It is a relatively dreary day here in Oklahoma as the experiment rolls onwards. I’ve been out into the world, gassed up my wife’s vehicle and picked up some breakfast for the two of us. Lately on the weekends we have been going out and indulging our recent photography habit, but unless things clear up I don’t see that happening. It rained most of the night, and still looks like the sky could open any minute so for now I am hanging out inside blogging.
The Wrong Leather
Initially I had intended to get in some League of Legends last night, but within moments of logging into mumble Drathis announced that he had to leave and would be back later. Knowing the normal schedule, Tam confirmed that he too would be leaving shortly to go dancing. This left us with four players that could commit to playing, and instead of pushing it further I just decided I would pop into World of Warcraft and continue working on Lodin. I really enjoy LoL, but it is really only a worthwhile endeavor for me, if I am hanging out with a full team of friends.
I picked up in the Jinyu village where I had left off the previous night and started going through the paces of questing. It was around this time when my favorite Aussie turned Malaysian 3D Content artist popped by the voice server. Banzai is coming off a big project for Nintendo, and as such finally starting to filter back out into society. This is a normal pattern for him, he goes into crunch mode on some awesome new project… then pops his head up afterwards and mingles for awhile.
When I am talking, I tend not to be paying attention to what I am doing. As a result I ended up happily indulging my bloodlust and skinning anything I could. So after a few hours of talking about 70s and 80s “Giant Robot” anime… I noticed my bags were insanely full with Pandaria level leather. Normally this would be a great thing… but unfortunately I leveled way faster through the cataclysm content than I had intended and neglected to level my leatherworking past 460.
I consulted my favorite farming guide and decided that I did not want to take the amount of time required to unlock the Molten Front content. So as a result I was bound for Tol Barad. It was around this time that Banzai filtered out off the channel… damned time shift.. and silence fell. Farming spiders over and over is pretty boring. I managed to farm up about 70 savage leather before the boredom hit me.
Pandaria to Pandora
My friend Warenwolf had been happily playing Borderlands 2 while I was off in pandaland farming up leather. Every so often he would comment about some spiffy thing he got to drop. I thought to myself… I like cool things dropping *sadface*. The biggest problem with Borderlands 2, is that for whatever reason I never got synced up with my friends. They are all out doing the mega super extended content, and I am still stuck at level 12 poking around doing lower level quests. With the boredom setting in heavily, I decided I really should be over trying to catch up my Commando.
Borderlands has always been such a great concept, and the second one is so much richer than the first. However wandering around killing mobs several levels lower than me wasn’t exactly a stellar cure for my boredom either. I managed to knock out four quests, all of which involved wandering back through areas I had already beaten the bosses of. At this point I need to do some research in how to skip ahead in the content to something that is actually challenging and fun.
I managed to hold out as I did most of a level and a half, but this is the type of game that was really made to be played as a group. I will admit that my fetish for Jacobs weapons in all their steampunky goodness is still in place. As you can see in the picture above, I spent most of my time with a single shot tommygun-esc Jacobs assault rifle. However after an hour and a half I was still looking for something fun to occupy my night.
Difference a Spec Makes
If you were following any of my tweets, you will know that I wound up over in Rift last night towards the end of the evening. Based on the excitement of those tweets, it went extremely well. While we are on the subject of tweets… why the hell has no one else integrated a twitter client with their game? Seriously this is one of the killer features Rift has going for it. Rift truly is the king of the “WoW Clones”, and I mean that with the utmost respect… because they have essentially gone around and latched onto the best practices of everyone else in the industry.
One of the things that always hits me, when I boot up Rift on my gaming machine is just how amazing the game looks. The subtle features of the title are just gorgeous to look at. Inevitably I hit /tweetpic and comment about this, and someone chimes in agreeing. Again someone else needs to make a /tweetpic command… it is absolutely brilliant. A few weeks back, I had been reading a blog post by Wilhelm on The Ancient Gaming Noob talking about how he was just having a hard time getting into Storm Legion.
This resonated pretty solidly with me, because from about 56 onwards it has been like pulling teeth to try and level. The mob hit points increased at a rate that was far greater than either my dps or survival. I had been leveling with somewhat of a forum sanctioned spec, that was supposedly the best survivability to dps ratio. Even at that it was still taking me roughly half my life to chew through most even level mobs. I really want to hit 60, and try some of the endgame content… but essentially leveling through the higher content was pure torture for me.
In the same post, after I had chimed in another guy (pkudude99) came in behind me and posted a spec that folks should try. This week Wilhelm made a new post talking about trying out the spec, and how successful it was. After reading this, it had been in the back of my head to do the same and this present boredom was the perfect opportunity. After about 30 minutes of respeccing, rebuilding macros, resituating hotbars… I was off to Camp Cyclone in Morban.
I hopped on my white tiger and rode up to the first mob I encountered, a 58 Storm Legion trooper of some sort. I charged into battle, and in within a few seconds I had torn the mob asunder and taken next to no damage. In that moment, a game that had felt like an extremely soulless grind only an hour before had become a magical playground of bloodlust and dismemberment. The spec was in fact amazing, and over the course of the evening I happily ping ponged back and forth between packs of mobs slaughtering them with a smile on my face.
I have mentioned that I have quite the bloodlust when playing a warrior right? My happiest moments in games is when I am not paying attention at all to the objectives I am supposed to be completing, but instead just bouncing around the map killing everything that crosses my map. This totally happened last night, and as the dust settled around my warriors feet I had somehow put on half a level and gotten three planar attunement levels. I was a happy boy, but also noticed that it was almost midnight so I figured I should probably start winding down for the night.
Extremely long story short… if you are playing a Warrior like me, and found yourself losing a battle to the grind of Storm Legion… I highly suggest you check out this spec. Thank you Wilhelm and thank you PkuDude99 the author of the spec… for pointing it out.
"Perfect Solo" updated for 2.1 Hotfix 7 changes
Slaying Saturday
It is day two of the experiment, and roughly an hour later I have another blog post about nothing. Our hope was to be able to go out wandering today and take some photos, but looking out our window it looks extremely dark out there. In fact I think I just heard thunder, so I am guessing that is off the menu. I believe Neverwinter is now available for me to play, so I may indulge that for awhile. Essentially I purchased the cheap package, to be able to get in and play the beta events out of curiosity. Honestly if I could have refunded that purchase I likely would have.
I played just enough in beta to decide I didn’t really enjoy the game as much as I thought I would. But now that I have access to it, it feels like a colossal waste not to at least try playing it again. Maybe I will care more about my characters with they are not throwaways? I honestly liked the Guardian fairly well, but the thing that kept getting on my nerves was the fact that forward momentum stopped as soon as you performed an action. This just felt like a needless break in motion. Ultimately I guess I was expecting it to control more like Skyrim, and less like SWTOR.
If you’ve made it this far… I hope you all have an amazing weekend. Here is hoping to the skies clearing and us being able to get out and about. Being about to get out on the weekends for some exercise and fresh air has been beneficial to my waistline.
Day two of the experiment, and another blog post – A Whole New World – http://t.co/pZ72OJLWD3