I'm going out of town Wednesday morning. As soon as I get back, I'll be preparing to move to Japan in January. So there isn't really any more time to play with Ailen.

Few goodbyes:

Imms:
Baer - Awesome as always. I had a REALLY rough time trying to make Acolyte fit with your religion. It took me a while to get my head around it, but I think I ended up decent. Enjoyed all of our interactions though, though I'll admit the first one was frustrating. I probably would have gone Corrlaan with that role, but he's dormant. And I thought it'd be fun trying to make that work with your religion.

Padwei - I was really starting to get frustrated, right around when I hit the 200 hour mark without being Acolyted. But after talking to you, it kind of made more sense. I only really looked at the Acolyte vs Jaguar thing from the religion side, instead of Acolyte. But looking back, I can see why I might have needed to wait longer than normal.

Both of you, I'm curious how well you think I pulled it off, or if I just completely sucked.

Fort:
Dupmasione - Great Captain, and a better shield ded than I could ever be. We had an interesting dynamic as two very VERY different paladins. But I think we had a pretty solid respect for each other.

Mzouryan - What the #### happened to you, dude? You were my best buddy from like lvl 5 til a week or so ago, when you completely disappeared. Had a lot of fun hanging out with you, especially when I was still getting the hang of the Monk skills

Lornkanamas - Our hours didn't seem to mesh too well, but I enjoyed the few times we got to chat.

Drawing a blank on names.. but I hope I was able to show a few of you folks some things, and learn from the rest of you. Pretty good experience all around.

Enemies:
Tinsalaop - Dude, you're ####ing relentless. And what's worse, I can't do anything against you. Monks have lousy melee defense, and your pets just ate me up. Especially when that ####ing devil dispels my protections. Some fun fights though.

Derogker - When we were pre-hero and even shortly afterwards, I seemed to own you 90% of the time. Then somewhere along the line, you must have figured it out, cause I just got stomped repeatedly. Well done.

Uilian - Seriously, dude. Bash. Bash is your friend, especially when you're with a Shaman who's dispelling all their anti-bash. You two could have killed me easily, if you didn't concentrate on flurry or boneshatter. Keep trucking though, and learn what you can.

Seems like there's a LOT more people than normal that want to give a 1 on 1 fight these days. I love that, although lately I seemed to suck more than I would hope.



Now, some thoughts on Monks, since there still haven't been too many of them.

Avoid - I'm glad the whole flag vs affect thing got fixed early on in my chars life. But I still wish their melee defense would get bumped up a little bit. I mean, when I'm getting hit more often than not against a cabal outer, there's a problem. Maybe up the melee defense and tune down the skill/spell avoidance? That seemed more effective than I would have guessed.

Intensify - Bad ass skill against mobs. Against PCs though, you basically have to count on them lagging themselves, otherwise they flee as soon as they see a "lightning strike" (assuming it's enough damage to matter). Ultimately, you're better off spamming wrath and not lagging yourself for 3-4 rounds at a time.

Transcend - Beautiful. Only request would be to add it to the damage type table.

Ascend - Nep hinted that this was an extremely powerful skill. All I could ever figure out was using it as a poor mans retreat, and poor mans dash. It might stop mobs from tracking, but I'm not positive. Aside from that, why would a warrior pick Ascend over a legacy (as Nep suggested)?

Respond - Beautiful skill. But it was SO much better when people didn't expect it. After a while, everyone used cursed weapons when they fought me, so I didn't get much mileage out of it.

Anticipate - Mixed feelings. It's great that you can use it with a sword/shield. And it's nice against one trick ponies, etc. But it seemed like the counterstrike when unarmed never triggered. And anticipate itself wasn't THAT much more reliable than simply avoiding, when weaponless. Overall though, it adds a nice bit of tactics to the class.

For what ever reason I can't access the "Other woman"

I got delayed a day. But when I get back in town in mid-November I'll try to go through my logs. I logged every minute of Ailen, so let me know if you have any specific requests. They're only organized by date, so it'll take a bit of an effort searching through and getting them cleaned up.

awfgaerg

Liked our run ins alot, after our last conversation I gained a whole new level of respect for you. Its usually very hard to get an enemy in a good rp session but we finally achieved that and I am greatful.

Lot of stress being in the chasm right now, alot of people getting drudged through the mud hole for a whole lot of nothing, I blame this for some of my behavior IC right now and I am going to owe some people some apologies for that.

It is a game afterall but more so sometimes its like restoring an old car, you hate to put all the manhours in to something and pay attention to every detail just to see it totaled on what you expected was going to be a nice sunday ride.

I'll miss having one less wrath spamming pally summoning me out of the chasm ;-).

GLWYN

Just had a couple run ins with Ailen and I don't recall many battles between us, but I thought he seemed like a fine paladin (had no idea you went acolyte but I imagine that's an even tougher way to go). You did not seem afraid to go it solo and pretty tough in pk but not someone I had to run as soon as I saw you come into the same area. Though I probably should have in most cases.

Have a good trip.

>Ascend - Nep hinted that this was an extremely powerful skill.
>All I could ever figure out was using it as a poor mans
>retreat, and poor mans dash. It might stop mobs from tracking,
>but I'm not positive. Aside from that, why would a warrior
>pick Ascend over a legacy (as Nep suggested)?

Well, note that I didn't say that all warriors would pick it over a legacy; however, I've seen a lot of warriors that essentially picked Enigma solely to quaff return in combat, and having ascend (for that purpose alone) instead of that would be kind of an interesting trade-off -- worse in some situations, better in others. Obviously, as a paladin you don't really need it in situations where word is an option, but when I look at my paladin logs, I can see deaths I could have avoided with that use of ascend. Your mileage may vary there, but I wouldn't say it's a poor man's retreat -- it's better in some ways, and it's worse in some ways, so maybe it's more justl ike a different retreat.

Beyond that, yeah, it's kind of a poor man's dash; it's also a poor man's phase door. I want to say there's a few other interesting uses in there but I haven't looked at the code for ascend recently if ever and I don't want to tell you that something's possible when it may not be.

cheater

Liar!

deceiver

Always a class act. Now I feel pretty dumb sitting you down and babbling about Cormindon to you for like an hour since well...you lived it! But that's ok...playing my religion so often you have to be ready and willing to live through some repeats.

It IS hard to play a Baer Acolyte. It's meant to be that way, I wanted it to be a hard war religion and I didn't give it an easy Acolyte angle on purpose. But it is doable, and I think you generally made it work more or less. You would have been a better Maran tho!

Good luck when you come back (cause I know you will!) and have fun in Japan. I'm pretty jealous, you'll have to tell me how the sushi is! I assume awesome, but then again Americans americanize everything and deep fry it so it may be too authentic. At least, that's what happened to me when we went for Japanese at Japantown in San Fran. So...good luck!

But I was also paranoid that I was going to chime in with something from Llondo's perspective that I shouldn't know about. I was using backspace heavily in that conversation.

I know I wasn't perfect with the Baer Acolyte thing, but I think I did a better job than most would have. But that will probably be my only attempt at it.

It was a fun experience though, as it usually is. No regrets.

One quick thing I'll mention though, Fortitude seems to do SO little for a Monk paladin. I'd give a serious second thought when you want to hand that out again. Divine blessing, I didn't bother practicing. Essence of fortitude was cool, but melee offense wasn't ever an issue for me regardless. Ultimately, what makes that virtue nice to have is veterans insight. But veterans insight doesn't work with avoid, so a Monk will get pretty limited use out of it.

I'll still be in touch when I'm in Japan, so I'll give ya'll the details as I figure it out. Still a couple more months away though.

You're right, and I haven't played a Monk or Crusader or whatever the neo paladins are. I waffled heavily between Fort and Charity for your second one and now think I should have gone charity but I kind of felt like it would have been pushing you too far towards Aco and not enough towards Baerish if I'd done that. Given the chance again I might do it differently...of course it's not like you'll ever play another Baer paladin again right? *wry*

I'll be perfectly honest and say while I didn't watch you a ton like
some other people did, I never saw anything that made you stand
out as a Scribe/Aco rather than as just another Squire. Even when I
actively tried to watch you, looking for reasons to promote you, I sorta
just had this hollow/bland feeling about the character in general. I
relied a lot on what other members of the Fort/other IMMs had to
say, which was generally good, but even when I did promote you, I
still felt iffy about it. Probably not the most glowing report you've
ever heard, but there you go.

I actually generally agree. Judging by this thread, I think some people liked Ailen a lot more than I did.

I DO think I had a few shining Acolyte-y moments in there, but they were few and far between. Especially over the last few weeks, when so much of my log ins where me and maybe one or two people in my PK. I felt bad knowing that certain Imms would probably try to watch me, and I'd be killing a Dragon to gather coins to spread around or something equally boring just because.. I didn't have much to do.

I did try to bring another perspective to the Squires/Marans though, and when the opportunities came up, I think I made the most of them. A big goal of Ailen's, that I tried to push forward, was bringing people like Outlanders, Nexus, Tribs, Heralds, etc into the "Light" so to speak, since IC they all wanted what was best for Thera. I think I made some progress with a few people (Jhunok and Bezzilan come to mind). But those opportunities were relatively rare.
I had some role entries written up, but I always just forgot to add them. But that pretty much sums up what they were about.

I was definately not a huggy Acolyte though. I was a bit of a preacher, a bit of a teacher, and a lot of a warrior all mixed together.

I always thought Llondolis was a little more Acolyte than Maran in a lot of ways, but maybe with Ailen I had the opposite problem. I know I was probably more aggressive than a lot of Acolytes (probably one of the few with a positive PK ratio), but that stemmed from being a Priest of Baerinika. In hindsight, I probably could have reworked the role slightly, and made a pretty solid Maran. But I've done the Maran thing so many times, I wanted a change.

You came in near the tail end of Balten's time, and I really thought you'd be one of the ones to replace me and Lorn when we went. You obviously knew what you were doing and were a good, solid presence.

Well done. It was a pleasure.

Good luck in Japan! I was there for a could weeks a few months ago and loved it.

-Grudan

Our times crossed a bit. And from what I saw you were a great person to speak and travel.

I was really glad to saw you Acolyted, and was sad when saw this thread.

Good luck in the Japan, and don't eat too many sushi :)

You were a solid character and was thinking perhaps, with time, you would get a leadership position so I could retire! Anyway, Japan! Woo! I love it there! Which part are you going to? I spent most of the time in the Kansai region and Mie prefecture (Yokkaichi City, near Nagoya). Osaka has Tokyo beat, in my opinion. So much more life!

Hehe.. I didn't expect a leader spot, considering the whole Baer Priest/Acolyte dynamic. Don't think Padwei really liked that.

But.. Acolytes are pretty slim nowadays, so who knows. It's fun to play things from a different perspective. I tend to go the Maran route with my Fort chars.

I'll be living in Okinawa. Far from mainland Japan, but I'm still looking forward to it. Lots of travelling too, Thailand, Korea, Philippines, etc.

Kinda hard to kill a paladin when he avoids all your ambushes. Le sigh.

We had some great conversations. Lots-o-fun. Played your side well, in my humble opinion. More to say when I'm gone!

Enjoy Japan, it's a waaaaay fun place to be, trust me.

Haha. We had an interesting relationship.

How many times did I call off our friendship? Too many to count. But at the end of the day, I was too much of a softy to stay mad. It was a fun dynamic.

I understood your frustration. I know that the new paladin types are supposed to add more dimension to the class, but they just seem a little bit weak sauce in comparison to the two original versions. You played the monk awesome and I really enjoyed our fights.

I do enjoy the one on one fights and greatly appreciate you providing some good ones. You are always a class act Java and I as a player appreciate it.

GLWN