random average

Just a quickie.

MMO: WoW
Grezzk
This was kind of an exciting week with the guild, as we expanded our raid schedule a bit to accommodate more people.

Normally, we do the (10-man) Karazhan instance on the weekends (most of the real progress is on Saturday and Sunday for a couple hours, though we do sometimes get started with a drunken Friday night 'run' for laughs).

This last week, we ran a Kara raid on the weeknights as well. This is a pretty big deal, because you can't be saved to two instances at the same time, which means we had 20+ different people (or at least different characters) participating, and two runs means more gear upgrades for everyone. Both teams pretty much cleared the whole instance. (I believe the weekday team did it in three nights, and the weekend group did everything but Maiden in two runs and just decided to skip the Maiden of Virtue, as there was no benefit for anyone to doing the fight.)

That was cool, but even better was fielding a full 25-man group to take a shot a High King Maulgar (and his court of Ogres) on Friday night, followed by Gruul the Dragonkiller.

This was a pretty momentous thing. The last time we took a serious stab at that fight was in November, and we didn't really get enough people: we didn't actually even beat Maulgar, and we've had that fight pretty much worked out for awhile.

Now... this time... okay, the signs weren't great. We took maybe an hour to get started, and we have a LOT, and I mean a LOT of new people. The guy who usually magetanks Krosh Firehand was on his healer, so Lee was magetanking with Wyrmeyed. We had a new guy tanking Kiggler the Crazed who'd never done it before. We had a new guy who doesn't speak English very well tanking the Warlock. Probably half our healers were new. We brought a level 68 guy along just to fill out to 25 people. It was crazy.

So we fight through the trash to get to the High King, we explain the fight to the new people, and how complicated the five-simultaneous-pulls start is, and we say "go" and we go...

... and we one-shot it. Damn near perfect fight. After not doing it for months and then bringing a bunch of new people. That was cool. I was up around 900 damage-per-second, and another guy broke 1000 dps. Insane. In-sane.

So it's on to Gruuls. The Raid Leader announces that we're going to do three tries and be done with the fight, no matter how it's going. No building frustration: we have a lot of new people (we swapped in a 70 for the 68 at this point, with no hard feelings), and a brand new strategy to learn.

Let me explain what kills people in this fight. It's not really the Boss. Gruul is an incredibly big guy in a very big cavern, and he does this thing every so often where he smashes the ground. Again, this guy is BIG: when he smashes the ground, it jumps like a trampoline and everyone goes flying in the air in random directions. When you land, you are slowed... slowed... slowed, and six seconds after you land, you're frozen for a few seconds, and then SHATTERED. Everyone who's within 15 feet of you at that point will cause you (a lot of) damage, then you can move again, if you aren't dead. Around four people or so around you, and you stand a good chance of dying. If no one is close to you, you take no damage.

The problem is, even with a big room, there are 25 people in there. The chance of you landing too close to too many people is HIGH, and it's hard to get away when you're slowed. So we have a strategy now where everyone but the healers and the tanks run to the walls before the slam, so we don't fly around anywhere -- just the healers and tanks do. Less people flying around means less damage from the Shatter.

And it works. Damn it works. We did not get Gruul down, but we got him lower than we ever have in the past (again, with a lot of new people and no practice in two months). We had some bad luck where all our healers got silenced at a very bad point in the fight, so the tanks died... and on another attempt, sheer bad luck bounced all the healers and the tanks on top of each other, so the whole healing and tanking groups Shattered each other to death.

But that's just bad luck. We can beat bad luck. We totally have the damage-dealers we need (I broke 1000dps on one attempt, and another guy broke an unheard-of 1200) and we have the method we need to beat that bastard. It might even be this Friday night.

... when I will be on a plane to New York, which I'm very happy about... so I wish them luck.

ANYWAY: it was a very fun series of runs, and Grezzk got the last of the gear he can get from either of the instances (pretty much -- I've given up on getting the Wolfslayer Rifle or Nightbane's mail leggings, and that's okay) -- Curator in Karazhan dropped my Demon Hunter (Tier 4) shoulderguards and I got the matching gloves off High King Maulgaur, so not only are my stats pretty damn good, I *match* -- at this point, I'm going along on the runs to help the rest of the guild gear up and to have a good time (which it almost always is). My last two major equipment upgrades until we get past Gruul and start doing the later 25-man raids are going to come through Arena pvp.

Syncerus and Thienedera
I'm leveling up two Horde alts right now. Syncerus the tauren druid (the bearcat cow), and Thienedera the paladin. Last week, they got a lot of love. This week, I'm leaving them logged out in Inns to build up their rested rating for that lovely double XP bonus. I've seen the low and mid-game content already -- I'm not interested in dwelling on it this time, so I'm focusing on flying up to 70 as fast as I can with both of them. Thie is a little lower level than Syn at this point (she's on a PvP server for now, so I'm a little more cautious), but I expect they'll get a lot of playtime soon.

My grand scheme is to have one Damage dealer, one Tank, and one Healer at level 70 and reasonably well-geared by the time the next expansion hits. I don't have much interest in alts past that point.

Kayti
I have, really, one alliance character. I finally dusted off Kayti and took her for a spin this week, and it was a lot of fun. Spell casters are a total pain in the ass on a paladin, but if I avoid them it's a nice relaxing solo grind. I'm taking my time on her because there's stuff on the Alliance side of the mid-game that I HAVEN'T seen.

Kate was available to play this week, so we got on Geiri and Tiranor. We had a lot of Fellowship quests to do, so I got on the Looking for Fellowship channel and asked around for some more people. A guy sent me a tell and pretty quick we were in a group with a bunch of guys who all know each other in real life and were all on voicechat.

Two hours later, all those Fellowship quests were done, Kate had gotten hooked up with some new crafted loot from one of the other players, and I had built up a pretty good start on a "DPS" set of equipment to put on when I'm not tanking -- something that will become a lot more useful when Book Twelve opens up new options for Guardians, and we had some new people in our Friends list. It was another good run with a random group of strangers -- in that arena, I believe LotRO is the Best MMO on the market, bar NONE.

Ongoing:
* Galactic: We still have a lot of game left to do there.
* Spirit of the Century: Need to get those sessions started up again.

Upcoming
* I have Savage Donjon Squad ready for our next pick-up game session.
* Once Galactic is done, I want to take a stab at Bliss Stage with Dave and De and whoever else I can get in.
* I have the pre-order copy of In a Wicked Age, a sword and sorcery bit of genius from the guy who did Dogs in the Vineyard. Totally new system. Totally new kind of Awesome.
* Don't think I've forgotten about our characters for Breaking the Ice, Kate. I haven't. Also, I have been challenged to play a Paranoia-set game using Breaking the Ice, and I don't intend to back down from that. That's a two-person game -- anyone out there want to learn a new game set in a familiar, crazy setting?

Posted by Doyce at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

WoW breaks 10-million subscribers.

Blizzard also explicitly defined who it counted as subscribers, clarifying that the 10 million number (2.5 in the U.S and Europe each, 5 million in Asia; currently available in 7 languages and coming soon to Russian) refers to those who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access.

The count does not include free promotional subscriptions, expired or canceled subscriptions or prepaid cards.

For the purposes of comparison, CoH has about 120 to 150 thousand active subscribers at any given time. LotRO has, at last report, 300k and rising.

People need to stop comparing WoW to other US-developed MMOs in terms of subscribers or size or 'who wil be the WoW-killer'. 10 MILLION people isn't a game, it's a city. Comparing WoW to something like DnD Online is like comparing CoH's playerbase to the population of Chicago.

Posted by Doyce at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Grezzk - level 70 (effective level: 117)

Most of my time on Grezzk has been spent on (1) Kara runs (2) getting folks qualified for Karazhan runs and (3) getting together supplies for the Kara runs. Which isn't to say that they're terribly time consuming, just that that's all the time I've spent on him in the last couple weeks. Just a few updates:

Team Stuff:
I'm the default "caller" for the Infernal 'bombs' during the fight with Prince. Basically, while fighting the boss, these bombs fall out of the sky at regular intervals, flying in at and angle, change direction one time in the sky, then hit the ground. If they land near or on the team, the team probably wipes, and we all start over. The caller's job is to figure out where they're going to land, and get people out of the way. One of the members of the guild calls the fight "Grezzk vs. the Prince", due to the way the fight tends to play out -- everyone is doing their job, but it pretty much comes down to whether or not we can stay out of the Infernals long enough to kill the Prince. Some of it is just luck, unfortunately, but alot of it is good calling a group who follows instructions well, and quickly. It's a tricky thing to judge when you don't have anything else going on, which of course I do. As ranged DPS, I'm in a position where I can pan my camera around to watch for the Infernals as they fly in from the sky behind us, while still doing my primary job (kill the boss) and keeping my pet fighting and alive.

I've called the fights for about a month now, and we've been pretty successful. The raid leaders have been pretty vocal about my ability with the calling. Feels good.

Gear:
I've pulled in quite a lot of heroic badges commemorating boss kills, which you can then use to acquire some nice loot, so I've upgrade quite a lot of stuff (my new leggings aren't on yet, since I'm still waiting to get an enchant on them from a guy in the guild. I also got a really really sweet bow off that Prince fight last week, so right now my gear is pretty strong.

PvP:
There's really nothing I can 'buy' with honor from the battlegrounds right now that would be an upgrade for me as near as I can tell, so after I got a very nice ring, I've been giving them a pass for now.

HOWEVER, there is a very nice hunter's axe I can probably pick up with a few more weeks of doing arenas. The "noob" 3v3 team I was on kind of dissolved, but another guy got a 5v5 team started this week, featuring some pretty major DPS guys from our Kara runs. I like 5v5 a bit more because I'm not ALWAYS the "first kill priority" target in the bigger group. In our first series of matches, we won something like 8-of-12, and we were actually short a healer for that run, so that group looks really promising, and they're fun to chat in Vent with as we play. I like doing arena as a fun break from the typical activities in WoW -- it's fast, furious, and over quickly -- you can get your 10 matches in in about 20 minutes and have the rest of the week to do other stuff.

Fun:
Honestly, I think my favorite part of the raiding isn't the gear (whatever) or the boss fights (though they are fun), it's having everyone in Vent and talking while we play. It's a very laid back, fun, social kind of thing, and I'm less interested in being on Grezzk just to make some gold and do solo quests than I used to be, simply because I'd RATHER be doing something that involves running Ventrilo. I probably end up doing more Instance runs because of that, since it usually means having vent to chat on.

MMOs -- a social activity. Who'da thunk it.

Syncerus (level 31)
My tauren (minotaur) druid is a ton of fun, and that's reflected in the time I've spent on him -- I think I was level 22 or 24 about a week ago. For you CoH people, druids work a bit like a Kheldian. You can stay in your 'native' form and heal/cast damaging spells, shift into bear form to tank (or when you pull way more aggro than you meant to), and claw the crap out of stuff in a "cat" (read: lion) form when you want to sneak around and kill stuff super quick (read: scrapper). Basically, whatever mood I'm in, there's probably some way to scratch that itch with this character. Right now, all his talents are going into stuff that makes his Bear/Cat forms stronger, but I have a pretty decent set of "healer/caster" gear that I switch into when that sort of thing is called for -- I'm not sure what I'll be doing with him at level 70, but he'll be either a tank or a healer. (I already have a ranged DPS character, so as cool as the Moonkin (read: spellcasting, facemelting Owlbear form) is, that won't be what I do.

My current project with him is doing the quest chain to give him the 'water' form -- a kind of manatee -- cuz I need a lot of stranglekelp for my alchemy right now. I have a non-combat 'cheetah' form for hauling ass on land and let me tell you -- it actually makes gathering up herbs fun -- looking forward to the same ability underwater. :)

Herbalism aside, I'm not really stopping to smell the roses on Syn, though; I want to get him to 70 and join in all the big-reindeer games. Ultimately, I'd like to have one DPS, one CC/Tank, and one Healer available in the end game. Since I don't know whether Syn will be a tank or healer, my 'third' guy should probably be someone who can go either way as well -- that probably means Paladin, so I might be talking more about Theinedera in the future.

LotRO
Kate's been MIA for a couple weeks to get her company rolling and wrap up things in NYC, so I haven't really been on LotRO much. I did get a chance to play a bit with Dave and Margie's trial-characters last night, and I hope they decide to give the game a run; Dave geeks out on the lore like I do, and Margie seems to really enjoy the 'mini games' hidden within the crafting system and auction house, as well as the nuances of the skills and traits. They're both adaptive and smart (obviously) and have quickly figured out the changes to gameplay that you need for different quests.

I leveled my little armorsmith a bit with them -- one more level and he can actually wear the heavy armor he's been making for other people. Really do like that game, and I look forward to some more time spent there once things settle down for Kate and myself.

----

face to face
No joy in mudville. We were going to run another session of galactic on Sunday, but I've been sick (not really feeling better even today), so I called it off and took a long nap. Hopefully we'll get something going soon.

Posted by Doyce at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not sure who this mad, mad genius is, but I can't argue with the results. Boing Boing linked to his (?) steampunk Justice League (and they are yummy -- I *adore* Hawkgirl), but take a look at the Star Wars and Venture Brothers figures as well.

Posted by Doyce at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Holy crap. Holy CRAP.

Okay, the animation isn't great, but the voices are pretty good. Why am I so excited?

Here's the story with Dragonlance. Basically, a group of DnD players back in the days of ADnD, working at TSR, ran a campaign. The two authors who were writing the books basically statted out the characters from their story and everyone divvied them up. A huge amount of stuff that happened in that game made it into the story, but as importantly, the idea of the story superseding the basic DnD practices of "kill it and take their stuff" infused the campaign.

It didn't hurt that the books are actually pretty good.

When the books were released, TSR also released a series of campaign modules designed to let anyone play those characters through, essentially, the story of the books, with some extra stuff that you only see alluded to in the books. It was something like 14 modules, I think -- an epic, epic kind of story. Huge.

But more importantly, a lot of the players in my group (this was back in high school) read the books and were really jazzed about the characters and the story. They saw what the characters were doing, they saw what happened to them, and what kind of choices they made -- more realistic, less 'loot it!' And that informed their play.

In short, that was the first game I ran where people weren't so much playing a group, tabletop version of Gauntlet, and started roleplaying.

The story was a horrible, horrible railroad from one end to the other, I'm sure -- no way it could be otherwise, really, when you're trying to follow the basic storyline of a book -- but it was a golden, special time in my memory, and I preordered the movie this morning.

Posted by Doyce at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)