More Than Pixels

February 14, 2015February 13, 2015 by Belghast

The People Who Get You

I love twitter because it speeds up the process of finding amazing people who "get me" and who at least on some level I think I "get them"

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) February 13, 2015

Yesterday was an exceptionally strange day on twitter, in that an extremely length discussion started from something that @AlternativeChat said, and then spawned a side conversation including myself, @Jaedia, @BraxWolf and @GGChestnut regarding the nature of twitter and online connections. The later conversation seemed to rope in at least half of my friends at one time or another. Ultimately it started with the tweets above, and then grew a life of its own. I come from a very small town. To illustrate my point, I graduated from a class of roughly sixty students. When you live in an environment like that, you ultimately develop friendships based around what was actually available. So while I had many friends growing up, I also had the constant feeling that very few people actually “got me” on any real fundamental level.

I didn’t like the things I was supposed to like, and didn’t react the way to stimulus that I was supposed to react. But in that situation you make the best friends you have available to yourself and make due. It was not really until I stepped foot onto the internet and moved to college that I started to meet people I felt a deeper connection with. There were in fact people out there whose life did not revolve around the football game, and did not think the pinnacle of their existence was getting drunk at a broken down picnic area beside a creek imaginatively referred to as “tables”. I’ve lived much of my life with this sense that the world wanted me to play a role that didn’t quite fit. When I leave the house, it is as though I am putting on my “man suit” and trying to be the person that the world just assumes that I am. I like video games, if I watch television I am generally watching cartoons, and I deeply care about what is going on in the world of Lego this season. I am not “normal”.

More Than Pixels

Since I did not exactly have a lot of examples of people that I could relate to in the flesh, I cherished the few individuals that I did find a connection with. So when I interact with someone, I try and approach it as though I could be meeting a brand new life long friend. I got into a discussion during the day with Brax about how he feels that physical relationships are just different than digital ones. Ultimately I feel like it is only different if you are making it different. I guess maybe I come from a different place on this than most people. I would not know my very awesome wife were it not for the fact that we were both IRC junkies back during the dawn of the internet. We became friends when we were introduced by a mutual friend living in Belgium, and later found out we grew up thirty minutes apart. So when I think about my own beginnings, I find it impossible not to think about the person behind the screen when I interact with anyone.

I realize that just because I feel this way about the people I surround myself with, that it isn’t automatically a two way street. For many of the people that follow me on Twitter, read my blog or listen to my podcasts… I am in fact just a collection of pixels assembled on their screen that they happen to find appealing. There is nothing that I can do or will ever be able to do to bridge that gap. However I do find that there are people out there that I make a real and genuine connection with, and ultimately cherish them for their willingness to care about individuals that in the strictest sense they have no obligation to. I’ve often said it is the way you treat the people you don’t have to be nice to, that is what reflects your personal character the most. When you interact with someone online, you are seeing the real person… the one that is buried deep inside. We are all either inherently the villain trying to cause strife, or the hero attempting to right it.

Sharing Myself

One of the conscious decisions I made a few years ago was that I would be open to my readers. For the first several years of my blog I didn’t really talk about myself at all. I would keep my posts limited to strictly the facts about the game I happened to be playing, but ultimately I am more than just the games I play. I knew if I was going to manage to blog on a daily basis, I had to allow myself to talk about all of the things that were important to me. So each morning I open my door and invite strangers into my world. I walk this fine line however because I still cling to the relative anonymity of a “handle”. My goal is to tell real stories, but just leave out the names, places and finest levels of details. As a result I think you end up with a greater truth than had I said everything, because I have boiled whatever I happen to be talking about to the essentials that matter, leaving out the strictest minutiae. To quote Dragnet “Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent”.

Brax asked me if I found keeping up this personal aspect difficult as I continue to widen this circle of people I interact with. On some level I would say that yeah, it becomes much harder to keep your finger on everything that is going on. That said I have developed a realization that I will never be able to read every tweet or blog post or keep tabs on every person in my life. The interaction aspect isn’t that hard because each day I am just being me. Once upon a time my guildies used to refer to a persona I would adopt as “Rockstar Bel”, in that I would wear this mask of a person that amplified all the characteristics that I wished I was. Over time, and developing a certain level of confidence I have started to actually be this amped up version of myself. Which goes back to the statement I made earlier… when you encounter someone online, you get the see the person they really are, the person they have a potential in becoming. I think slowly, bit by bit I am becoming that person that I always wished I was, the one that actually believed I could accomplish interesting things. Maybe some day I will get there, but in the mean time I am going to keep sharing the ride with anyone who is willing to join me.

10 Years :: 10 Questions

August 9, 2014 by Belghast

Mission for Godmother

This mornings post is going to be a little bit different than my normal fare. One of the Blaugust bloggers the acclaimed Godmother of Faff posted a challenge of her own. On her blog Alternative Chat she is wanting anyone who has played World of Warcraft at any point during the ten years it has been in progress to take a quick survery. Being a blogger… this screamed a blog post to me. I will of course post my responses into her handy google form after I have finished this process, but I wanted to share my responses with the world as well. There is hardly any gamer that has not been touched in some way by Blizzard and the World of Warcraft… so I highly suggest you all participate in the event as well.

10 Years :: 10 Questions

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

I was indoctrinated into the world of MMO gaming during Everquest, and from that point onwards I was always on the look out for the next awesome game. I spent three years in EQ, another three in DAoC, a year in Horizons and was playing City of Heroes when I first got my taste of beta. I admit when I first heard about World of Warcraft, I wondered how in the hell they would have enough storyline to make a game out of that. I remembered Blizzard mostly as a company that made awesome games, but with only enough storyline to keep them from absolutely falling apart. I just couldn’t imagine something as detailed as say an Everquest coming out of that company. Then I got my first taste of the game and I was hooked.

World of Warcraft was so evolutionarily better than anything out at the time. It was a pulling together of all of the best characteristics of all of the games I had played to date and melding it together with this awesome cohesive narrative. I had some bad experiences with the Everquest guild I was in, and the leader being extremely domineering, so I knew going into a new game that everyone was excited about like WoW… I didn’t want that to happen again. I figured the only way I could stop it from happening was to accept the mantle of leadership myself. Roughly a year before the game actually released we started a forum, pulling together the small pools of players that we had played with in all of the games along the way, and through it House Stalwart was born. At launch we had around fifty players, and it continues to be a large multi-gaming guild to this day.

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

My first character was my paladin Exeter, who began his life as a dwarf. I had fallen in love with the Paladin in beta, and especially the synergy between my Paladin and the Priest my friend had been playing. The problem is by the time release came around they gutted the extremely enjoyable strike system and replaced it with the extremely cludgy seal system. I gave it the good college try and so long as I was leveling with my friends I did just fine. The problem is my ability to solo was dismal, and I felt like I was getting pulled into another “forced grouping” situation like Everquest. Then tragedy struck… there was a death in the family and I was absent from the game for a good time. When I came back all of my friends were a good 10 to 20 levels higher than me, and I knew there was no hope of catching up on the paladin.

I ended up rolling a new character a Dwarven Hunter Lodin, and with him I was able to solo until my heart was content and catch up to my friends. He was the main I never intended to have, and while fun ranged dps was never really my cup of tea. The problem is that some of my good friends had formed a raid group on our server, and they needed another hunter. From the moment I started raiding as a hunter, I felt obligated to STAY a hunter since they were going to the efforts of gearing me up. I played all of Vanilla as a survival hunter rocking the dragonbreath hand cannon for my main weapon. Belghast was not actually born until I decided that I wanted to be the best tank I could be… and rolled a warrior to level with my friends priest. But that is a story for another day.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

In truth when House Stalwart first launched we made a failed attempt to play both factions. We had House Stalwart of Argent Dawn on the Alliance side, and we had the Burning Claw of Silverhand on the Horde side. We split between the two roleplaying servers that existed at launch. For the first few months everything was fine. We pretty regularly alternated between the two sides, but the problem is as we got deeper into our characters we self sorted. A small faction of our guild preferred to play horde and the vast majority preferred the alliance. For me I have always been partial to dwarves, so it was an easy pick for which side to go on.

Because of this however I don’t really feel like I have massive faction loyalty, and ultimately would rather the factions simply not exist. Having a wall between the players feels like a poor design choice, and one that keeps getting repeated out in other games. I’ve always preferred how Everquest series handles faction, in that it is a personal choice and determines what areas you can go into… but not who you can associate with. As far as my not really playing horde regularly since… I guess I have gotten used to the easy life of the alliance. PVP only happens if you go and look for it, and since I am by nature a massive carebear I like this aspect of my faction. Additionally I have never really enjoyed playing “Monstrous Humanoids” to borrow the Dungeons and Dragons term. I would rather be a valiant knight in shining armor than a noble savage.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

I have a whole string of memorable moments, but probably the one that will always stand out for me is the first time we killed Sindragosa in Icecrown CItadel. This was a fight that we absolutely struggled with for weeks. The raid I was helping to lead at the time, Duranub Raiding Company was aptly named. We were in fact a durable pack of nubs… which is a phrase that ties back to an even earlier raid group the Late Night Raiders. We were one of those groups that struggled to get down the basics of an encounter… then all the sudden the moment you beat it you never wipe on it again. Same was the case with Sindragosa, we struggled to deal with people getting frozen and people breaking them out. On the time we actually downed her one of our best hunters Thalen, landed the killing blow mere seconds before getting put into an iceblock himself. So the boss was down and there were 25 little icicles spread throughout the room. The above image is my “artists recreation” of the fight.

All of the most memorable moments I have from the game came either through raiding or through dungeon runs, and I have come to the realization that they have little to do with the actual game itself. Sure the game provided me a backdrop to do interesting things with other people, but it was the interaction with said people that made it interesting. From the raid singing the “Crotch Pocket” jingle anytime Furnace Master Ignis shoved someone into his belt mounted crucible, or the struggles with “OmNomNomITron” and our shouting of “KIds!” anytime the plague one would spawn adds. It was the people that made everything interesting and all of the memorable moments I have are something you can never actually get back. They were awesome but they were fleeting and you can make new memories, but you can never fully relive the old ones.

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

My favorite aspect of World of Warcraft or any MMO for that matter are the dungeons. I love delving into ancient ruins with friends in the search for fabled treasures. For starters I have a massive bloodlust when it comes to gaming, and I will go out of my way to kill mobs. In a given night there are lots of moments where my friends will ask “Where is Bel?” and sure enough I will be a ways off killing something that we didn’t actually need to kill. So I love running dungeons with friends and during the era of WoW before the dungeon finder I used to build groups regularly from random strangers on the server. This was the primary way I met new people to join our raid and often times my guild.

The problem is with the dungeon finder the dungeons changed into something that I didn’t like very much at all. It all became about getting through them as quickly as possible and avoiding as much content as you could to rush to the end boss and “Finish”. This mentality just seemed like a travesty to me, because for me the dungeon itself was the reward and the time spent with new and interesting people in it. Unfortunately this dungeon mentality has infected so many other game communities that if you log in and run a dungeon in say Rift, they have the same expectations. While there are a few games like FFXIV that seem to have been forgotten by time and have really charming dungeon running cultures, my biggest fear is that WoW opened a Pandora’s box and ruined dungeon running in the process.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

There are a few areas of the game that I never skip, for example if I have the opportunity I will always level through Duskwood. Yes it is a frustratingly laid out zone, but I love the vibe of it. If there is a zone in a game that has werewolves, vampires or zombies… chances are I will deviate my leveling path to make sure I go through there. The problem with Duskwood however is Elwynn Forest and Westfall have so many issues. On a role-playing server, Goldshire is still ERP central… so I have long since stopped leveling any character in Elwynn. Westfall got considerably better in Cataclysm but is still a fairly boring slog in a pretty ugly zone. So generally speaking if I am working on a new character I will make a beeline to Duskwood around 20… complete the zone and then run the hell away and get back out of the human areas.

As far as areas I return to, I admit that I return to past raids often. Even though I spent three hours of every sunday for years in first Molen Core and then later Kharazan… I still enjoy soloing both zones. I am also extremely partial to the Black Temple, as I love the look and feel of the encounters. Basically if it is a raid and I can potentially solo it, I will likely do it on a semi regular basis. In a way I know I am wallowing in the nostalgia of the good times I had in that place, so once again it is less about the place itself and more about the experiences I had there. Each time I take down Nefarian for example I remember one of our paladins screaming “Use the Fucking Force” over teamspeak as all the healy paladins cast holy wrath. I have so much nostalgia tied to so many zones at this point, that revisiting any of them is enjoyable.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I am am really hoping you mean how long we have played the game in time, not actual /played hours. Firstly it will take forever for me to compile a list of just how many hours I have played this game spread out among my army of alts. Secondly I really don’t want to confront just how big that number will be. Suffice to say I have 7 level 90 characters, 2 85+, 4 80+, 2 70+ and enough 10-30 characters scattered on so many different servers that I have long since hit my 50 character limit and have to delete something to roll anything new. Belgrave became my “main” while we were starting Crusaders Coliseum 25 and I just looked and his /played is 86 days so I cannot fathom just how many physical years I have spent when you add everything up.

As far as how long have I played… I was in beta before the launch of World of Warcraft and House Stalwart was a day one guild. I played pretty solidly until Cataclysm when I feel out of love with the game in a big way and wandered off into Rift and then a string of other games. It seems like I renew interest in the game a few times a year now. I came back at the tail end of Cataclysm and stayed for the first few months of Pandaria, long enough to raid a little bit. Then most recently I came back for about six months and raided a bit of Throne of Thunder/Siege of Orgrimmar. At which point I took back the crown of my guild and have at the very least kept my account active from that point onwards. I love the guild and the people in it, and I am always willing to log in and check in on things even though I am maybe only playing once or twice a month. It is easy to quit the game, but it is extremely hard to quit the people playing it.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

I freely admit that most of the time I do not. There are two distinct kinds of questing for me… busy work and epic quest chains. The busy work like Kill X things, deliver this to that, retrieve this doodad… I really don’t pay attention to at all. In general I try to skim every quest I get to see if it is going to be an interesting one or not. If something catches my eye in this skimming process I go ahead and read the entire thing. I have gotten really spoiled by modern games with voice acted content. I will stop and listen to every last acted word when a quest is delivered like that, however if you are giving me a wall of text I skim it for the relevant bits and then move on. The primary time I end up reading every last line is when you get one of those quests that doesn’t work the way you think it should.

If you can believe it I am actually better about reading quest text today than I used to be. During the early days of WoW I would far rather grind mobs than do quests at all. This was the side effect from coming through a long line of games where the quests didn’t really matter. Everquest was a massive misnaming of that game, because in reality you never encountered quest unless you dug for them by “hailhumping” every mob in a zone until one of them responded with a keyword that signaled there was a quest. Instead I preferred to just go out and slaughter entire zones rather than hunt for the one clue that started a quest that was more than likely just a “bring me X things” that you got from killing mobs anyways. It also depends on the game, in a game like The Secret World I read every last bit because I know not doing so will come around to bite me in the end.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

I am sitting here trying to think of something, but really nothing major comes to mind. I know there have been times where I wished things had ended better with various people regarding the games. When you lead a guild and lead a raid there is always drama surrounding it. There are various events brought on by the game, and raiding that I wished would have maybe ended on better terms. However I don’t really dwell on them enough to consider them regrets. For the most part everything I have experienced through games, has lead me to be the gamer and blogger I am today. I tend to focus on the journey and not the goals. Sure there are little baubles and trinkets along the way that I kinda wish I had gotten, but for the most part I can always go back and obtain them later.

The only thing I really wish I had done was complete my shadowmourne. I am up to the part where I need to collect the various bits from the different encounters in Icecrown, but I have never actually gone back and made an effort to do it after the close of Wrath. Ultimately it just didn’t seem important enough to hassle a bunch of people into doing. It is not the sort of thing I really dwell upon but it would have been nice to complete that legendary eventually. I would still love to see a set of bindings drop for Thunderfury, but that is less about me or more about me wanting to make sure SOMEONE from LNR gets some. We raided Molten Core every single week for two years and never saw so much as a single binding drop.

10. What effects has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

Other than it making my wife occasionally grump and want to pull the plug from the back of my PC, I have to say overall the experience has been a positive one. There are so many friends that I would not have today were it not for this game. My blog for example started entirely out of a love of World of Warcraft and over time morphed into a love of all gaming. My twitter community, my blogger friends, the massive group of people that makes up House Stalwart and even the Blaugust event that is going on right now and is so amazingly successful… none of this would have happened were it not for World of Warcraft and the connections I made while playing it. As a result, even if I fall out of love with the game, I have to respect the effect it has had on my life and the great lives I have met in the process.

A Guild Divided

December 2, 2013 by Belghast

Nostalgia Won

If I remember correctly the last time I wrote a real post before my Nano recess, I was talking about the upwelling of nostalgia brought on by playing Hearthstone. I fought valiantly to resist but before long I was staring at the account section of the battle.net page and renewing my subscription. I had put this off because really I assumed this decision would end in tears. The odd thing is so far it has not. I have been enjoying the hell out of playing, and have even resumed raiding a bit. I don’t want to jinx it by saying I am back, but so far it feels like at least a possibility.

One of the awesome things about coming back at the tail end of the expansion is that Blizzard tends to give players many different ways to catch up gear wise. I have spent a ton of time out on the Timeless Isle and have been collecting sets of level 90 heirloom gear for each of my alts I intend to level. Since coming back I have caught my Deathknight Main Belgrave and Druid Belgarou up a bit in gear, leveled my Shaman Tallow and Warrior Belghast to 90, and am within a stones throw of 90 on my paladin Exeter. There is part of me that wants to push as many toons to 90 as I can before the release of Warlords of Draenor.

I have to say despite all of the negativity flowing around it, I am really looking forward to the expansion. They said during Blizzcon that the majority of the content would work more like Timeless Isle, and that was pretty much music to my ears. I love the way the content on the isle works, and I can spend hours both there and on the Isle of Giants tearing about the mobs with Belgrave. I think my happy medium is a mix of quests to give me purpose, and then found objectives along the way to force me to stop and smell the roses. If they can strike a balance, I think the content will be just about perfect for me. Not to mention that Garrisons sound amazingly fun, like a mix between player housing and the crew skill system in SWTOR.

A Guild Divided

At the beginning of Cataclysm I got a serious case of wanderlust. I would like to think it was because Rift was so amazing, but in reality I think I just needed a break from WoW. At that point I had played it for almost eight years straight without significant pause. But the sad thing is, that while I played it for seven years, I have yet to play a single game since for more than seven months. When I wandered off so did a lot of other guild members who were feeling a similar drag on their time. The untold story however is the fact that the vast majority of the guild stayed in World of Warcraft and in spite of my recruitment to other ventures… seemingly thrived. In fact I would say that right now Stalwart WoW was experiencing a bit of a renaissance with folks coming back that have long been dormant.

You can say this is the “Blizzcon Bump” but it seems a bit different for some reason. On my server Argent Dawn, I am seeing people showing up on my friends list that had disappeared years before I left the game. Even seeing familiar names popping into channels that out of nostalgia I am still joining. As much as I wanted to deny the fact, World of Warcraft is still thriving at least in pockets of players that have kept the embers of the community burning brightly. In my absence Rylacus has done a phenomenal job of “not messing with things” as he puts it. He has always been one of my closest and most loyal friends, and as I have been gone he has simply tried to continue on with what he thought I would do. It seems to have worked, because on week nights we tend to have 20-30 or more people online and active in doing something.

The only problem is that this maintaining the status quo has only caused to further some divides that started back in Cataclysm. When I said “A Guild Divided” in the section heading, I was not referring to the nomad gamers and the wow loyalists… but instead a rift that was always there but has deepened in my time away. Essentially our guild right now is a tale of two raids, the haves and the have-nots essentially. One raid has thrived clearing content and racking up the loot, while the other has floundered struggling to fill. There has been no intended malice, but the lesser performing raid has lost a lot of its brighter members to the better performing raid as folks sought out the path of easier loot. As a result there is more than a bit of bitterness and bad blood that has developed towards the alpha team.

Cleansing the Way

In the past I had served as a bridge between the two worlds, a bit of a buffer to lower the frustrations and aggressions. Rylacus has tried hard to fill these shoes but he simply does not have the volume of playtime that I do. Now that I am back at least for a bit I am trying my best to bridge this rift and hopefully mend the way between. As a result I have started tanking for the lesser progressed raid, and it seems like I am the difference between failure and success. The first week we downed new content, and it seemed so easy that I had no idea it wasn’t already on farm. The other tank is amazing to work with, and I am adjusting rapidly to this whole new concept for me of “no main tank”.

Additionally I am trying to attend the events sponsored by the alpha team to build the social equity there. The “big kids” have been gracious enough to host an open flex raid night on Mondays and this is getting betters of both teams in the same space. It is a bit awkward at times, but so far I think it has been an overall positive experience. The flex gear will help bolster both raids. The holidays have taken a big chunk out of our schedules, but I am hoping this week we can return to normality. In a sort of serendipity… several of my blogger and twitter friends have characters on Argent Dawn or are rerolling there. Going to try and get as many of them as I can into the open raid nights.

When I had come back for Pandaria the guild felt wrong to me. No one talked, no one worked together… and I really did not know how to fix it. Now coming back things are just different. Guild chat is full of lively conversation. Folks seem happy, and willing to help one another. Stalwart had survived all these years on a shared spirit, a feeling that we were all working together towards a greater good. During Cataclysm it feels that this spirit lost its way as we absorbed so many of the smaller satellite guilds that made up our non-guild-based raiding alliance. It feels though that in the midst of all of this a strong community has evolved. Here is hoping that I can be a catalyst towards solidifying this community into something truly great. If nothing else, I have been remembered and I still very much feel loved by my WoW family.

A Quiet Evening in Norrath

May 4, 2012 by Belghast

I have to say, it has been a fairly crazy week. At work I have been dealing with a “brand marketing” company, as we try and stand up a brand new promotional website. On the blog, the Newbie Blogger Initiative has kinda kicked me in the ass, and made me start trying to post some useful stuff on a regular basis. In game, as I mentioned yesterday I picked up TERA on a whim, so I have added it to my rotation of SWTOR and EQ2.

Checking In On The Republic

After spending the weekend in the Guild Wars 2 beta, and a good chunk of the week playing TERA, I felt like I needed to spend last night in SWTOR since the troops were getting restless. Leading a guild in Star Wars has been an interesting transition. I lead a very active guild in World of Warcraft for a little over seven years, so since the Star Wars guild is a combination of the same people, one would think I would be used to it.

I have to say however, it has been an interesting experience. I’ve talked about it before, but I really am not the same player that my friends knew and loved form WoW. After being committed to raiding 3-4 times a week, I find myself having trouble even committing to running a dungeon as a group. I’ve developed this resentment towards anything that ties me down, or forces other players to depend on me.

The Reluctant Guildmaster

After several nights of piddling around in other games and a weekend of soloing while testing, coming back to SWTOR last night was a bit jarring. I logged into a sea of tells, similar to like I used to get on a nightly basis in WoW. Each person that contacted me, had been waiting patiently for me to show up again, because they had some real need of my attention. But I have to say, it almost invoked a fight or flee instinct in me. Instead of actually going out and trying to get into my new Chiss Smuggler, I wound up simply logging in my 4 characters all night and running slicing missions.

I can happily report however, that the last patch did in fact seem to fix the slicing bugs. I was able to make a meager profit from running high end slicing boxes. When 1.2 came out, I ended up blowing through around 300,000 credits, trying to figure out a mix of lockboxes that actually was able to at least break even. Our guild crafters really relied on getting materials from those slicing missions, so it will be nice to be able to provide them once more.

I’ve hit a wall right now in Star Wars: The Old Republic. I have 3 characters at 50, each of them geared at least in purple mods in moldable gear. All that is missing from my stable is a smuggler. I made a push to do dailies on all three of my max level characters, and farmed up the 1.5 million credits to unlock the Chiss race I was wanting. Problem is, I just can’t seem to push forward anymore. At almost legacy 30, there really is nothing left for me in the system that does not involve prodigious amounts of credit grinding.

Norrath Calling

After last night feeling very much like returning to a job after a vacation, and knowing that tomorrow would be spent on the road, I decided tonight I would relax over in Norrath. Everquest 2 is one of those games I can always return to, and always find something interesting to do. I seriously think there is more content in that game than I will ever be able to complete.

I have a level 90 ShadowKnight, with around 300 AAs, so I could be off doing the new 90-92 content. Problem being that I don’t really feel like doing anything that serious. The rest of my guild seems to be moving happily through the content, and from all accounts it seems like the Withering Lands and Skyshrine are extremely awesome. For whatever reason though, I just have more of a desire to play my level 80 Dark Elf Dirge, and my level 20 Froglok Paladin.

Belglorian of Marr

Tonight I decided to log into my little frogadin, and take a trip to Stormhold. Over the years this has been one of my favorite dungeons. I love the way Norrathian dungeons are laid out, and anytime you give me one filled with tons of undead I am a happy camper. Other games have pretty dungeons, but for whatever reason they don’t feel like something the mobs would actually use. EQ2 dungeons are replete with kitchens, store rooms, audience chambers, and are populated with everything from the butler to the chef. I honestly think this was why I liked Karazhan so much. It was the only wow dungeon that felt like someone could actually inhabit it.

I’ve completely stacked the deck on my Belglorian, my paladin. I picked him up one of Fippy Darkpaw’s swords during the chronoportal event. In addition I have crafted some nice armor, including the level 20 reactant “of authority” chest piece. Essentially my gameplay is to keep him locked at 100% AA at level 20 until I can get at least 100 AA levels. Right now I am sitting at 45, and each AA makes life a little easier. There are so many good level 20ish spots, and I find running around killing random stuff in Everquest 2 really relaxing.

I had a bad pull deep down inside of Stormhold, wound up getting two bosses and wiped. I took a quick break to come over her and write something up, but I can hear the soft crackling of the braziers near the entrance in the background as I right. It is softly calling me back, to come bash heads again. I hope you all have a great weekend, mine will be busy chaperoning a college trip with my educator wife. As a result not sure how much playtime I will actually get other than tonight, so I am planning on savoring it.