Strange Expeditions and Chicks

Daily Ramble 21: Strange Expeditions and Chicks in Albion

After yesterday’s options, I finally made my decision. I went with the update to my personal island – it just seemed to provide the most opportunity. With that decision behind me I headed to my 4th Tier 6 Expedition and it turned out to be a wild one.

Chicks

As soon as I upgraded my island, I went inside and built my next farm…this one was gonna be for livestock rather than vegetables. Since I hadn’t raised any animals yet, I had to start with chickens. Buying the chicks at the farmer merchant was easy enough and placing them was straight forward, but I didn’t realize that you need to feed your little chickadees. So as opposed to the simplicity of a vegetable farm, the animals need to be fed and nurtured. So, it’s a 3 step process rather than 2 steps – place, feed, nurture. It also takes chickens longer to mature than vegetables take to grow.

I’ll keep you updated on my farming prowess…it is a bit like Farmville though.

A Strange Expedition

So I made the decision to stick with my Tier 4.1 Great Fire Staff for my DPS expeditions. And once I built my chicken farm I headed to run an expedition so I could make some Silver. Little did I know I’d be essentially the tank on this run.

The group that assembled had a good healer with a Master’s Great Nature Staff and DPS with a War Bow and a second DPS with a Crossbow. Along with me, it seemed we had plenty of damage and healing, it was the ‘tank’ that I was concerned about. Somehow a character with a Master’s Great Arcane Staff got the tank role.

In the long run, this ended up working but it really tested our abilities. The main problem was that the ‘tank’ would boost my damage with his Empowering Beam and with no real tank, it turned into a damage race.  Since the staff had no way of generating threat other than enhancing damage and no way of pulling bad guys off the squishies, whoever it was used on took tons of aggro. If we did enough damage before I got killed, or one of the other DPS got killed, we were good, but there were a couple cases where it got really close to a wipe. I actually went down a couple times but eventually our team came through and I didn’t get killed. I suppose I had the most trouble because I had the flimsiest armor of the group and next was the healer who was usually targeted 2nd after whoever was getting boosted.  I’m gonna have to upgrade my armor I think.

Needless to say, it was an interesting expedition. One I’m glad I participated in but also one that tested my abilities.