Oops. I won V Rising, What Comes Next? Covid?

A couple weeks ago, the server settings on the Team Spode V Rising server somehow got set to easy mode and I didn't know it.  All I knew is that suddenly I felt like an uncontrollable superhero in game. My scythe was mowing down mobs like a butter knife going through soft butter. In my mind I was thinking, what did I just upgrade in my kit, this is amazing!

So, because I was feeling so amazing, I was like, man, I bet I could try taking on one of those final three bosses. 2 hours later I had beaten the game.

Man, I bet that's tough when the server isn't on easy mode

Then I started thinking . . . hmmm . . . that seemed too easy, and then I looked at the server settings. Yeah, I was at 10x damage and .1x damage received. I alerted Tipa and she hit the reset the settings button, but I already had the pylons sitting safely in my castle.

They give awesome buffs!

Whoops.

Team Spode has still been playing on Sundays, but my motivation to log in and play outside of that has been minimal. I've got my full Bloodmoon set, sanguine reaper, and blood key, so I'm kind of done. I could find a random server to join and give it another go, but I'm not feeling that passionate about playing it again just yet.

. . . . and then I got COVID. For the past three weeks my family had been hosting visitors and treating ourselves to fun things to do around the greater Austin area. I think we narrowed it down to when we went to the Snake Farm Zoo and a lady there was sneezing and coughing a bunch, and we had dropped our guard by not wearing our masks. Yeah, that was probably when it happened. And if not then, we certainly spread it around to each other in the Escape room.

That Star Trek Discovery Escape Room was really tough!

The past week has really been about recovering and just sitting around watching TV. The Iron Chef Iron Legend series was great! Allez Cuisine! Needless to say, after all that, I'm feeling hungry . . . for a game to play! To those ends, I have a HUGE backlog of VR games that I want to play, but being sick and playing VR don't go together. No one wants to strap on a VR headset in that state.

I also noticed my buddy Lessah Ismorah was playing a lot of Planet Crafter on her Youtube channel and she talked me in to buying it. It was only 20 bucks. That's also when I saw, my old wish list, Legend of Keepers was on sale for 8 bucks. A checkout screen later, I had both.

Bringing back life to a dead planet . . . why am I here again?

Time to kill some adventurers!

Dear readers of The Friendly Necromancer. I'm on the mend, and I have a lot of games to write about here in the future. Expect more posts in the future.

Happy Dueling!

Hitting End Game in V Rising

The past few days have been extremely productive for me in V Rising. On Sunday, Team Spode played together and destroyed a few lower level bosses for Spodepire, which of course is Lord Spode's vampiric name on V Rising.  . . . and then everything after that during the week was a solo hunt for me . . . because I'm addicted . . . seriously.

On Monday I took out the Duke of Balaton, Foulrot the Soultaker, Wilfred the Werewolf Chief, and Azariel the Sunbringer. This allowed me to finally construct the Eye of Twilight. Also, with my new gold bar recipe I had from Azariel, I was able to upgrade my castle to its final full size. BAM!

I spy with my little little eye, something twilight 

On Tuesday I did another round of boss hunting and rounded out the bosses that I had skipped: Mairwyn the Elementalist and Terrorclaw the Ogre. They were difficult hunts, but nothing I couldn't overcome with time, patience, a healing potion, and a bit of skill swapping.  

Thanks for the Golden Jewellery, Mairwyn

On Wednesday, I brought down Morian the Stormwing Matriarch, Matka the Curse Weaver, and Nightmarshal Styx the Sunderer.  With that, I now had my bat form, and I basically rule the night skies. HISS! FLAP FLAP FLAP! (Just don't go trying to fly in the daytime or it's insta-barbecued bat after 5 seconds.)

Stingite and his Batform!

The next three bosses, nay THE FINAL THREE BOSSES, are special! Upon inspecting the Eye of Twilight that I had constructed on Monday, it revealed the location of the final three.  What's special about these bosses is that if you defeat them, you can obtain their soul shard. 

There is a server setting that can make these soul shards unique. Tipa currently has that turned on. (Maybe we should turn that off?) Basically, it's a setting to encourage pvp between vampires as they hunt for soul shards from other vampires. At least I think that's how it works? Probably no need to inspire that kind of competition on our PvE server.

The final three await!

Of other note, these bosses seem like a big jump in difficulty. Granted, I still need to craft my end game amulet and two pieces of endgame outfit.  To get those, I'm either going to have to discover their recipe while farming end game Silverlight Hills and Cursed Forest mobs or burn tons of schematics looking for them.  Either way and ultimately, I'm going to need a lot of reagents to craft them when I get them. I need gold necklaces, yo--a lot of them!

So here I am at end game. I'm staring down the final three and needing just a few more pieces of the final gear set. My castle is built. My animal forms unlocked. LET'S GO!

Happy Dueling!

Moving on up in V Rising

The old castle in V Rising was becoming a bit problematic. Everything was crammed up against each other like a disorganized workspace area at a FedEx Kinkos, and quite honestly, I was running out of room.  Team Spode made the decision early on to try and keep our castles close to each other in a communal vampire coven, but the only problem with that is . . . I'm freaking addicted to this game.

The old castle is a bit crowded

I've been spending far FAR too much time in this game. I've soloed all the bosses up through Frostmaw (as of this post), and the rest of Team Spode has been involved in other things. (Gratz Tipa on reaching the final boss of Elden Ring.)

Kind of disappointing, Frostmaw bugged and ended up being easy to kill

Luckily you can have a couple of castles at once in V Rising, so I hiked up North, found a really great location to make a new castle and went to work. Team, the new castle is looking LEGIT! I've got rooms separated out with differing floor tiles and workstations that get bonuses from being located on those tiles. I've got a jail. I've got a throne room. I've got a secret garden in back with two gigantic copper resource nodes. I've got servant quarters . . . and look, I'm not even DONE DECORATING!  It's going to be epic.

The Forge is separated from the Library and Alchemist's Lab!

The best part of the new castle, however, is that it's located in the heart of Dunley with easy access to a slew of bosses and resources.  It was pretty natural to move my bass of operations from South to North.

One of my latest conquests was killing Tristan the Vampire Slayer. Man that felt good.  Whenever you'd see Tristan in your lower levels you'd run like you were an expendable low rank hacker in the Matrix and Agent Smith was after you. As a bonus for killing him, I got three things. 1- His cool vampire hunter pilgrim hat. 2- A recipe that allows you to transmute your boxes and boxes full of blood essence into that delicious Greater Essence. 3- A cool skill that lets you easily see the types of blood and purity of blood of your enemies.

Ready for thanksgiving . . . and murder . . .

That last skill is pretty epic. Rolling your mouse over an enemy to see that information was cumbersome. Launching a skill to see blood type and quality is epic. Why?  Lemme see if I can explain that a bit.

A 15, a flock of 19s, and a 22 . . . 

So basically, there are several types of blood in the game right? Brute, Rogue, Warrior, Worker, Scholar, Beast . . . think those are the main ones. In addition, each living enemy you encounter has one of those blood types and a percentage of blood purity. When you drink an enemies blood, you switch to their blood type and percentage.

In a way you can think of it as your sub-class because each of these blood types give you different bonuses base on its purity.  If you want to go kill a bunch of enemies, switch to a battle type.  If you want to do a lot of spell damage, switch to Scholar.  If you want to spend a chunk of time crafting, switch to Worker.

Worker blood . . . Gotta love that increased resource yield!

Also, just to note, blood percentages don't stack. So let's say you're rocking a 54% Warrior blood and you drink the blood of a 9% warrior, you're going to drop down to a 9% warrior blood type. You don't want that because there's bonuses for getting higher quality blood.

This blood also naturally decays over time, and using vampire skills also drains it a bit. The big blood hog happens when you regen life through a vampire skill . . . that drains it big time. The ultimate drain of course is when you die. If you die, you lose your blood type completely and your blood type says "frailed." If you eat heart or a rat, your blood will fill, but it'll replace your blood type with frailed, so only use those in an emergency. (You should really only be using rats and hearts for other crafting related things anyway.)

Eventually you'll be able to craft jail cells and charm your enemies with a vampire skill. Those 100 percent blood enemies are EXTREMELY valuable and you'll want to put them in a jail cell because eventually you put them on tap . . . and then 100 percent blood will be available to you all the time . . . as long as you don't completely drain your jailed purebloods, which is actually surprisingly easy to do.  That's where fishing comes back in to play.  If you feed your prisoners good fish, they are less miserable and less likely to die from blood draining.

100 percent warrior blood . . . melikey!

YOU GUYS THIS GAME! It's so good. I don't know . . . I know a few of my friends have struggled with the controls, but I kind of took to it like a fish in water. Good times.

Happy Dueling!

Rising to Mid-Game in V Rising

V-rising continues to dominate my game time lately. Since I've posted last about it, I've caught the elusive Twilight Snapper . . . twice (more about that later), built a throne, captured some minions, mined for iron, made a forge, killed a handful of bosses, outfitted myself and my minions, and have died and been reborn in a bat-filled whirlwind of a bloodbath A LOT. Basically, yeah, I've been having a great time! It continues to be the best $20 purchase I've made in a long time.

When you finally reel in that Twilight Snapper . . . whew

First off, let's talk a bit about that Putrid Rat boss.  Holy crap I was not expecting that rat to be that tough the first time around.  For a level 20 boss, he sure felt like he was 8 levels higher than that. He attacked fast, summoned a horde, and had a really small tether.  Some fights I'd have to restart it just because I had accidentally backed up too far from his spawn point!

Since it spawns from your vermin nest as a crafted boss, what really helped win the fight was not only having my minions in my castle help me kill it, but outfitting them with good gear to have them fight with me and not just instantly die. Sapping its essence then gave me the power of becoming a rat so I can sneak around and past big groups of enemies.  It's super helpful when you're trying to get to a boss while it's still night time.

Living my best ratty life

Eventually I was able to start mining some Iron because I had Merciless grade weapons, but I had absolutely no way of smelting said iron.  That meant downing the Bandit King.  

The Bandit King is probably the hardest of the bosses found in the southern map, and it took me a bit before I figured out the perfect skills to take him down. Basically the Blood Shield and the Blood Counter skills coupled with the Chaos Magic sprint skill and several axe swipes to the face.  Done!

That same Blood Shield and Blood Counter strategy also worked great against the Bear Boss. In fact, my practice defeating the Bear Boss with this strategy is what lead to me taking down the Bandit King with the same strategy.  I was raging pretty hard on those two bosses until I figured that out.  Repair costs and frustration from running back to the bosses were not good for my blood pressure.

Learning to Grin and Bear it in Bear Form

Having downed the Bandit King, NOW I could smelt that iron and do all the good stuff that comes with that, which includes unlocking Steel weapons, and WOW . . . what an upgrade getting those steel weapons is.  Once you have those weapons you have access to an extra weapon power and a couple of new weapon types, including the Scythe, which is my new favorite weapon type by far.

Now I'm looking like a friendly necromancer

The scythe can be thrown out and spins in an area slicing and dicing everything for a second or two. It's great and also does extra damage to undead, which was a plus since this morning's target was Nicholas the Fallen, a very UNFRIENDLY necromancer that excelled at casting poison bolts and summoning a horde of undead.

It took a few attempts. He was really good at lagging my computer tbh

I'm starting to really feel powerful in the game now, and having fun dominating lower level enemies. After today's rampage, I'm ready to start to crack into what seems to be the mid-game? I may have to build a second base up North now though. It's starting to become cumbersome if I die in the North and have to repair down South first. Plus I'm running out of room in my castle and need to start building out "rooms" that have floors that match the room's purpose for crafting bonuses.  Things are getting kind of cramped.

It's essentially one big room full of everything at this point

Happy Dueling!

Team Spode goes Vampire in V Rising

So after spending a good chunk of last year playing Runes of Magic as a vampire, I thought . . . let's do it again! Of course now I'm not playing Runes of Magic, now I'm playing V Rising, and it's super fun.

Last week V Rising launched, and its numbers on Steam went absolutely bonkers. The trend is up, and V Rising had 150k concurrent users in the past 17 hours.  I was one of 'em.

All signs are pointing up!

In fact, all of Team Spode seems to be onboard. It's a great fit for the group IMHO. It's a Diablo-esque isometric view combined with many common features to Valhiem.  Those are two things (Diablo and Valheim) that Team Spode loves!

Tipa was quick to set up a private server for us to play on, and soon after we started chopping down trees, cracking open rocks, and sucking the blood out of wolves and man alike! 

Thanks for giving me your ice bat skill, Keely!

My greatest fear as a vampire doesn't come from silly humans . . . it is from running out of blood, carrying silver, and the searing judgements of heaven every time I set a foot into the sun.

IT BURNS!  FIND SOME SHADE!  

You can still survive out in the sun for a bit, but not for very long. Thankfully even a tiny pixel of shade can sometimes provide a nice escape.

Ultimately the name of the game is to simply follow along with the quest log in the top left hand corner of the screen.  Just follow that and you'll be a master vampire in no time.  Currently I'm stuck trying to build a throne so I can command my minions, socks and shoes, so they may terrorize the land.

Socks and Shoes . . . Pants, Underwear, and Boostier to follow!

But that's the catch, to build a throne, I need Iron Ingots. To get Iron Ingots, I need to have a weapon that can break iron nodes (which I have), and have unlocked the recipe for smelting iron. To unlock the recipe for smelting iron, you need to take down the Bandit King. To get to the Bandit King, you need to craft explosives to get inside his castle.  It's that kind of layering on of requirements that makes this kind of survival game fun and keeps you playing for hours.

I've earned my wolf form, which allows me to run faster, but now it's time to earn my rat form as well.  I'm thinking it most likely lets me sneak around unnoticed. Earning your rat form means you also need to fish for the elusive twilight snapper fish so you can spawn the rat boss you need to defeat. To my happy surprise, fishing this morning also produced a super cool straw hat!

What's that, a hat? Crazy funky junky hat?

It's too bad that straw hat doesn't actually provide any protection from the sun for me.  I'd be the happiest vampire in all the land.

So far I'm loving this game and having a great time playing it. Better yet, I get to take it on with friends.

Happy Dueling!