JimdaFish's Okey-Dokey PPE Thread

XBookwyrmX · 2024-02-18 07:10:47 UTC

Granted, I haven’t played in a couple years, but I haven’t seen a massacre like that in ages lol

JimdaFish · 2024-02-21 05:15:51 UTC

Love was in the air, but Grugo was single. So he got a yoyo to pass the time and keep his spirits up:

He kept mowing lawns around the Nexus and dealing with the various sentient plants that kept popping up. While the death-dealing flowers would have proven quite helpful to fend off a zombie invasion, they really were just pests in this circumstance. He was getting rather tired of this, though, and found himself only able to kill Belladonna’s minions… half-heartedly!

Badum-tiss

But Grugo really wanted to learn how to train dragons. How else could he actually do cool things in life if he wasn’t riding a giant, multi-ton beast into battle? After slaying Limoz, he finally saw that orange bag he had been looking for. He eagerly dove in to claim his prized helm:

Well, that was a little disappointing.

Unable to become a dragon rider, he settled for becoming a gladiator instead. Knowing that Oryx the Mad God was himself a renowned gladiator, Grugo sought his advice. After a brief sparring lesson and way more dancing than he had anticipated, Oryx gave him some gladiator armor to help him on his path to stardom:

Then Grugo used his newfound gladiatorial skills to slay the mighty Lich, what with him being the master of life and death and all that. He got a weird sphere:

This might be somewhat relevant later.

Then Grugo’s skills were really put to the test by the Beer Sentry:

Turns out that warriors kinda struggle in these spots.

Then he took another crack at The Forgotten King, which went about as well as the previous attempt:

Grugo, it seems, is dearly lacking in the patience department. Maybe someday he’ll put his dodging shoes on for real and get through it. Until then, he’ll just have to keep trying.

Another O3 saw him get another armor. It was a repeat, but it’s a pretty cool repeat, so Grugo was still Glad, reGuardless:

And yes, that Mysterious Portal opening resulted in a very nice O3 chain, which Grugo also managed to get through despite not being good at Celestial phase yet. Lowered damage is nice for practicing!

I’m doing my best to keep this thread from just becoming the OSanc/Shatters montage that most PPE content these days seems to devolve into, but it is rather difficult since those are the only two exaltation dungeons I still need. I’ll keep sprinkling in the other stuff, because I also don’t want to burn out just running those two dungeons to the point of frustration.

Also, following those Glad Guards, our OSanc white:blueprint ratio has risen to a much more appreciable 4:6!

Herwin · 2024-02-24 02:18:05 UTC

i swear u got a breastplate and ub hp before, def worth carrying over 2 hp pots for shatters

JimdaFish · 2024-02-24 16:21:04 UTC

That sounds like a fantastic suggestion! I will need to get another ring though, since I dropped the exa hp a while back.

Part of the issue is that every time I gear up to enter a Shatters, my assumption is that I will be nexusing before I even get to Patience (and I’m usually right ). But as I get more practice with Shatters, I’ll definitely have to bring better hp gear.

On another note, I scrolled up and realized that a number of the images I had posted via Discord links were no longer visible. I’m going back and replacing those with just standard image uploads.

JimdaFish · 2024-02-25 03:50:15 UTC

Grugo is happy being a warrior, but the game was giving him some subtle hints that he should switch career paths. It wanted him to take up the harp:

Then it gave him whatever this is:

I think it’s a drum, not quite sure though.

But Grugo was sure that bard was not the class for him. As a matter of fact, being a strong Colo Sword enjoyer, he found that he quite disliked bards! In an effort to get away from them, he ran a Shatters:

Now he has a backup Cuirass, just in case this one gets worn out. He’ll have to put it next to his backup Jack’o’naut helm, backup Barnacle Basher and backup Glad Guard.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you this Ice Cave content:

Fantastic.

Now, Grugo was having a wonderful time trying to learn Oryx’s Celestial phase. And by “fantastic”, we mean “not fantastic whatsoever”. However, he was steadily making progress, and tried running an O3 with his good pal @SkySlurp.

SkySlurp, being a pro gamer, made it through just fine. Grugo, being a chump, did not and had to nexus. He also got a Ballistic Star blueprint that run, though he forgot to screenshot it.

Speaking of blueprints…

The collection grows!

Then Grugo was treated to yet more epic O3 red bag loot:

Someday that will be a ubhp.

Then he got a blueprint for a crown!

But not a very exciting crown, as crowns go. He’ll keep trying!

Now, in the process of doing all those various quests and killing all those monsters, Grugo had made a bit of progress in the battle pass. So much so that he got a whopping two ST chests that he could open:

…aaaaaaaaaand…

A top hat and a battleaxe! Dalvar might be dead (whoever he was), but now Grugo had a weapon which, according to the Ent Ancients scattered throughout the Realm, was completely unable to fell the Ent Ancients scattered throughout the Realm. It’s probably useful for non-Ent entities, though.

Will Grugo finally learn Celestial phase? Is the Valentine’s event still going on in the background of this story because JimdaFish is behind on posting? Will Grugo soon get his hands on a definitely very balanced item? We’ll just have to wait and see!

OSanc white:blueprint ratio is now 4:9.

JimdaFish · 2024-02-27 19:23:50 UTC

The Nexus’ monthly Crucible Challenge didn’t seem like a lot of fun this time around. Sick and Bleeding aren’t fun status effects, and Grugo wasn’t particularly interested in experiencing them more than he already was on a regular basis. But there were a couple quests that seemed doable with them, so he briefly took on the challenge to complete them and get items:

Then he promptly switched Crucible mode back off and vowed not to return for the rest of the month.

Instead, he mowed the lawn and got a weird egg thing:

It couldn’t permanently make a pet, but he could keep making all the little hearts he wanted with it. At first he was hesitant to bring such an item with him on his perilous journeys, but then Shuriken offered to carry it for him in his saddlebag. This worked out just fine!

Then Grugo geared up to fight the Avatar of the Forgotten Kogbold Expedition:

Yet more trips into Oryx’s Sanctuary yielded yet more red bags, which unfortunately did not have a sword for him:

You may also notice that our beloved Grugo turned into a djinja in the last screenshot. He considered talking to his physician about this malady, but it only proved temporary.

What isn’t temporary is death, and that is exactly what awaited a number of Grugo’s compatriots.

As they stormed Gemsbok’s treasure hoards (the Nexus Crew’s charity bake sale hadn’t quite panned out as they had hoped and they needed some cash), Gemsbok twirled his staff at them and killed a bunch of the heroes.

Please note that that was not the full list of deaths; some got pushed off the screen. I recall at least one unleveled grave (obviously not pictured), and there were multiple deaths before that one.

Well, that was traumatic. Grugo’s therapist would be getting a lot of business from him in the near future. But first our vertically challenged friend tried once more to get an Enhancement Core from the Kogbolds. He was unsuccessful, but did get something neat:

An ST token chest! Able to pick any token he wanted, I chose to get one that might turn him into a minotaur. Now, do you remember that Phylactery drop from before? Neither do I. But it’s up there, and between that item, this token and another random ST that Grugo got, he was able to forge a Very Balanced Item!

This is allowed within my forge rules, since the item can only be obtained in this way.

For anyone who hasn’t been keeping up with Realm updates, DECA decided to add the Fury Flail into the game. So long as you can stand on top of (or like one tile away from) an enemy, this item has the highest dps of any melee item in the game. You can get it via the ST forge, or by handing DECA a nice pile of your hard-earned cash, because that it how this game is.

But that’s still not enough destructive power. Grugo wanted more. So when he got a really good ring for breaking stuff, he sure was pleased!

Now he has every white bag from the dungeon except for the Enhancement Core.

Quick update on the Hillbilly warrior set:

He’s now 3/4 of the way there!

JimdaFish · 2024-03-01 18:39:18 UTC

For some reason, some people actually liked the plants going berserk and taking over everything. The Gardener was one of these individuals, and Grugo was sent to stop this man before the chaos plants took over everything. It seems he was successful, and got a free bird out of the deal:

Shuriken wanted to eat the bird, but Grugo wasn’t having any of that and kept the avian safely away from his tiger.

Figuring it had been a while since he had gone to church, our hero went to visit Archbishop Leucoryx and see what he was like. But alas, Leucoryx seemed a little crazy and was more about killing people than anything else. So Grugo stole his stuff and left in a huff:

(He also got a Dammah and a Leucoryx blueprint around this time, but that’s not interesting enough to post.)

But Grugo was enjoying the Mardi Gras celebrations, and went to a puppet show. The puppets were nice enough to give him a costume:

Sadly, the costume did not fit:

Another attempt at tasteful discussion about local issues turned into bloodshed in Dammah’s office. Grugo really figured that some building inspectors should take a look at the knife throwing portals that just seemed to pop up all over the place now and then, but satisfied himself with some mediocre loot instead:

Now, you might be wondering why I bothered posting this image. Well, if you carefully compare this screenshot to the previous ones, you might notice something interesting.

You see, Grugo was feeling tired. Very, very tired. The kind of tired that usually tells you, “Hey, maybe I should log off and stop Realming now!” But alas, Grugo kept playing. His reaction times were slow, and his awareness was steadily fading. At one point, he was fighting a Lost Sentry and was so out of it that he got armor broken and then tanked the entire blue/green shotgun it fires, only surviving death because of his Heavy Protective Matrix. For some reason, this wasn’t enough of a deterrent, and he kept playing.

Heading into Oryx’s Castle, Grugo yawned his way through the hallways to the Stone Guardians, and dispatched them quite easily. He quickly reached down and snagged a defense potion from the ground, placing it in his inventory in exchange for what he thought was just an extra hp pot. He then carried on, fighting Oryx 1 and Oryx 2 before proceeding into Oryx’s Sanctuary.

It was at the end of his fight with Dammah that Grugo finally realized his mistake; that hadn’t been an hp pot he had dropped; that was his Fury Flail. It was long gone at this point, and there was no going back to grab it. He sighed, shrugged his tired shoulders, and somehow made it through the Oryx 3 fight unscathed before going to bed.

With that sob story out of the way, I do believe it’s been a while since our last edition of the

QUEST FOR DBLADE

That’s not a dblade.

Now, Grugo was steadily getting better and better at Oryx 3, and at Celestial phase in particular. He could now reliably make it all the way through the phase, oftentimes only by taking one or two hits (a noticeable improvement from before). As such, his odds of completing a given O3 run had risen well above the previous 25% chance to more like 90%, and he was starting to rake in the exalts at a much faster rate. It was around this time that he finally got his next tiered item upgrade:

Happy that he was finally winning at Realm again, he checked the stats on the armor. They were pretty good, though the armor turned out to be unslotted. He compared this to his T14 armor with a relative defense boost, and found that the T14 armor actually gave him +4 def compared to the T15. So much for upgrades!

Hopefully the next tiered item upgrade is a better one:

Yep! Unslotted, but still beats the old T5 hp ring.

OSanc white:blueprint ratio is now 5:12!

Mynamerr · 2024-03-01 19:23:58 UTC

The game should really have an option to “lock” items to your inventory so that you can’t drop them

JimdaFish · 2024-03-07 16:13:26 UTC

Happy with his progress towards finally learning O3, Grugo was running quite a few of them. But this required him to close a lot of realms, which involved running all over the map and hunting down obscure quest enemies located approximately 352 light-years apart (needless to say, he looks forward to the upcoming rework).

Well, sooner or later he was bound to get some white bags from these guys, and he received only the best of the best:

It kinda seemed like the game was trying to get him to switch classes again, but he decided he would rather keep warrioring on and maybe try ninja another day.

Thankfully, Oryx proved himself to be far more supportive than his event bosses, and gave Grugo something actually useful:

It’s no Divinity, but we’ll take it! Now Grugo has a ring swapout for when he’s fighting low-damage enemies and wants to still do some damage without being able to proc his Cranium. Also, the Colo/Jack/GGuard/Horn setup is pretty cool-looking, so that’s an extra bonus.

Then Grugo found more pet food for Shuriken:

Sadly, Shuriken isn’t going to be able to eat much until Grugo dies and drops his boatload of fame. It’s kinda heartbreaking.

Ratio is now 6:12, which is better than last time.

JimdaFish · 2024-03-14 15:21:25 UTC

“YOUR NEXUS SHALL BURN FOR THIS INSOLENCE!” Dammah shouted, killing someone named Hindrances and disappearing into smoke. Grugo slowly approached the white bag on the ground and peeked inside:

It was Dammah’s portal creator! Sadly, despite his best efforts, our hero was unable to summon any knife walls with it and ended up donating it to a local thrift store.

A new season had started, and Grugo was in the mood for a little chaos. So were the Kogbolds, it seemed, and Grugo saw an interesting face when he went to fight them.

It seemed that Thomas the Tank Engine had fallen to the dark side, which was quite troubling indeed. But Grugo killed him anyways because he really is a heartless little monster.

Now, what is peak RotMG content? Is it conquering the hardest content out there, proving your worth by besting the worst that the foes of the Nexus can throw at you? Of course not! It’s spending countless hours running around the same pink dungeon, killing the same enemies over and over again while hoping that this roll of the dice will finally give you the dopamine rush that only a white bag item can give. Thankfully, this time it only took one boss kill for Grugo to get his white bag:

Now he finally had the most candy-coated of all the armors!

Then he got the most ringed of candies, but this was of significantly less interest. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know why I bothered screenshotting this.

Then our hero entered a Haunted Cemetery, and got this:

While not impressive whatsoever, this did bring back flashbacks to when it took him 20k base fame to finally get rid of his T5 helm, and caused him to shudder slightly.

A quick jaunt through a sprite world saw him collect a neat little item…

Which later turned into a smart financial investment!

Someday I will have the fame to feed these crystals to Shuriken, and we’ll be moving up the pet levels once again. Unfortunately, that will require Grugo to die, which might be unpleasant.

Not too much excitement right now since I’ve been backing off of the O3s a little bit to account for the new season and the other quests associated with it, but we’ll be back to lategame stuff again soon. I also tried a couple Moonlight Villages and am still very bad at them, but we’re making (slow) progress on learning them. I’ll get a completion at some point.

JimdaFish · 2024-03-18 15:27:15 UTC

Sometimes this game has a sense of humor, and it seemed to be mocking JimdaFish the other day. Shortly after he lost a samurai in one of his dumbest deaths in a while, Grugo got a neat little treat from O3:

That T7 waki made for a bit of a chuckle, no doubt. The Horn blueprint, though, was interesting because Jim hadn’t had one of those before so it was cool to unlock, even if he’ll probably never make use of it (ratio is now 7:13) (Jim really like talking about himself in the third person, and it’s a little weird) (he should probably stop).

But it was time to give those Kogbolds another ~~beating~~ friendly talking-to, and Grugo marched into their factory to see if he could at last, finally, get this hands on the elusive Enhancement Core that had eluded him for so long. He had also heard that there was some leprechaun dude hanging around, and Grugo could really use some gold right now. Well, he did get something of use:

It was time for a comeback! Grugo still had another Phylactery sitting around (along with a ton of other STs), so he was able to make up for previous… erm… occurrences, and got another Fury Flail!

Freshly nerfed by DECA, this item was still a powerhouse and still a welcome (if highly imbalanced) addition to his arsenal.

Meanwhile, Oryx was having a little trouble talking properly:

stringlist.Jim_da_Fish.confusion.3

But then at long last, another chapter in Grugo’s journey to exaltation closed. As Oryx the Mad God breathed his last (again), our hero took quick note of his exaltation progress:

As he exited the dungeon (getting a blue bag, of course), he finished his life exaltations and got the account to 100 total exalts as well!

The journey had been tough; going into this, JimdaFish had had no prior O3 completes, and wasn’t particularly interested in the usual method of learning (by throwing 0/8 warriors into the meat grinder). Thanks to the power of the alien armor and a determination to just keep on trying (it took 55 completes, with 128 total attempts), Grugo had accomplished something great, and beaten the Mad God himself into submission.

Now, Grugo would someday have to go back and keep killing O3 again. After all, he was still missing a T14 sword, a T7 helm and Divinity. But those, he decided, could wait for another day.

Okay, now I really need to do some Shatters.

JimdaFish · 2024-03-21 19:01:24 UTC

Grugo was growing up, and needed some new clothes. So he helped a dwarf gather a bunch of crystals so he could fight the mushroom people, and got a box:

Then he used this and an Anointed Robe he got a little bit ago from the Stone Guardians to fashion himself some excellent overalls:

And with that, he finally became the Killbilly:

He then proceeded to return these items to his vault and carry on as before.

And by “as before” I of course mean that he headed back into the Steamworks for another crack at that stupid Enhancement Core. He had fought the overgrown robot so many times, and he was getting a little ticked off at this point.

Now, because he had spent a bunch of time lately fighting the evil leprechauns of the realm, he had some extra golden clovers on hand to boost his odds. He popped one of those, and headed into the factory.

The going wasn’t easy. The High-Visibility Kogbolds were apparently hard for people to see, and Grugo watched one of his friends explode in front of him. Then the weird core/brain thing grew legs and eventually turned into a dragon, and our hero found himself diving through energy beams and dodging fire to survive.

But survive he did, and made it to the end. And when the boss self-destructed and dropped the loot, Grugo walked forward…

… and picked up his well-deserved Enhancement Core! And on his 100th Kogbold, no less! Then he took his newfound prize back to The Blacksmith… and realized that he had to wait a little bit before he’d have enough forge fire to actually make the item.

In the meantime, he killed some other stuff, and got a different sword:

He also adopted a bunny wearing a hat:

And then the time finally came (two days after getting the Core, because after the first day he was still 14 forge fire short). He waltzed over to his vault and grabbed the Core, a random blueprint, and the very same Ancient Stone Sword he had wielded much earlier in his career. It had been gathering dust for over a year now, but it was time for it to again see the light of day.

Grugo brought his items to The Blacksmith, who set to work turning the A.S.S. into an A.S.S.

When the work was done, he beheld this new masterpiece of an item:

Now, perhaps this sword isn’t the best one in the game. It doesn’t have the highest dps or the longest range, but it does have specific uses where it is quite good, and I like this. I was a little saddened to see items like the Ancient Stone Sword and the Doom Bow slowly fade from relevance as other, more powerful items took the spotlight. After all, these were perfect examples of what UTs should be; not too powerful, but usable and quite potent under the right conditions. I’m very happy that DECA brought back a way to make some of my old favorites relevant again, even as the steady powercreep in this game continues.

Herwin · 2024-03-24 12:48:07 UTC

Sabre is well know to be top tier and very consistent, sadly t14 with range is so much easier to get an is very similar so most people just make the bow

JimdaFish · 2024-04-04 17:09:21 UTC

Bunny time!

Well, that was vaguely traumatizing. Following that lagomorph incident, Grugo was understandably a little shaken, and decided to drown his sorrows in some assorted liquids. Sadly, the owner of that establishment also wanted him dead, and Grugo had to beat him up. Our hero did manage to get something, though:

Well, that’s an item he could equip, so we gotta post it. It’s now sitting in Grugo’s vault, taking up space.

You know what else is an equippable item for warriors? A sword! Which means it’s time for another

QUEST FOR DBLADE

That’s not a dblade.

Worm time!

Good lord. At this rate, I really do wonder how much longer Grugo is going to live, because he’s really pushing it sometimes.

JimdaFish · 2024-04-13 03:42:46 UTC

With his last experience with rabbits being a little troubling, Grugo was hesitant to pick up his new find: a stick that summoned more of them.

He gave it to a friend, who appreciated it much more than he did.

Speaking of event bosses that briefly terrorize the realm, Grugo ran into the Keyper guy. The Keyper wasn’t interested in giving Grugo anything actually good, but our hero saved up enough key parts to make a whole key for himself!

He’ll either feed this to his pets, or forge it into something with more fp to feed to his pets.

Now, Grugo had been running a handful of Davys’ lately, in the hopes that he could finally get that ST sword for the set he was slowly collecting. So naturally, when he saw the orange bag after killing Davy again, he was quite excited:

Better luck next time, we hope.

Well, at least he could control some things. He got a basket thing from the campaign thing, and made a weird flail constructed of chocolate. This sounded tasty, even if he didn’t plan to use it.

According to the post timer it’s been more than a week since our last

QUEST FOR DBLADE

You already knew it wasn’t a dblade.

To deal with his sadness, Grugo ate some grapes:

Then some pizza:

Then he finally had enough tickets from that Appetizer guy to get his pets something nice:

Now he just needs account fame. If only he could get some account fame…

Grugo will die at some point. When? I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year. But all I know is that I’ve got a growing pile of items to feed, and not enough fame to feed it. On the other hand, I’m having fun running with Grugo and don’t want to ruin that. I suspect that at some point the decision will be made for me, but for now we shall continue the ppe grind.

JimdaFish · 2024-04-26 13:44:31 UTC

Shuriken wanted some French Toast, and to get that Grugo needed to kill some crystal worms. So he did, and got a chest:

Then he killed some more, and was rewarded with a rather interesting sight:

At last, it was that thing that Stormrage (the old huntress ppe) had searched for in vain! This was actually my first time getting this item, so that was cool.

So Grugo ran another one.

Now the game’s just torturing me.

Fighting Beisa means you get the big Beisa bonk stick:

And completing the campaign means that you get an egg skin:

Also, Grugo managed to no-life just enough of the event to complete some relevant quests, but nothing too fancy:

Then an O3 run got him a red bag, but not one of the ones he actually wanted:

The low hp pot count is due to a slight skill issue during cosmos. Grugo doesn’t usually dodge much, I’m afraid.

JimdaFish · 2024-05-01 16:16:39 UTC

Following a whole lot of battlepass running, quest completing and general tomfoolery, Grugo had at last saved up enough ancient schematics to buy himself something nice. And that’s exactly what he did, paying the Tinkerer a quick visit and making off with something cool:

Now, according to my ppe rules Grugo is not allowed to actually forge a jugg, but whatever. He has this now. Your move, game.

He got a chestplate to go with his anger chain anvil:

And then he joined his pals for a most desperate struggle, trying to remove this nasty Keyper guy from the realm once and for all. Grugo and his pals were also broke, and hoped that they could leech some dungeon keys from the guy. Well, after giving the Keyper a solid bonking, our hero got a white bag:

Not what we had hoped for, but we’ll take it!

In addition, he also finally collected enough key shards to make his second key ring thing:

But what’s this? A realm rework? Now Grugo had some exploring to do! And by “exploring” I of course mean “fishing”.

It took him a few tries to actually learn how this whole thing was supposed to work, but he eventually got the hang of it.

Then he found a very angry clam, who could (allegedly) drop a jugg, but Grugo unfortunately has yet to actually experience this.

Then it was back to fishing!

Fishing has absolutely no right being this entertaining. Also, cyan bag collection time!

Now, I remain very, very bad at Shatters. I’ve been getting more experience, but I keep getting distracted and not doing enough of them to actually progress meaningfully in skill. But I decided to send Grugo into a hardmode anyways, and it turned out to be reasonably worthwhile:

Needless to say, Grugo had to bail partway through the dungeon. Someday he’ll get his first Shatters complete, but today is not that day.

XBookwyrmX · 2024-05-02 02:31:44 UTC

Hopefully Grugo can survive until the rework properly releases! But for the time being going forward, I might have to skim your posts, as I’m trying to spoil myself as little as possible into the rework drops. It’s been probably 3 years since I’ve actually played the game, now? So there’s content in the current realm I’ve never even experienced.

Nonetheless, it’s been entertaining to keep up with your travels! It’s been my only other source of info outside of guildies/ex-guildies who still play on my Discord (albeit, we all don’t talk about RotMG much anymore as it is. We mostly do other games instead)

Chewbacka · 2024-05-02 16:28:18 UTC

holy moly, look at that fame!
even tho I was never posting here, I was following Grugo’s journey (and I have to say, it has been quite entertaining)

JimdaFish · 2024-05-03 00:07:37 UTC

Understandable! Yeah, the reworked realm has been a cool spot for exploration; especially since so many people are learning the content at the same time, it really is a different experience from the usual RotMG grind. It’s got a little bit of that nostalgic feeling of going into a new, previously unexplored part of the game, which is a refreshing change from the usual.

Good to hear! I do enjoy writing about my characters and making up little lives for them; it just makes them so much more interesting that way. And if I can entertain people in the process, that’s even better!

I must say though that the fame really is just due to that alien armor. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful when learning O3, and my current attempts to learn Shatters/MV probably would have killed off poor Grugo a while back. Little dude’s been through a lot.