March is upon us and that means Pat O' Gold will be in the spiral soon enough. If luck is on your side, you can even snag some of her festive items from Lord Nightshade. He's always a popular target around the holidays! Speaking of luck, how has yours been lately? As a mercenary at Mercenaries101, I get to assist many wizards with various challenges. Some of those runs go wonderfully, while others are SUPER unlucky. Today I'm going to be describing what I consider my most unlucky merc run to date.
Dungeon: Upper Halls
Upper Halls, the second dungeon in the Darkmoor side area, is where my most unlucky run took place. Some things there just aren't in your control.
What Happened
First Battle: Akhtang WormCrawl
Stuns ... everywhere. Akhtang has 3 storm minions, and boy do they love their Storm Lord! Constant chain-stunning quickly set the mood for this run.
Minion bullies. One of the most dangerous weapons Akhtang's minions have is the power of the bolt. They used that to their advantage. One of my merc clients kept getting hit repeatedly with Insane Bolts and max damage Wild Bolts. As a result, they kept dying and I was on constant healing duty. If the damage had been dealt evenly among the team, things would have been different. However, enemies don't always like to play nice.
What feints? Akhtang will steal single blades, so this fight tends to rely heavily on traps (mostly stacking feints). Unfortunately, an Insane Bolt cast by one of Akhtang's minions actually ended up hitting Akhtang. The bolt used up all of our stacking feints the round before we were ready to hit.
We were able to recover after the feint debacle, but our terrible luck extended the battle significantly.
)
Second Battle: Spirit of Darkmoor
Combined power. Between the cheat "buffing penalties" and the boss/minion regular attacks, my team was once again coming close to death. Multiple unblocked criticals also contributed to the dire situation.
Sorry, what blades? I don't see it from her often, but on this run, the Spirit of Darkmoor decided to throw an Earthquake at us a few rounds before we were going to hit.
Even with the Earthquake mishap, this fight was still the smoothest encounter we would have all day.
Third Battle: Shane von Shane
A stormy day. Since our hammer was storm, it was only natural for the game to give us all storm minions. Shane von Shane resists myth, so we would have to double prism in order to boost on all of the enemies.
Stuns are (not) fun. Just like the first fight, the storm minions made sure to "stun" us with their presence.
Nice try. Near constant accuracy debuffs left behind by Sirens and Catalan caused many fizzled buffs.
Nice try again. By the time we were able to get any buffs on at all, a Leviathan or Sirens would rear its head - taking away most of our progress.
Oh, you wanted to prism? To prevent our hammer from wasting pips, I was put in charge of casting the Mass Storm Prism. One well-timed Dissipate from a storm minion delayed this crucial part of the plan.
)
Here comes the Beguile. Remember those accuracy debuffs? Fizzled wand hits (that usually stop Shane's Beguile cycle) caused us to be hit with multiple Beguiles. This not only made buffing a problem, but also keeping everyone alive!
A misclick. After our hammer accidentally chose the wrong card, all of our blades and traps were used in an incredibly underpowered AOE attack. You would think that at least SOME reduced health would be beneficial but ...
Shane kept healing himself. As a master of death, Shane utilized various health steal spells. He was quickly restoring almost all of the health he had lost.
Musical fleeing. All of the above combined led my entire team to play a game of "musical fleeing." Whenever someone would return after having fled, another person would follow their lead.
It certainly wasn't easy, but we powered through the dungeon. Even the best laid out plans can end in disaster! Despite all of the troubles bad luck can cause, deadly possibilities make the game more interesting. I only hope all of you have better luck! Start searching for those four-leaf clovers.
