I was out digging the corn patch this morning, and I hit the cable line.
Now I’ve got no internet for a while.
So, no DDO Hardcore League 2 event for the time being.
Facepalm
Bedtime
16 hours of Hardcore mode. I logged in at 11:40am yesterday, and it’s now 3:49am. I am still wired from all the coffee, but it will pass, I’m sure.
I made two characters, but only played on one today. Lusongee joined the Death Smile guild and reached level 8. I have done almost everything up to level 4.
I did skip Shan-to-Kor and Tangleroot. I will run the Sharn Syndicate tomorrow and the Depths chain in-house, Denieth.
I had a close call in Two-Toed Tobias with a pair of reapers and one of the new champions. I saw the hirelings had aggro and decided to use my bottle of mist from Ravenloft. Well, I accidentally moved and reset the cooldown just as the hires were turned to paste.
I freaked out and hit ALT-F4.
It was a timely move, and I was pleased to see when I logged back in later that I wasn’t dead.
There are all of these new Champions for Hardcore mode, and they are totally beastly. I feel like I spent half the day running away from stuff.
I was online when the highest-level player died.
They were level 12 when he died, racing to 20 to TR. I believe their name was Wesside, a Sorcerer / Bard build. That player was up to level 5 in the first 22 minutes of the game, crazy.
I have a little over 6k Reaper experience points, 433 Favor, and my crafting is level 42. I made a nice +2 fortification, a 55 mithril large shield of solar guard for my Favor guy.
Whoops
I recently did the $200 bank bonus on the BB&T Choice Checking. I read about it on Doctor of Credit last year.
Anyways, it’s been long enough, so I was zeroing out the balance before closing. I forgot, though, that I had a bill payment scheduled, and I ended up overdrawn after the bank holiday on the 17th.
Between the monthly fees and the overdraft charge, I lost $124 of the bonus.
Big ouch.
Accidents may happen, but they are avoidable with wisdom. I was not wise this go ’round.
Hardcore League 2
The second season of Hardcore League is approaching. Tomorrow’s update will bring the Hardcore server back with the permadeath feature.
I have two days off from work, which will get me started. I am temporarily ceasing my Pokémon Go gaming to focus on the Hardcore event. The server runs through May, so I will be able to claim a spot before flying out to England in June.
The Anniversary Event is also running, which might have been a distraction. Sensing a possible conflict, I just spent 4.5 hours grinding to get all the gear and the sentient kobold gem I needed for my second account.
I have my builds worked out for both a Favor toon and a Reaper mode toon. I will be reusing the same names as last year’s event. My reaper toon will be Lusongee, and the Favor toon is Ananzi.
Lusongee will be 3 Wiz, 3 Arti, and 14 Cleric.
Ananzi will be 2 Cleric, 3 Wiz, and 15 Paladin.
Both will use Sun Elf for race and will be mixes of familiar classes and have Animal Domain for turning purposes.
Lusongee will need the arti levels for trapping, as I will likely play solo on her for most of the game, like last year. Ananzi will play sword’n’board, going for heavy defense and using spellsword to fill out his DPS.
I am still debating whether or not to buy an INT tome early on to boost my skill points. I’ll have to give it more thought for now.
Victory
I have been holding Sprint shares since September of last year. I kept stocking up as the price went down, and today I got my reward.
With the approval of the Sprint / T-Mobile merger, I was able to cash out with a nice profit.
Most of my shares were bought around the $4 mark. Though I did get some as free stocks from the various commission-free apps that have become so popular.
I made around $700 in profit from the shares I sold. Mostly, I am just happy to see some green in my portfolio. I do have some others that I have lost all hope with, but you can’t win them all.
I used Robinhood and SoFi to complete the trades. I also use the watch lists on Webull to track all of my apps and the shares in each portfolio.
Oh! It’s a button
I’ve been emailing support and generally complaining elsewhere for a couple of weeks about TradeUp.
I got my free share notifications, but nothing had been credited to my account. The complaints stemmed from not getting any responses from their support team.
Anyways, I was checking out the app and my phone slipped out of my hand, and as I fumbled with it, I ended up pressing what I thought was just a picture.
Turns out it was the button to redeem the free stock. I certainly feel silly now that I found this out.
All is well now, I have 3 shares of NIO and 1 share of Ford.
Vacation
I have just bought my tickets and am looking forward to traveling again. I will be visiting my uncle in England later this year.
I will take about a week’s worth of vacation for the trip. I also have my father visiting a bit earlier this year, so I will take 3-4 days of vacation for that too.
I should have 8-9 days, maybe some floating holidays, left for vacations from my workplace at that point.
It will give me ample room to work with for Pokémon Go community days and events, which I have been regularly taking off for vacation.
I got a notification this morning that one of my referrals had made their deposit on the MooMoo app.
So I got another stock card to exchange for stocks. It was another Groupon card, but it is worth $10 this time instead of the two $4 cards I got previously.
I will wait for Groupon to drop to $2.50 a share and then exchange my stock card for four shares.
If you’d like to try your luck at getting a good share, you can use my link for MooMoo.
“Year of the Rat” Mouse Cookies
Little mouse cookies for New Year’s.
Shiny Pokemon (part 2)
I caught these a couple of weeks after the previous shiny Pokémon post.
Turn Undead
I’d say this is my favorite ability in Dungeons and Dragons Online. I certainly do seem to play Cleric and Paladin often.
My ‘Banishing Flame’ build uses 3 levels of Cleric and 2 levels of Paladin. The Knight of the Chalice and Radiant Servant enhancement tree bonuses can be stacked to really put Turn Undead over the top.
The build gets better by choosing Animal Domain at level 2 of Cleric. Animals and Magical Beasts added to the list of turnable targets can be immense in the early game.
The problem with Turn Undead is that once you reach Epic quests past level 20, the Hit Dice and Levels of creatures go up tremendously.
Your basic cleric or paladin just doesn’t have the power or level range to affect something of that size. Even with my Banishing Flame build, you can only target 1 or 2 creatures per use of Turn Undead.
It has been one of my goals while playing Dungeons and Dragons Online to make Turn Undead effective at Epic (20) and Legendary (30) levels.
The recent Hardcore server event gave me a chance to play the Morning Lord (Sun Elf) iconic class starting from level 1. I found the effectiveness of Turn Undead was intense with the racial enhancement Bane of the Restless. This adds 6 to your effective level for turning purposes, 6 to the number of hit dice, and does 18d6 light damage per use.
The enhancement does not increase the Maximum Hit Dice, though. Even so, being able to turn at level 7 effectively and do 18-108 light damage at character level 1 was crazy.
My main character for Turn Undead is named Wahida. Playing on Cannith server, I have 3 past lives of cleric and recently TR’d to Sun Elf.
Her build is 3 Artificer/4 Paladin/13 Cleric, using the Inquisitive tree for normal combat and trapping. She is a bit short on Action Points, so I may decide to do some racial reincarnation later on.
10 AP into Radiant Servant tree and 11 AP in Knight of the Chalice, 4 AP in the racial tree. 34 AP into Inquisitive, with the remaining action points going to either Renegade Master-maker in Artificer tree or Sacred Defender in the Paladin tree.
I have the +1 Racial AP and Universal AP tomes.
The points into Renegade Master-maker are optional. 6 AP to get the second core ability, providing protection against magic missiles and a +4 to AC.
The shield spell can be used from a wand as an alternative, though recasting every 5 minutes can be tedious. The points in Sacred Defender give a defensive stance with +25 to PRR/MRR. Ideally, I would have 17 AP in Sacred Defender to get the sacred bonus to run speed and +6 to constitution.
I can’t get everything I want. Taking AP away from Inquisitive would compromise my ability to fight everything else.
Well, that’s probably enough for today. I will go over my actual Turning stats in a later post.
Fat Wallet Refugee 