Albion and More

Daily Ramble 1: So Much Going On

Wow, I take a few days off and all kinds of things happen…Big Ben goes silent, Whedonesque shuts down, searchers find the USS Independence, Jerry Lewis passes away, and there’s this big celestial event crossing the entire country. Oh, and I decided to change my rambling from a Morning Ramble to a Daily Ramble. I suppose I made this move since while I might come up with and draft my rambles in the morning, I usually don’t end up posting them until later in the day. It’s all semantics, but whatever, I wanted something new after my little break. The bottom line is that a bunch happened and most of those things happened in the past 2 days. But while all that was happening and I was taking my break, I got a chance to play some Albion.

Albion: Attempting Tier 4 Expedition

Now that I’m over in Fort Sterling and hooked up with my guild, I figured it was time to try my hand at the Tier 4 solo expedition. I figured this should be pretty similar to the Tier 3 one, just a bit more difficult. Boy was I wrong. These guys in there were tough and my usual strategy of attack would not seem to work.

In the Tier 3 dungeons, I’ve been using a Tier 3 Journeyman’s Nature Staff for the most part. With this, I select Rejuvenation as my Q, Poison Thorns as the W, Circle of Life for my E and Adrenaline for my passive. This makes Poison Thorns my main damage dealing spell and it seems to work pretty well for Tier 3 dungeons.

As you can see, this spell does a DOT, but not just to the primary target. This causes 21 damage per second to anyone in a 3m radius of my target. This works pretty well in getting some decent AOE damage applied. It can also stack 3 times which means 63 damage every second for 10 seconds. Further, each application extends all of the stacks so you can have this go on for quite a while. The issue I was having with Tier 4 dungeons though, is that it’s not applying the damage fast enough or in large enough bursts.

Basically, in the Tier 3 dungeons, I would apply 3 of these and then start healing myself with Rejuvenation.

This does a decent HOT that stacks up to 42 HP per second which works well to keep me healthy in Tier 3 dungeons. The problem I’m having though is application in Tier 4 dungeons. What I’m seeing is that when you get to 3 stacks of Rejuv, the next cast will consume all the stacks, restore energy, and set you back to no HOT. That is pretty rough at this level where I really don’t seem to have any kind of energy problems – I need the healing to keep going.

Essentially what’s happening is that I do pretty well in bursts – whenever I am healing – then I freak out when I get to max Rejuv, I cast again, and the HOT goes down and I realize I’m taking damage. About that time, one of the bad guys drops a stun on me and I get to sit there watching them hit me for a while – not fun.

I’ve gotta figure out a pattern for damage and healing that keeps me healthy so I can focus on avoiding the stuns, but I haven’t gotten there yet. So I dropped back down to Tier 3 Expeditions where I know how to survive and I’m assessing different staff and equipment combos to see how they work.