random average

Well, I have the game and I've checked it out. I haven't had a chance to play that much (several trips home and some LotRO gaming have got in the way), nor have I read up on some of the nuances of the game... I understand what's going on, but in some places I'm not 100% sure WHY it's going on.

But still, I'm going to talk about it a bit.

How's it feel?
In terms of it as an MMO, it's a good solid game. I haven't run into any major bugs of any kind, and the gameplay is pretty intuitive. Basically it's going to feel very familiar to WoW or LotRO players, although there are a few more screens available in WAR, so there's more keybinds. I don't know why they mapped so many things to the same keys, and then chose to map just a few things to wrong different keys (I'm looking at you, mister "P for the Character Pane"), but that's easily fixed stuff.

In terms of the game as an expression of the Warhammer Intellectual Property (IP), it's also pretty darn good. The game feels a little more like Warhammer Fantasy Battles than it does the Warhammer Fantasy RPG (or at least the Warhammer FRPG in my head), but that's fine -- the Fantasy Battles game has contributed a lot more to the IP than the RPG has over the years. The forces of Chaos feel appropriately alien and nasty... the Greenskins are nasty, brutish, and (mostly) short... and the Empire is note-perfect. (Can't talk about the dwarves or elves yet, as I mostly haven't played them.)

The graphics are somewhere between WoW and LotRO in terms of tone, and not-quite LotRO in terms of quality. Everything LOOKS very Warhammer, though.

You can dye your armor and equipment right off the bat, and... get this... all the dye colors are the color names from the Official Games Workshop lines of miniature paints.

Speaking of custom looks, let's talk about...

Character Creation

Okay, so each of the two factions in the game (Order and Destruction) have three representative races. Order has Dwarves, High Elves, and Humans. Destruction has Greenskins (orcs and goblins), Dark Elves, and Chaos (basically humans in service to otherworldly gods of corruption and decay).

You pick a server, then a faction and race within that faction first. Know that you can't have characters from both factions on the same server, but you can make other-faction character on some other server.

So you've picked your race, and now you pick your career. Each race has either three or four careers to choose from. Don't worry too much about balance here, because what it boils down to is that each faction has a total of 10 classes, and each class has a almost-direct counterpart in the other Faction.

Let's see if I can remember the classes:

I think that's most of them.

The main thing to note here is that the basic Faction vs. Faction are:

• Chaos vs. the Empire (humans)
  
• Dark Elves vs. High Elves
  
• Greenskins vs. Dwarves
  

... and that none of the racial careers have their direct counterpart in the faction they will fight the MOST. For instance, if you play a Chosen (chaos tank), your direct counterpart in Order is a dwarven Ironguard. Now, maybe you'll run into one because a dwarf has run over to this Empire allies to help them out, but TYPICALLY, you won't see an enemy who has mostly all the same tricks that you do.

Also notably, each class pairing has some kind of special mechanic that doesn't work like any other class pairing. That really makes each class in your faction unique and cool -- you might really like playing one kind of career, but not like another, and that really makes sense here -- they do NOT play the same way, and it's a MUCH more profound difference than say, a Scrapper and Tank in CoH, or a Hunter and Guardian in LotRO. (Yes, a guardian and hunter do very different jobs in the game, but their MECHANICS are basically the same... that is not the case in WAR.)

Finally, you figure out how your character is going to look. The level of character customization is right around the same as Lord of the Rings and WELL past the customization in WoW. (Obviously it's far below CoH and CoV -- that's just the nature of the game -- that level of customization would be totally pointless in any genre in which 'found loot' is relevant.)

One thing I think is interesting here is that each of the CLASSES actually has its own set of looks to combine and play with -- you and your buddy might both make humans of the Empire, but if you make a Warrior Priest and he makes a Bright Mage, it is completely impossible to make those two characters look the same. Forget the default clothing: what I mean is that the hairstyle options, facial forms, tattoos, scars, accessories, and even in the body shape is going to be different between those two classes, despite being the same race. You can pick out a fire Bright Wizard from 100 yards away, even if he's just standing there.

Put another way, in LotRO or WoW, if you make a dwarf warrior and a dwarf spell caster, and you pick all the same "look" settings for both, they will look identical to each other if they're standing there in their skivvies. In WAR, they won't even be close.

What you're doing
There's about four different activities you can do for leveling in WAR.

PvE Quests
These are your basic solo missions and quest chains that lead to the rare team-required quests with nice rewards. The stories here are pretty good, and the the way they show you where to go on the map to perform the quest is GENIUS, but the basics of the questing is nothing new here. (One nice thing? You never kill a boar and find out it doesn't have a tusk that you need.)

Public Quests
Let's see if I can explain this in terms of City of Heroes.

You know those Rikti Invasion fights? Or really any of the CoH special events, like snow men or the hoodlums burning down buildings?

Okay, let's say those things could happen at any time -- that they were keyed to certain locations and tended to happen both randomly and/or when a lot of people were around. Sounds pretty much like the events in CoH.

Now, let's say that when you walked into an area where one was happening, you saw a message like "The Rikti Are Attacking!" and you got a Public Quest temporarily assigned to you, like "Stage One: Stop the Scouts!" You could ignore it if you wanted to, and keep doing your thing, or just leave, or you could jump in and help.

If you help, and the people 'in' the Public Quest successfully did whatever it was they needed to do, everyone got quest completion XP, divided by total participants (with a bonus for being part of a group instead of solo). Repeat for several "Stages", and then there's an End Boss who shows up.

After you beat the end boss, a chest drops, and everyone gets a turn at picking one thing out of the chest... first pick goes to the person who contributed most to the entire Public Quest, and on down from there. Some of the loot is really quite good.

That's a public quest, and they're ALL OVER THE PLACE in Warhammer. War is, indeed, everywhere.

PvP Scenarios
Every zone in the game as a PvP scenario associated for it. You can 'queue' up to participate in these things -- tactically important areas in the region -- and continue to work on whatever it is you're doing. When there are enough people on BOTH sides queued up to do the thing, a big battle horn sounds and off you all 'muster' to the battle area (or not: you can chose to just not go when it's time, if you're busy). You can get xp from this, and in addition your character actually has a 'PvP level' that can advance, as well as a 'normal' character level, and those two don't have to be kept even. They're fun, they're short, and the rewards are, again, pretty nice.

When you're done, the game pops you right back to wherever you were before the Scenario, and you can keep doing what you were doing (even queueing back up for the next one).

Oh, and the Scenario System auto-levels you to a 'competetive' level for the Scenario, if you're a little level 2 guy trying to play in a "levels 1 to 11" scenario; so in that way, WAR even uses a genre-useful kind of CoH's Sidekicking.

Dungeons
You're basic closed-instance adventures, with maximum group sizes ranging from six to 24. Again, these are nasty, brutish, short, and filled with some nice gear.

How you're keeping track of it
Every character has a Tome of Knowledge. Think of the Tome as a combination of CoH Badge-tracker, Quest log, collection of game fiction on all the important people you've seen, monsters you've faced, pictures of places you've been, and a source of new quests.

What's that? Accomplishment-borne quests? Yeah, it is pretty cool: say you've been fighting chaos beastmen for awhile. While fighting them, you end up killing, like, your fiftieth one

- In WoW, nothing notable happens.
- In CoH, you'd get a Badge. ("Bane of Beastmen")
- In LotRO, you probably get a title ("Bane of Beastmen"), plus it opens up a similar 'advanced' challenge to work on ("Kill 150 MORE and you'll get a bonus to your Determination Trait.")
- In WAR, you get a title ("Bane of Beastmen"), plus it opens up a similar 'advanced' challenge to work on, and there's a chance that (a) you'll immediately get a quest to go talk to Someone Important (b) you earn a new minor ability ("Bonus to killing Beastmen!") (c) you get some special piece of gear.

Basically, the Tome is a combination of every kind of Character Accomplishment Tracker in every MMO I've ever seen, with whipped cream and sprinkles on top. Take Note: Regardless of how well WAR does, this is going to be a game aspect that players will expect in all their MMO play from now on.

Is it the end-all-be-all of MMO gaming? Nope. But it's a good game that takes the current state-of-play from a lot of good or successful games, and improves or adapts it to make their game better.

Is it my next 2-year game? I don't know, but I'm definitely going to play it for more than the first free month. (I'm looking at you, Tabula Rasa & Age of Conan.)

Posted by Doyce at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over on Waaaaagh, they're talking about "The Race."

The Race is my pet term for the phenomena that happens at the beginning of any MMO launch, where players rush in the gates, then feel the compulsive need to flat-out sprint toward the end game out of fear of getting left behind. Left behind what? This isn’t the rapture, it’s a video game. Some yahoo is going to hit rank 40 in about 110 hours of non-stop, red-eyed gaming and be a minor game celebrity for six seconds. I’m not quite sure what Mr. Yahoo thinks, but I can assure him that women are not going to be throwing ovulated girlie parts at his feet because they want his awesome genetic legacy to live on. He’s just the first of several folk who think that the game “hasn’t really started” until they hit the highest peak.

So obviously nobody’s going to keep up with that, apart from a few insane hardcore guilds and their incredibly angry spouses. But there is this unsaid, palpable fear of getting left behind the main pack in those first few weeks, especially your guildies and friends who you want to team with.

(Emphasis mine.)

Like the original poster, I confess that I do have a certain amount of drive to get to the 'top' of the game, if for no other reason than the fact that I hate like hell to be the guy who can't come along and play with my friends when they all want to run a new event and I'm not tall enough to ride the ride. I've experienced that to a small degree on WoW (not a lot, actually, since I wasn't really IN a guild until after Grezzk hit 70), and a lot more on LotRO (where it seemed that someone was always organizing a group-event centered around a zone I wasn't high enough level to survive).

((Dutiful props, here, to CoX and it's Sidekick mechanism.))

With that said, I'm not really sweating this for the release of WAR. As much as I'd like to get into the game and go a little crazy, there are reasons I'm not (even though I did qualify for the early-bird week of play):

1. Technical difficulties. It took ages to download the 9 gig client, and once I had it, the .zip was corrupt. Consequently, I need to wait for the actual install disks to arrive, and they didn't ship til Wednesday. No head-start for me.
2. AFK. The head start was last weekend. I was out of town. The "real" start is tomorrow. I'm going to be out of town (for the same depressing reason). :P
3. Other gaming stuff to do. Yes, I want to play WAR, but I also have stuff I want to accomplish in WoW and LotRO before THEIR next releases hit the shelves. I maintain that one of the best ways to balance one's time in a game is to play more than one game. "Drugs are my antidrug"? Maybe, but it works. Tabletop games would work well here as well, but they simply aren't as reliable for me at this point.
4. Other stuff to do in general. Home improvements. TV and movies to watch with Kate. Kaylee-things. Writing. Reading. Just stuff.
5. One must wait for the giants to grow up before one stands on their shoulders. Frankly, I'm lazy -- I don't like paying fifteen bucks a month to wander around fucking LOST for two hours while I try to find the little widget-thing that I need for a quest. If I wanted to get turned around and travel back and forth over the same area for an hour looking for something I KNOW should be RIGHT THERE, I'd drive downtown. Waiting a few weeks to get started and taking my time once I get in means that when I DO get into the game, there will be a number of lovely guides to tell me how-to and what-to and when-to and why.

So am I looking forward to WAR?

Absolutely. I want to play EVERYTHING.

But it will all still be there in a few days.

((And frankly, I'm going to kick ass no matter when I start. :) ))

Posted by Doyce at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft is coming out November 13th - a bit less than 2 months. With it comes another 10 levels added to the level cap, and something like 10 new zones and stuff to do. Siege warfare, with big weapons. Et cetera.

Hot on its heels, Lord of the Rings Online is releasing it's first expansion, The Mines of Moria, on november 18th. That expansion also adds 10 levels to the level-cap, a ton of new areas to explore, and a metric ton of new content for the 'other' heroes of Middle-Earth -- things that, per usual, surround the events of the second 'book' of the Fellowship of the Ring, without directly focusing that.

So. Two Months left before the current content in both games becomes... well, not obsolete, but merely a bump in the road that leads to the new end-game.

Two months to tie up some loose ends. What loose ends? Well, let's look at a list or two:

WoW

• Titles for your character in WoW (unlike most games) are INCREDIBLY rare and hard to come by. Grezzk needs to run two more "hardcore-difficulty" dungeons and defeat one of the easier 25-man raid bosses to become a "Champion of the Naruu". I would dearly, dearly like to do that.
  
• Grezzk is also capable of improving his reputation with the "Netherwing Dragons" faction to the point where one of the Dragons actually volunteers to be his mount. This is an entirely soloable effort, and simply requires that I put in the time necessary to do the daily Netherwing quests for a couple weeks... and then I'd have a FLYING DRAGON to ride around on.
  
• I'd really like to get enough gold together to get the maxed-out riding skill for Syncerus, which would then let me start/finish the questline that would give him the 'epic' druid flight-form. This requires more than a little grinding of daily quests -- about the same amount as what I need to do on Grezzk to get the dragon. With that said, there's no reason I can't do this particular goal AFTER Wrath comes out.
  
• There's no gear or anything I really need for either of my main characters -- Grezzk is pretty much geared to the nines until he's close to level 80, and Syn's stuff will be replaced relatively quickly by questing in the new zones.
  

LotRO

• Finish the Books. There are epic questlines in LotRO called 'books.' Basically, these are the story arcs in the game that specifically hover around the storyline of the actually Fellowship of the Ring story, either directly or obliquely... regardless, they bring you in contact with the main characters of the books a lot. There were eight "Book" story arcs in the basic LotRO release (with books 7 and 8 pretty much aimed at level 50 characters), and since then they have released... six more Books, all designed for level 50 characters. Kate and I have finished books 1 to 8 on our main characters, and we want to finish the other six books before the expansion comes out. If we I don't manage to do anything else before Mines of Moria comes out, I'll be quite happy.
  
• Kill that Balrog. I've written about him before. We're close to figuring out how to beat him, and I'd like to do that before the level cap rises and he's not as much of a challenge.
  
• Again, I don't really have any gear I feel I must have before the expansion comes out. What I have now is working for me really well, and will no doubt be replaced as we venture ever closer to Mordor.
  
• Just for Kate, I'll add that we need to get her character's reputation with one of the factions up high enough for her to actually make use of a very nice item that she accidentally bought LONG before she has high enough rep to USE it.
  
• I'd like to get one more character to 50 before MoM comes out. I don't know if that will happen, but I think it will for Kate, especially if she works on Tirathien while I'm doing my dailies in WoW.
  

Finally, I'll note that I really only have about a month and a half to do this, not two months, because NaNoWriMo starts November 1st, and MIGHT cut into my play time a bit...

Posted by Doyce at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, while I was out of town, the WoW guild my main character was a part of disbanded.

Said guild was the one true Horde 'end game' raiding guild on Farstriders - a 'low-pop' server that I transferred to a year ago when it was first brought online. It was a very successful guild for the player base -- in the time I've been with them we've fought and defeated some stuff in the game that I NEVER thought I would see before the next expansion came out. I can't say I was really friends with any of the guys in the guild, but I respected the leadership -- they were good guys.

And now, just before the expansion comes out and everyone starts their big push to the new level cap and into the new content... I'm at loose ends again. This makes GoH the third guild that's disbanded while I was afk.

I moved my second-alt to another server about a month ago -- due to other stuff going on in my life, I haven't spent a ton of time with those guys, but they seem pretty cool, and Cenarion Circle is a pretty high-population server with a robust player base... maybe I'll go there.

Then again, they just made it possible to transfer your characters from PvE to PvP realms, so I *could* move Grezzk to the PvP server that I know people on... or the one that Lee has some active characters on...

I'm definitely going to move servers, I think. I know that much. I just dunno where. I'd really like to get into a group that will have a good time leveling up and 'learning' the new expansion.

I'll try to leave my guild-killing-karma on Farstriders. :P

Posted by Doyce at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tanking classes (if they're build to be good tanks in NON-pvp) suck in PvP situations. They don't do enough damage to take guys down, and all their cool tanking abilities don't do squat.

In PvE: You can taunt a bad guy, forcing it to attack you, so that other people in your group can do their job while you soak all the big nasty hits.

In PvP: Your taunts have zero effect, and any opponent with half a brain will attack the wimpy little mage that does BIG damage first, then come back and whittle through your health at their leisure.

((Note: you can reconfigure a tanking class to do very good damage... at which point their ability to tank starts to suffer.))

Warhammer has come up with an elegant solution that's vaguely like DnD 4th edition: in PvP, if you taunt an opponent, they can still attack whoever they want, but *if* they attack someone else, they do less damage and their chance of missing is higher. This gives your opponent a choice: take out the tank to get rid of the penalty, or try to take out the squishy mage anyway... even with the penalty, knowing you'll miss more and won't hit as hard?

Either way, you as the tank are still doing your job -- protecting the group.

I think it's a genius way of handling it, and I really hope that this kind of idea finds its way into games like LotRO, WoW, and CoH.

Posted by Doyce at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I played CoH for a couple years. I think it's fair to say I played the game a stunningly unhealthy amount quite a bit, but I did hit a point with every character when I became less interested in logging them in and more interested in playing some other character. It is perhaps not a coincidence that that point of disinterest came not-so-long after the character hit the level cap.

That's not a fault of the characters -- they were (and no doubt are, if I ever renewed the subscription) still a lot of fun to play, but there was nothing new or interesting to do -- no real sense of "okay, you are now among Earth's Mightiest Heroes (tm), now you're ready for the important stuff." It was much more like "well, you've beat everything the villains of this world can throw at you. Time to retire."

Which is basically what I did. Honestly? The only characters from CoH that I wish I could go back and play some more are Pummelcite and Mister Brightside... because I didn't "finish" them. More than any other MMO I've played, CoH has an end-state more than it has an end-game.

((And please don't get me wrong - I think it's a great game, but it is possible to be 'done' with it, or at least with a character. As evidence, I present the Consortium; they still play the game regularly, but their exploits are (near as I can tell) entirely involved in leveling up new guys; there's simply no reason for them to log in Amorpha or Psi-clone or even their more recent 50s.))

Anyway. Moving on.

When I started playing World of Warcraft, I was in a different mental place than I had been when I started CoH, and I was a lot more careful of how much time I spent playing (though perhaps no more careful about how much time I spent thinking about it); although leveling is much easier in WoW than CoH, it was about 9 months before I hit the level cap with my first character (Grezzk). My total /played time on him was a whopping 23 days worth of online time, when the average amount of time to hit the level cap now is closer to half that time.

The difference between WoW and CoH is that, since then, I've more than doubled my /played time on Grezzk. That is to say that I've spent more time playing Grez AT 70 than I spent getting Grezzk TO 70. And it's fair to say that I'm nowhere near 'done' with everything I could do with him in the end-game of WoW as it exists today (though perhaps I'm done with everything I can do on the server I'm on). I'm getting close, but I'm not done. (And an expansion is coming out in a few months to give me even more to do.)

I had thought that maybe WoW had the corner on this end-game thing. I enjoyed playing Lord of the Rings Online with Kate, but I was struggling with the leveling grind in the mid-40s.

Then we hit 50.

I've been on LotRO for a least a couple minutes (almost) every day since then, I think. There are 7 "epic" storylines to get through, and a bunch of dungeons to explore...

And then there's the Rift (a 12-player dungeon -- a mine in Angmar where they accidentally (or not) unearthed a Balrog that was supposed to stay chained up til the end of days). And this "Rift" thing? If I wanted to do that, there was some gear I needed*, and some old quests to finish up...

In short, there was an End-game. We could finally play with the Big Kids. We were, indeed, among (middle-)earth's mightiest heroes, and ready for the Greatest Challenges, and we've really been enjoying how the game has changed; an already rich and rewarding world opened up and said "You thought raiding Fornost was cool? You thought fighting one of the Nine in the Misty Mountains was epic? Take. A. Look. At. This."

And look, we have. By my calculations, it took us about 12 days worth of /played time (spread out over more than a year) to get to level 50. That was two weeks ago, and in only that time, we've already spent about a sixth as much time just playing the end-game... advancing the Epic Storyline... figuring out how we're going to Beat that Balrog. **

Frankly (and in stark contrast to CoH), I don't have TIME to level an alt.

And in a few months, an expansion comes out to coincide with the Fellowship traveling out of Rivendell and heading (unknowingly) into the Mines of Moria.

I can't wait.

(* - actually, it turns out my gear was just fine.)

(** - Funny story about the Rift. Our Kinship has been working on defeating the Rift for awhile now -- they schedule a run every couple weekends. Kate and I signed up the first weekend after we turned 50, since it looked like they were short on players and, since they were short on players, we were brought along... expectations for our performance were not, I think, very high. Since then, we've gone back a second time. We've gotten farther as a Kinship than we ever have, and faster than we ever have. Our vets attribute a lot of this to us (me and Kate). Kate and I informed the Kin that we couldn't be online this weekend or the next... and they called off the Rift runs until we get back. It's gratifying to feel wanted.)

Posted by Doyce at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's Tiranor and Geiri, deep in the frozen lands of Forochel, about 30 seconds before we both hit level 50 (the current level-cap in Lord of the Rings online).

I don't know if there's a way to see the total amount of time /played on a character from within Lord of the Rings, but I don't think it was a whole heck of a lot; it's been a long time since we started playing them, but our play time has been VERY off-and-on since we started, and almost every serious bout of playing resulted in a flurry of leveling and advancing. To illustrate the ease of progression, Kate is now playing a solo minstrel and TEARING through content that took us several months to get through, since we simply weren't playing as often.

So what's next? Well, once you hit 50, there are a number (and that number is about six) of Legendary quests for each character class, so we each have our work cut out for us to go from a 'baby' 50 to a 'real' 50.

Also, there are fourteen 'books' of epic story in LotRO, and we're currently on... Book Seven? Books 8 through 14 are all geared for level 50s, so we have a LOT to do and experience there before the Mines of Moria expansion comes out later this year.

... and I need to improve my crafting of Rings of Power! useful trinkets and magical jewelry. Diamonds and Beryls and Ancient Silver, oh my...

And I have some fishing to do... what?

And... yeah, I've got two (if not three) other characters I'd like to level up. Tyelaf my hunter (and the first actual character I made), my Captain, Finnras... and man I tell you what... Kate's Minstrel sure looks cool...

She needs some help leveling, though... that girl has to "retreat" a LOT.

Posted by Doyce at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have this annoying little thing I do whenever anyone is telling me about some kind of personality conflict going on in the world.

Doesn't matter if it's Margie talking about stuff at work, Kate relaying the woes of multiple-sisterhood, Dave on the latest Episcopalian Brouhaha (a pairing of words so common I feel like it should get a trademark stamp), or Stan relaying the latest in politics --

I nod my head sagely and say: "Yeah... guild drama is the worst."

Because, let's face it; humanity thrives on interaction, and we're all flawed in various ways, and the internet exacerbates those flaws -- so as often as you're likely to come into conflict when face to face, the chances quintuple as soon as the internet is added to the mix.

And what are MMO guilds? Big social constructs whose main product is an increase in Interneteraction.

Result? You will see interpersonal drama fifty times more online than in all other social gatherings, combined, and with that kind of weighting and repetition, it isn't long before every OTHER kind of drama starts to look like something you've already seen online.

I spend a fair amount of time online. I've witnessed (and caused) my share of drama, going back as far as... 1991, when a friend and I nearly came to blows over some argument in a text based Star Wars mmo... and as recently as... well, last night.

I don't like drama. I especially don't like the effect it sometimes has on me, which is frustration that puts the Enter key on my keyboard at serious risk of mechanical failure.

So here's the deal - I'm in a guild now that I don't feel a lot of connection to. Decent enough people, but I just don't feel like I know any of them. I already talked about this:

I’m acquainted with these guys, like people at my job, and they’re cool, but they aren’t my friends; not the way that Dismember or Yodi or Izmut were — or Mal or Sam or 76 were — or even Crystal and Staer.

Added to that was this thing where the guild had posted a need for some healing druids. I leveled a druid up, practiced healing, got geared up at no small expense (in-game) solely to myself, and told them "Okay... I'm ready! Put me in Coach", and got back the empty sound of Nothing in return.

Right. No personal connection in what is an ostensibly SOCIAL passtime, and a lot of effort going to waste? Time to look for better options.

I'm on a smaller server, though, so I knew I'd have to look to other servers to find another option. In my poking around, I found a guild that not only seemed like a lot of fun, but which actually had a couple of my old friends in it -- including the one guy I've really gotten along with this whole time.

And I posted to their forums, and the responses from the other guys in his guild were... well, it just clicked. I started making arrangements.

Last night, we have a raid going on, and beforehand I go to the head guy and tell him "damn, you just don't seem interested in using this guy I've worked on. What's up?"

There followed a conversation about the guild's concern about me bringing my 'alt' and getting gear that someone's 'main' might need. I assured him that I had no intention of asking for any gear beyond what would otherwise go completely unused -- I just wanted to help the group out. Whatever.

((And honestly? I'm really not that worried about it at this point, because I'm thinking "I'm probably going to at LEAST transfer Syn to another server, if not both characters." I just wanted to voice my thoughts.))

He said we'd talk later, and we got the group going, and not long after that, I get a /tell that says "Get Syn on, you're healing this.")

To quote Matt: "WTF, over?"

So I healed my first big raid (Serpent Shrine Cavern, facing the Lurker Below and Leotheras the Blind). It was fun. I learned alot (and the healing-boss-person said I was "Doing GREAT", so that's cool).

And on the last boss, two identical items dropped that I could use.

And someone in the group says "I'll take one, in case I respec to healing." (He is currently specced for damage.)

And there's silence. One main said something, but there are two of these things.

So I say "Well, I'm in for one of em, if no one else needs em, for this guy." Who is, as has been stated, an Alt character, and thus pretty much the crappy muck surrounding the bottom of the totem pole.

And just as I'm typing that out and hitting Enter, someone else says "I'll take one too, in case I respec to healing."

Ahh. Oh well. C'est la WoW. Right?

And someone quickly says in Ventrillo "You can't get those if a Main needs em, Grez!"

Hmm. Bit over-emotional in the tone, there, but okay. Easy to diffuse.

"Yeah," I say, "it's totally f--"

"Why not?" someone asks.

"Guys," I say, "I just came to play, it's totally -"

"It in the loot rules."

"Well, that's kinda dumb, he healed it, didn't he? Those are healer items."

"It's in the --"

"GUYS," I say, "Seriously. I didn't see the second person before I typed it. My bad. Don't worry abo--"

Guild Boss Guy: "We're going to give the second drop to Grezzk."

Oh. Shit.

Right. The best kind of game drama. Loot drama. (And don't shake your heads at this online foolishness, tabletop players -- the same damn thing happens in tabletops all the damn time, even in games without gear.)

So now I'm in a pickle, kids.

1. I was all 'even steven' with the guild until last night -- my time invested in raids perfectly 'paid' for the loot I'd gotten (you can go in the hole for items that drop and sort of pay it back later, though it would take some guys like... five months to do so). Now, I am not.

2. No one was 'using' Syn in raids. Now they are.

3. I got the gear, and I quote, "Because Syn getting it will be the best benefit to the guild in the long term."

... so... how the hell do I transfer to another server NOW?

Unfortunately, while the raid was nice and all, I'm still stuck with this:

4. I don't know anyone in the guild, really, or feel like there's any sort of connection.

And that #4 is a problem. It's a social game, chilluns; that's why I *play*.

(A Side Note: is the concept of an "alt" vs. a "main" really... viable? I have two similarly-geared characters with completely different abilities, and I'm willing to bring either of them in, as needed. Am I, the player, not the character, the real asset to the group? Yes, obviously that is the case, if for NO OTHER REASON than the fact that the character's can't play themselves. Why not assign loot to the PLAYER who has the most 'points' to 'buy' the drop, and leave it at that?)

Posted by Doyce at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

* No, no tabletop gaming thoughts at the moment. I'd have to be doing some of that to have any. (Or, if not, I'd be having a lot of Lonely Fun thinking about games I'd like to run but can't. Thanks, but no: been there, done that.) Downsides there may be, but an MMO is (almost) always available for a game at the same time you are.

* There are... nine end-game 'dungeons' in WoW, two of which have been added since the expansion came out. My guild is working on the 7th. We'd like to hit the 8th before the new expansion comes out. Not likely.

* On the last two boss fights, I hit Sunwell (final dungeon)-level single-target DPS with Grezzk. Support for me swapping my 'main' from Grezzk to my barely-geared healing druid is... fading.

* You don't get to know people in 25 man raids. To really get to know them, you need to run (and re-run) five-person and 10-person runs with folks -- where you are the only person doing your job, and they are the only person doing THEIR job... it's more personal. I've never gotten a chance to really run the smaller dungeons with my guild, having joined after my last guild melted, and it changes the dynamics of the game - I'm acquainted with these guys, like people at my job, and they're cool, but they aren't my friends; not the way that Dismember or Yodi or Izmut were -- or Mal or Sam or 76 were -- or even Crystal and Staer.

* I'm looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King (Rash of the Itch King) coming out, because we'll all be leveling together and back to running 5 and 10-person dungeons again. I might get a chance to actually get to know the guys in my guild.

* Hopefully, I'll still like em when I do.

Posted by Doyce at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I've been to Karazhan... umm... a bunch. A buncha bunch. However, that was:

a) On Grezzk. (Ranged damage)
b) With a different guild.

Now I'm going with my *new* guy, Syncerus, with an entirely different group of people, and it's kind of all new to me -- totally different set of challenges, because I'm (one of) the healer(s), rather than a tank or damage-dealer.

So I'm back to sort of analyzing performance and such, and it's interesting to me, so you poor bastards get to read about it, too.

What's Karazhan?
It's a 10-person 'raid' dungeon. (For the CoH-centric, think taskforce, but all in one very large instanced mission with static (and very atmospheric) entrance location.) There are... 10 bosses (and one boss-like 'event') in the instance, and a LOT of 'trash mob' pulls to do between them. The whole thing takes about 4 hours to clear if you have what it takes to clear it, but that time can expand a lot or even decrease quite a bit, depending on the group.

It is, easily, my favorite group activity to do in the game. I love the atmosphere, the story, the instance itself, and the boss fights. Haunted castles are just goddamn cool.

Y'all know how I was ALWAYS down to do that one timed event out in Eden? What the hell was that called? The thing with the big Crystal Giant thing? The Eden Trial? GOD I loved that thing. (Crying shame I never got to do that on Pummelcite.)

Karazhan is my WoW "Eden Trial."

So... how'd the second run go?
Really well. I didn't get pimped out like I did last time, but I contributed a lot more.

Were the groups the same as last time?
Not at all.

Last time, we had one tank, four healers (as the most undergeared guy, I alternately healed or did damage, as the situation warranted), and five ranged damage dealers. No melee guys at all, besides the tank. VERY strange group.

(A typical group is 2 tanks (from 3 possible tanking classes), 2-3 healers (from four possible healing classes), and a mix of ranged and melee DPS (of which there are way too many options to count).)

This time, we had a somewhat more normal group: 2 tanks (though both were the same class, which is fairly unusual and not always desirable), 2 healers (usually, you see three unless both of the two are over-geared; we weren't), and six DPS ranging from totally overgeared to secondary- or tertiary alts of main characters. I was one of the two healers, and my gear was roughly comparable to the other healers. My class excels at covering damage on the tanks, while his is fantastic at dealing with group-wide damage from AoEs and such -- a pretty complimentary pairing, all in all.

We didn't have a way to keep the tanks from getting feared, however, and we would MISS that ability in the long run.

How did you do, overall?

Once in a while, someone will compare healing a big group to playing whack-a-mole -- you see damage hit someone, and you smack it with your healing spell. Maybe that's accurate for your first few raids - before you figure out much, you might have no idea who was going to take damage next. This is probably why you see so many newbie healing reports showing an abundance of emergency healing (high mana cost for fast, big spells); the healers just aren’t experienced enough to not play a reactive game. But good healers know their fights and know their raid-mates well enough to start a cast before damage happens.

I went into the run with that in mind, trying to school myself to see beyond what was happening and start looking ahead to see what was going to happen. I'm not particularly good at this, because most of my 'healing practice' to this point has been in PvP battlegrounds, where most of the damage IS largely unpredictable... but I really feel like I was getting the hang of this during the run.

So how about Boss by Boss

Okay, sure...

((I was going to lay this out in a table, but I realized that I don't really remember how to do that in anything but a Wiki anymore. Ahh well.))

What happened last time: I was melee dps, and I didn't do very well at all.

What happened this time: This was the first boss and only about the fourth fight with this group, so things were a little bumpy, but we beat him handily. The hunter in the group (who plays a healing priest as her main) got a nice crossbow that I never saw once, playing Grezzk.

What happened last time: I was melee dps, and I didn't do very well. Moroes garrotted me in the middle of the fight, and I died from the 'ticking' bleed damage before the fight ended.

What happened this time: I think I died once while we were clearing out the trash mobs before the main fight -- it rather stunned the tanks -- but the fight went well. Moroes vanishes periodically throughout the fight, reappears beside a random member of the group, garrotes them, then runs back over to the tank. The 'garrote' is a constant bleeding effect that will kill the character quickly if not seen too, so on top of healing the two tanks (he keeps blinding one of them, so you need two), you have to keep heals going on an ever-growing number of garroted team mates (often, you're one of them).

Oh, and he has four friends you have to either kill or crowd control while you're beating on him, so group-wide damage is happening a lot.

No one died (except me, from bleeding, seconds from the end of the fight). I was happy. Also, he dropped a really nice item for tanking, and no one else wanted it, so it took it for my 'tank set' of gear, for times when I need to respec. My tanking set is now reasonably strong.

What happened last time: I was melee for this fight, and actually did pretty well.

What happened this time: This fight was annoying. One of the two paladin tanks was on 'heal the healers' duty for this fight, cuz Maiden likes to smack the hell out of the healers, and... well, I don't know what they were doing, but it wasn't healing me. I died quickly and watched most of the fight from the floor. She dropped a very nice healing item, though, which I got, so it was hard to complain.

What happened last time: I chased the big bad wolf around and clawed at his backside.

What happened this time: I healed the tank and whoever the wolf was chasing. (Every 30 seconds, he turns someone into a little gnome girl with a red cloak and chases 'her' around the room. Healing them is a bit of a challenge, as they're running around and behind stage sets and breaking my line of sight. One guy died, but in my defense, he always dies. One of the tanks died, but I rezzed him mid fight (a druid-only ability).

I got Little Red Riding Hood's cloak, which is quite a decent healing cloak for healer/spellcaster, and actually toughens me up a bit into the bargain.

What happened last time: We died repeatedly, even with four healers on the tank, and finally decided to give up and come back and kick his ass later. He's probably the toughest fight in the whole run.

What happened this time: We died repeatedly, even with two tanks, mostly because he fear-bombs the groups and we didn't have any way to keep our tanks from running all over like chicken little and getting dragon-chomped in their unprotected back. We decided to come back later and try again.

What happened last time: After a really frustrating nightbane fight, I respecced out of melee and into a Healing & Ranged Spellcaster build. During this fight I did both.

What happened this time: This is a damage- and healing-race. We had lots of DPS, and two healers. No one died, and the curator dropped in record time.

The Curator marks the end of the 'first half' of Karazhan. It is generally accepted wisdom that everything after Curator is a serious upshift in difficulty from what has come before. (With the exception of Nightbane, whom you can fight earlier, but really aren't *meant* to until later.)

What happened last time: I was healing for this fight, but my health was so low that when Illhoof summoned me into the "sacrifice circle", my teammates couldn't heal/free me before I died.

What happened this time: Obviously, I was healing, and I was really nervous about being sacrificed, because last time there were THREE other healers and they couldn't keep me up until the damage-dealers could free me... this time, there was only one healer besides me. What I didn't count on was the simple fact that I'm tougher now than last time, and the dps was more on the ball. No deaths. We annihilated him.

What happened last time: Aran has no aggro table, so he can't be tanked: he does AoEs and randomly targets people and hammers them with spells. The first time he did that to me, I died. I just didn't have the health to take the punishment, even with four healers.

What happened this time: He targeted me for a personal beat-down not once, but twice. Thanks to my own increased toughness and come anticipatory healing on my part, neither one killed me. I also combat-rezzed our biggest damage dealer when he dropped in the middle of the fight.

What happened last time: I was an off-healer and, when called upon, switched into bear form and TANKED Netherspite.

What happened this time: We wiped very quickly on this one due to an inexpert pull by the lead tank -- I just couldn't stand where I was in range of everyone for heals. On the second try, we took him down with only Mister Big Damage But Dies A Lot going down, two seconds from the end of the fight.

What happened last time: We won.
What happened this time: We won. The Chess event isn't exactly... hard.

What happened last time: I think we had to beat on him at least once before we won.

What happened this time: Took him out in one shot. I didn't think about it at the time, but that may be the very first time I've EVER been involved in a one-shot of Prince... there are a lot of random elements in that fight that usually screw you at least once before it all goes your way. Not this time.

What happened last time: We got a priest into the group, so they could fearward the tank.

What happened this time: We got the player of the hunter to log on their main character -- a priest -- so they could fearward the tank (stupid gimmicky fight). We took him out in one easy attempt. Of course, with that player on the wrong character, Nightbane dropped nothing but hunter gear. :P

All in All
I had been looking forward to this run all week, because I knew I was going to be one of the main healers for the first time EVER in a proper raid, and I really wanted to see if I could do it. I think my performance was strong; I got two very much needed gear upgrades, kudos from the other healer, and a lot of surprise and disbelief when I told the group after we were done that I'd only done Kara once before on Syncerus and had NEVER been a main healer for it. My guild leader was on the run and commented that he would never have guessed I was a total healing-noob. "Really great job for your first run. Well done."

/preen

I need to replace my pauldrons for sure (one more Kara run and I can) and possibly my gauntlets (entirely up to chance), but as soon as I do I'm going to tell the guild leader I'd like to bring Syncerus to the next big-boy, 25-man raid instead of Grezzk. I believe he now knows I'm up to it.

Posted by Doyce at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I know I just did a photo spread on Syncerus, but his gear situation changed for him rather abruptly last night, so... updates.

See, the guild got done with the 25-man raid-du-jour early, and folks wanted to do something else. A couple of the higher-end guys, (myself, one of the lead tanks and the Guild Leader included), have some fairly fresh-minted 70s we'd like to get geared up a bit, and basically that means "let's go run Karazhan", which is the first of the end-game 10-man dungeons.

The nice thing about Kara is that folks are really pretty familiar with it by now, and very little has to be explained before any big fight. Also, unlike the non-hardcore-mode five-man dungeons, there's still a really good reason for even the most HEAVILY-geared guys in the guild to want to come to Kara*, so it's actually REALLY easy for use to get enough people to do the run, and if you're just getting up to the point where you can do Kara, having a few heavy hitters with you is kinda nice.

(* - Each boss in Kara gives you a couple 'badges of justice' that can be used to acquire really good loot, even if you're heavily geared. There are 11 bosses in Kara, which means 22 badges in a few hours of play, which is easily just about the best effort-to-payoff ratio in the game.)

So, we'd started the Kara run the night before, and everyone wanted to finish; people started to assemble, and we had the craziest group: usually, we have two tanks, 3 healers (two if they're both heavily geared), and a mix of ranged and melee damage-dealers.

What did we get?

1 tank (the guild leader), four healers (one of which was me, and the other three HEAVILY over-geared), and five ranged DPS. No melee guys at all, other than the tank. So weird.

Since the healers in the group totally had healing covered, I just sat back and blasted away with my offensive spells (nature's wrath, insect swarm, moonfire, starfire, et cetera) and emergency healed when needed. My performance dps-wise was much better than when I came in the night before as a cat -- I'm USED to doing this as a ranged damage dealer -- melee was just a pain for me.

So. 11 bosses. Each one potentially dropping some gear I can use.

How much gear did I get?

14 pieces. No one else in the group really needed anything at all -- they were just there for the badges -- and the other two guys who actually needed gear were playing a paladin (platemail, please) and a warlock (cloth-only), so none of the stuff I wanted was anything they could use.

Four.teen. I got seven pieces that directly and instantly improved both my healing and spell damage by about 50%, and the other seven helped fill out (dare I say 'complete') almost all of my tankingbear- and cat-form sets.

And they look badass.

Here we have, as a review, Syn as he appeared when he was doing anything but healing/casting. Decent gear, but it looks bloody awful. The only consolation here is that, since this was the gear I used for either tanking as a bear or soloing my quests as a cat, I was always in either Dire bear or Cat form, and never saw it.

That was then, this is now.

Gone is the clown-like, mismatched armor. I'm sporting Heavy Clefthide chestpiece, leggings, and 'boots', plus some nice new gloves and shoulders (that for some reason aren't displayed in this shot).

With the exception of that crazy (but good) "I'm Batman" staff, he looks just like how I think a Tank should look: very little adornment - just heavy armor and a 'lets get to work' attitude. I really like it, and for all that I'm currently focusing on playing as a Healer/spellcaster, I do hope that I get a chance to do some tanking as well.

The catform set of equipment has significantly different stats than the tanking gear: forget about extra health, extra dodge, extra armor - focus on "I want to kill you in the face..." (or the back, I'm not choosy).

Obviously, the *attitude* of the gear is totally different also. Straps all over, lots of sharp points -- the damned EYES GLOW RED in the headgear -- the whole thing just screams "dangerous".

I love it -- almost makes me want to respec back to Feral damage-dealing to REALLY try it out, but as it stands, it'll be gathering a little dust in the vault while I work on healing -- it's too expensive right now to respec back and forth between the two. Doing the Cat & Bear thing is *fantastic* for soloing and doing daily quests, but I'll be honest and say that I'm not really good at playing melee dps in a raid. Tanking, yes, but melee damage? No. I don't know how the rogues do it.

I won't show the healer-gear set again, because although I got like 7 new pieces, it's all stuff that's concealed under the robe, so nothing looks different, until you look at new totals in my healing and mana regen and stuff like that... where there were HUGE boosts. Huge. At one point, I mentioned what my numbers had gotten up to, and the general consensus was that they weren't just "good numbers for a new guy", but just plain "good numbers."

Finally, the story.

We're getting close to the end of the night, and we've made it up to Netherspite, a sort of ethereal dragon.

Netherspite is an interesting fight that goes back and forth between two Phases.

In phase 1, one guy in the raid stands in a specific place, and whoever is standing there WILL BE the guy that the dragon attacks. Period. (There's also a spot one person can stand in to do massive healing, and another where you can do massive damage.)

In phase two, which is fairly short, Netherspite sort of just attacks anyone - totally random. As long as he doesn't go after you twice (which is just bad luck), you can surive that -- then you're back to phase 1.

But there's a catch. Whoever stood in those three magic spots in the LAST phase 1 cannot stand in the same spot in the NEXT phase 1. (And someone HAS to stand there and soak them up, or they buff the dragon and he kills you really dead.)

So you have to have two guys for each spot, and they take turns during each "Phase 1" being the guy who has to stand in the Spot.

So... there's this Tanking Spot, right? We need two guys for the tanking spot.

We have one tank.

The conversation went something like this:

"So... we need another tank."
"Right."
"Syn, did you bring your tanking gear?"
"Umm... no. It's not up to par for Kara, so I left it in the bank. All I have is my healing gear. For tanking, it's... not... good."
"Okay. Right. Doomas, You're going to be the second tank."
"What? I'm healing specced."
"Yeah, but you're a paladin. You have platemail. You have a shield. You can tank him."
"It's a bonus-to-healing shield! It's probably just paper mache with some LEDs in it to make it glow!"
"Nevertheless..."
"*sigh* alright, but I don't know how to do the tanking here."
"I'll explain."

And he did, and we started.

But... on that stand-in tank's second turn, he died. Right. I dunno what happened -- my job was to take my turn in the Super Healing Spot and, when not there, blast the hell out of the dragon, and when he went down, I was blasting away and trying not to die.

The next Phase 1 came around, and the Real Tank says:

"Okay guys, burn him down! We don't have another tank for the next Phase one!"

And we tried. We really really tried, but he just wasn't quite ready to drop.

So we go into the crazy-running-around-don't-die Phase Two, and the Real Tank says:

"We need another tank for this phase! I can't do it twice in a row. Someone step up!"

Right.

So I turn round, shift into bear form (which (at least) significantly bumps up my health and the protection bonus I get from my OH SO NOT A TANK healing gear, hit my Feral charge to get to the Tanking Spot and start hammering away with (few, oh so few) default Tanking Abilities that I have when I'm not specced for it.

I. Am tanking. Netherspite. I did NOT get the briefing on the little 'step in, step out' thing you have to do on the Tanking Spot to keep from getting squashed (though I'd seen it done many times on Grezzk), and I was NOT mentally prepared for that duty.

And I'm in healer gear.

But dammit, we needed a tank, and if there's something Druids do well, it's fill lots of different roles...

This is where everyone was really glad that we ended up bringing three overgeared healers. I liiiiiiiiiiived!

(And then I ran like a little pussy (cat) for the back wall during Phase 2 and healed myself like crazy.)

Netherspite died on the next Phase 1. There was much cheering.

All the gear upgrades were nice, yes. But that fight?

That is what I'm going to remember about Syn's first run in the haunted keep of Karazhan.

Posted by Doyce at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 by Doyce at 10:33 AM | Permalink | 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 by Doyce at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Haven't done one of these in awhile, mostly because I'd been updating WoW and LotRO play stuff using Twitter. However, Twitter's API went completely kerflooey a month ago or so, which means that, since Twitter never updates in my feedreader anymore, I rarely think about it, and thus, never update it.

So, until I come up with another, better way to just give MMO character updates on the fly, here's everything going on with anything that could be considered gaming.

MMO: WoW

Grezzk
I mostly just log Grez on for raiding and running a few 'daily' (repeatable each day) quests for cash. My guild has finished off Vashj, and is the only Hordeside guild to have done so on my server (Farstriders). We're currently working on Kaelthas, the Blood elf 'prince', who is the other boss at the same Tier of difficulty as Vashj, and I'd expect he'll go down in the next week or so... this will ALSO be a boss kill that no one on the Horde side of our server has completed.

Grezzk is pretty well geared at this point, because I've been working on such things and I'm considered a 'contributing' member of the raid, but one recent 'gear ding' made me very happy: I just got the second piece of a four-piece 'set' of items available only to raiders hitting the high level of content that we are. (In wow-speak: The Tier Five two-piece set bonus for hunters.) Getting two pieces of that 'set' gives me a really awesome bonus ability: every time I hit something, I heal my pet for 15% of whatever my damage was.

Just... ponder that for a second. If you don't do wow, work it out for whatever game you DO play, where you have a pet. You're on CoH? Okay... you hit a bad guy for 100 points and your Jack Frost heals 15 points.

As an added bonus, the threat generated by that heal doesn't count toward me -- it counts as the pet healing itself, so it actually helps the pet hold aggro and tank for me when I'm soloing, which is AWESOME - I do so much damage now that it's really hard for my pet to really tank anything for more than a few seconds before my damage output convinces the target that I'm the (far) more serious threat.

Syncerus
Druids in WoW are a bit like Kheldians in CoH, only much, much better. Depending on the way I spec, I can play him as a Tank + backup Melee damage-dealer, a viable main healer, or a ranged damage-dealer (which I already have with Grezzk and have no intention of doing with Syn).

This kind of versatility has been a total joy to level with. I'm specced heavily into Tanking/melee, with a few good low-end abilities out of the healing tree. That, plus effort on my part to have both a good set of tanking gear and a good set of healing gear means that I can solo to my heart's content as an extremely viable 'big cat' form (with stealth, which makes things even more fun), and then join a five-man dungeon run as either the Tank, the Healer (I've actually healed as many runs as I've tanked), or even melee damage.

When I want a break, I just strap on my healing gear and join a PvP battleground and heal like crazy -- it's great practice for when a regular old PvE dungeon fight goes haywire and everyone (including me) starts taking damage... plus I earn a ton of Honor I'll be able to use at level 70 for some huge gear upgrades.

My goal is to get him to 70 as fast as possible (I'm at level 66, and it's taken me approximately half as much time as it took me on Grezzk), respec into full-on healing mode, and join in the Raiding fun with the rest of the guild. Once I hit 70, I think about a few serious runs of some end-game content will get me to the point where I can actually contribute well to even the toughest of the raids we're doing -- I already have about half the gear I need (8 items) to be a viable raid-level healer.

LotRO
Geiri and Tiranor ("Geiranor") have leveled up to 46-of-50 in Lord of the Rings, and we're well and truly into some interesting end-game content.

The progression of the storyline in the game has us to the point where the Fellowship is in Rivendell and is ready to leave on their great journey, but unable to leave because one of the Nine survived the attack at the Fords of Bruinen and is slinking around the Trollshaws and the Misty Mountains, spying on Rivendell. Gandalf surmises (rightly) that if the Fellowship set out while a Nazgul was around to report back to Moria, they'd all be dead inside a week.

So you have to eliminate that threat.

Yeah... we defeated a Nazgul, baby. (As part of a full team, but still.) Big epic fight in an old dwarf ruin in the Misty Mountains. The ground trembled and the walls shook, and when it was all said and done, the bastard went down. Pretty damn cool.

So we've four more levels to go to fifty, and I think something like seven more "books" of epic storyline to play through before Mines of Moria drops sometime later this year.

And we have a few alts we want to level. Kate took some time this week on her minstrel an rocketed up like 4 or 5 levels. It's NOT hard to find a big group willing to help you with your quests when you're a healer, I guess. WHO KNEW.

Tabletop
Why is that we can easily get five people to the table with short notice for a DnD game, but we can't get three together reliably for something like In a Wicked Age on even a monthly basis?

Eh.

4th edition is fun for what it's good at. I'm kind of eliding the roleplaying stuff at this point while we learn the rules a bit more, and that means we're doing a lot of fights, but the fights are fun.

in non-dnd news, Colorado Story Game is doing a gameday up at the Casa this coming weekend. I'll either be running IaWA or The Mountain Witch, probably. I'd like to do more In a Wicked Age with Lee and De and Kate... the In a Wuxia Age with Dave and Margie and Kate... and Spirit of the Century.

Yeah... more Spirit of the Century would be GOOD. I keep thinking that being able to put Aspects on the Scene is the perfect way to reflect the kind of subtle magic you see in the Lord of the Rings books.

Hmm.

Posted by Doyce at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I noticed early on that LotRO's main conceit about their "Health Bar" really really works in DnD 4th with regards to healing.

Lord of the Rings refers to your 'health bar' as Morale -- so it's mostly representative of your will to continue the fight -- the rest of the game works in similar ways -- where death ='s 'retreat' and so forth. This makes 'healers' in Lord of the Rings (which is really quite a low-magic setting) make sense -- they are the minstrels with their uplifting songs (VERY Tolkein), the Captains with the rallying crys and bold words, and even the Lore Masters with their quietly whispered words (or sometimes taking your worries on their own shoulders to ease your burden).

That idea really works in 4th edition DnD, especially when you look at the Healing Surges everyone has (accessible in combat as Second Wind) and the names of the healing-type abilities for the Warlord (Captain), which indicate that they're really just boosting your will to continue the fight.

Mike Mearls was saying in an interview that it changes nothing in the game if a player wants to take all his mage spells and switch them to 'cold' damage instead of, say, fire; it's the kind of customization hacking he expects from players in the game as they make their character their own.

Then I thought: it would be a pretty simple thing indeed to hack the Cleric into a sort of lore-master and/or minstrel (or both, depending on which path you took at creation) simply by changing the names of the powers and changing their "implement" from a holy symbol to either a wizards staff or a musical instrument. Do that, drop Mages and Warlocks from the game (or leave them for the bad guys), and you're pretty much ready to play in Middle Earth in LotRO style.

So, to sum up...

- Drop Dragonborn and Tieflings. Duh.
- Elladrin are the elves of Lothlorien and Rivendell.
- Sylvan elves are the elves of Mirkwood.

- Fighters: unchanged. Depending on build, they are either Champions or Guardians.
- Rogues: rogues are more melee damage dealers than the LotRO Burglars, and their benefit to the group is slightly different, but it's still similar enough. Halfling rogues should favor trickster builds, probably, with the other type being more common with sylvan elves and the like.
- Rangers: virtually no changes.
- Warlord: call em Captains and you're done, though I think a lot of them would be multiclassed.
- Cleric: the 'sit-in-the-back' build (whatever the name) you tweak in Power names and Implements to be Minstrels, and the 'up-in-your-face' build you likewise tweak to be Loremasters.
- Warlocks: probably only bad guys -- infernal types serve Sauron entirely, I'd guess. Fey types work alright with the High elves, and Star-pact warlocks would make an interesting type of Loremaster, maybe.
- Mages: too overt to be anything but bad guys, really.

This would simulate LotRO pretty well, would work for a game setting like Midnight quite well, but still be too much magic for true Tolkein.

If you really wanted to be totally hardcore Tolkein, not LotRO, you remove Clerics and Mages. Healing would fall entirely to the use of Healing Surges and any Captains you had with you. Warlocks stay in the setting in very particular instances. Infernal Warlocks are bad guys, Fey Warlocks are the Elf Lords, and Star Pact Warlocks are Gandalf and Sauruman. (Keep the Ritual List, from which you'd likewise remove things like passwall and the Portal magic, but keep the 'rezzes' for when Frodo gets insta-gibbed a ringwraith on Weathertop. Only the various Warlocks would get such Rituals automatically -- anyone else would need a Feat to learn a few -- Aragorn did so.)

Posted by Doyce at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A staff writer on Massively.com writes a bit about how he really got into Age of Conan, and then stopped playing in favor of Guild Wars.

Now I know that AoC puts much higher graphic demands on your system and that Guild Wars has had years to eliminate the performance bugs that still plague the early days of AoC, but none of that mattered. Playing Guild Wars made something instantly apparent to me. Age of Conan is an enjoyable game with a great deal of potential but after a month of intensive play I'd gotten to the point where it just wasn't worth the consistent and mundane technical hassles involved in playing it. I wasn't angry, I wasn't frustrated, but at that moment in time I'd found something better to do and so I just stopped playing.

This is the problem I'm currently having with Lord of the Rings Online. My poor old desktop is five years old and, while it's pretty much tweaked out as far as the hardware will withstand, it can't get any better, and when I start up Lord of the Rings, the machine's old bones really start to show. Graphics issues. Lock-ups, some of them system-wide. Horrible horrible lag.

In order to combat this problem (which, rather than getting better over time and bug-fixing on LotRO's part, has gotten progressively worse as they add newer content and cooler graphics -- the problems aren't bugs, they're just the way things are), I've had to dial my game settings down to the lowest possible. The gorgeous LotRO panoramic views? I don't see much of them when I have my graphics set to "Low", to avoid lag -- I dial up to "high" to take screenshots, then back to "low" to actually, you know... move. I have a dual monitor system, but one of them is now simply taking up space on my desk, unplugged, because running both at the same time, with LotRO, causes heat problems on my video card, thanks to the strain that the game puts on my card. Don't even get me started about the hiccuping sound during any of the justly-vaunted cinematics within the game.

I love the game, I really do -- I think they're doing a fantastic job on it, and I acknowledge that the problems I'm having are largely due to trying to run the thing on an old, loyal golden retriever of a PC that really needs to be put out of his misery. Hell, Kate's laptop is only a few years old and IT struggles with all the rendering it has to do in a busy town.

But, you see... there's this thing. WoW doesn't cause me any of those problems. I might have a night of lag, due to a server issue, and when that happens I'm glad to be able to do something else, but that's a known server issue, easily fixed, not an inability of my Hardware to run the Software. When it comes down to it, I spent many evenings choosing to play WoW over LotRO this last month (even when LotRO can include Kate) because I knew that when I logged into WoW, the game would RUN.

I appreciate that games traditionally push the envelope of what PCs can accomplish -- more than any other kind of software, GAMES push hardware developers to climb to the next plateau, and that's great.

But if you want to really be a huge success? You need to remember that you can't be so cutting edge that the playerbase spends more time trying to balance on that cutting-knife-edge than they do ACTUALLY PLAYING YOUR GAME.

I mean, it's not just LotRO. I bought Tabula Rasa because the idea of a good Sci-fi MMO excited me -- and couldn't get the game to play, at all. I made it halfway through the tutorial before I gave up.

I have a copy of Age of Conan gathering dust in my office closet because if I deleted everything but the operating system off my PC, I still wouldn't have the harddrive space to INSTALL IT -- forget about whether or not my other system specs would be up to speed.

It doesn't matter if your game is awesome if people can't run it. WoW graphics are comic-book in style (On purpose - comic-book-style imagery has successfully sold for five decades - uncanny valley CGI? Not so much.) and requires what is now low-end hardware to run quite well. That's at least part of the reason they have retained 10 million active subscribers. Ten. Million. No one seems to know what it is they they're doing to enjoy the kind of grade-curve-breaking success, but I'll tell you what they aren't doing -- they aren't pushing the hardware envelope -- that is not, in any way, where they garner their win.

I had a great, really fun time playing Lord of the Rings last night. Kate and I led a group of heroes (total strangers) into the ruins of Fornost, the last, ruined, capitol of the Kingdom of the North, now thick with wights and orcs and wargs and their horrible leaders, bound to life by the morgul blades they wielded. We fought our first Nemesis-level foe, and defeated him only when Kate figured out that we had to light the old Kingdom's signal fires mounted on the rooftop where we faced him, in order to weaken him enough to win.

It was epic.

But you know what I enjoyed the most? It was the second night in a month where my PC hadn't locked up while playing the game.

"Not locking up" shouldn't be the thing I liked the best out of the whole night; that should be assumed.

My one regret of the evening shouldn't have been "the screenshot I took from the top of the tallest towers of Fornost was pretty boring, because I forgot to dial my graphics back up from the setting where I can play to the setting where it looks good."

Posted by Doyce at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The internets are pretty darned quiet today... at least the areas I listen to. This is, I think, almost entirely due to the release of the Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures on Friday -- all those folks who normally blog about WoW stuff are creeping through the jungle, watching the branches above for Stygian assassins. Seriously: I mean it. WoWInsider posts maybe 50 to 70 news items a day, and yesterday a bunch of new information on the upcoming and much-looked-for Expansion was leaked out.. and today, there have been seven posts.

Seven.

It's set up to be a big hit.

* Huge potential fan base. A major fantasy property. A million subscribers in the beta, alone. That would be, as a point of reference, three times more than the best numbers CoH has ever put out for a quarter, and larger just in the BETA than all but the truly huge players in the US and Euro market are doing with their production models right now. Their BETA had twice as many player accounts as LotRO -- a successful game by any measure, representing possibly the most definitive fantasy setting in the world -- does right now.

* Beautiful, evocative, machine-straining gameplay. I've known I've needed to upgrade my desktop machine for a while now -- it's ... (checks Dells site) ... wow... it's over FIVE YEARS old, and although I have tweaked and upgraded and pushed and prodded and squeezed additional performance out of that box until it damn near vibrates with the strain, the very very best I can get out the old horse today is less than the cheapest desktop models Dell is selling today as factory refurbs. Age of Conan knows it -- their bare minimum requirements to run the game are beyond anything I have.

* A combat system that's actually... you know... different.

* A crafting system that you don't have to screw with for 40 levels, if at all.

* Acknowledgment of the growing-older playerbase with an "M" rating that it works HARD to deserve. Bloody, violent, grown-up fun. That alone will put it in the shopping cart of another 500 thousand folks.

I'll be honest -- it's not the only reason I want to replace my home computer, but it's one of em.

Posted by Doyce at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Really, what is an MMO but a mini-vacation? And what should you do on a vacation? You take pictures.

I'll have some screenies from LotRO soon as well, because they are much prettier. WoW is much more comic-book style, but pretty in it's own way... or maybe I'm just a nerd.

This image is from a Karazhan run that, judging from the gear I'm wearing and who I'm grouped with, was probably about 2 or 3 months ago. First, I like this picture because it's kind of a heroic action shot: Grezzk has just released an arrow at Prince Malcheezar, Octan's water elemental is blasting an ice bolt over my head at the target... it's cool.

Second, it's a pretty good shot of my customized user interface in action. I've tweaked the look of the game a lot from the default (thanks to Blizzard making the UI pretty much open-source for developers to mess with at will and release addons for). If you click on the picture above, it links to the Flickr page where I've made a bunch of notes on the elements in the picture, just because I've never done that before, and it was pretty fun to do.

Next...

Whoops. I killed Dr. Boom.

Who's Dr. Boom? Officially, he's a guy you're supposed to kill in this one quest in Netherstorm -- a mad goblin who specializes in making exploding robots or something. The thing is, the guy has like like a million-zillion hit points, so in the quest you get some special bombs that you can chuck at him if you can get close enough -- hit him with like four of them and he goes down. Unofficially, his stupidly high health and the fact that he never aggros on you -- just surrounds himself with bombs -- means that ranged DPS like mages and hunters can use him to test out new shot rotations with a DPS-meter running to see what options do more damage, without worrying about (a) killing your target or (b) dying.

I had cause to use him for that purpose last weekend.

Turns out, you will eventually have to worry about (a).

Posted by Doyce at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You know, the first time I went to Karazhan with Grezzk, I was geared up appropriately, ready to go, and yet... I didn't outperform anyone.

I mean, I did my job, and I didn't screw up (too much: I saved that for my second run), and I filled a role that needed filled and did the damage that needed to be done. But that was it. I wasn't posting chart-topping numbers, I wasn't three-times higher than the next higher damage-class, and I wasn't doing as much damage as all the other teammates put together.

Eventually, I manage all those things in Karazhan and Heroic-level dungeon teams, but not that time. I was the new guy. I was decently geared for entry-level, but that was it.

And that stage... being the new guy with "good-enough" but not actually "good" gear, and not knowing what I was doing and actually gimping my performance simply because I was focusing so hard on just not screwing up? That stage was a LONG, LONG TIME AGO.

Note that I say "was" a long time ago. As of last night, I'm back in that same place again. I'm the guy with "good enough, but not *good*" gear -- the one who needs to learn the fights before he relaxes enough to really open the throttle up -- the one who died about 2/3rds of the way through every boss fight. I did the job I was brought in to do, but it wasn't A+... it was ... maybe a B-, maybe a C. "Shows promise, needs to focus" writes the teacher in my new class -- not nearly as 'easy' as my old class.

A friend from my old guild who convinced me to join him in this new guild told me that he really wanted me to come in and just blow the doors off some of the cockier members of the guild. That didn't happen last night.

But it will.

I like this new pond. It's a lot bigger.

Posted by Doyce at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hmm. I wrote a really really long post that didn't go anywhere. Let's start over.

Playing Grezzk, I've been working on the new event in World of Warcraft -- the introduction of the Shattered Sun Offensive and all the heroic behind the scenes effort (read: repeatable quests) that go into it -- as you complete quests, you and all the other folks doing those quests on the server help the 'progress' of the war effort move along -- over time, you gain a foothold on the island, then expand it, get logistical support, et cetera, et cetera.

I've really enjoyed being part of the Offensive. This can be shown numerically, because the quests themselves pay pretty well and advance your reputation with the Shattered Sun faction -- in the short time since this faction was introduced, I've gone from 500 gold to the almsot 5200 I need to get an epic-speed flying mount and because Exalted with the faction weeks ago... all without trying... just ENJOYING my small part in the war effort. Good stuff.

But I'm kind of done with that. I enjoy my alt characters a lot, but at the same time I like playing GREZZ: I've got more play-time on him AT level 70 than the play time I have on all his other 69 levels combined (a tribute both to the character and to the piles of stuff there is to do in the end game), and there is a lot more stuff to see in the game that I haven't yet -- 'end game' stuff that no one will run come Halloween/Thanksgiving when the new expansion comes out. There are seven 25-man dungeons in the end-game, and I've seen one of them. I'd really like to fix that.

I was in a guild that was gearing up to hit that content really hard, and it melted down. Scholomance Debate Team went from a really quirky family to a truly poisonous environment in a matter of weeks. In Lee's words, "it was like dating a really pretty, smart, sexy girl for six months... and then finding out that she was in a mental institution for the three years just before she met you... and then escaped."

When all the happened, I just didn't have time to deal with it; I wasn't an officer or a class lead, and frankly between Kate moving out here and looking for a new job, I just had more important stuff to think about.

So I moved into a casual guild of people I knew who were thinking about doing a little more raiding then they had been. What they were moving up and in to was stuff I'd already done a bunch, but it was still fun to see it again through new eyes. I wasn't sure it was the right fit for what I wanted, but the GL talked to me about what he wanted to do in the future, and convinced me to stay. That was just before the wedding.

While I was off getting married, the guild leader quit the game during a firestorm of a guild meltdown that I'm pretty glad I missed.

Right. Guildless again. Farstriders is a small server (note: still 5 times higher population than the average CoH server), and there are really only about three guilds who are doing the content I'd like to see, and they're all kind of 'hardcore' raiding guilds; to use an amateur-sports analogy, I was playing with my friends, out in the park, on weekends. These guys are trying to win their division the sponsored league play.

But seriously? It's that or doing a paid transfer to another, much bigger server and looking for a 'responsible, but casual' guild that would take in a stranger.

So I'm basically trying out for one of the local Big Names this week. It's a series of job interviews all over again.

Honestly? I'm pretty excited.

And in the meantime, i get to play Lord of the Rings with Kate, one which we've really picked out our 'mains' and started some serious exploration of the higher-end areas. People want us to get to Rivendell in time to give Aragorn a message! We've seen Angmar! (Well, we snuck into the southernmost passes leading into angmar and saw a really terrifyingly big dragon go by overhead.)

Pretty heady stuff for a steadfast dwarven guardian and his adorable elven hunting companion. (It's my blog, so she's his companion. :)

Posted by Doyce at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

... that's largely because there hasn't been a lot of gaming going on.

Sometime last month, Dave ran a session of Ill Met by Gaslight, and that was good.

A little while before that, I ran a session of In a Wicked Age down at Lee and De's, and that was good too.

I haven't run Spirit of the Century this year... maybe since last November.

I haven't run a session of Galactic since mid-December.

Which would leave me posting mostly about World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings online (which, unlike my local playerbase/social calendar, is always available). I don't really want to do that (though I may have a "WTB: PvE Hordeside Raiding Guild that won't Melt Down" post coming up at some point), so that has left me with not a lot to write at the moment.

In lieu of slew of WoW/LotRO-centric posts, I've installed two twitter feeds into the sidebar to let me natter on, in a constrained fashion, regarding whatever bit of digital-adventure minutia I'm currently obsessing over.

And seriously?

"Skilled Orc Hunter WTB: Hordeside raiding guild that won't melt down. Will transfer servers for new content and good group of players."

Posted by Doyce at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

MP3 sound files of the "level-up ding" from 40 different online games. Coming soon as a ringtone to a phone near you.

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

Not a ton to say, really. Kate might disagree, but it doesn't feel as though a lot's been going on with Gaming-stuff.

* No Galactic or Spirit of the Century. *sad panda*

* I led a Kara raid up through the Opera event on Wednesday. That was fun in a wacky way; more stress, but we had a weird group and ended up doing stuff like taking out Moroes and company with no priests, chain-traps, and a lot of shooting things in the face.

* One of the other Raids on a 'free' night fell through, which left me with nothing to do, so I hopped on Syncerus the Drood and chewed up Strangethorn Vale and Duskwallow Marsh for awhile, dinging both 40 (hellooooo Dire Bear form) and 41.

* I didn't really want to watch the Oscars, so I played during that while Kate watched and filed a bunch of her books on our now-full shelves. This led to FINALLY getting Kayti done with the huge Zul Farrak dungeon for which I've been gathering quests and prepatory gear for... three months? A long time. During the run I dinged 47, and turning in the (eight!) quests afterwards took her all through 47 tp 48. Tanking the run was fun, though the paladin threat generation isn't as easy as I recall (partly due to trigger-happy pug-teammates).

Grezzk's guild is struggling to recreate itself in an active-raiding mold. Consequently, raid schedules are in flux, the officer corp is in flux, the guild charter... you get the picture. Old officers unhappy with the changes are leaving, etc. etc.

Y'know what I'm doing about it? Nothing. I went to the (vent-based) meeting to vote on various changes, and offered my two cents and a reality check or two on some of the rules, but volunteer to be a raid leader? No. Volunteer to be an officer? No.

Thanks. I've done that. I have the t-shirt and the "die in a fire" emails from former guildmates.

I log on. I play. If I'm really lucky, I get in a group with some folks and we have a good time. If not, I still get to blow stuff up and mess with my little characters and play a game.

A second job (unpaid, that is) I do not need.

Posted by Doyce at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

... or, to be fair, a Gaming-widow in general.

I've been giving my Google-calendar a workout for the last couple days, because although I am a gamer of many different colors and stripes, I have traveled down the road of life-imbalance quite a few times since the early 90s (oh, those early MUDs and MUSHes; oh those hours of Space Hulk and Battletech map creation), mid-90s, and far far more recently... and I'd just rather not go back there, thanks.

So: I raid in WoW (though I could wish for a little more progression-status and a little less farm-status -- I did my farming in my youth :P), and I have some alts I really enjoy, and I play LotRO, and a have a copy of Tabula Rasa winging its way to me for a practically criminal discount, and I have table top games I'm running and even more that I want to run, and then there's writing stuff, and reading stuff... the question before me is "how do I get enough time to 'blow stuff up', without ensuring that I have "ALL THE TIME YOU COULD EVER WANT, AND THEN SOME, YOU BASTARD"?

Ahem.

I'm not an expert, but these are the guidelines I'm working with right now.

1. Schedule my time. I don't mean just my play time, but just flat out schedule the Big Stuff that ne