Breaching the Core

One of the pains of living in Oklahoma is the shifting weather patterns.  Last night when I went to bed it was roughly 80* and this morning as I am waking up it is 45*.  At this point I wish it would just pick a season and go with it, because flipping back and forth between heat and air conditioning is a pain in the butt.  Despite the weather annoyances, yesterday went pretty awesome for me.  I had two fairly huge meetings, both of which went extremely well, and the roadmap I had slaved over was well accepted.

Hellbugs on my yard

Yesterday it was announced in the patch notes that a new kind of Fire Rift was opening up in Telara.  These “Invasive Species” rifts have a chance of dropping either the hellbug mount pictured above, or a hellbug companion pet.  Rift Scene has a good writeup by Cupcakes about the event, and last night I started to see players on these new mounts showing up in Tempest Bay.  It was late in the night and I honestly forgot to take a screenshot, so I am doing something I dislike doing and linking to the Rift Scene image for reference… hopefully I have given sufficient credit.

I spent the better part of the evening roaming around trying to find one of these Hellbug rifts.  After roaming around Morban, Kingsward, and eventually several old world areas I came up completely empty handed.  Going to need to do some research to see where they are more likely to spawn.  I really want either the purple one, or the super rare green one.  While I played enough defiance to know it was not really a game for me, I am all about cross overs and new mounts.

A.R.A.M.

I popped onto mumble, and after a bit of chatting with my friends and listening to their banter about League of Legends, I allowed myself to get drawn in for a quick map.  I was reintroduced to the concept of A.R.A.M. aka All Random All Murderbridge.  We had done this the night before, but I didn’t realize it was an actual “thing”.  Apparently the Howling Abyss really wants me to play Nunu, because once again I got him assigned to me as my random champion.

I promise Nunu is not like the only champion I have unlocked.  The game should have been able to pick from Alistair, Annie, Ashe, Darius, Garen, Graves, Jayce, Kennen, Olaf, Shen, Tristana, Udyr or Wukong… but instead in both cases it picked Nunu which is part of the weeks free rotation.  Apparently it thinks I need more Yeti in my life.  Moaning aside, I have to say I am finally feeling like I am getting used to him.

Once again ARAM assigned us one champion that we were familiar with and one that we were not per team.  So it essentially ended up with Tam playing Morgana vs Rae playing Nidalee…  and then Drathis trying to play Alistair vs me trying to play Nunu.  It was a really good match and we had a “no towers down” stalemate at midbridge for most of the map.

Tam and I actually managed to make a break, get a 15 minute into the game double kill, and drop two towers.  Then all hell broke loose as my shitty DSL internet connection fell apart.  My ping climbed up to 500, then 1500, then 3500 and disconnected me from the game.  At which point we never really recovered.  In true sportsmanlike tradition, Drathis and Rae asked if they should hang back until my connection stabilized but we urged them onwards… since a map against friends is a map against friends.

Breaching the Core

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I wrote about this the other day, but over the weekend Plasmodia and I had talked about trying to pull together some groups on Wednesday nights.  We had set a startup time of 9pm Central, and after my one ARAM map it was getting close to the meet up time.  We managed to pull together a really solid core of a team, and they were totally willing to run non-elite dungeons so my nub arse could join in.  We ended up with Plasmodia tanking, Marklaar running support, me dpsing, and Aleriase healing.  This left us only needing a single dps, so the queue times were near instantaneous. 

We got assigned Empyrean Core, which a few of us had never seen before.  The zone itself was amazingly beautiful, full of super intricate widgets and bobbles.  The thing that really surprised me however was just how challenging the dungeon still was.  Previously the Elites were super hard, but the normal dungeons were a bit faceroll-y once you actually managed to hit cap.  Last night I was the only under level player, and it each of the boss rights were still rather challenging.

We ended up doing two runs last night, and getting assigned Empyrean Core both times (apparently this is a problem in Rift).  I had a complete and total blast, and hanging out with the Alea Iacta Est rift contingency was awesome.  Aleriase mentioned that they had been trying to start doing group nights both Tuesday and Wednesday, so I am completely down with doing more of this in the future.  I am not sure if we will regenerate the numbers needed to raid, but any kind of grouping with friends is always a positive.

Dungeoneering Challenge

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I had almost forgotten just how much I have missed running challenging content with friends.  I have been in a real lull of good group content of late.  The last time I feel like I was truly challenged in a dungeon was back in The Secret World, running the Nightmare mode content with the friends I have been playing League with.  The content was brutal, we had to constantly think on our feet, but the adjustment process was a blast.

I had hoped that with Pandaria we would at least have a period of time when heroic content was an actual challenge.  But from the first night, we essentially steamrolled the dungeons we ran in greens and a smattering of quested blues.  I think in part that is a good reason why I got bored of WoW so quickly this time around.  WoW for whatever reason has forgotten how to be challenging, without resorting to random or downright “Cheap Shot” tactics.  Random chance that a mob kills you outright, or does something so horrible you just can’t recover is not challenging, it is just annoying.

If I can actually muster a regular group in Rift, I can see myself sticking around for awhile.  In these games I am happiest when the groups come easily, and we can go off and smash baddies together each night.  I get bored and slog down when the grouping stops, and my only option becomes pugging.  So much of the grouping experience… are the people you experience it with.  In most cases, I would rather not play a game at all than to deal with pugs.

Tiny Two-hander

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Last night gathered up some much needed gear for 60 through the various dungeon runs.  One of the few pieces that I could actually equip now, is a Protector’s Sword of Slaying pictured above.  This was a pretty massive upgrade over the two level 58 green one-handers I was using, but as you can see above, the scale feels a wee bit small for a Bahmi.  Maybe I am just used to the final fantasy-esc big dude with an even bigger sword trope that wow ran with, but it is just too “normal” for me to feel epic about it.

I will say though it has been fun trying to two-hander.  I’ve always gravitated towards dual wield, and in the original rift game what kind of weapons you wielded really mattered for your soul.  As such I always gravitated towards paragon heavy souls, which were the dual wield tree.  I had not however played around with a two-hander since they made it no longer matter what weapon you were wielding with which soul.  That alone has been fun and well worth any wipes that happened in the core.

I am really hoping that over the next few days, I can use this sword as a dowsing rod to help me find some of those hellbug rifts.  I would really love to have one of those mounts, and I have missed out on so many other cool mounts thanks to my bad luck and my wanderlust.  I am super grateful to my guildies for pulling together the groups last night.  I had a blast and look forward to doing it again. 

I see my time is running short, and my coffee has run out.  If you’ve made it down this far in the post… I wish you the best of days.  I will have to pull my coat back out of the closet as I go off to work, but I am hoping that by the weekend it will be warm again.  Hopefully it is pleasant wherever you are.

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