Gather round and hunker down today we tackled the high level hunting areas. We handled it a little differently today than before because on the whole it seemed that people wanted to see if the one school archer was still able to survive with low buffs. So here is todays set-up for me.

Level 70 Bow Hunter (1/2 through 70)

Strength 120
End 140
Coord 230
Quick 210
Focus 150
Self 100

Health 180
Stam 240
Mana 180

Arcane 220
Bow 300
Melee D 310
Alchemy 250
Fletch 250
Healing 240
Magic D 180
Lockpick 250
Item Enchantment 200

Today I am going solo for a while before I hook up with Wumpus. We're going to tackle the dires today. It's going to be interesting.

My buffs today consist of:

Bow 5, Coord 4, Strength 4, End 4, Magic Res 4
Armor 5, Pierce 4, Cold 4

My Bow is +120% +8% and I am buffing it with 5's while I solo.

I head to Tethana. It's always been one of my favorite places to hunt.

I arrive and I am safe, I decide to run straight for the town and see how the plains outside the city are for me. Acidic Diamonds, Enforcers, Thrahser, Tiatus litter the landscape and I am panicking with no one here to debuff this is going to be rough. (Note: I still didn't imbued.)

I open the can of whoopass. It sputters. But not horribly. With deadly lightnings I take down a camp of tiatus. The open plans fight is not my hook-up though. And I get wrecked by boulders without the bludgeon pro. They are ringing me for 11-33 a pop. Armor is good nothing under 250 and average to all. Enforcers are tough, but I can kill them. Acidic Golems I am amazingly resisting about 1 in 20 spells. ;-) That 33 million into Magic D paid off.

After hunting down a coupld of new faces, som grievvers and other wonderful dires creatures. I am tallying my deaths 3. Tallying my costs about 2 stacks of arrows all tolled, and tallying my xp 500k

The next part of the test starts when Wumpus and I hop in. We are running the test a little different. We are grabbing one of each camp and focusing on it.

I upgrade the bow to Armor Rending here and he is level 70 as well his war and life buff to 353. We begin.

Lugian. It's close and when he gets walloped he needs to heal, he is vuln, war, war. Then it dies. I kill in about 10 arrows. XP is well worth the expenditure though. And the amount of time is about the same taking into account a resist or two on the Tiatus. Oh by the way the Tiatus is now 105.

Enforcer. Here he wins the race. But again it is close.
Thrasher. I win the race, and take much less damage in combat thanks to my melee D.

Golems. Oddly we are close on the Diamond, though in the end he wins speed wise.

Gold Golems. I win speed wise.

We are pretty even through here. Except I die 3 times. Not having the right buffs still hurts. But it's not that bad.

Wumpus is fully buffed with 6's, again I have the same stats from earlier.

We head to the swampy areas and meet up with a bundle of static tumeroks. We find that the revamped High Priest is tougher to kill but still has health for his old stats. This needs to be fixed. Likewise with the Moarsmen.

We also fight a Coral Golem Viceroy. The two of us take him down in about 5 minutes of fighting and though his loot is still on the light side we end up looking at a nice increase in XP. The fight was harried and crazy and we wished we had a melee to keep the hurt on him while we dealth with the caustics.

We end the day on a run of Coral Golems and a few more desolation moarsman. I hunted for half an hour alone before...and earned 500k.

Together we brought in 2.5 Million in an hour of landscape hunting.

Now if I had been hunting with the AR bow all along I see my total doubling to 1 million. All I can say is that it was fun and dangerous all at the same time.

I am out of the office tomorrow so Monday you will get a write-up on the Extreme/Obsidian Plains and Tuesday will be the start of the Melee Play days.

Also i hope to explain a little more in depth here later next week. Until then have fun all!