Thursday, April 30, 2009

I Smite Thee...

So, I made it to the champion's part of jousting. I realize now that once you do the valiant quest for other races, your mount options get wider. I like that because I think the Sunstrider is a terrible mount. I whipped the Black Knight without much problem. I thought he would be a little harder to put down, but he wasnt. It was like killing a level 2 critter.

So, now we are working on the champion dailies. Not bad, but now one of the quests requires you to kill a DK commander. Those suckers are a little tough. I did find out that if you shield break them and pull them away from the pack, you can still beat him with your lance until he is dead. They shield break the crap out of you, but if you hit fast enough, you will still prevail. Many people are finding this quest to be too difficult. Which it is and it isn't. The number of scouts are annoying to the max. Fortunately, I can down the scouts in 2 hits, but they will still try and shield break you.

I was reading ole Tobold again today. He was fussing about being bored in game, and I could agree that sometimes, you just gotta get burned out. The only thing I can't agree with is his lack of wanting to try other things in game to enhance his enjoyment. There is more to life then Phat Lewts. I don't even have one flying epic mount, or fast flying for that matter, and I manage to keep myself busy... Try something new. You might find that there is something for you to keep your mind and your writing alive...

I decided to make me a Priest character for fun... Well it was fun because it has a spell called Smite... I love smiting things. Only level 3, more on that later...

See ya!

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Bring The Rain! Or Bring The Fire...

Well, my only hope is that sometime we will get arial combat maybe something along the line of Dragon Riders like Eragon the movie. I am not exactly sure how difficult that would be to code, but maybe like Descent with smart dragons or dragons with spell sets you could train or whatever. I know some folks already fly around on those bad boys, but I have yet to even get my fast flying paid for. I was in too big of a hurry to get my gear up to par, and spent all my gold.

Speaking of things with mounts. I really wish Blizzard would have allowed you to use your own mount in the jousting instead of making us use our race default mount. Again, probably different and more complex coding would be involved, but they could have put the available mount options (Thrust, Shield Break, Charge, Shield, etc)down on the spell bar. It would have also been nice to allow us to move those options around on the spellbar. I seriously hate that thrust is on my pinky finger. I would prefer thrust to be in the #4 position so I can use my index finger and middle finger for shield break. I hope that down the road they make some changes to some of these vehicles so we can make them work better for our individual needs.

I will probably be able to move to the next level of jousting tomorrow. I have to wait until all of my dailies reset.

That's all for now!

For Those About To Joust, We Salute You!

I have been getting a little more into Tobold lately, just because he talks more about WoW, and not trying to figure out why PvPers still want to PK him 10 years later like Lummy.

So, if you read the article I linked above there, you will see yet another post of Tobold getting the low down on raiding and why some folks think it is too easy or whatever.

I'm not sure, but the way they talk, I don't think they even realize how far ahead of the majority they really are. The guy gets a lot of comments, but these are from folks that don't just play the game. They are in its head... Or it is in theirs, but in any event, they say things that many of us causuals would say, "what the hell is that Earl?". I have started to pick up on the lingo, so I am doing better, but it is just so amazing how different groups will pick apart their "area" of knowlege and not even realize that most of us don't even care.

PvPers are the same way, and back in the day, as noted by my counter with over 3.4 million hits, I used to have the same group of people here that were just as rabbid as Tobold's army of raiders, except we liked killing each other. Both groups are equally crazy about their game subset, but we have different goals. Some like to kill monsters (PvE), and some like to kill each other (PvP). We all love to kill things. We are all killers!

Anyway, on with my latest issues. First of all that 3.1 patch is still not 100% functional. Emergency restarts on Tuesday, rolling restarts Wednesday and Thursday morning... There is something afoot at the Circle K here folks. Blizz has had no love in the patch department for quite awhile. I mean there was a month or so of relative peace before 3.1 came out, but now the nightmare has begun again. Hey guys, WTF?

Anyway, my jousting has improved. I finally started to figure out how the heck to beat the Sin'ji and the Shadowmoon guys. First off, I was confused about the shield. It has three levels. For those of us that drive, red is level 1 or low shield, yellow is level 2 or medium shield, and green is shields at full captian. It ain't easy being green, but you can set up your shield before you even joust. This was helpful information for me. You will want to keep the shield green through the entire battle, so if it turns yellow, then you need to bump it back up as fast as possible. Green is good! It can also mean "Go!".

Now, call me crazy, but I thought it would be more like "jousting" where you stand across the field from each other, run at the other guy full speed and try to knock him off the horse or whatever. No... This is like go over, tell the guy "Hey let's do this", then you smack the crap out of your opponent with the stick (lance). When the opponent tries to walk away to get distance, you throw a lance at them. Immediately after throwing your lance, get back in close range to your opponent and whip them with your lance some more. It takes some time, but as long as you don't let them turn around and shield break you, or charge, then you will get them down eventually. Hit them in the back! It's okay, no really, it works!

So, I have been enjoying my dailies for the Argent Tournament, and I am gleefully collecting some star looking thingys so I can advance to jousting some other guys. Hopefully will the same or similar tactic, or I will be blogging about how much I suck again.

So, for those about to joust, we salute you! Go get em!

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Buzy Little Bee...

Well, all my hopes and dreams of not being bored have finally come true. With the still not yet 100% functional patch 3.1, I have been very busy.

First off they added some stuff to the Wintergrasp vendors. Not sure how useful they will be, but now I have more phat lewts I can shoot for. I have been more focused on the DK lately. Simply because I am not really geared for Raids on my warlock, and I am not so sure I should be in a raiding guild. I don't know what it is, but I seriously do not get that deep into my game as the raiders do. We have a guy that can calculate just about any scenerio as to what our chances are. He knows everything about every character and how they should be set up and all their max dps rotations etc... It is quite the experience to listen to him talk about this stuff, but still. I think that much information really kills it for me in the game.

I kinda like to learn this stuff for myself to an extent, and if I fail, it is not something I go completely crazy over. Sure, it costs me 7 gold per death to repair, but these damn tightwads drive me nuts. It is way more expensive to do the raids then to do PvP or the smaller 5 man quests, but I guess the rewards should reflect that right?

Which bring me to my point. WoW, is very bad about offering the "right" rewards to the right people. If I am on a quest, and the reward is something I can't use, then why the hell do the quest? I never quite understood why they can't just customize the rewards to the class of character. There is a limited number of classes, so why should this be so difficult? The other thing that really bugged me about the rewards, is that many times it is the same thing. 4 quest givers offer boots of the same armor, but the stats are slightly different. For me, that is completely unacceptable. I think there should be several options for the same class, and not make my plate wearing power house choose from 2 cloth items, one leather and one mail item.

I am currently engaged in several projects. One of course is the Argent Tournament. Very nice, they have now added three new movies into wow. The Black Knight, A Knights Tale and Excalibur have been imbedded in the code. I haven't figured out everything yet as my jousting is in a bit of a... Well, it sucks right now...

Plenty of new things to do in Icecrown that I have started to unlock and reveal after finally getting someone to help me get past Not-so-honorable-combat. That really opened up the flood gates for me.

Anyway, I am outta here for now. Keep your eyes open and your legs closed.

CIAO!

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Epic Fail?

I haven't been digging too deep yet, but WoW's 3.1 patch is taking a bit longer than expected. Ohhh, about 6 hours so far and counting, unexpected which I am sure is making some poor IT team go completely crazy. There is only so much pressure us IT guys can handle before we flip out and start shootin. lol

Anyway, my epic fail story has to do with getting groups together to go on raids and daily heroics. Now all I want is a few of those heroism badges so I can get this sigil thingy for my DK. Every time I try, I get into a group like Leeeroooy Jenkins! or I get some whiner that doesn't want to be saved or some other whiner that can't spend 7 gold for repairs and leaves the group. So far I have tried 6 times to get some heroism badges and I have only aquired 2. I only need 15. I am not happy. I hate whiners. Whatever the saving you to an instance does to these poor fellows obviously needs to be addressed. It is preventing us from having fun or learning how to do these raids and heroics. I did get through one time, but that was in WG in VoA. Every other place I have gone, we have failed to get me some badges.

Apparently DK's were patched to death. I have looked over the list but until I get in there to see what they are talking about, I have come to the realization that everything I have learned up to this point is gone. Respec, the new duel spec and then of course the new plan for killing everything will have to be relearned. Not too happy about that.

I see they finally tried to make fishing worth while. You can fish anywhere even if you aren't skilled enough to fish there. Flint and tinder are gone, which is funny because my GF used to have like 50 of those in her packs and I would laugh that she might want to carry a few less so she would have room for lewts. Because we are just that darn resourcefull. I noticed they have some jokes in the patch notes. I would think that if they wrote the patch notes today, there is not a lot of joking going on. I did find them amusing however.

PvP notes indicate that Alterac Valley has been recharged and reconfigured for better honor. That would be nice since absolutely NO ONE wants to play that BG anymore. I think I have played AV like 5 times on my hordie and each time we slaughtered the Allies terribly. While my Warlock doesn't even bother to go in there. She used to, and I still have 70 marks to prove it.

The new battle ground stuff with the Lich King sounds cool, I will be all over that soon. Can't wait to try and kick that guys hiney!

I dunno, but I hope they get this sucker running some time today. I can only imagine they are probably considering free time for us at this point since the day is technically over.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

The Guide To Strategy...

Ole Tobold was talking about the fact that folks just don't want to play the game as intended anymore.

To make things short and sweet I will give you this. I agree with the fact that the fun SHOULD be in the experience of learning and playing your character with as little help as possible from outside influences.

That strategy only lasts for the first character however. Once the honeymoon is over and I've built my first one. You better bet that the second one is gonna get some help. If it took me 3 months to get my first character to 70, then I can only assume that it may only take 2 months on the second character. In any event, that seems like way too much work when I could just get a little addon or two and maybe cut that number down even further.

The problem is that there is somewhere I want to go or a skill I want to have or just have a character that can assist the first one in some compacity. I don't want to spend 3 months per character to do that. I got to the end of the game already, if I want to explore further, it is something that needs to be done faster.

Until they can come up with a way for me to learn at my own speed and not theirs, I will just have to rely on the fact that other people will.

I do find it amazing however, how much information is now available about these games. I mean, when I played UO, there wasn't much of a pool of information on how to get what and what every single item is etc. I mean, we webmasters tried to pool as much as we could and after 2000 some sites started devoting databases for items and whatever, but no where near the colosal amount of information we have now. I was completely shocked to see how much things have changed since a decade ago.

Anyway, I do love the adventure, but after I get where I want to go, I want to have control over the next characters experience. I think it would be a good idea for developers like Blizzard to recognize and give us options to skip over the lowbie content if we so choose. They let us change sex, why not be born as a grownup? I dunno, that level 55 thing with the DK's was a great start.

Laters.

Kick My Balls Next Time... 10 Day Trial My Hiney!

Today was interesting and also disturbing. I went to work last night an my GF's two boys decided that they needed to play the 10 Day trial of WoW, together...

Well the good news is you don't need to get a code to play the trial anymore. Oh no, Blizz fixed that. The problem is that you can download and install the trial right over the top of your retail copy of WoW! Oh yea, and according to the older boy of 13, there are no warning messages about a retail version on the computer. They only needed to set up a trial account, not install the trial version of WoW.

Can this be true? I don't want to try and install the trial version to find out. I just know I lost the better part of the day on a week where it was just a "rolling restart" to reinstalling the whole ball of wax. Not to mention any addons, fixing all of my options and generally being pissed off.

So, if you are out there Blizz, please make sure to add a better check system to your 10 Day Free Download Trial.

The punishment is for the older boy to install my retail version on the other laptop that he also jacked up with the trial version. I think it's all fair since I did the other laptop. I did ask that next time the boys want to mess up my day to please just kick me in the balls. It is so much less painful then installing WoW from scratch.

See ya!

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Malygos, my first 25 man evar!

OMG... I do not understand why people don't like PvP. Predictable monsters or not, that crap is pretty difficult. At least in PvP, you can come right back and right wrongs or kill some poor unexpecting clothy to take out your aggression.

Wiping in a raid can be a very long experience, and COSTLY.

My new guild "Madness" asked me to join them on the last part of Obsidian Sanctum which is where the dragon Malygos hangs out apparently. I had no idea what the hell I was getting into. Slightly undergeared in S2 wear, I go happily prancing into the dungeon via portal.

They warned me to stay out of the "firewalls" which the only refrence I could think of was like the ones in Mario Brothers or something. Just some walls of fire around that you don't step in...

To my dismay, I found out within 20 seconds that we were going fire surfing, and the walls were actually giant tidal waves of fire that cook little clothy warlocks in about 1 second. Oh suuuure! Now you tell me it is a giant wave of fire that MOVES!

Needless to say the entire raid wiped at about 10% health when Malygos drops about 50 adds to try and save his ass from the impending doom. Our tank does about 4.9K damage and I mean rocks the recount meter with over 50% damage usually. I of course rock the bottom of the meter, doing less damage then most of the healers. lol

So, we got to try a second time and after they rezzed me, the Tank showed me where exactly to stand when we go "away from the boss" and "to the boss". I thought I had it all figured out this time...

Well, we get going about 20 minutes later and the guy said "to the boss", so I start running forward, but just then he said, "no, away from the boss". Did I mention that the tidal wave of fire cooks me in under 1 second? Well it did it again. I ran back to the spot I thought the tank was safe, but I got ran over by the tidal wave again. I was annoyed beyond imagination. The guild had tried several times that day to Kill Malygos, and they decided to run VoA as 25 man.

Now, VoA is the raid dungeon that becomes available after you fight in Wintergrasp for control of the keep. I went there, and the pitfalls were much less to deal with. I had no problem keeping out of the rock shards and smoke. The only thing that dissapointed me is how small that raid is for all the work you need to do to even get in there.

I mean it is like 10 monsters total, including the boss and that may be an over estimation. We were in there for like 10 minutes and I got my 2 emblems of valor. Then I found out you can only do those raids once a friggin week anyway... I was like what the hell??!?!?

So, my first experience wasn't all that great, but I got to see some content I otherwise would not have been able to enjoy on my own. I think I will just have to lower myself and gear in Naxx or something, even though it is beneath me and several DK's to do so.

My repair bill for one evening of fun was over 14 gold! PvP is much cheaper!
Laters!