Wukong is super annoying

Yesterday more than mildly sucked.  While I was blogging in the morning, just after posting it… I managed to stub my toe hard enough on something sharp under my desk… that it caused a chunk of my toenail to chip off and a little bout of excessive bleeding.  After that my stomach pretty much bothered me all day long, and I tagged out of work around noon.  I worked remotely the rest of the day trying to catch up and prepare for big releases on Thursday and Saturday.

Escapist Thwarted

All of this, combined with trying to come up with a new way to circumvent my ninja ferret caused me to get a later than normal start on evening relaxation time.  On the ferret note, our current solution seems to be working… and I am breathing at least a minor sigh of relief.  We have a drop ceiling in our kitchen, circa 1980, with those massive semi-opaque sheets of plastic covering fluorescent lighting.  Over the years the 1980s plastic has fallen apart, and we have had to replace them on a piecemeal basis.

We had just finished doing this, and still had the leftover bits in the kitchen when a stroke of brilliance hit.  Basically Miss Bellatrix is getting out by climbing the corner with the litter box.  We surmised that if she did not have a foothold, she couldn’t get out.  So essentially we have taken two sheets of this plastic covering and clipped it onto the wire with binder clips from the backside, so that it presents a sheer face for her to try and climb.

Based on last night, and the fact we left her out over night as an experiment…  and she is still pouncing around the playpen this morning…  I would say the experiment worked.  The funny thing is, I think she just tries to escape out of boredom.  She sleeps far less than the other two ferrets, and when she has gotten out she tried to crawl up into bed with us. 

My theory was that she was bored and looking for someone to play with… she often tries to wake the other two ferrets up to play.  So the whole escape thing is kind of adorable… but something we had to nip in the bud, because our house is just too dangerous for her.  We have an open living room, that spans 2 stories, and a second floor balcony that overlooks it.  It is just too likely that she will wander up there and try and take a swan dive off.

Freljord Rising

 

Yesterday was a big day for new content releases.  In Everquest 2 you had the Game Update 66 launch, and with it the launch of the Cobalt Scar area.  Neverwinter Online of course launched to the public, and has been riddled with issues at least with the patcher.  Early in the evening I decided to fire up the client and log in, and was greeted by a roughly 8000 player queue.  So it appears that the launch is at least popular, but then again most MMO launches are. 

The content launch I ended up playing last night however is League of Legends and its patch 3.6.  The big event with the patch is a massive re-ordering of the champion lore in Freljord and the release of a brand new champion…  Lissandra The Ice Witch.  I would highly suggest watching the above video if you are interested, but the basics are that the Freljord is now divided into three warring clans:  The Avarosans lead by Ashe, The Winter’s Claw lead by Sejuani and the Frostguard lead by Lissandra.

With the focus on Freljord and its lore, this week all of the free rotation champions are somehow connected to this effort.  With it, there is a much more sweeping sale going on in the store, with ALL Freljord champions costing both reduced RP and IP.  Additionally there are some nifty new skins available, my personal favorite is Runeguard Volibear.  I already really liked playing Voli, but this skin just makes him look even more badass.

Sucking Less

It was pretty late by the time I had gotten around to actually doing much of anything, and since I had not played League for roughly a week… I decided to join in the festivities there.  While waiting on our group to filter into mumble, we decided to do a little 2 v 2 “Murder Bridge” aka Howling Abyss.  To be extra griefy…  Tam decided to set us up for a random champions match.  By the artwork above you can see that I got stuck with NuNu.  What essentially happened is two players got champions they were familiar and decent with, and two completely random picks they had never played.

Making it even more hilarious was the fact that we ended up with four melee champions.  The teams broke down like this:  Myself playing Nunu and Drathis playing Tryndamere against Tam playing Warwick and Ashgar playing Udyr.  My big takeaway from playing Nunu is that his frostbolt is without a doubt one of the most griefy pokes I have seen in the game, especially on a map that includes nothing but melee that have no solid ways of closing the gap. 

We lost rather spectacularly in part because Drathis ended up spending most of the map pretty underfed, which as a carry caused him never quite to reach his potential.  Also…  Ashgar is really really good at Udyr, a champion he was super familiar with and rather skilled.  It was hilarious for Tam and I however, because really Nunu and Warwick are much much not our kind of champions… much laughing ensued.

Wukong is super annoying

After our quick murder bridge, we somehow jumped from four players online to eight and decided to do a 4v4 Summoners Rift.  After the ickyness of playing Nunu, a champion that I absolutely hate when playing against him… I decided to climb back into the warmth of what has become my favorite champion…  Wukong.  When playing against each other, it is always interesting.  Some of us, Rae especially, seem to have a problem killing friends, and you can almost hear her audibly cringe each time she does it.  Others like Ashgar and I seem to set up and develop a friendly rivalry, which unfortunately causes us to deathmatch more than we should.

Another thing I am learning, is that apparently I am super annoying playing Wukong.  Ashgar and I both ended up as solo tops, which pitted Wukong against Fizz…  both of which are super bursty and super pouncy champions.  For the most part we traded blows back and forth, but once I had gotten fed I seemed to start winning these little battles.  Apparently my Ultimate ability is super overpowered, and after a few interludes where I went through the jungle to help out in another lane…  it seemed my dear friends started hunting for me.

At one point they boxed me in, as two came down from base and the other two came from the river and completely wrecked me.  It is funny to listen to your friends reacting to the decoy ability, and finding out that it is not the real you they just killed.  I have to say if I were up against Wukong I would probably focus fire him as well.  The game felt like a tale of two games, the first when I was super fed and able to pick off players with impunity, and the second when said players realized what was going on and started gunning for me.

Champion Testing

After the mega 4v4 battle, we had a few more players filter off and we fired up a Summoner’s Rift vs bots to test out various champions folks had wanted to play.  I got to play Olaf, which I played extremely differently than I expected…  but was really enjoyable nonetheless.  In addition, I finally got to play Mordekaiser, which is NOT as fun as he looks… and most definitely not a “Belghast” champion.  I think I could get used to him, but I feel like I need to do a lot of reading first.

Was a fun evening all around, and I got to play several characters that I had never played before.  I am of mixed opinions on my Nunu experience, I was told by my friends that I played him pretty effectively, but overall it just felt so odd to me.  He also feels like one of the most griefy champions I have seen, with the frost ball and his ultimate…  so many ways to slow the player and do large amounts of damage to them in the process.  I could see maybe picking him up and trying him again.

If you aren’t regularly playing, I highly suggest you hop in during the Freljord launch event.  There is a much better assortment of killer champions in the free rotation this week than normal.  Or at least, there are more champions I was wanting to play, and most of them on a significant sale.  If you’ve made it this far in the post, I hope you guys continue having an awesome week.  Today is a super stressful day for me, delivering my mobile web roadmap, so hopefully that will go well.  More than anything, I think the document is designed to be big, and sit on a table during the meeting saying “look we thought about this shit”.