Wednesday 29 August 2007

Nekkid Fun! SR's First Salvage Run

A few weeks ago, the "powers that be" in ShadowRavenloft decided it was time to get off our butts and give Salvage a try. Tonight we would be exploring the Silver Seas Remenants. Our brave exploration team includes: Dutrance, Bigawkward, Lunakitty, Lenor, Jojax, Kysuke, Gruive, Marzanna, Vashanti.

We gather around the Gilded Doors of the Silver Seas Remanents, eagerly anticipating what's inside...

...and promptly get stripped of the ability to wear equipment. Our hit points, magic points and stats were severely nerfed too. Job abilities, magic, even support jobs were restricted as well.

FAN-tastic.

Fortunately, after the April patch, they've changed Salvage so that an Armoury Create containing a certain number of "cells" can be found in the first room. These cells unlock certain abilities. Jojax was put in charge of cell assignment. Since it was our first time, people took some time casting lots and passing on cells that weren't assigned to them.
The first floor of the Silver Seas Remanents were full of Fomors. Talking the easier route, we farmed as many as we could in order to unlock more of our party member's abilities.

Overall, they were pretty easy to handle. We made sure everyone came prepared with some meds to make the run smoother.

The first death came just as we were heading to the teleporter up to the second floor. Congratulations go to Marzanna for being the first casualty on our first Salvage run!
Up we go to the second floor. The second floor contained a mixture of Imps and Fomors. The Fomors would aggro and link to sound. The Imps would aggro the Fomors by sight.

We weren't up for massive amounts of Deathga, so we took the "easier" path which involved taking down two Imp Notorious Monsters.

These Imps were annoying. There were two of them in the room: the first one spammed an AoE Silence ability. The second one meleed like it was a Monk using Hundred Fist.
Despite overdosing on Echo Drops, we managed to bring both of them down without too much drama. The second Imp NM dropped the lv. 15 gear for Skadi-leg gear which went to Dutrance - Congratulations!

Up to the third floor we go. The third floor contain Archaic mobs. We've run into them before during boredom Nyzul Isles runs and they are mean little buggers.

In order to progress, we needed to clear the room. Things got a little hairy when they started linking and detecting magic. Kysuke became the second victim during our quest. After clearing the room of all gears, this NM showed up. Beating it down wasn't too much of an issue. It was nice enough to drop an item for the Marduk gear set (forgot which piece - I think it was body), which went to Marzanna. Congratulations!
There was also another Imp NM. He was just as annoying as the others because he was fast and liked to teleport away when the going got tough for him. What a wuss.

We tried to sneak up to the fourth floor, but got caught out by the Archaic Gears. Vashanti died on the way up. We tried to hold back the aggressive gears as one of our members made their way to the teleporter.
We reached the fourth floor with 10 minutes to go. Up ahead were more Archaic gears. Dutrance with his l33t Flee skills ran on ahead to train all the gears in the way with Jojax in tow. Dutrance died for the cause and Jojax teleported us to the last floor.

With only 30 seconds on the clock, we had no chance of taking down the Long Chariot waiting for us on the fifth floor, so I did the only thing I could for a dramatic finish.
Overall it went pretty smooth for our first Salvage run. We're so proud of our minions :p Everyone will have to get used to passing and casting lots in mid-battle though, but it should be something that will improve as people participate in more runs.

Besides the lv. 15 gear drops, we also got two Silver Seas Cards.

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