Rift Archives - Page 16 of 43 - Tales of the Aggronaut

I Lived Threes Company

February 19, 2014 by Belghast

The Illusive Bottle

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had expected. Well that is a bit of a misnomer in that I knew we would be running errands, but I did not realize it would take quite so long nor be so frantic. My wife is a rock star teacher, this much I have said before. However she is tag-team teaching a forensics science class this year and as a result they are pretty much pulling the curriculum out of their asses as they go. For what they are teaching there really are no textbooks, and as a result no approve lab equipment really either. Enter the empty eye drop bottle on the right. You would think something like this would be relatively easy to find. You would also be completely wrong

She needs these for a faux blood typing lab, since it is against safety regulations to use actual blood. Funny thing is I can remember doing blood typing in freshman biology… odd how things have changed in two decades. We went everywhere we could think that might have little bottles including craft stores, pharmacies, finally we found eight of these at a local medical equipment/compounding pharmacy. Problem is to be useful… she needs 30. We picked up what we could find and proceeded onwards in search of the illusive idea. Finally at Michaels we found some flip top bottles that should also work. The problem is this took the count up to 25… still 5 short of the finish line. Supposedly today that Michaels location is getting some more in a shipment, so that means we will need to make our way back out there tonight to pick some more up. The preference would be to find more of the actual eye drop bottles, so my wife plans on calling around to the various compounding pharmacies today. This is the unknown life of the husband of a rock star teacher… the constant trips out for random things for the classroom.

Clearance Lego Haul

Roughly every six months the various store chains jettison one batch of toys to receive new ones. This is my favorite time of the season… because it means I can pick up cheap Legos. I have always loved building with Legos and I likely always will. This desire to build things is exactly why games like Minecraft and Everquest Next Landmark are so sticky to me. They are the dream of every Lego kid, the ability to create things without restrictions of having to have the right pieces. The above image represents the haul of new sets for me to play with over the last several weeks. They have come from a mixture of Target and Wal-mart and for the most part everything was 25-50% off. There is a certain price range that I am willing to snatch things up, and while the Jabba’s Sail Barge that I saw yesterday would have been awesome… it was not $70 worth of awesome.

So instead I play a waiting game to see if it will make a second price cut and drop down into the range which I am willing to buy it for. Last night while we were running around in the mad search for the bottles I managed to pick up the two Galaxy Squad sets above. I might be because I grew up in the “funky space lego” era, but I love new space sets. What was extra cool about this find as a whole is that last year I managed to pick up the Lego Star Wars TIE Fighter really cheaply, so now having an X-Wing to go with it is pretty awesome. I realize I am a big damned kid… but I am okay with this. Getting older is require, growing up and losing the childish wonder at things… is completely optional… and not something I suggest at all.

Boosting for Fun and Profit

I feel like today’s post would be incomplete without mentioning the price leak yesterday for the boost to level 90. I realize ahead of time that my point of view on this is going to be controversial, but it is my point of view anyway. I personally think the boosting to 90 thing is generally going to be bad for the game community, in that dropping a new player into a fully leveled character is a bit of an overload. Honestly I went through this myself when I accepted a scroll of resurrection and decided to boost a character to 80 that I would never actually level otherwise. Dropping directly into a level 80 priest, when I had never actually played a priest past 10 before… was to say the least disorienting. This is coming from someone who has six 90s, and three others waiting in the wings to reach the cap as well. I “grok” warcraft on a pretty deep level and understand how the systems tend to work.

If I was completely at a loss for dropping in the pilot seat of a fully realized character… I can only imagine what it is going to be like for someone who has never played the game, or has not played the game in years. After all this is the reason why Blizzard says they are giving us a boost to 90, so that we can recruit new friends and catch back up old ones. It just seems like a fundamentally bad idea, but like I said I realize I am in the minority as people seem to want the ability to skip the majority of the game. That is honestly the other problem I have with this idea. Fundamentally Warcraft and the MMO genre in general… are about leveling and gaining constant incremental achievements and improvements. If you do not want to level… then maybe you are playing the wrong genre? MMOs are always going to be about leveling in one form or another… be it leveling in actual character level, or grinding away to get the gear to move to the next tier of LFR. There is always a leveling treadmill there, because at its core this is what the genre is all about.

So after all of this… now I feel like maybe you are prepared for my opinion on the price point. I honestly think $60 is rather fair for what you are asking. You are asking for the luxury of being able to skip the majority of the game and jump straight to being inches from the finish line. It is absolutely a luxury, so it should have a luxury price tag associated with it. Understand that this is for additional 90s… we are still getting one for free when we purchase Warlords of Draenor. So the ambiguous planned social benefit of catching people up to the latest content will still be firmly intact… as everyone is going to have to buy the expansion anyway. If you think of it in terms as paying for a Faction and Realm Transfer combo costs $55 right now… then it is not really out of order to expect that creating a brand new 90 character to cost $5 more.

Mentoring Is A Better Answer

I still feel like boosting was a bit of a copout answer to the problem at hand. A much better solution would have been to finally implement a good mentoring system like so many other MMOs have. Rift, EQ2, City of Heroes, and so many others have systems that allow you to drop your level to that of your friends. We we had the bulk of players actively playing Rift this year, we took advantage of this weekly. On Wednesday nights we would gather up and assess what levels we had, then everyone would mentor themselves to the lowest person and we would go do content together that was relevant for that level. It was pretty glorious and my only complaint is that hey really need to make “queue for random mentored dungeon” a thing, because it was always a pain in the butt to do a dungeon together with all the manual mentoring.

The ever awesome @Gypsy_Syl posed this statement when I opened up this line of dialog on twitter last night. While I agree with her that this likely was the intent with the boosts, the question is what exactly are players rushing towards then? Leveling is pretty much the solo game, and all that awaits you when you hit the cap is for the most part group content or leveling another character. Mentoring systems would help with what the stated intent was… to allow you to play with your friends. If that was not their intent, then quite honestly they should stop selling it that way. Mentoring systems go far further for helping you play with your friends, since you and your friends get to experience content the way it was designed to be experienced together.

At the end of the day I tend to align with @MatthewWRossi who put it so poignantly in the above tweet. If a character is a struggle to level, then it won’t be something I play often once I get it to the level cap. Prime example of this was my rogue that I just recently hit 90 on. It was absolute skull drudgery to get it to the level cap, but I forced myself to do it… because I have not had a rogue at cap since burning crusade. Problem is while leveling it and the eventual LFR grind… I came to realize just how much I do not like playing a rogue. I pushed him over this finish line for reasons other than wanting to play the character, namely I wanted a max level transmute specialization alchemist… but each time I log over to the rogue to do something like a holiday instance, it just feels wrong. If you don’t enjoy the process of leveling the character, then to me at least it is highly unlikely you will enjoy the end result either.

I Lived Threes Company

Today’s blog post is going super long, but I guess I had a lot bottled up in me to talk about… no callback to the eye droppers intended. As I have said a few times I started out at a junior college for the first two years of my college education. So when it came time to transfer up to a four year university to finish off, I opted to get an apartment with a high school friend who had been doing the same. For a few months everything was peachy, and we lived pretty blissfully. Then one morning I was woken up by a bunch of strange men moving my roommates stuff out of our apartment. Without warning he decided to move into the “band” frat house, leaving me pretty much high and dry without much explanation.

It turns out that the landlords were coming that afternoon to kick him out of our apartment. When we got the place we had opted to each pay our half of the rent separately. While I had been religiously bringing my envelope down to the landlord on time, it seems as though he had not for the last two months. They were not going to make me catch up his side of the rent, but I just didn’t feel right not doing so. As a result it pretty much burned through all of my available cash, and the burden of keeping a place that I got intending to have a second income to support. At this same time, my wife and her roommate were living in the slums essentially. The place they were renting had literal holes in the floor and a very curious maroon stain creeping through the paint on the ceiling. So we both needed to get out of our current situation.

As a result we did the pragmatic thing, since it was a rarity that my wife and I spent a night a part at that point. We found a place that was ideal for three people, and after spending a few months watching the really nice caretaker renovate the place… we moved in. It was in a quite little trailer park roughly ten miles from town, so it gave us the feeling of having a home… more than a rental. So at that point I was basically living Threes Company, with two female roommates. Essentially my wife and I had the master bedroom together, and our roommate had another large bedroom on the opposite end of the trailer. The computers and consoles were set up in a “vestigial” middle bedroom that while it had a bed, the bed got used more as a couch than anything else.

The funny thing is that my wife’s father refused to admit that we were “living together in sin”. Anytime he needed to talk to my wife, he would not call our phone line at our end of the trailer, but instead he would call the roommates phone at the opposite end. Remember these are the days of dial-up… and since all of us were IRC junkies to boot… we had to have separate phone lines. I have to say the situation was damned near idyllic, and over the time living together the room mate and I developed a loving brother/sister type relationship. She is one of the few people we still keep in contact with from our college days, and while we don’t see her often not a week goes by that we don’t think about her. Our bonding was special, since she has Cystic Fibrosis… and when she was having a bad night it was not unusual that I would get employed to pound on her back to help break up the gunk so she could breathe. After all us respiratory system rejects got to stick together.

International Cupid

February 13, 2014 by Belghast

Short term commitment

Yesterday a friend of mine asked me if it would be okay if she played Elder Scrolls with the House Stalwart group. She was not sure how into the game she was, so might only be around for a month or so. She wanted to make sure no one would be upset with her not staying terribly long. She was afraid that House Stalwart were more dedicated members and might take offense to that. I of course assuaged her fears, since Stalwart as a whole is super casual and primarily a social guild. However what came next was a realization that I am not sure I had actually admitted to myself.

When I go into one of these games I don’t really expect folks to last more than a few months. That has been the track record with new games and our guild especially. This was so much the case with Final Fantasy XIV that I even started what I feel is going to be a new thing for me. When I subscribed to that game I chose to do so for three months and then immediately went into the back end and cancelled my account. That way it would essentially self destruct after three months unless I made some form of manual intervention to renew it. While you might think this is me not having faith in the game… it is more that I am not having faith in myself.

Other than World of Warcraft, each game I have played has been a three to six month encounter. While there are still games that I play semi-regularly, the tempest of activity has usually died down into a spring breeze at or around the three month mark. It feels to me that we are inherently either gaming lifers, or game jumpers. If you look at my own guild our I would say we have roughly sixty players that have only ever played WoW and cannot imagine playing another game. Then there is a pool of forty or so that tend to play whatever happens to be the next great game in the internet cultural zeitgeist. This experience has lead me to the new stance of giving a game three months of subscription and then evaluating where I stand after that.

Cash Shop Expansion

Yesterday the big 2.6 patch went in over in Rift and I have to say I have been watching this one with a bit of excitement. There are a ton of new features going into the game and you can read highlights of them over on this little info blurb created by Trion. This is the point at which I am going to be a bit of a downer, because after logging in last night I realized… the things I am most interested are really freaking expensive. A big thing they added in was the ability to start applying cosmetic skins to your pets. This has been one of my key frustrations with the pet classes that unlike the WoW Hunter we had no real control over what our pets looked like. There have been some really ugly pets as well… I am looking at you emaciated beastlord blue tiger thing. Most of these have improved to where the base pet is at least passable, but I would never turn down the opportunity to tweak the appearance.

Problem is that they are really expensive, in order to get all of the new skins… something that admittedly not everyone is going to want… they are running a special on them for roughly $70 worth of in game currency. Once the special is over however that price quadruples for the full unlock. Individual class based unlocks are more reasonable at around $7 per class. These are of course guesstimates based on the fact that in the $20 bundle it breaks out to be 160 credits per dollar. I feel like the whole budgie mount thing has maybe unfairly colored my opinion of the cash shop as a whole. Once upon a time it felt extremely reasonable, but now everything just seems more expensive than I want to pay for it.

The biggest thing I was interested in during this patch was the Dreamweaving profession. Once again however I was hit by the realization that in order to play with that it would involve me plunking down some cash to buy another trade skill extension. I don’t want to roll a brand new character just to be able to play with the profession, and I don’t really want to unlearn any of my already max level professions from my characters to pick up this new one. I realize it is a first world problem, and in a game like WoW we would have no choice at all but to do just that. However last night I was being irrational and felt extremely frustrated by having to make that choice.

Basically the only thing left that really made me excited after having the other two shiny baubles behind a paywall I didn’t feel like crossing… was the bounty system. I will admit I am pretty excited about this. One of the features that I loved from Dark Age of Camelot that no other game has really gotten right was the ability to create trophies of certain mobs out in the world. Our guild hall was full of these because I was constantly going out and collecting the “remains” needed to craft them. Rift seems to have finally created a version of that system that looks like it will work in modern terms. However after the frustrations up until that point, I just didn’t feel like sinking in the needed research to figure out exactly how the system worked.

I am sure at some point soon I will revisit it and be happy as a clam hunting down trophies. I just fear that this is he new reality for a game like Rift. When we get a patch, it will involve a little bit of free content and a lot of content you will have to hit the cash shop button to be able to truly enjoy. My frustration mostly is due the fact that I am a patron and have been one since the transition of that program. I feel like overall that is a “bad deal” since the loyalty accrual is excessively slow, there is no monthly credit allowance, and we still end up having to buy the new baubles when they come out. Sure the various daily buffs are nice, and I likely would not have made it to 60 on my rogue without them… but it feels like there should be at least some regular allowance of credits that can add up over time to be able to buy stuff from the store.

International Cupid

Today in light of Valentines being tomorrow, I have a factoid that I rarely tell. It is really weird how chance, fate, kismet… whatever you want to call it works sometimes. My wife and I grew up thirty minutes apart from each other in neighboring towns. It turns out that we knew several of the same people, went to several of the same places, and were probably in the same room multiple times during our lives. We would not have met however were it not for a mutual friend in Belgium. During the early days of the internet, we were both IRC junkies. Internet Relay Chat opened up a door to a world much larger than our own, and let us converse with people around the world… breakout out of our very limited small town upbringings.

Chatrooms in truth were a lot like we view guilds today, as a little social family that you hung out with. People shifted back and forth between them freely, and much like running content with some friends guild you hopped back and forth between channels freely. I’ve always been interested in programming and for awhile I got really into writing IRC bots. I would build little games into them, with dice rollers, character sheets and combat. It was through one of these bots that I met Hans. He asked me to come help him out with one of the bots on his channel, and it was one of the nights I was in his channel working on it that I saw a familiar address pop into the channel. Back in that day, you could see what internet service provider someone was connecting from, and over time I learned to immediately recognize all the local ones.

Out of the blue I messaged the new person who had entered the room saying something dumb to the equivalent of “not often that I see a local”. Apparently I freaked her out a little, since at the time I was logged into the bot. Observational skills were never a strong point. Hans apparently verified that I was a nice guy, and non-stalkerish because over the course of the next few weeks we struck up a friendship. Over Easter weekend she was heading back to her hometown, and we decided to meet up and go to the movies together. At this point it was just two friends hanging out and meeting in real life. We got along just fine, but neither of us was really looking for anything at that point so dating didn’t even dawn on either of us I don’t think.

As fate would have it, I was planning on transferring to the university she was attending, so at the very least it would be awesome to have some friends on campus. It was not until I had actually transferred that sparks really happened. To be honest we moved very quickly from “dating”, to being essentially inseparable from that point onwards. There were no long drawn out courtship rituals for us, we were far more practical than that. I still marvel at just how odd it was, that we had grown up so close to each other, but that it took someone half a world away to introduce us. Years later as we talked about our childhoods we have come up with several points at which we were likely in the same place at the same time. Thankfully we have an international cupid to thank for finally connecting us.

Budgie Week Fiasco

February 7, 2014 by Belghast

Another Friday, Moar Fodder

Well another week has passed and it is once again time for Friday Forum Fodder. I have admittedly not been following the discussion around the interwebs as closely as I usually do during the week. I have a massive backlog of unread blog posts in my reader as spending the first half of the week sick and the second half desperately trying to play catch-up has left me with less lollygagging time. I did stumble across a couple of things that I found interesting so the topics are primed and ready to go.

WoW Up to 7.8 Million Subscribers

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3741-WoW-Up-to-7-8-Million-Subscribers

Apparently yesterday Blizzard had their Q4 2013 earnings call, and announced that they were currently sitting at 7.8 Million subscribers, which surprisingly is a 200k subscriber bump over the 7.6 announced in the Q3 2013 earnings call. Of course we all know that Blizzcon happened between those two calls, and that we had the announcement of the Warlords of Draenor expansion. However 200,000 players seems like an awful lot to simply account for the “Blizzcon Bump”. On Argent Dawn I have said before that we have been experiencing a bit of a renaissance with a large number of players coming back that I have not seen since Wrath, and some of them not even since Burning Crusade. This feels like something more substantial than just interest in the new and shiny bauble called Warlords.

With the release of Rift, something happened in the populace, a fracturing of sorts. That was the very first time I saw people leave WoW in a semi-permanent fashion. Always before when a new product released, players would drift away from the game only to return a month or two later. Something was different with the release of Cataclysm that broke the inertia of players to stay in one place. I myself was gone for a little over two years, and during most of that time I never saw myself seriously returning. For whatever reason I think a lot of us are resigned to the fact that the “wow-killer” simply will never exist. All of this effort spent trying to find a better experience than World of Warcraft just wound up leading us right back to the original.

I personally have come to realize that what WoW provides just does not exist in the same quantity or quality elsewhere. Sure various games do various components of the total WoW experience better, but no one game hits as many high points as Blizzard does. I have reached a point where I am mostly okay with the games flaws… and while I wish that it did certain things better, I can accept the fact that what it does is for the benefit of the many not the few. There are niche games out there that will scratch the various itches I have that WoW simply cannot. So while I am back in WoW I am also still very much playing Rift, TSW, Everquest Next Landmark and will be adding Elder Scrolls Online to that lineup. I have reached a point where I am okay with playing multiple games at the same time.

The beauty of World of Warcraft is that it is the game of consensus. It is that game that everyone plays when they can’t get anyone to agree on any other game. People play WoW because people play WoW. More than anything the large community that comes part and parcel with playing the game was the thing I had been missing since leaving it. When you play wow, you are instantly a member of something larger than yourself, and that is just an experience that is lacking with any of the other games. Don’t get me wrong, the other game communities are great, especially the fledgling Everquest Next community bolstered by SOE’s new sense of transparency. However it is still lacking in sheer size and volume of players. The Blizzard gaming community is big enough to support everyone, and that is a really rare and special thing.

Budgie Week Fiasco

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/412505-budgie-week-guide.html

Firstly I want to say, this is less about the specific thread but more about the Budgie Week event. I latched onto the guide threat by Seatin mostly because it was the only really active thread out there that coalesced all of the viewpoints in one place, whether or not he actually intended that to happen. Seatin does a great job of supporting the community with his guides and videos, so nothing I say should be held as a reflection on that. Additionally I love the folks at Trion, especially the team that is presently working on Trove. That is such a great game and the open process is so refreshing, including the use of Reddit as their primary forums. Additionally when Rift went free to play, I considered it to be one of the more just and equitable models. However some of the things they have been doing with the cash shop are feeling more than a little shifty.

Awhile back some of my friends were frustrated over the Squirrel mount that was released, in that they missed the ridiculously short window it was available for purchase outright in the game. This was really the beginning of a new trend, offering a cool mount for a very short time, and then putting a similar mount in a cash shop lootbox as the primary means of obtaining it. This was the case for the Squirrel mount, the Mech mount, and now looks to be the same basic thing going on with the Budgie mount. The shifty part this time is that they introduced a world event to make it seem as though you can actually acquire the mount that way. Problem is… with this being only a 7 day event it is simply impossible to gain enough of the “bird seed” currency doing these quests alone.

According to Seatin’s guide, if you got in on the first day of the event there is a maximum of 210 bird seed that you can obtain. The mount costs 850 bird seed on the vendor, meaning there is simply no way to obtain it without somehow augmenting your seed count. It turns out right now they are offering a limited time cash box that has a chance of dropping a different colored budgie mount, and you are guaranteed between 6 and 10 birdseed per box. The average seems to be 8 per trove, so in theory you need roughly 80 of these cash shop boxes to be able to purchase the bird. Granted you have a chance from each to get the OTHER budgie mount, but we aren’t even taking this into account. Essentially even doing your quests religiously every day, you would have to spend roughly $300 on the cash shop to be certain you get this mount while it is available.

Now Daglar has posted on the forums that this is a promo event, and they intend to run it several times a year, and by participating in all of them you should be able to get the mount. Even saying that… it still feels extremely bad seeing this unfold. This is the same kind of crap that I see over in SWTOR with making most of the truly unique looking mounts only available through the random chance of a cash shop box. The difference there is that you can actually post the items once you have gotten them on the auction house… whereas the cash shop loot in Rift is either soul bound or bound to your account. This whole event just leaves me feeling a little dirty for having supported their shirt to free to play so actively. I still think Rift is a great game, and I still think more or less it is a good value… they are just doing a few unsavory things that make me a little sad inside.

Bel Goes to Nasa

This mornings factoid digs pretty deep into the annals of time. Once upon a time I wanted to grow up to be a Scientist. I am not really sure what happened along the way to change that life ambition. If I had to guess it was probably the fact that AP Chemistry ate my lunch, but I managed to get out of it with a B, which seemed pretty damned good at the time. All that aside, I did really and truly want to be a Scientist, so I took the yearly ritual of the science fair extremely seriously. Through boy scouts I had gotten into model rocketry, so when it came time to pick a project I thought it would be interesting to do something related to that. With copious help from my father, we constructed a wind tunnel that ran on a shop vac, and proceeded to test the effects of airflow based on various model rocket fin shapes.

I think the key to winning a science fair is to have something cool to look at in your booth. I am sure there were many students that had more scientifically sound studies than I did, but I had cool photos of the pattern each of the fins had made. We tied string to each of the fins so that we could watch the pattern the thread made based on the airflow. The contrails that were created gave a clear picture of how each shape varied and was something nice and concrete that the judges to latch onto. I won the local level science fair and managed to move up to regional’s, but this was not something really new to me, because my pantograph had done the same my six grade year. In all honesty repeating a victory at the local level would have been more than enough for me.

When I got to regional’s however I was shocked at just how excited the judges seemed to be about my exhibit. So when it came down to time to present the awards, I don’t really remember what place I got in the main competition, because it was quickly overshadowed by the “special” award that I won. I got a trip for me, my family and my science teacher to NASA’s Johnson Space center. I have to say it was one of the cooler things I have experienced. A lot of the trip is a haze at this point, but I remember walking through a prototype of what would eventually become the international space station. I also remember getting to play around in the shuttle flight simulator, and meeting actual astronauts. All of which were pretty heady things for my little wannabe scientist seventh grader mind. But of course, High School happened… and I discovered computers and programming… and I jettisoned the thoughts of being a scientist out the airlock and moved on.

Sneaky McSneakybits

January 29, 2014 by Belghast

Persistent Stuff

It has been quite a while since I last talked about Trove on my blog. For a bit I had been recording regular segments of me exploring the world, then after roughly six of them I just stopped. Namely this coincides with me getting super into World of Warcraft raiding for a bit. I however have continued to explore the game each time they add a new build. At this point it is hard to remember exactly what the state of the game was when I last talked about it. Currently we have fully persistent cornerstones, and you can see mine on the right-hand side of the image above. It is still very much a work in progress, but essentially I was trying to maximize the space available and still look like something I could pick out at a distance as “mine”.

Currently there are four levels above ground and two below ground, the first of which below has my workbench and block transmuter thingy. One of the cool things that they added in within the last few patches is the ability for your crafting inventory to survive between server resets. This means I finally have a real reason to mass harvest materials for use later, since I am not constantly losing everything each time a patch goes in. My biggest wish however is that we could craft some weapons to replace the starter crap. Each time the server resets I rush around trying to get decent enough weapons to leave the first tier zones. In this present patch it feels like maybe they nerfed the drop rates a bit, as I slaughter a few dozen ladybugs and bees this morning and have gotten nothing at all but cubits… the crafting currency.

Another cool thing they are doing is replacing the in game weapon drops with ones created by players. When you get an item, it now says who the weapon was created by. It was pretty cool the other night when I got a nifty rapier drop and noticed it was created by a friend of mine CaptainCursor. Since the community is relatively small at present, this adds a whole new level to the game since you are constantly running into things created by names you recognize. You can check out the latest patch notes over on the Trove reddit.

Sneaky McSneakybits

Yeah I have no clue why I named this subsection and the blog post this… brain does things sometimes. Last night my most important mission was to finish leveling my rogue to 60, and consume all of the various loot boxes I had gathered up along the way. At some point they made it so that you are guaranteed a lockbox of some sort from your weekly patron gift. Since my warrior Belghast is already fairly well geared, or at least well enough to begin raiding… I figured I would stockpile them to give my rogue a quick gear boost upon dinging. Turns out it worked pretty well at doing just that. Between the lockboxes and about 50 plat in select purchases I was able to get well past the 300 hit requirement for expert dungeons. I did not however get to run one as we spent a good chunk of the evening out and about last night.

In theory the queue should go pretty fast since I am equally comfortable Barding it up as support or going dps as either my Marksman spec or my Nightblade primary dps one. Going back and playing rift has made me realize just how much I love the Rift Rogue and truly dislike playing a WoW Rogue. While I got Gloam to 90, and I am extremely happy I did so that I could do the living steel transmutes I needed to craft my Sky Golem… I really don’t think he is going to get much play. Quite simply put… Belgarou my feral druid is a better rogue than my rogue is… or is at least a more interesting one. I have just come to realize I don’t really like the way rogues in wow play. Not sure what it is about the play style but it just isn’t for me anymore, especially now that I feel other classes like Retribution Paladin do the rogue combo point thing better.

Ultimately my key frustration with WoW rogues is that combo points are built in the target instead of a buff that stacks on the rogue itself. Warhammer Online got this right initially with the Witchhunter class, which was by all purposes a “better” rogue. I realize at this point the combo points on target thing is tradition, but it simply does not work that well. While saying the Rift rogue is better, is a bit disingenuous since it is essentially a wow rogue, hunter, druid, and a few other classes that don’t exist in wow rolled into one. I think the main reason why it “works” better is that the combo point mechanism is on the rogue, not the mob. This adds a bunch of interesting gameplay elements like building your combo points on the boss, and then using your combo dump to execute weaker encounters. It is just at this point that the WoW rogue seems so much less interesting than the other “Rogue like” combo point classes.

Onyxia Mount Patrol

After the time in Trove and Rift, I settled in for a little bit of Tuesday raid reset madness over in World of Warcraft. For better or worse, there are several raids that I solo each week on multiple characters for an attempt at the various pets, tansmoggy bits, and every elusive mounts. The start of each week tends to be me making the trek out to Dustwallow Marsh to beat up on Onyxia. First off I have to bitch a little bit, because post Cataclysm they have made it a royal pain in the ass to get to Onyxia for Alliance players. The fastest route I have figured out is fly straight south out of Stormwind, hop the boat at Booty Bay, and then fly to Dustwallow from there. All of that involves flying across several zones and hoping that you happen to arrive at Booty Bay just in time to land on the boat.

Of course like normal she didn’t drop me a mount, or anything else of interest for that matter but at this point I can easily solo her as Retribution Paladin and Frost Deathknight, so I do this little interchange twice a week. I need to cycle through some of my other characters and see if I can build a spec for them that can bring her out of the air in phase two. I might be able to gather up enough timeless isle gear to make a passable Boomkin spec on my druid, and I think in theory I could probably do it on as Enhancement Shaman. I do not think however that my Rogue or Warrior will be of much use in my quest for her mount. I need to check with my friend Rylacus and see if he has any master tips for dropping her out of the air. The one time I tried to do the fight as a Blood DK it literally took 30 minutes for my diseases/icy touch/deathcoil to do enough damage to get her back on the ground.

The highlight of the evening in WoW however was me flying over to Ahn’Qiraj on a whim. Turns out that I now have enough physical damage to solo the Twin Emperors fight. This had long been a stumbling block for me when it came to soloing AQ40. The other big hurdle was viscidious, however since I dual wield frost… I simply switched my razorice enchanted one-hander to my main hand and that seemed to do the trick for shattering him. Past that howling blast was more than enough frost damage to freeze the big blob. I am still missing two pets from this place, so I can see adding it to the weekly faff farming rotation. I did not really have time to do my BWL run on my paladin, I am still missing a few pieces of judgement… so I am sure over the next few days I will be getting that in. Since the eggs are a pain in the ass on anyone other than my Deathknight, I generally grab a random person from the guild who needs transmoggy bits before venturing into the dungeon. My hope is to find a time when Scarybooster can be online, and drag his butt through with them.