Rift Archives - Page 36 of 43 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Computer Blues

June 12, 2013 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have been having what I term as “bad mental health” days. I’ve been super stressed about various sundry things at work, and combine that with the fact that I just do not handle change well. Every time my wife goes away during the summer for a conference, I go through this massive adjustment period. So much of my life is intertwined with hers, that when she is gone… there is just a void. I try my best to manage this “funk” but now and then it gets the better of me. I am thankful that I have a lot of friends who are willing to cheer me up.

Computer Blues

It seems like over the last few days… my computers have been betraying me. I have been having issues with my gaming laptop, where it is intermittently losing its power connection. Fiddling with the cord brings back the connection for short periods of time, before going out. I initially thought… this is likely a power supply issue so I did what I always do and went on amazon… found a replacement and got it shipped through prime. I got the new power supply and it worked even worse.

After much research it seemed like the g73 model has had some issue with the power port getting lose itself. After watching a few videos… I decided this was not something I wanted to undertake myself. It involved pretty much a complete teardown of the laptop, de-soldering one port and soldering back in another. I am essentially a software guy… I build my own PCs but that is mostly just assembling a bunch of parts that were designed to go together. I have done soldering work before, but it was nothing I was ever extremely comfortable doing.

After digging around I found what appeared to be an extremely reputable guy here in my town that does this sort of thing. He owns a “Nerds: We Can Fix That” franchise and as such is primarily a mobile pc repair truck, so we agreed to meet so that I could have him look over my laptop. After doing various sundry tests his though process was that it really was a bad power supply. After looking around he showed me a spot in the power connector one where of the prongs was most definitely crushed. His suggestion was to find an original Asus power supply and try that.

After much digging I finally was able to get a real Asus power supply ordered… but unlike the speed I am used to with prime.. it wont be here until Thursday at the earliest. As a result I am without my laptop and my ability to hang out downstairs while playing games. I know I have blogged about this before… when I lost my Gateway FX laptop, but I never really appreciate how amazing that is… until I can’t do it. After a long day it is so nice to just chill out on the couch with my laptop and half play games and half watch stuff off the DVR. I am nervous however that this will not really be the issue, but I am willing to try it… and it is far less invasive than other possible solutions.

Another Betrayal

Last night I get home, and go upstairs to begin the evening ritual of playing something. I get on mumble to talk to my friends… and in the middle of booting something up my gaming desktop locks up hard. In fact at first I can’t seem to get it to boot… which I later find that it is simply booting exceedingly slowly. I go into diagnostic mode trying to figure out what exactly is wrong. Everything seems to be operating as expected… voltage looks good… hard drive tests fine… memory tests fine. So after much fiddling I am basically at square one as to what might have happened.

A lock up is common enough, but a lock up followed by not wanting to boot afterwards really floored me. I am not talking windows booting… I am talking slow bios posting. I am going to have to keep and eye on things, but last night switched from a gaming night… to a do maintenance on all the things night. I went ahead and patched everything that could possibly be patched, updated all the drivers that could be updated… and did some registry maintenance. Given my “bad mental health” state… having both machines down at the same time was a state I was almost unable to cope with.

I realize that these are all first world problems… and rather petty… but having both machines potentially down at the same time sucked. Luckily through all my fiddling whatever happened seems to be not happening now. When a problem mysteriously goes away… it bothers the hell out of me though. I am not sure what happened, have no log evidence of what caused the lockup/slow boot scenario and ultimately no evidence of what seems to have cleared it up. My desktop is three to four years old at this point, so it might simply be aging hardware issues.

Now that I think of it… it might be older than that… I got it when we we were still raiding Wrath of the Lich King content in World of Warcraft. It has been a trusty machine that has pretty much run anything I have thrown at it for several years. It might in fact be time to upgrade… but I would much rather do it on my own time than having a box just up and die on me. Here is hoping that I have at least temporarily staved off whatever occurred.

Killing Psychos

I finally was able to get my machine in a state I was happy with around 9:30 last night. At this point I got back onto mumble and decided to join some friends in Borderlands 2. It was me playing Axton, Ash playing Zero and Rae playing a super bloodlust infused Maya. Quite frankly the combination of Rae and I riding around in a vehicle together is probably a bad thing. Especially when it comes to doing quests that have non-standard objectives. There may or may not have been a few objectives we almost failed at… because we were both too busy shooting things to notice that was not the goal.

When the game first shipped for whatever reason I was not able to hook up with the crew playing it. As a result I have pretty much only played single player borderlands 2 content. Last night was an absolute blast, and having players to rez me… really helped when I tried to play “tank” and bull rush a bunch of mobs. I need to find some better weapons… because right now my assault rifle is a tap to fire model that seems to always need reloading at the wrong time. I picked up an amazing sub machinegun last night, but it seems to go through bullets like water… and I am always scavenging to find more.

The combo of Axton/Maya/Zero seemed extremely formidable… but I think if you put ANY combination of different classes together you would have had the same results. Looking forward to maybe getting back in tonight and finishing the quests we were doing. Honestly I don’t really care if we even do quests…. I was just in the mood to roam around and kill things to satiate my “computer troubles” induced bloodlust. Borderlands 2 is a really good game for that kind of mindless violence. It is like the Saturday morning cartoon of death.

Rift Update

The other big thing going on today is the fact that it is the launch of the Rift Free to Play conversion. It will be interesting seeing how this improves or damages the community. My hope is that by lowering the barrier of entry it will be easier to get folks to try the game. Additionally I am hoping for a path through the cash shop to pick up some dimension goodies… because quite frankly I have been way too poor thus far to really experience the dimension content properly. In any case it will definitely be a massive change to the game… and as such interesting to watch unfold.

Additionally… it is really hard to type with a cat trying to balance on your arm. I guess I should take that as a queue to wrap things up. I hope you all have a great day, and that you are in a better mental place than I have been. I think my body is betraying me as well. This morning I am additionally having a “bad lung day” in that my asthma and allergies have decided to make my life hell. Trying to decide if today will be a stay home and take breathing treatments all day occasion or not.

The Rat Trap

June 10, 2013 by Belghast

By necessity this is going to be one of my shorter early morning posts. I am in process of drinking some coffee, and before much longer I will need to run my wife to the airport. I’m awake roughly 30 minutes ahead of when I normally wake up… but for whatever reason it feels like I am missing 3 or 4 hours of sleep. I always find it extremely hard to shut my brain off when I know I NEED to be sleeping… and last night was no exception to this rule.

The Prophecy

I am still finding myself very much inexplicably drawn to this game. The more I play it, the more nuanced the combat becomes… but at the same time everything about it is deceptively simple. It is essentially all the same clicks and key presses, but when you do them in timing with what other abilities produces entirely new results. This feels extremely liberating in that I can get all the same warrior like abilities that I enjoy in other games with a handful of key presses just varying my timing for different results. This guy feels like I have always wanted a warrior to feel… brutal and imposing but also controlling the battlefield.

My biggest problem so far is the fact that I seem to always receive the quest to do something… moments after I have done it. The game has these public quest areas that are very reminiscent of Warhammer Online. They involve killing a bunch of things, and then finally an insanely difficult boss spawns and taking it down rewards treasure and completion of the public quest. In every single instance of a public quest in game… I have completed it, and then shortly thereafter gotten a quest to kill the final guy in the public quest.

Some of these were extremely difficult to solo… like the Subject 18 public quest area, and I have not been amped to try and do it again. So as a result these public quests kill tasks sit in my task list undone until I finally get frustrated enough to go over and repeat the process. This is the one thing I really wish they would change… instead of unlocking the public quest kill task at the end of a chain… just give it to players up front similar to the wanted posters were in World of Warcraft. That way if you are already in the area and are feeling your wheaties you can make a stab at the big boss.

The Rat Trap

The other aspect of the game that is quite literally killing me… is the fact that killing rats of ANY kind is a trap. Basically when I play any game I thoroughly believe in a scorched earth policy. If it is killable… it should probably die and die often to give me tasty tasty loot. I find myself ping ponging across most maps killing everything in my wake. The problem is… in Dragon’s Prophecy this is a brutal trap. Rats are generally non-aggro neutral mobs, that have a nasty habit of wandering into AOE attacks and adding onto whatever you happen to be fighting. They rarely have much hit points so the immediate thought is… this is no big deal.

The initial thought process… is so deadly wrong. While rats don’t do much attack damage and are fairly week… they pack the single strongest attack I have encountered in this game… Bacterial Infection. This appears to be a percentage based damage over time ability… that can take me from alive to dead in like 10 seconds. I have yet to really find a good way to counter this. Right now I take on of the strongest potions I have and pray I will survive. I would say that 90% of my deaths so far… have been to a damned stray rat.

This has lead me to play the game completely different than I normally would. I end up carefully picking my way through packs of mobs… drawing them around corners to try and fight in areas that are not so rat infested. It is so difficult for me to quell my “kill all the things” instinct and carefully pull my way through content. This basically has flipped me into dungeon tank mode… tanking an instance is the one time I am super cautious about my pulls. Everything about the guardian feels like the WoW Warrior on steroids, with more nuanced controls.

I am still not 100% sure why I am enjoying the game so much. It just feels like it is perfect for whatever state of mind I have been in. I am sure my enjoyment will fade over time, but right now the dragon taming aspect with some really amazing tanky gameplay has made this a real win for me. I always find it interesting when a game like this completely takes me by surprise. Everything about the setup for this game, sounds like something that would annoy me. I never really cared for runes of magic so the constant assertion that this was developed by the same people… was only taken as a negative by me. What we have instead is an extremely deep and subtle game, that I feel like I have just barely scratched the surface of its systems.

PK Comes through Again

Last week in response to a post talking about playing a Ranger again in Rift and farming cloth, PKDude99 the guy behind my favorite warrior solo build… posted a link to his favorite rogue build. This one is called the “Granpa said knock you out” build and is comprised of 41 Nightblade, 21 Riftstalker, and 4 Tactician. I have to say once again PK is completely right. The build works amazingly well, has extremely high damage output and next to no downtime. I can routinely take mobs 2 or more levels than me without any issue or added difficulty. I played with it quite a bit this weekend and was burning through the quests I worked on.

The funny thing is… as melee centric as I tend to be. This is the first time I have ever really seriously played a melee rogue in Rift. For whatever reason I was always drawn to the ranger/marksman builds that mimicked the WoW Hunter. I think it is mostly that traditionally I do not get along well with stealth classes. It always feels so tedious stealthing around and setting up the perfect moment to attack… then the combat itself is usually over in seconds. If you do not stealth around, usually you die horribly for your poor life choices.

Fortunately stealthing in Rift is completely different than my experience playing stealthers in the past. Stealth is a 30 second buff that you use only as a setup immediately before combat. Additionally you do not slow your movement speed, so combat still feels fast paced. Additionally it seems to not really matter if I open with a stealth attack or not… I can still chew through mobs just as effectively without a big opener. I feel like the Rift rogue is the “warriors” rogue… for someone who prefers fast paced combat to fiddly stealthy nonsense. I am sure most rogue types are ready to throttle me at this point… but I am enjoying it.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap this up so we can get on the road. We need to get to the airport, and then me on to work. I hope you all have a great day, and hope that you all go as much sleep as needed… unlike me. Not really sure what this week will bring, I tend to completely vege out on video games during these periods. I am sure I will play a good deal more Rift and Dragon’s Prophet… and I would like to get back in to some more SWTOR as well. Hopefully the week goes quickly.

Lair of the Beast

June 6, 2013 by Belghast

Mornings are starting to become an exercise in cat juggling. We have one cat that is significantly older than the others, and has special dietary needs. As a result we have been trying to get her locked into the bathroom with us as we shower so we can feed her a can of special food. The problem is… the other cats and her alike have now come to expect this. So before I do anything in the morning… I have to shut her in the bathroom… go into the kitchen and set out some wet food for the other two cats… then return to feed her. Hungry cats are very good at dive bombing your legs… making it extremely hard to walk when already groggy.

Bagmaker in Chief

Over the last few weeks I have had quite a few friends become active over in Rift. Other than answering questions and getting them into the guild I am in.. I have been trying to provide for their gear and equipment needs as well. As a result I had set aside yesterday evening to try and farm up enough Lanzan cloth to make a set of 24 slot bags for Rylacus (or Rylakus as he had to go with in game… apparently the other name has become popular). It seems like I go through cloth like water, and the 14 bolts requirement is pretty hefty to be able to make a single bag.

I expected to be farming most of the night to make his set. Funny thing is… apparently Rift has done the same thing that WoW did. They have made it so that cloth drops so much faster when you are farming it on an outfitter than when you are on anyone else. The only negative is that this meant I needed to do the farming on Belgrave my bag maker. Since the release of Storm Legion, I made one small push to level him… ran into issues chewing through the mob hitpoint pools and have not really tried since. As a result his specs were somewhat in a state of disarray.

I quickly pulled together a very rudimentary Ranger/Marksman spec and proceeded to start playing again like a WoW hunter. Luckily this seemed to work better than the last time I tried it, and I could shred mobs and manage to keep my pet up at the same time. Sure enough the drop rates were considerably better than when I had tried this little exercise on my warrior. In roughly an hour and a half I accumulated enough cloth to make a full set of 4 bags. Additionally I crafted Ry a set of 19ish leather gear for him to grow into, though since I taught him how to play the “scratchers” game he has managed to stay fairly well outfitted in planar goods.

I still want to find a time when both Rylacus and Thalen can be on, and anyone else we can manage to gather up. Would be fun to run them through a couple of dungeons… even though Thalen is now over 50 at this point and Ry is not even 20. I guess this is the reason why the mentoring system is in. I think it will be interesting when Ry sees Rift dungeons. So far it has been a very eye opening experience for him. He has until now been pretty much a wow loyalist, other than a jaunt into SWTOR. Now he finally gets why I say that Rift is hands down the best of the wow-like games.

The Keymaster

After gathering up the materials and crafting some bags, I pinged my friends over IM and decided that we would make another push and finishing the Gatekeeper requirements for Rae. Once again I was playing the part of Shinobi Belghast, and after checking her achievements… we determined that the only thing she was still missing was the achievement for Elite Hell Eternal. This is one that we specifically avoided the night before last, because of the time commitment it took previously. When we were running elites regularly, Hell Eternal had several bugged fights and usually took the longest to get through.

Fortunately all of the buggy moments have been ironed out and the experience was extremely smooth start to finish. I really love the Hell series of dungeons and the story they tell. I have always been partial to the writings of Clive Barker… and the story of Theodore Wicker definitely parallels some of these stories. I could see this tale fitting as a footnote in the “Great and Secret Show”/”Everville” series. Not to mention that the hell skinned weapons are hands down my favorite in the game… so I am always game to collect more of those skins.

I have been enjoying the Shinobi skin immensely. There is just something fundamentally wrong with running around in a ninja costume with a rocket launcher strapped to your back. It is this great juxtaposition, and pretty much represents what happens when I attempt to play a stealth class. I attempt to sneak around and ultimately end up just pummeling the opposition with superior force. There is something so satisfying about watching a rocket fly off towards the target, and this is all the more satisfying seeing a ninja fire it.

We wrapped up the dungeon rather quickly, and Rae was off to her date with the Gatekeeper. We had set her up for the harsh reality that we experienced when each of us did the trial. At that point, hands down the hardest was the dps encounter… and of the five of us… only 2 of us even attempted the fight. Either they have nerfed the encounter a bit, or Rae is just fundamentally better than we were. It took me 20-30 tries to get through the encounter, and Waren two days of attempts… last night Rae managed to beat the Gatekeeper on DPS mode in less than 20 minutes.

Lair of the Beast

Instead of starting in on the nightmares last night we decided to take an alternate path. In our absence from being active in the game, Funcom had introduced quests for all the various monster lairs. So we made our way to what we perceived as the “starter lair” in Kingsmouth. Upon entering the burnt out region on the map, we were greated with a brand new visual effect announcing the lair. The edges of the screen became roped in the veiny filth graphic and a title appeared in the center of the screen announcing the lair name (which I cannot for the life of me remember).

The lairs themselves are just as difficult as before. We started off working on them with just 3 players… 1 tank, 1 healer and me as the single dps. We were able to chew through the equivalent of “trash” but when we attempted to fight a Draugr they tended to rip us a new one. Now this might have been that we were not quite used to the various mechanics to avoid… but in any case as we got our 4th and 5th player the experience became much more enjoyable. Essentially the first two lair quests that we did were the standard kill and collect type fair, but it gave us a sense of purpose as we wandered around the dangerous area.

It was getting late when we wrapped up the first two quests… and picked up phase 2 of one of the quests and unlocked a harder one. Since we were standing near the exit to the area… and based on the late hour… we decided to tackle the other two missions at a later date. Previously when we had made an attempt at the various summoned lair bosses, the drop rates were abysmal. They seem to have improved this, as we were getting a summon boss part on almost every other kill. We designated one player to collect the bits, and he die an amazing impression of a pack mule throughout the night.

We seem to have slightly misunderstood the goals however, as we were thinking we needed to get all the parts of a specific kind of piece… aka Beta, Theta, Xi. But it turns out that each monster is crafted out of multiple named pieces… and in any given lair there are 3 different monsters to summon. We were feeling rather disheartened as we had 3 of one type, 2 of another, and the rest were singletons. However I would be wiling to bet that after last nights journey, we should be able to summon at least one complete monster. Hopefully we can get together tonight and give it a shot.

Wrapping Up

In the time off from The Secret World, it seems as though they have made a not insignificant number of changes to the game to tweak the abilities and the overall balance. As a result I think we are all really enjoying the game more than we did before. Each player has finally found a spec that they seem to enjoy, and of the five of us… only Ash has yet to completely abandon the concept of playing anything melee. That is still a major shortcoming of the game to me, the way it unfairly punishes players for attempting to melee. I gave up long ago and switched to Shotgun/Pistol for instances over my beloved Shotgun/Blades.

If you were like us and had not seriously done much group content since early in the game. You definitely owe it to yourself to give the elite, nightmare and lair content another look. Our little group has been having a blast, and for the most part the game feels very fresh. I find myself looking forward to getting into group content each night, and that has been a feeling that has been missing for a few months. Anyways… the time is ticking on and I need to be really wrapping up instead of rambling more. I hope you all have a great day and relight whatever spark has been dimming for yourself.

Making Horrible Choices

June 5, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I sit here typing as a truly insane torrent of rain pours down on our house. Apparently over night this massive storm system has blown in, and the deluge we are experiencing is the end result. Luckily the “T” word has not been mentioned at all, just lots of rain and the potential for flash flooding. Still instinctually I turned to channel 6 or on digital cable… 706 and have been watching it as I get ready this morning. This is a reaction to weather that is just engrained in Oklahomans from a little age… and even though I rarely if ever watch the evening news… when weather happens I am glued to it.

Unplanned Adventure

Yesterday I was just feeling absolutely horrible, and while I made it into work… by noon I was wishing I had not. I was suffering from what I tend to term “giblet” problems… everything just felt all wrong. So I took a half sick day, and went home after I got out of an important series of meetings. When home I pretty much went to bed, or at least laid down. I ended up falling asleep and sleeping roughly three hours, and when I woke up I was feeling a bit better.

I got up and around and checked email… remoted into work and did a few things. At this point my wife who is on summer break tells me that one of her coordinators called, and as a result she would need to go back to school this evening to pick up a text book. Summer School starts today, and she would no longer have access to her room to grab it. At first I groggily agreed, thinking man that sucks for her… then she informed me that she was wanting me to go with her.

I quickly saw my evening going to absolute crap before my eyes. I already felt horrible, but the thought of having to leave the house and go off on a jaunt just felt almost unbearable. To her credit, we had a stack of errands that needed running… and her thought process was that we could just do them on the way to or from the house. The negative part however is that her school is 45 minutes away on the exact opposite end of Tulsa. She said we would do it later, but as time ticked past… I ended up insisting that we leave as not to wreck the entire night.

Making Horrible Choices

This timing and path we ended up taking was a bad call on my part all around. We ended up venturing out into the tail end of rush hour and wading knee deep into bumper to bumper traffic. It turns out there had been a wreck in the middle lane of 169 at 51st street, and as a result traffic was backed up past 11th street. What should have been an hour and a half trip at most, ended up being a three and a half hour slog. All the while I am fuming that I even have to be doing this in the first place. My wife gets an unbelievable amount of credit for dealing with me last night at all. We bickered back and forth during the whole trip, but it could have gotten so much worse.

I was very much an asshole about the whole ordeal. I felt like crap, my migraines have been getting worse, work has been stressing me out… and adding on top of that was getting drug back into the world for something that didn’t really involve me. Had I needed to run get something from work, I would have just run in by myself and gotten it, I didn’t understand why I needed to be tagging along in the process. All of this snowballed together to turn me into a bundle of unfettered rage… or at least angry sulking. I was an absolute bear to deal with all of last night, and I greatly apologize for it. Her thought process made absolute sense, but she is the logical one… I tend to be the one driven by my passions.

Making everything worse was the fact that we were both pretty hungry at this point. She had not had any lunch at all, and the combination of both of us lead to a pretty crappy car ride. The one glowing silver lining is the fact that we got to eat at Ron’s. For those not native to Tulsa, Ron’s is this awesome chain of hamburger joints. They specialize in several things, including the sausage hamburger… but my absolute favorites are their hot and spicy chicken and cheese tots. Figuring it would put both of us in a better mood that is exactly where we went, and at the end of all the frustration it was truly glorious. I had way more calories than I would have liked, but enjoyed every bite of the buffalo flavored ambrosia.

Defiance

Between waking up from my nap and after doing some work that had stacked up while sleeping, and our horrible jaunt out into the real world I sat around on our amazingly comfy sofa trying to get “ungroggy”. As a result I decided to boot up defiance and give it a spin for a few. I have been sitting on a copy for awhile thanks to my early alpha testing ways, but have not really spent much time playing the game. Honestly I had created my engineer, and gotten him to the Earth Defense force base… and that was just about it.

Yesterday I decided to start working through the first few quests. I remember thinking in alpha that this was really not “my game”. While there are definitely elements I like about it, I am just not much of a shooter person any more… and in fantasy MMOs I very rarely if ever play a ranged class. All of that said there is something undeniably enjoyable about the game. It seems to tweak what ever section of my brain that loves the Fallout series. I feel like in order to really tap into this I need to find myself a shotgun, since essentially I play every Fallout game wielding a Combat Shotgun, or whatever equivalent that game has.

I wandered around for a bit and managed to knock out one of the quests that was horribly bugged in early testing… the whole rescue men that leads to recover supplies from the hospital mission. During testing this ended up with essentially endless waves of mutants spawning on top of you until you could no longer keep up. This time around, while there were a lot of mutants that spawned… they were definitely a finite number. The gameplay feels better overall, the game less laggy and the controls more responsive.

I hope as I move further through the content that I will find myself caring about it a little more. Having watched the television show, I find myself actually caring about the game world quite a bit more. The only problem I have however is that the starting missions feel extremely uninspired. The mutants you end up fighting, seem like the most generic possible mob you could end up fighting. I don’t care that I am slaughtering them, they are completely meaningless… to fall back on the Fallout analogy… I found myself caring more about killing mole rats and rad scorpions.

There are some neat random side effects that happen, like saving EREP forces from mutants. The only problem is that this loses all sense of urgency when you realize that this spawns in exactly the same place on a pretty regular interval and almost every time you ATV through the area… those damned EREP soldiers have been captured again. I have yet to encounter an Ark Fall, so I am hoping that those will really spice up the gameplay as I love Rifts. All it all it feels like something that I will play every now and then… just like Guild Wars 2, and Neverwinter… but not a game I will likely ever get seriously into.

Reaches of Inner-Outer Space

I will admit that likely a good chunk of my bitchiness earlier, was the fact that I figured I would have lost my chance to continue on in The Secret World. That by the time I managed to get home and watching IM again… that the Elite Dungeon train would have long left the station. I really enjoyed Monday night, and was looking forward to being able to roll around as a prebuilt team of five last night. It turns out that my friends had for the most part been patiently waiting for me to show up. So as soon as I got home and fired up my laptop, they were beckoning me to join them in game. After the ball of frustration I had just experienced, I was in major need for venting it all into killing random bad things.

Much like last night we started running the next few elites all in an attempt to get Rae the achievement needed to unlock the gatekeeper fight. As a result we burned through Hell Fallen and the Facility, making short work of both. We decided to skip Hell Eternal since it is an extremely long dungeon, and make an attempt at the Slaughterhouse since it is comparatively short. I am not sure what it was… either that the fight had changed since we were last in there… or the fact that we were probably getting tired at that point… but for whatever reason we could not push through the NKL-107 encounter.

After doing some research, apparently there is a bug currently in place that causes some of the buffs from nightmare to bleed into the elite version. This also happened to us in the past when they rolled out the nightmare version of The Ankh. We went from being able to roll through that place without issue, to not being able to defeat the final boss at all. It was the same kind of feeling we had with Slaughterhouse in the robot fight. Ultimately we needed a more reliable purge, which was not something we really had at that moment. Both myself and Rae had the ability to do a 33% of the time purge, but this was just not regular enough to keep the tank alive with the nightmare buffs.

It was still a really fun time, and the best part is that once we finish these last two elites… Rae should be geared enough to face the Gatekeeper and hopefully survive. Granted getting past him was a mind numbingly frustrating experience as a DPS, so it might take her awhile to come up with that magic formula that allows her to defeat him. The fact that she picked up her 100% purge should make the fight overall easier, since I did it with only my 33% of the time purge… and it introduced a random element into my success. I really look forward to trying Nightmares again, to see if we are any better equipped to handle them than we were before.

Wrapping Up

The other awesome thing that happened last night is that I finally connected with Rylacus and got his two characters invited to the Outcast Misfits in Rift. I am sure he will appreciate having some “green spam” while he is leveling, and it will definitely be easier to determine if he is actually online… or just playing the scratchers. It is still pouring down insanely outside… and I am not looking forward to making a wild dash out to my car. However the hour is getting later, and I need to be getting on the road. I hope you have a great day… and you also can admit when you are being an asshole… more gracefully than I did last night.