flame – not only for the idiotic run to it, but also the long boring run to the top of the city once you’re inside the quest. Altho I might not get as much XP as Wiz King, I’m fairly sure with the 2 side quests I have still to do – Maraud the Mines and Spawn of Vulkoor, and the third main quest – And offering of Blood, I will most likely finish 13. But I’m not exactly excited about it.

Partly because Menechtarun for all it’s slayer potential – is a pretty time consuming area to explore.

Into the Red Fen

I’ve come to appreciate every series and pack of quests that allows me to maximize hirelings for a 2 or so hour stint. Such as Red Fen. Even if I in the end, I end up finishing the level doing something else. Like now – level 11; doing level 9 (Normal) quests on Reaper 1.

It’s a whole new interesting ball game doing Reaper 1. A little tougher than Elite, but not dramatically – with the added difficulty of numerous champions and reapers. Such as when I did one of the red fen quests and ran around a corner just to find 3 reapers.

And you can still die; normally (and dependent on difficulty) I always felt that some deaths are dumb. Such as random traps. I hate it in ToEE and Slavers. Because it’s not just 1 or 2, it is entire corridors. Back in the day when you almost required rogues to do traps you had an idea and the rogue usually communicated traps to you. With random floor traps you simply end up running through them without a rogues ability to sense them.

Anyways; safe to say – I find random stupid features like that annoying. They don’t add an element of danger – just an element of nuisance. Most of them are not cool, there is no logic behind them (after all, what is so good about a corridor of traps when you as a player can use them to make entire mobs run through them and waste their lives?).

I can just imagine the conversation.

‘So you’re telling me that the reason they destroyed our slavers operation was because you idiots added traps everywhere and then ran through them yourself?’

Anyways – what I like about Reaper 1 (or any other of the repeater difficulty levels) is that you yourself decide to add a ‘randomness’ to the existing quest you know by heart. You don’t know what type of champion and what reaper will appear. That was especially fun in the end quest of the Red Fen, with me slowly jumping off ledges under the ocean and reapers ‘teleporting’ to my last floating position under the sea etc.

It felt so appropriately epic that I, unlike other Red Fen completions, decided to explore the entire area and finishing all the optionals. Both in the wilderness and the final quest.

Now it’s onto completing 11. I do wish I had more green steel on this guy. I truly regret that I didn’t have more opportunity to run and make at least a good con op when I had the chance.