Welcome to my latest endeavor.  This will begin my journal of my new Opal mage Dizzop.  I know some of you are looking at this for the first time and the title alone poses many questions.  I'll try to answer all I can as well as give you some background.  

As always please visit http://dizzarian.com/acmages for all your mage needs and for a html copy of this and many other journals by me and other mages.

Background 

A lot of people know who I am but for those that don't I'll try to bring you up to date.  Dizzarian was a battlemage I started almost a year ago.  At the time BMs were not common and there were only a few who proclaimed it's glory.  I read Zarya's journals on the CoD message board and was in awe of her and what she was doing.  I decided that it was time to actually try the template out and to document my journey every step of the way.  I started posting journals at level 1 and continued all the way past graduation.  Along the way they became very popular and I decided that a website was in order to hold them.  Since then the site has grown into a great site encompassing all mages.  It no longer focuses on me but all mages.

But Why Darktide?

I don't want to lie, I've suffered from severe burn out the last month.  The burn out came from several factors.
1) After power-leveling Dizz I was exhausted.  Even though I completed this wonderful mage I had gotten more AC in a short period of time then I was comfortable with 
2) I pushed on, I had people watching me they wanted to see what I could do now that I achieved my goal.  So again lots more AC than I'm use to.
3) After turbine put in the remaining level 7 spells mage love came pretty much to a halt.   Not that mages need love but this made updating the site hard and thus I kind of lost interest.  The site has suffered from it.

So I kind of backed off, Dizz has leveled from vassel xp and pincher xp.  Nothing glamorous pretty dreary to be precise.  I tried many things to rekindle my enthusiasm for the game but nothing seems to be working.  I tried a melee but they are rather.. umm... dull.  I tried a x-bower (bow is my first love) but I felt like I'd been there done that.  So what's left?  PK.  Pk is pretty weak on white servers, I won't go much into this but it doesn't feel right.

So DT seems like it could be the solution to push me through to AC2 (I hope)  I'm not necessarily leaving MT anymore than I already have.  I really love my clan there, they are all great and I will always log in there from time to time.

Why Opal?

Couple of factors went into this.  First and foremost, I consider this template to be one of the most powerful in the game.  But like BM and even Og back in the day no one believed it till someone showed them.  Opal herself has gone a long ways to prove this template but I feel it still needs a lot more exposure as it's a very powerful mage.  Next on on a pk server so creature spec'd becomes even more important for the ability to debuff your opponent.  I wouldn't consider Opal to be the top pk template but it's in the top 3 and above bm. 

It Begins

I played around a UA gimp on DT before committing.  So I had a feel for what I needed to do beforehand.  A nice/bad thing that has happened in the last couple of patches is that there are now only 3 starter towns.  This is good because it's usually an easy portal hop to get into a somewhat safe area, since starter grounds have always been notoriously bad for newbies.  The bad part being that all the noob-killers now squeeze into 3 areas so it's more treacherous than before.    Even with that it's highly recommended that you do the noob quest now, by the time that your down with it you will be level 3 (make sure you turn in 3 wasp wings).  Plus you get a groovy little starter wand that has focus 1, will 1, and manaC 1.  It might be a good idea to do this early some morning before work or school so that you miss primetime noob killing.

I started in Holtburg West and started doing the quest.  I was pleasently surprised that there were no red dots on my radar when I got in.  So I started into the training dungeon, well I should have know better, there were 2 archers perched in the entrance laughing it up and having a good time.  I didn't fight I just let them take me.  I went back in and proceed on the quest now that I was white.   I get to the wasp and there's a nekid dagger dood there named "Carebear's wrath" cute name I continue on and he's following me prepared for action.  At this time I got quite a surprise when one of the archers who got me when I came in, said "Watch out for him he got us several times" When I went back to red the battle was on and I was pretty happy with my first kill on DT :)  He was never seen again.

The Personalities of DT

After finishing the starter quest I started portal jumping through starter towns till I found a nice home.  I've always been fond of Al-Arquas so that were I stayed till level 6 or so.  A local lowbie dungeon to Al-Arquas is the abandoned shops.  It mainly has low level drudges in there so this is were I leveled.  To illustrate the personalities, I'm plowing through the drudges and along comes a red dot whips out his hollow and boom I'm back at the lifestone with out any warning.  I head back portal in and see a red dot so I run. On the surface the guy portals out and says "Hey why'd you run?" I look and this is not the same guy that just ganked me.  I told him about the dude and he proceeds to buff me up.  Now I was baffled, I was pretty sure that till level 20 or so I would be on my own and and never get any help especially from a complete stranger.   So after playing on DT to level 17 or so I've really come to the conclusion that there's really no middle ground on DT either your a complete ass or not.  And the ones who are not are generally very generous and protective of their own.

Level 8-13

After the lower level junk at Al got to be tiring I picked up my bags and moved to Rith.  I had heard that Rith was an anti town so it seemed like a good place to continue leveling as I was very familiar with the area.  I stoned at the Rith East there was a level 2 dagger guy (Grosse Colere) there in all white poised to strike.  I whipped out my wand and when he pounced I let the war bolts fly.  He was dead in a matter of seconds so I went on to find my leveling grounds.  The Rithwic cottage portals are pretty near to the outpost so I took one of those and continued to level.  I push myself when leveling so I die a lot, every time I died that little dagger dood would be there and everytime I would kick his ass.  One time he was white and waiting to turn red on me so I messaged him "Dude if you stop attacking me I won't kill you" no response, he turned red and immediately died again.  I gave little thought as to why he was white as he was camping the stone.  On my way back to the portals another red appeared, I id'd her and it was a level 40 or 50 staffer, wtf?  I just stood there and she came up and immediately killed me.  Noobie killing is just something I don't get, I sent a message to her "Feel better about yourself now?"  the response was expected "Yes I do thanks!!"  Grr I went on about my ways.  I continued this little dance of killing the noobie and then getting killed by tyra till about level 8.

Also I want to point out something very import that I forgot up to this level... Yield.  This whole time I had been playing Dizzop like a BM which semi works but if you're going to push your level don't forget to yield it will help tremendously.  Also I was always casting Life mastery during these levels that way I could convert stamina to mana and stamina to health in a hurry.  Unfortunately I did not collect gold notes for the wands and jewelry which isn't as big of issue since I actually have critter.

At level 8 I had made contact with someone from the DT boards, Aerik.  Aerik was nice enough to take my happy butt up to Bandit Castle (An anti outpost) and after hooking me up with some cash he proceeded to twink me on fauna in the area till level 13.  This was great, great help and he did all this out of kindness and expected nothing in return.  I'll be forever in his debt.

The Long Haul

Getting to 16 with no life is no easy task.  I've heard of people going this route untwinked but I had no idea how tough it was.  Hit and run is basically your only option.  Even though you can take out low level drudges from 13 on, it's a long process and lot of running on a very slow character.  I trotted on though, and got to 15 even though at one time I had up to 36% vit... Ugh that was rough.  I usually had to resort to going into the castle dungeon and burning my vit on undead and rats.  This was a long slow process I do not wish to repeat again.

But there was new light at level 15, I had just gotten back from the latest mage gather and found that a regular poster there "Deus De Iro" was on DT!  I contacted him in game and he took me to Stonehold another anti outpost.  But Stonehold is a much more popular anti city.  Although it does get attacked... a lot!  And when we portaled in it was no exception, there were probably 10 Anti's and 5 pks there.  The pks came straight for me as if they had their "Noobdar" on.  But everyone was already attacking them.  It was great fun and I didn't die.   Deus hooked me up with buffs and I went out and shortly got 16.  The day had come I was on my way to being a powerful mage on DT.  Also around this time I joined in under Deus into the Clan of The Hand.

The Stats and Applying Xp

Yes I'm on DT and I'm going to show my stats.  I know there are many who would never do this but I really can't see the danger.  People are going to know that I'm opal and they're going to have a good approximation of what they are anyways so no biggy to me.  Although time may tell different.   Something that is different from my diaries with dizzarian is that I'm not going to show my age and deaths.  My deaths are going to be way high just because of the nature of DT and my age isn't going to be that important as I have been twinked a little and may even more in the future.

There's nothing really shocking here with my stats,  I do want to talk about how I'm applying stats though.  I've come up with a method that seems to be pretty good at distributing stats.  I still go by the adage that what ever you feel you're lacking bump but I also do it certain way.  First I find the skill I want to bump let's say endurance.  When I bump a stat I do it 5 times to keep it even so if it's currently 75 if I decide to bump the skill I will do it till 80.  After I decide on the skill I wait till I have enough to bump then apply the skill.  There's always some left over, now most of the time I would leave this to bump it again the next time but with my new method I don't do this.  I start going down through all my important skills i.e can I bump quick? no can I bump focus? no....  If I can bump the skill I do and continue down the list till I can no longer bump any skill or I reach endurance again.  Why am I doing it this way? Since I'm on DT I can't really neglect anything so if I can bump magic defense, I should.  If I can bump jump I should.  It's proven to be quite effective for me at this point.

Conclusions

I'm really enjoying my time on DT and pretty sure I'm taking Dizzop all the way to graduation so these diaries will continue which is good news for all of you who have been bugging me for new journals :)

Till next time Have Fun and Blow Stuff UP!