A Boy and his Ship

Healers Not Required

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I have a distinctive grumpy this morning.  For starters it is raining and storming… and I cannot pull the covers over my head and allow myself to be lulled back to sleep by the rhythmic noise.  Secondly I was up far later than I expected last night. but that in itself wasn’t all that out of the ordinary.  However roughly 45 minutes before the alarm was set to go off, our kitten using some of her newly discovered jumping abilities caused an avalanche to occur sending a ton of crap falling off of a high perch.  Instead of just accepting my fate and getting on up, I did the futile thing and attempted to go back to sleep.  So I am going through that sluggish phase when you have attempted to get sleep…  but didn’t get enough of it.  As such my mental processing is a bit sluggish, but the show must go on.  Coffee is being consumed, and hopefully that will fix all the wrongs in the world… or at least lessen them.  As to last night… I was up late in part due to a bout of insomnia and in part due to doing things with friends.  I wrote the other day about my process of working through the HK-47 storyline, and over the weekend Tam managed to get caught up to the same place I was.  As I was folding laundry last night, I got a text asking if I was around but I didn’t actually see it until I was headed upstairs to wait out my insomnia.

There are a whole lot of faffing about that you have to do, which involves going to planets and scanning for HK-47 parts.  After that however you have two dungeons… the first one being a normal mode False Emperor and the second being a hard mode Maelstrom Prison.  We managed to get four warm bodies, which included a tank and three dps…  but unfortunately our only healing option had to go to bed early.  Since  all of us were between 56 and 57 in level  we assumed we would be able to do the normal mode dungeon without much issue.  While I managed to get a little low a few places, False Emperor went off without a hitch and we even managed to get a few cool cosmetic pieces.  Still feeling brave we decided to go ahead and attempt Hard Mode Maelstrom Prison without a healer… and while I took a few deaths due to my own stupidity…  we managed to make it through that dungeon as well.  So in theory…  we can likely run any of the older content without heals.  The cool thing is that while we were running the place we managed to get housing items to drop… which makes the place far more interesting for repeated running.  I think tonight I can run the last part of the HK-47 chain, which is a return to the Heroic 2 dungeon from the very first of it.  I simply did not have the oomph to remain awake last night and push through it.

A Boy and his Ship

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I spent most of yesterday chasing Skavak across Coruscant on my Chiss Scoundrel.  I am having quite a bit of fun playing the smuggler right now, and it is really the only class that I did not spend a significant amount of time playing during release.  Before leaving the game I had managed to get the Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular and Trooper all to level cap, and had several failed starts and playing the smuggler.  This time around I decided to go for the “sawbones” spec, which now does more than it previously did.  The Scoundrel subclass was a confusing mess because I personally struggled trying to figure out what abilities I should be using.  Previously you got this mix of melee focused and ranged abilities… and it seemed like a horrible idea to be a melee healer in this game.  Instead they have taken out all but the crowd control melee abilities and give Sawbones a focus on ranged damage to mix in with their healing.  This combined with switching to Treek as my tank over Corso Riggs has ended up making for a much more enjoyable experience.  Towards evening I blasted out of the space port on Coruscant headed for the wasteland of Taris.

Now that I have dinged 21, I spent some of my hard earned commendations and kitted out both my armor and that of Treek in full level 21 modifications.  I am pretty damned happy that I have orange sets of gear for both, and my theory is that I will upgrade at the end of each planet, hoping to soak up enough commendations while on the planet to be able to kit out my gear each time.  The truth is with the experience bonus I am well ahead of the curve.  Taris for example is originally intended for level 16-20 players… and I didn’t even make it onto the planet until 21.  My hope is this is going to allow me to be able to complete some of the heroic four content, and get more commendations that way.  In theory I think the heroics are daily quests, and I could keep going back to Coruscant to do those in order to soak up a few additional commendations.  In any case I am really enjoying myself, and this has been a welcome diversion.  My hope is that we can muster some grouping again over the next few days and explore some of the flashpoints that we never saw.  While this is a long shot, it would be kinda cool to be able to see some of the operations as well.  Tonight however…  we are going to work on taking down Ravana Extreme.

Something New

Yesterday I decided to try something slightly new, and failed a little bit along the way.  I had noticed that many podcasts actually uploaded their shows to YouTube, by simply throwing up a static image with the audio running behind it.  I figured this couldn’t hurt, and for some people YouTube might be a more comfortable experience than having to set up podcast software.  The first attempt however lacked any audio at all.  I was using Adobe Premiere for the first time, and as a result ended up exporting in some strange format that was a combination of a video file and a waveform audio file as well.  Windows seemed to know what to do with the file, and when I tested it… it appeared to play just fine.  However upon uploading it… I got a really long still image with zero sound kinda defeating the purpose.  The second export however made it just fine, and we now have our first YouTube show up.  We’ve already gotten a few views so we will see how this compares to the podcast.  It might also make an easier format for folks to comment on.  Let me know what you think.  I doubt we will ever do a video show like Cat Context and The MMO Show… but for the time being it gets our show in another medium.

 

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