Guild Leadership Archives - Page 79 of 108

The Crusades

March 26, 2014 by Belghast

The Morning After

Yesterday was a trying day to say the least. The funeral for my grandmother was at the odd hour of 9:30, and to add to that it was 35* outside which made me cling to my leather jacket like a life vest. The wind that was blowing made the graveside portion absolute torture. When we got back to the dinner afterwards, we huddled around the coffee pot trying to warm up. I feel like it has been too long since I had been to a catholic funeral, because after going to mostly protestant ones over the last few years… it felt very clinical and detached from my grandmother. I am sure she would have liked it, being the devout catholic that she was, and the priest… however hard he was to understand seemed to do his level best to give her a proper sendoff.

Normally I am used to absolutely losing my shit at some point during the funeral service as loved ones recount tales of the deceased. This didn’t happen, either in the losing my shit variety or the recounting tales variety. It was a mass, just like every other mass I have attended… with the exception that there was a casket at the front. Nothing about the service felt like we were honoring my grandmother… instead it just felt like we were obeying a ritual. It is sad she is gone, but the positive of it all is that I think it is going to help my generation… the cousins to reconnect. We stood around and visited for a couple of hours in the church hall after the service.

For whatever problems my moms generation has had with drama… that seems to be completely absent from my generation. It was good seeing my cousins and finding out that all but one are living in close enough vicinity to be able to get together for dinner. My wife is already scheming to have some sort of a cousins day out at the zoo.. in part because the children of my cousins don’t really know each other… and that is a damned shame. I remember similar outings to the kiddie park etc, that let my generation mingle and get to know each other. While I have never really fit into my family, it seems like none of my cousins have really felt like they fit in either. I guess it is time for us to create our own brand of family.

The Crusades

I have to say I love everything about the crusader. I somehow got left out of the Reaper of Souls beta shenanigans, so yesterday was quite literally the first time I had played one. I have always been drawn to “tanky” characters, or at the very least sword and board oriented ones. The crusader so far does not disappoint at all. I have only made it a little way through the play through and I am already digging the look and feel and style. My friends seem to have a problem with the male crusader voice acting, but I dig it so far. So right now I am completely torn, I want to play my crusader so much… but I also want to complete Act V. In part because I don’t want the internet to spoil my fun. I can only go so long without reading tweets about D3, and sooner or later someone is going to spoil the ending.

Granted Blizzard games are not exactly high fiction, but I am trying to keep whatever I can about the game secret for now. Which is extremely ironic, considering I live streamed the entire evenings play. So basically… if you care about spoilers don’t watch. It should be at least mildly entertaining as within moments of starting playing last night, I ended up with two other friends joining me in my mission. Whenever Rae is in the channel it is always entertaining. As the evening went on we ended up with Tib, Waren, Drathis and eventually Tam in the channel as well. Granted our trio never really changed during the course of the evening, but suffice as to say that we were all somehow playing Reaper of Souls.

So far I am really enjoying the new content. I don’t want to dig too deeply into it as to create my own spoilers but the maps are pretty vast, and extremely detailed. The thing that I am liking the most so far is how almost every single dungeon has some sort of new event. These were my favorite thing about Diablo 3, but they just felt like they were to sparse or random as to whether or not you would actually see one. The amount of creativity that went into designing this acts traps and events is pretty great. There is also an amazing sub theme going on, that will make Frank Herbert fans excited, but I won’t go into more detail than that. It is not exactly subtle, but fans of the Dune series will pick up on the references.

Bounty of Games

Right now my big hope is to be able to get through Act five this week, and hopefully have my monk to level 70 to show for it. The primary reason I am wanting to push through the content is that if my math is correct… Elder Scrolls Online head start begins this Sunday. Granted this is the five day launch for folks who preordered imperial edition through Zenimax… but that is precisely what I did. I have been really looking forward to this game and I am amped to finally get in and make some permanent decisions. Like I have said before, I have been in testing of this title for over a year at this point and have watched it grow from something good to something great. The only problem is… it is launching super close to Reaper of Souls. So while I don’t want to abandon playing a crusader… I know I will at least for the short term. I intend to be in and streaming ESO from day one as I wander around and adventure on my Imperial Sword and Shield Dragon Knight.

Ding 60… and 90

March 25, 2014 by Belghast

The Rosary

While I grew up catholic, it has literally been years since I had been to the crux of catholic existence… the rosary. Somehow my wife who was raised Baptist has never actually attended one at all in the over 16 years we’ve been married (or two decades we’ve been together). Under normal circumstances this would have been a disorienting experience, but last night it was made doubly so by a weird quirk of the modern church. It seems as though there is a massive priest shortage currently in the church. Quite simply put very few individuals enter the priesthood in America, and this is really no big surprise given the negative image of the church over numerous sex scandals. I am not adding commentary here, just stating the fact that there is a massive shortage of priests.

As a result since the retirement of the priest I grew up with, they briefly had a priest designed to “reinforce catholic doctrine”. Father had many quirks, one of them was a refusal to have “special offerings” for the various causes of the Catholic church. Apparently lately there have been no less than three passing of the plate for various causes, so I can see why he refused to do that crap. Anyways since the reformer priest, they have cycled through a series of priests, none of them native English speakers. Each one seemingly harder to understand than the last one. The catholic church is thriving in other parts of the world… just not here in America. So when you take what would have already been a confused experience and add in severe language issues… it was all my wife could do to keep from laughing.

For starters each time the priest would say a “Hail Mary”, he sounded like he was bored with the prayer. As a result he would begin running his words together and mumbling. So this produced all sorts of interesting things. After the Rosary I got together with my cousins and we all compared notes on what we heard. I personally thought he was saying something about a “Roma Tomato”, one of my cousins heard “Fruit of the Loom” and another something about “flushing the toilet”. It reminded me of a time when I was at my wife’s church, and the preacher had an extremely thick accent. We kept thinking he was talking about “Bastard’s For Christ” instead of what we found out later was “Ambassadors for Christ”. The problem is once you hear it… you can’t un-hear it… and while I knew by memory the words he was trying to say, I had no less trouble making them out.

So long as he was sticking to prayers I knew I was mostly okay, but there was a period where because of his respect for my grandmother… he went completely off script. The words I did manage to grasp, seemed to be meandering and completely off focus. He was talking about how some people live to be 100, and most people live to be 60. Which I thought was an odd statement considering the vast majority of the people in front of him… were well over 60. Thankfully all of us managed to make it through more or less with a straight face. The only thing I am certain of is that we have a new florist. The shop we used to use is no longer in business, so we tried the spouse of a person my wife teaches with. She did an amazing job and produced two gorgeous arrangements for a more than reasonable price. It’s always good to have a florist at the ready.

Ding 60… and 90

Yesterday during the day I spent a good chunk of my time streaming and playing World of Warcraft. With the release of Reaper of Souls last night at midnight, and the upcoming headstart of Elder Scrolls Online… I really wanted to get my mage to 60 so I could perform the boost. Going into the day I was sitting at 57 so just a stones throw away from the finish line. I spent most of that time chain running dungeons, and if you are phenomenally bored you can watch almost the entire adventure on my twitch stream. A few odd things happened along the way. Firstly I ran into a guild called Combat Wombats… which in itself is not that interesting. What I do find interesting is that they are apparently not connected at all to the guild by the same name run by several of my blogger friends. I threw out a few names, and the two members of the guild didn’t have a clue who I might be talking about.

Second interesting thing is that I reached a point of equilibrium where I maybe didn’t suck at magery as badly. In fact for quite a while running these dungeons I was pretty damned high on the damage meters and overall damage done. I felt like I had grasped the basics of playing frost and was ready to move on to bigger and better things. When I dinged 60 and took the boost to 90 I went from being confident to being completely confused. In the 30 levels that I skipped over, I had more than doubled the number of buttons I had to keep track of. Firstly I found it extremely disorienting to have my hotbars completely replaced without being prompted. At least when I took the jump to 80 from the scroll of resurrection, it asked me if I wanted to have them rearrange my hotbars.

After deconstructing them and trying to remember what I had on each of the buttons, I realized that I had way more buttons than places to put them. This is the problem with boosting. In those 30 levels the way a mage plays changes drastically, and I am sure this happens for all of the classes. So while I felt extremely comfortable playing a mage before the boost, afterwards I felt like I was a complete and total “nub” again. I scrounged around and found a complete set of timeless isle gear between the banks for a few characters. Complete in the pieces of armor, as I was missing 1 ring, a necklace and two trinkets. However this took my overall gear score to 491 which I felt was better than most of the boostards would be. As a test I decided to queue for the first stage of Throne of Thunder.

While I was not the lowest dps… I was really damned close. There is so much going on, that I felt completely lost in trying to figure out when I should do what. I like all the other boostards did things backwards. After realizing I was in over my head, I did a little bit of research and I think for the most part I have a grasp on what my priority should be for casting. At some point in the next few days I will try the next part of the LFR to see if my overall numbers improve. I would run a few heroics, but quite honestly… I find LFR to be far less confrontational when you are not sure about how you are doing. I can almost always do better than the worst player, so that gives me the leverage to learn on my feet rather than being called out in a 5 man group.

Pugs Aren’t All Bad

I had another interesting incident happen yesterday, that is making me feel like I need to re-evaluate my stance on pugging. Starting to think that maybe I should even start trying to tank them some more. In all of the dungeons I have run on my mage to get to 60, I had very few situations where things did not go well. More than that, I have had a few incidents happen where folks have been genuinely awesome. Yesterday in the middle of a Lower Blackrock Spire run, I ended up meeting a pretty awesome druid healer. Throughout the course of the run we chatted back and forth, and when for no apparent reason half of the party bailed on us, we hung out for a bit while waiting on the queue to fill. She said she was waiting around on a call from the vets, and was hoping to get a few dungeon runs in the meantime.

Since she was on a timeframe, I told her that she should drop group and should be able to get an instant queue. She thanked me, and we went on our way… thinking that I would never see this player again. Turns out there were really only a few people queuing at that time of the day, and when the queue popped I was in another LBRS group with the same healer. We had a really good druid tank to work with, but he admitted straight up that he didn’t know his way around the zone. So I helped shuttle him through the content, giving him a few tips on nasty pulls. We wiped a few times, but overall everyone stuck with it and we managed to complete the dungeon. Over the course of the run the healer talked about coming back to wow and wishing she could find a good guild to run with.

After the conclusion of the run I gave her the spiel on House Stalwart. Went over our three rules, and a bit of background information. Once again I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but within thirty minutes she had rolled a priest on Argent Dawn and pinged me for an invite. So as frustrating as pugs can be, I guess there are some genuinely nice players just trying to get through the game as well. I went into the dungeons not expecting anything more than experience, and ended up walking out with a new guild member. Considering just how many of my current guildies are people who I met through dungeon groups… I really should relax my anti-pug stance and give it a shot now and then. There are always going to be gems in the rough out there to be found.

Comfort Gaming

March 22, 2014 by Belghast

Classy Defined

This morning I got up like I do most weekend mornings, and threw on enough clothing to make myself presentable. Generally speaking I don’t shower until later in the day, so generally this means I have to throw on a skull cap to tame my hair that is sticking straight up. In the winter this makes sense… in the summer not so much. Honestly in the morning anytime I see someone in a skull cap or baseball cap… I pretty much assume they are doing precisely what I am doing. As always I went to QuikTrip to gather up sustenance, and walked away with chocolate donut holes for the Mrs. and a jalapeño sausage roll for me.

While there… I saw the definition of classy. This woman walked in, who looked like she was already three sheets to the wind. What was she buying you ask? Well she planted an “Olde English” 40 oz malt liquor on the counter. Granted this is 8 am in the morning, most of the people in the place are buying donuts or juice or something more breakfast appropriate. In addition she had a package of twinkies and asked the guy at the counter if he sold single swisher sweets. After some fumbling around he found her a three pack, and I guess that was “close enough”. So yeah… I guess that is how some people roll. I am guessing this is not breakfast but a “night cap” of sorts. Just not something I normally see in the neighborhood QuikTrip.

Comfort Gaming

I think I grieve differently than most. Since the news of my grandmother, all I have really wanted to do is “turtle”… aka pull my head inside my shell and forget that the world exists. One of my chosen ways of doing this is to go off and play games that have always made me happy. One of the games I always cycle back to eventually is Everquest 2. It is like an old friend that I have spent so much time with, that I don’t even need to talk anymore… and I know that it understands me. Yeah I am sure it is odd that I personify a game like that, but really EQ2 was a thing I did for “me” and no one else. All the while raiding in WoW I would steal private time by logging into Norrath and wandering around aimlessly on my army of alts.

Just as a coincidence, right now my absolutely favorite event is going on in EQ2. Once a year Chronoportals open up allowing players to revisit areas from the original Everquest. Some of them are rather funny, like the Ancient Cyclops event in Sinking Sands. Back in the day there were all sorts of “theories” for how you get the ancient cyclops to spawn. Some of these involved killing all the madmen, spiders or mummies… and none of them really worked. It was a fairly random chance that you would get him to spawn. Why did players care? Well the Ancient Cyclops dropped the item needed to start the Journeyman Boots quest line, which of course provided the player with their own personal way of casting “Spirit of the Wolf”. SoW Plx!

Basically they are a really awesome way of getting account bound gear for your alts. I am not sure when I will actually level an alt again, but sooner or later I always seem to, and having these weapons and gear makes a bit difference. On my Shadow Knight I am still using the sword that comes from the Lower Guk chronoportal event. It is precisely the kind of mindless nostalgia that I need right now. The above video has me running through several of the events, or at least the ones I could remember off the top of my head. However if you are looking for a full listing, the place to check is Zam as always the amazing Cyliena does a great job as always with updates.

The Great Wipe

The end of Alpha is I believe next Wednesday morning, and the beginning of Closed Beta begins Wednesday afternoon/evening when the servers come back up. What this means is everything we have created along the way… will be gone. The only thing that will be kept are your characters, and the various entitlements like things that came from the trailblazer packs and things purchased from the store. This means all of the claim data will be wiped. I have a big mixed opinion about this. I don’t mind the idea of losing the work I have done on my claim, but I really don’t like the idea of losing my claim in general. I like my claim, I like where it is. My frustration is that there will be a massive landrush Wednesday evening… which is going to suck.

My plan will be to try and get a spot similar to where I had it before on Liberation/Pingo, but if I cannot… who knows where I will end up. Basically the acquisition of goods begins a new. So that means we will have to go back to square one with only our extra special trailblazer axe to start and work our way through the gearing tiers again. Here is hoping that with the addition of heartwood the grind for stuff is far less painful. As a result I got in for a bit yesterday, but I didn’t really feel like doing much. I made a few claims extension flags to see how well that worked, but really with everything going away, I don’t feel much like screwing with it. I have a bit of my stuff templated, but really I found using super huge templates really awkward so I will probably build everything back from scratch.

The cool thing about closed beta is that each of us trailblazers are getting friend keys. The notice from the other day says these are no longer going to be time limited keys… but instead permanent access to the beta from this point onwards. I know a few people who wanted them, so I will be trying to hand mine out that way. However there should be a lot of them up for grabs as I know a lot of people in the blogosphere who are Trailblazers. My hope is that they pretty much limit the closed beta access to just the friend codes for a bit, at least until the great landrush is over. My goal is to get another claim somewhere in a forested area and then start over from there. I really liked being in the forest, especially since the later item grind ends up being wood, and not ore.

Gadgetzan Bound

March 20, 2014 by Belghast

Obligatory Update

Yesterday while I was in training I got a text from my mother. It seems as though the lasix is doing what it is supposed to do and my grandmothers kidney function is improved. At this point they are talking about maybe taking her off the ventilator today, and trying to wake her up completely. For the last several days they have kept her sedated with propofol aka “the Michael Jackson drug”. This has been allowing her to rest and hopefully heal. As always I want to thank you all for the support. I am not sure if I want to hope that things are turning around yet or not, because I really don’t want to jinx things. If they can take her off the ventilator that means she moves out of ICU and up to something called a telemetrics floor. Which I believe means all the monitoring of ICU, just without the critical nature. I of course will report in with what has happened one way or the other tomorrow.

Gadgetzan Bound

Last night I did not get a ton of playtime but the time I did get I continued working on my Night Elf Mage. At this point I am 45 and sitting in Gadgetzan, having more or less completed Thousand Needles. Tanaris feels much the same, even though it has changed massively since when I was first out here leveling my Hunter back in 2005. The flavor of the zone is still there… namely the conflict between the goblins of Gadgetzan and the south seas pirates. While not as hard hit as thousand needles, the zone has lost a significant amount of dry land during the Cataclysm. In many ways this has made some of the places more enjoyable. I especially liked the shallow lake full of sea giants.

Back in Everquest, the iconic “dangerous” mob was the Sand Giant, and Sea Giants have that same sort of feeling. I remember the first time I encountered one, and I also remember it completely kicking my ass. So while it feels odd that I am openly hunting them during a kill quest, it also feels cool to know that I can now take them down. Additionally you might notice that I finally got off my duff and made some glyphs. I have to say the “unbound” elemental is so much cooler than the stock frost elemental. On top of that it has a much more soothing sound as opposed to the default “water boiling” noise.

I only managed to put on a few levels last night, but mostly because I was not feeling up to pugging. There are days I can deal with the frustration and stress and there are other days I cannot. Last night I just wanted to wrap up in my cocoon on the sofa and vege out for a bit. I ended up going to bed fairly early, which I am sure is something my body needed. I still feel like I am half coming down with something, half allergies going haywire. According to fitbit I managed to get over six hours of sleep last night, which is pretty damned good for me. Traditionally I barely get five hours on the best night.

Out of Touch

The oddest thing about being in a serious training class, or at least one with the word “bootcamp” in the title means that I really am disconnected from the world while doing it. This has been odd, I am so used to knowing about everything happening within minutes thanks to twitter and google plus. Being disconnected has created this sense that I am missing something important. Yet instead of trying to catch up last night, I mostly just kept ignoring it. I guess my mind is going into weekend mode when I really don’t check into stuff much at all. Training has been good, but it was one of those situations where I did not realize quite how much I already knew about the software. Day one was pretty much just a review of concepts we already knew.

Hopefully today we will get into the hardcore nuts and bolts of tearing stuff apart and reassembling it in a fashion we want. The instructor is pretty hardcore, in that I guess at one point he was over the hardware division at Microsoft, as well as other things. Nice guy, seems to know what he is talking about. The time has gone extremely quickly, and I think it helps that I am taking it with two other co-workers. I guess right now it just feels like I am in this bubble that is not entirely “the real world”, but instead some odd “training world”. Oh well just today and tomorrow and then we are back to normality.