With More Spikey Bits

Having one of those mornings where I am just struggling to get going.  Here is hoping that the blessing of caffeine will kick me out of my slumber.  This is now day five of the experiment, and today is the first day I considered blowing off the post.  It is not that I have nothing to say, but more than right now I am exhausted and my brain seems to be misbehaving.  I had another one of my bouts of insomnia, coupled with the fact that it was a bit warm last night.

The Desert of Flames

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Yesterday at lunch, Lethbridge and I had another one of our gamer lunches, where we take our laptops to an empty conference room and chill out playing games for a bit.  Since I normally need to relax during the time, I tend to pick a game that calms me.  Yesterday like most days, I chose to play Everquest 2.  It did not hurt that this is also what Leth was playing as well.  EQ2 is one of those games that I will likely always play, if not for the massive amount of content… but at least for the fact that Norrath is a world I am deeply connected to.

There are essentially three settings that I have massive amounts of nostalgia towards.  Norrath is probably the first and foremost, because of my time spent playing and idolizing Everquest.  Tamriel is probably in the number two slot, because I have rabidly consumed and spent thousands of hours at this point playing the various Elder Scrolls Titles.  Lastly, as much as I may or not want it…  I have a ton of nostalgia for Azeroth.  You can’t essentially live in a game world for the better part of a decade without missing it pretty often.

Tiny Elvis

EQPic_OasisDorfonGiantYou have likely noticed that I tend to gravitate heavily towards “core” grouping classes, especially of the tank spectrum.  This is the time of character I feel most natural playing, but it is also the type of character that has the most responsibilities to a given guild or group.  With currently nomadic game existence, I wouldn’t want anyone to try and count on me as the cornerstone of any group.  As a result I decided to try and roll a pure dps over in Everquest 2.

I spent yesterdays lunch working on Belgrifter, my little Ratonga Swashbuckler.  While definitely in the pure dps camp, the Swashbuckler has some of the survival that I crave in any character.  I’ve been progressing quickly through the content, and currently am working through the Sinking Sands area.  I am extremely nostalgic about the Desert of Flames content, mostly because I spent so much time in both South Ro and Oasis of Marr on Exeteroth my EQ1 cleric.  So many hours were spent killing crocs… and later spent killing sand giants as revenge for all the times they killed me.

For a trip down memory lane, above is a shot of my dwarf cleric, in Oasis of Marr… the area now contained within Sinking Sands taking down I believe my first sand giant.  My Rygorr armor was pretty spiffy, my guild jokingly called me “Tiny Elvis” because of the bedazzled nature of the gear.  I sadly do not remember the shield or mace at this point… but I had not started raiding hate yet, because I was not a giant purple blob swinging a Dark Ember.  Anyways… needless to say I have a lot of memories of that region… and still cannot help taking down the giants in zone.

The Great Escape

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It took me a bit to get settled down last night and capable of gaming.  We have this amazingly smart ferret, that has turned into a ninja like escape artist.  She keeps finding ways of scaling the walls of the two linked playpens and hopping out.  We have tried every solution we have seen online, and a few we came up with ourselves.  We had tried splitting black drainage pipe and putting it over the top so she could not get to the top of the cage and pull herself over.  Turns out after a little bit, she figured out to crawl up into the pipe itself and then get over to the top. 

Last night involved creating a shelf of sorts to cover the corner she normally gets out on.  After an our of bending metal flashing, carefully crimping and coating all edges in duct tape, and finally plugging all the wholes from which I was bleeding things to “Metal cuts”  (papercuts you are nothing to me now)…  I finally had this spiffy little shelf that fit down nicely onto the corner of the cage.  I secured in in place to the wire with binder clips, and proceeded into the kitchen to make myself some dinner. 

By the time I had assembled a plate, and walked back into the room… maybe 5 minutes tops… she had already figured out how to get on top of the shelf.  Smartest ferret ever…  also potentially the most frustrating.  I hate that we essentially have to leave her in the cage all the time right now, until we figure out a way to keep her from escaping.  Tonight we will be attempting to deploy a new ruse… coating the corner of the cage she uses to get out in plexiglass…  so she cannot climb there.

Spikey Bits on his Spikey Bits

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After this little back and forth with the ferret mastermind… I needed to kill lots of things to vent my frustrations.  Roaming around in an MMO laying waste to entire segments of a continent… is a thing I do.  I had also logged out at roughly 60% through my level, and really wanted to push further towards 59.  While roaming around doing my thing I stumbled across the guy above.  This little beauty goes by lXxalgol the Lurking Horror, and while the lurking part is a little ambiguous… they definitely got the horror bit down pat.  I thought for a second I was playing Warhammer again, and had just stumbled onto a Chaos War Machine.

I posted on G+ last night about this guy, saying I lacked the crazy to attack me.  I was wrong.  Seriously… I cannot find a mob like this and NOT try him at least.  I figured it would end in tears, but before giving it any further thought I hit my charge key and gave it a shot.  Surprising enough, he was not nearly as bad as I expected… granted I had remembered to put my buffs on at this point.  Overall however he was quite manageable, and I killed him before I had dropped below half health… which for a 59 elite at 58 player level… seemed good.

The funny thing is, he dropped nothing but coin.  This combined with the fact that his respawn is insanely fast, as over the course of the evening I killed him five times… leads me to believe that he is somehow tied to a quest or other objective.  I was able to turn up no details on either Rifthead, or the various wikis, apart from a stubbed out entry for the guy.  If anyone out there knows what he is for, and how I can start this magical mission… please let me know!  I feel like I need to kill him with a purpose!

Rift World Problems

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I have come to the realization that I have a problem with Carnage Quests.  No, this is going to go in the opposite direction you are probably thinking.  It has been well established that I like killing things in video games… and am extremely prone of fits of mindless bloodlust as I ping pong across the map.  Carnage Quests are like crack for me… they give my bloodlust a purpose.  I take forever to move out of a zone, because I keep finding new mobs that have new carnage quests… and then find myself not being able to leave an area until I have killed 16 Rabid Wombats.

This has lead to an additional problem.  I have entirely too much leather…  far more than I could ever use, and far more than I could likely ever need.  I literally have hundreds and hundreds of Storm Legion era leather…  and the problem is…  I cannot stop myself from skinning the corpses.  Too many years of playing a leatherworker in wow, have ingrained me that leaving an un-skinned corpse is a cardinal sin.  I even find myself going around and cleaning up the handiwork of others.  I hate using the auction house, but if you are over on Deepwood and find yourself in need of leather…  look me up.

Coffee and Rambling

Well it looks like I have squandered yet another morning drinking my coffee and rambling about the games I play.  This is now day five of my little experiment, and so far has been the day I least wanted to blog.  I managed to find focus and keep pushing forward, in spite of the fact my head is pounding and I just want to go back to sleep.  Since comments are kinda a thing of the past, and all my readers are picking up my posts via RSS… I feel like I am rambling into the void most of the time.  That is perfectly fine, since right now I am mostly doing this for myself.  If you’ve managed to make it this far in the post, I wish you the best of days…  hopefully mine will suck slightly less than yesterday.

Oh… as a footnote… I managed to ding 59 in Rift.  So one more level to go, and then I can stop feeling like a such a failure!

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