Plane of Hate Dungeon Crawl -- Two Tales of Woe

I'm still playing Everquest Legends, which is strangely weird, but it also feels strangely like home? I love when MMOs feel that way, and right now my love language is all about "Frog Slayer Stingite Sleestak the Legend".

Surrounded by gift-giving efreeti and some new shiny claws in the Plane of Sky

I like Frog Slayer as a title, but what I really want for a title is Godslayer because that's freaking heavy metal. To do that, I'm just going to need a couple weeks of farming the end boss of the Plane of Hate and the Plane of Fear. I can do that. I'm already up to ~25 kills out of the 100 I need for the title.

I love my new bee illusion for my warder . . . very fitting for a dude named "Stingite"

Speaking of the Plane of Hate, I have a tale of woe in two parts. There's a brand new Dungeon Crawl mode, which seems to really just be a revamp of the solo non-respawning instance with a new perk.  The basic idea is you create a dungeon crawl and after clearing out all the bosses and the majority of the trash mobs, you'll get rewarded with a bunch of extra loot . . . basically a re-roll of everything you killed. The only places I really want to do that at this point is The Plane of Hate and The Plane of Sky. 

SO, tale of woe part one happened last Thursday night. I roll up a Tier 4 Plane of Hate Dungeon Crawl and have at it. I play for three hours and go past my bedtime by an hour and a half, and I'm working the next day. By the time I finished up, I had destroyed 85 percent of the enemies and only had (what I thought) were like 2 bosses left. I couldn't bring myself to stay on for another hour, so I logged off and went to sleep.

Tale of woe part two happened last night, because you know I was fired up to give the Plane of Hate another go! This time, I'm rocking it and making pretty good time, but it's still a slog solo. The rumor is that this really is a group activity (wow! I've never even grouped in this game!). After three hours in the Plane of Hate, my enemy count is 100 percent, and I've killed every boss except one. I'm looking around the map, and the only "boss" I can see up is the Evangelist of Hate, but he's not really a boss. He's more of a side quest stop for a necromancer quest called Words of Darkness.

The hardest part about the Evangelist of Hate is that he's teaching a class on evil stuff with a classroom full of angry students. A simple pull of these guys will cause you to end up with 13 tier'dal giving you the lesson of your life. So I begin the painstaking process of clearing out the wandering enemies outside the classroom, then using Calm on the students inside the classroom and pulling them out in chunks of 3 or 4.

Finally, after a couple deaths, I triumphantly killed the Evangelist of Hate . . . and . . . the boss counter still says "1 rare creature." GOSH DANG IT! 

Forever stuck at 1 remaining creature with a bag full of motes

I went to Discord to see if I could find out if it was a bug, and yup, it's a bug. One person said they found the Maestro waaaaay out of bounds on the map, but I couldn't see him anyway, so I accepted the already generous pile of loot from a regular D4 Plane of Hate clear, and took myself to the Plane of Sky.

There are a few bugs in this instance, but at least Plane of Sky completes!

It was pretty disappointing to run into a bug and not get a heavy helping of extra loot, but when you're sitting with an inventory full of motes, it's hard to be too upset for too long . . . especially when this is the epitome of a first world problem. Hope they fix the bug soon!

Happy Dueling!

Sailing Takes Me Away to . . . where are we going?

Dylan and I recently embarked on a tour of the seas, floating on a raft, surrounded by hungry sharks . . . which means . . . SHARK HATS!

Shark hats were a toothsome surprise

RAFT launched into the seas of survival games back in 2022. In 2022, my survival game repertoire was mostly Icarus, V Rising, and Planet Crafter. I remember seeing it come up in my recommended games but ignored it at the time. With the recent survival game sale on Steam, Raft was one of the games that Dylan (or should I say Barbra per the picture above) and I picked up to play together. 

The wikipedia article tells more about it's unusual path to launch, which included some influencer attention to their original project back in 2016. Kind of cool! Good on 'em for sticking to it and believing in a project.

This game has a pretty challenging starting point. I think we died several times just from starvation and not knowing exactly what it was we were doing. You start out on a small 3x3 platform, just collecting wood and plastic out of the ocean with a hook. Meanwhile, your water and food meters just keep going down. The best you could hope for was a random island full of watermelon. Eventually, you make a water distiller to cook seawater into fresh water. Next is a fishing pole. Next is a grill. Once you get the basics, you'll be fine, but that break-in felt tough! 

Watermelons ahead!

For a while, when we were about to die, we'd throw all our stuff out to each other in desperation. Die and come back, then the other person would do the same. Basically, when you die, you lose most of your stuff, which is a huge setback. So the next thing you need is storage, and BAM . . . they've got you on the crafting treadmill.

Our first two-tier raft design

You'll occasionally find a good crate of goods that helps you unlock a new thing you can craft, but the research table is clutch to discovering new recipes. You slot raw materials into your research table, sacrifice the item, and that action then unlocks new recipes. 

The main thing we got stuck on was not knowing that the main use of shark bait was to distract the shark while you went diving into the water for clay, sand, scrap, and whatever else is on the bottom of the ocean floor. We were just happily island-hopping and stuck wondering where we would find clay. Yes, Dylan turned to the ultimate source of information (a child of his who had played the game before), and he let us know you park your boat out about 50 meters from an island, throw down some shark bait, and then swim to the island completely unbothered by the shark. In fact you can stay down on the bottom around the island and dig up all the clay you need.

So far it's been a fun distraction . . . give us a bit and we'll have our ship looking amazing. For now it's more functional than fun, but eventually I imagine our vessel will look amazing. Until then, we'll continue badly singing Sailing by Christopher Cross while floating our way to (hopefully) Margaritaville on a couple planks and a prayer.

Happy Dueling! 

My Blaugust 2026 Post-Mortem

Blaugust is done! I made it through! I posted every day at least something, and while I had my mega threads (EverQuest Legends and Poetry Slammers) I think overall I had a good mix of real life, D&D, EQL, and me just making stuff (and meta-talking about making stuff). Pride, I suppose, can live with just having finished the challenge of posting every day.

That said, it is very easy to say to myself . . . yes, but what did it accomplish? To what ends? Honestly, I'm not sure. 

One thing is for sure, with a week left of posting I thought to myself, oh man, I better talk about my Poetry Slammers game while I have a little bit of a wider audience, but ultimately, I think it generated very minimal traction. It wasn't like people were peeling off their skin with excitement saying YES, I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE RIGHT NOW! On the other hand, I'm glad I have a little developer log I can point to. Hopefully it shows that it was more than just vibe-coding. I was finally designing a dream from five years ago that I couldn't possibly have done on my own without these tools.

And as for all my EverQuest Legends posts, I probably didn't post anything earth shattering, but perhaps someday someone will Google "How to cast an illusion on your pet" or "Beastlord / Cleric / Shadow Knight" and stumble upon my journey.  Hard to tell, but I don't think my build will ever be the flavor of the month.

As for real life posts and D&D stuff, I probably would have made those posts anyway. If I hadn't done Blaugust though, I think I would have had a bit of FOMO from not doing it. Probably what I should have done was just signed up and stuck to my normal 3 or 4 posts a month! But that push to get the 31 posts in 31 days goal is what it's all about! Glad I stuck with it, even through a bout with COVID.

Anyway, I don't know what I'm trying to get at here . . . I'm just riffing. The bottom line is that I ended up tracking about 234,000 hits to the site for the month, which is pretty average, if not below average, but I suppose I did garner more opportunities for future blog traffic. The big accomplishment for the blog that happened over Blaugust was hitting the +7,000,000 hits mark. That's kind of fun. (me when it takes almost 20 years to do what some random YouTube / TikTok site does in a day). Of course, and I mean this with all sincerity . . . it's never really been about the hits. That's just a fun number to look at.

Funny enough, after 31 posts, there are still things that would have been cool to talk about more:

- I started Vibe Coding a VR interface for EverQuest Legends. It's faked but works pretty well for being faked.

- I played my song Cosmic Radiation and Bad Luck to a group of people at the cancer institute, and it seemed to go over well. I'd love to talk more about that project and eventually get the music out there.

- I added a set of throwing knives to my axe throwing repertoire. I haven't fully figured out the best way to throw them yet.

- A sale on PVE Survival Games just hit the Steam Store, and so Dylan and I are probably going to go a bit crazy.

- Food, cats, TV Shows, Movies, etc.

So, there you have it. I made it. I'm not sure why I made it. I'll probably do more of it! Thanks for reading and as always . . .

Happy Dueling