So my “second main” is now 70. Syncerus (so named because I made him look like a water buffalo in horn-style, face, and coloration, and because Stonestrider was already taken) is a tauren (read: tribal society of minotauresque humanoids) druid (read: shapeshifters and tree huggers).

It took approximately half as much time to get Syn to 70 as it took Grezzk — a bit over 12 days. I don’t know when I created him, but he’s third on my login screen after Grezzk and… the character who sits in one of the major cities and checks prices of items for me on the auction house. Seriously, I have no idea who’s in the ‘created second’ slot, but that’s all I use them for. I think it’s a rogue… so, yes, I put a rogue in charge of my money — Margie would find that funny.

ANWAY, let’s have a little Picture Pages fun with Syncerus.

This is Syncerus at the login screen, with the grassy plains, traditional tribal background you see behind all Tauren characters at login.

I really love tauren characters. The only real problem I have with them is that all characters move the same speed by default, which means that little characters like gnomes get animated with really fast little steps (and thus seem to move faster), and Tauren - as the biggest toons in the game - have a kind of slow, loping gait that feels slow. Luckily, I have a cheetah form and now a BIRD FORM, so the slow movement feel doesn’t bother me much.

In addition to being a druid with a number of sexy animal forms I’m not going to show you, Syncerus is a herbalist (Tauren get a nice boost to this skill that carries through the game) and a skinner (very ‘leave no part of the animal unused’), so the open plains of Nagrand are very… *tidy* after he come through on a hunting spree.

Anyway, that login screen is how Syn looks now, when he’s in “healer mode”. Let’s look at the horrible way he looks when he’s NOT all healing and stuff.

This is the gear Syncerus was wearing just as he dinged 70… kind of. Actually, I think I’ve already put on some level 70 gear, so even THIS outfit matches a bit more than the armored clown suit he usually had on.

This is the gear that Syn’s now wearing when he’s tanking (though you’ll never see it, because he’s busy being a DIRE BEAR RAWR), or being a claw-your-face kitty (which is how I run my normal quests.) It’s slightly better looking than the old stuff, but only just barely.

I need about one more good night of battlegrounds (wherein, ironically, I heal) to get rid of those hideous green shoulders and replace them with… well, seriously the best shoulderguards for bear-tanking in the game. I’m still nowhere near where I need to be on my tanking stats to be able to tank a Raid of any kind — there’s a lot of little niggling bits I need to take care of, but I’m getting there.

Visually, I also have a little more leather to gather before I can make the leg armor that matches the tough-guy-armor that you see on his feet and chest and hands… it’s a full set that’s pretty much the definitive gear for tanks at his level, and also probably (mostly) won’t be replaced before the new expansion comes out.

At that point, he’ll pretty much match from head to hoof while tanking… the way he does when healing.

I have, shall we say, had a lot more luck (and been, I will be honest, more motivated) to gather pretty decent gear for his healer-mode equipment.

This is Syn wearing the shiny new gear that was waiting for his "healing mode" set, once he hit 70. The most visible pieces (the Shoulders and and the “robe”) are also kind of the weakest — pieces I picked up when I became “honored” with some key factions. They’re nice, but I’ll probably have better fairly soon. The best stuff I’m wearing is barely visible, if at all.

Underneath the robe I’m already wearing, I am not ashamed to admit, one of the better pieces of druidic healing gear in the game - though the name (“Pants of Living Growth”) makes me smirk. My guild leader gave em to me, as well as that HUGE mace on my belt — which is pretty much the best non-epic one-handed healer-weapon out there; I’ll replace it, but not soon, unless I’m lucky.

The best pieces are the smallest. You see that little headpiece he’s got on, sort of giving him a second set of horns? That particular head piece is roughly equivalent in ‘power level’ to the stuff that drops off Kael’thas Sunstrider, the boss that my guild is working to take down for the first time at this point (If you speak WoW-raiding, we’re 6/6 SSC, 4/5 TK, 3/6 Hyjal). I got the piece through being a damned awesome healer in the pvp battlegrounds (seriously, we almost never lose a battleground), and I worked my gently-swishing, bovine tail off to get it, so people who want to bitch about ‘welfare epics’ can bite me - I know how much work raiding is, and I did just as much work in a damned PuG environment to get this single piece of gear. I also spent a lot of gold last night putting the best gems I could find into it. I sincerely doubt I’ll replace that piece soon.

Anyway, I went from level 69 and generally able to handle healing the lower-level-60 dungeons, to this gear; at which point in time my mana pool (9500), bonus to healing (+1050) and mana regen rate (145 in-combat) all jumped to right about where they need to be for me to heal the first level 70 ten-man dungeon — just a huge jump. I promptly went out and found a Shadow Labyrinth run to heal, and it went very well, even though almost all my talent points are still in Feral abilities, not Restoration (40/21 “feral swiftness” build).

I really, really, really hope I get a chance to go on a Karazhan run soon and see if I’m correct in my assessment.

Sometimes I wave to the Alliance guys in the battlegrounds while my teammates are beating the hell out of them (something I remember Lee doing with his healer on CoH, and now I know why). It’s those little things that bring a smile to the bearcow’s lips.

A fight in the battlegrounds against the same number of opponents is pretty much a toin coss — unless one side has a healer. It’s amazing how much of a difference even one person totally dedicated to healing makes in a fight.

I like doing PvP on Grez, but that’s pretty much a soloist’s game for me — a blaster-vs-blaster situation where I’m just trying to get the other guy to 0 before he does the same to me.

With Syncerus, I hold the line.

----

And finally, the definitive picture of Syn.

As any MMO player knows, this is usually all I see of my character.

Look at those shoulder guards! Peripheral vision is for the WEAK!

Posted in MMOs by Doyce at 10:33 AM • Link | Comments (2)

Hmm. Let’s see what was going on.

In general
I haven’t been feeling very well. I haven’t been sleeping well or enough.

WoW
Syncerus is about half a level away from the level-cap, so that’ll happen pretty quick; this week, I’d think. It has taken me about 240 hours less playtime to get him to this point than it did on Grezzk. Given how much time I spend playing, that works out to getting him to 70 roughly three months faster.

And what then? Well, I’ve been amassing a lot of “requires level 70” gear for Syn, so when he dings I should be able to step into some fairly significant upgrades.

For healing, I’m already wearing the about a quarter of the stuff that I’ll take into end-game. I have a lot of the rest waiting in the bank — when 70 hits I should be doing VERY well on the stats I need. I’m actually ALREADY at the ‘ready for raiding’ level on my mana and mana regen rates — I need a bit more health (should come with the gear) and a bit more bonus to healing (ditto) for the entry-level raids… more than that to really walk in with the big boys to the big raids.

For tanking, I don’t have quite as much of the gear I need, though oddly, what I *do* have is for all the slots I haven’t been able to fill in as a healer — weird luck there.

So what do I want to do?

I’ve REALLY enjoyed healing in pvp battlegrounds — I know pvp well enough to know when my healing has turned the tide of a fight, and lemme tell you, that happens a LOT — having that kind of influence on a fight is really cool. Plus, it’s good practice — after pvp, healing a five-man dungeon run is a piece of cake.

Tanking… is just that. Tanking. I’ve done that a lot (and I get a good “sword and board” tanking ‘fix’ with Geiri on LotRO), so that’s all fine, but it’s not new. Healing is new — it’s more than a new area in WoW, it’s like playing an entirely new game. That said, I *do* have decent tanking skills, even in WoW, and I’ve tanked a fair amount of stuff in the end-game. Plus, as tanks are more in demand than healers (barely), being willing to tank kind of ensures I can get a group for whatever I need. As a bonus, if I get a tell like “we can take you if you can heal/dps — we already have a tank”, i can do that to.

I dunno. I like healing. We’ll see when I hit 70, I guess. I’m out of ‘rested’ xp bonus right now, so that might take a few days to do. In the meantime, i’m going to hit Battlegrounds for more honor — the battlemasters have a belt (and bear-form shoulderguards) I want…

Man I like playing this guy.

Grezzk
For the content my guild is doing (Working on Kaelthas in tier 5, hitting Mount Hyjal), there is very little stuff I can upgrade on Grezzk until the new expansion comes out. Syn is the main reason I log in right now — I just run Grez for a little bit each night to earn gold.

LotRO
I can’t get LotRO to run reliably on my (old, tired) desktop right now, and I didn’t have a (either) LotRO-capable laptop home with me this weekend, so I haven’t played.

Tabletop
The game day for Sunday was called due to lack of interest. Next weekend I’ll miss the Colorado Springs one cuz I’ll be at a company picnic up in the mountains (tries to make an excited face).

Looking forward to (a) the DnD game, where the group is about to hit an encounter that has caused a lot of other groups to wipe, and (b) playing some more In a Wicked Age with Lee and De.

Posted in Actual Play by Doyce at 1:06 PM • Link | Comments (1)

Today finds me pondering (once again) the way that my blogging “life” is currently divided and partitioned off.

Once upon a time, the split was pretty clear: gaming-related stuff went here, and anything that I wanted to write about that wasn’t that went onto Average-Bear. This was done for a number of reasons, but none of them were really for compartmentalization as much as organization. The problem is basically that the organization of my gaming posts would suffer dramatically if they all had to be lumped under a single heading of “Gaming” on a blog that was supposed to handle everything — the bloat from that one category would be hard to manage and the heading itself would be largely meaningless in terms of actually organizing anything — I’ve over a dozen post categories on this gaming blog, and porting all that into another blog would, at best, make that combined blog a kind of “gaming, with a few tangents” blog that I’m not interested in doing.

But the problem is that, with my new ‘main’ blog, there are things that I *don’t* want to blog about there, which aren’t gaming-related either, and thus have nowhere to go.

Which brings me back to just having one big journal for everything, and the problems be damned…

Which brings me back to actually contemplating the problems and deciding that I can’t just ignore them.

And nothing changes.

Not entirely sure what to do with that. Not sure there’s much I actually can do about it.

But I think it’s telling that I’m writing about all this on my gaming blog… a blog that actually nets quite a bit more traffic now than my ‘neutered’ main blog. What it tells me is that I’m doing something wrong.

I’m just not sure what.

Posted in Musing by Doyce at 12:50 PM • Link | Comments (3)

Okay, not a patch, but people make the DnD = MMORPG comparison so much, I figured one more tired joke wouldn’t hurt.

Actually, it’s errata and updates for all three books, enough that I hope they correct this stuff in a second printing of the 4.0 rules.

They has completely overhauled the skill challenge system in the DMG errata. All skill challenges now end with 3 failures regardless of complexity, so Complexity 5 challenges are going to be very difficult. However, they also dropped the difficulty of all skill checks by 5 (which is something I was already doing, based on the number crunching geniuses at Story-Games… you know, they don’t right many crunchy games, but those guys grok dice probabilities.

Anyway: all Easy skill checks are now difficulty 5 instead of 10. Moderate skill checks are now DC 10 instead of 15, and Hard checks are now DC 15 instead of 20. This still scales up with level.

Posted in Links & Resources by Doyce at 9:37 AM • Link | Comments (2)