With More Spikey Bits

April 30, 2013 by Belghast

Having one of those mornings where I am just struggling to get going. Here is hoping that the blessing of caffeine will kick me out of my slumber. This is now day five of the experiment, and today is the first day I considered blowing off the post. It is not that I have nothing to say, but more than right now I am exhausted and my brain seems to be misbehaving. I had another one of my bouts of insomnia, coupled with the fact that it was a bit warm last night.

The Desert of Flames

Yesterday at lunch, Lethbridge and I had another one of our gamer lunches, where we take our laptops to an empty conference room and chill out playing games for a bit. Since I normally need to relax during the time, I tend to pick a game that calms me. Yesterday like most days, I chose to play Everquest 2. It did not hurt that this is also what Leth was playing as well. EQ2 is one of those games that I will likely always play, if not for the massive amount of content… but at least for the fact that Norrath is a world I am deeply connected to.

There are essentially three settings that I have massive amounts of nostalgia towards. Norrath is probably the first and foremost, because of my time spent playing and idolizing Everquest. Tamriel is probably in the number two slot, because I have rabidly consumed and spent thousands of hours at this point playing the various Elder Scrolls Titles. Lastly, as much as I may or not want it… I have a ton of nostalgia for Azeroth. You can’t essentially live in a game world for the better part of a decade without missing it pretty often.

Tiny Elvis

You have likely noticed that I tend to gravitate heavily towards “core” grouping classes, especially of the tank spectrum. This is the time of character I feel most natural playing, but it is also the type of character that has the most responsibilities to a given guild or group. With currently nomadic game existence, I wouldn’t want anyone to try and count on me as the cornerstone of any group. As a result I decided to try and roll a pure dps over in Everquest 2.

I spent yesterdays lunch working on Belgrifter, my little Ratonga Swashbuckler. While definitely in the pure dps camp, the Swashbuckler has some of the survival that I crave in any character. I’ve been progressing quickly through the content, and currently am working through the Sinking Sands area. I am extremely nostalgic about the Desert of Flames content, mostly because I spent so much time in both South Ro and Oasis of Marr on Exeteroth my EQ1 cleric. So many hours were spent killing crocs… and later spent killing sand giants as revenge for all the times they killed me.

For a trip down memory lane, above is a shot of my dwarf cleric, in Oasis of Marr… the area now contained within Sinking Sands taking down I believe my first sand giant. My Rygorr armor was pretty spiffy, my guild jokingly called me “Tiny Elvis” because of the bedazzled nature of the gear. I sadly do not remember the shield or mace at this point… but I had not started raiding hate yet, because I was not a giant purple blob swinging a Dark Ember. Anyways… needless to say I have a lot of memories of that region… and still cannot help taking down the giants in zone.

The Great Escape

It took me a bit to get settled down last night and capable of gaming. We have this amazingly smart ferret, that has turned into a ninja like escape artist. She keeps finding ways of scaling the walls of the two linked playpens and hopping out. We have tried every solution we have seen online, and a few we came up with ourselves. We had tried splitting black drainage pipe and putting it over the top so she could not get to the top of the cage and pull herself over. Turns out after a little bit, she figured out to crawl up into the pipe itself and then get over to the top.

Last night involved creating a shelf of sorts to cover the corner she normally gets out on. After an our of bending metal flashing, carefully crimping and coating all edges in duct tape, and finally plugging all the wholes from which I was bleeding things to “Metal cuts” (papercuts you are nothing to me now)… I finally had this spiffy little shelf that fit down nicely onto the corner of the cage. I secured in in place to the wire with binder clips, and proceeded into the kitchen to make myself some dinner.

By the time I had assembled a plate, and walked back into the room… maybe 5 minutes tops… she had already figured out how to get on top of the shelf. Smartest ferret ever… also potentially the most frustrating. I hate that we essentially have to leave her in the cage all the time right now, until we figure out a way to keep her from escaping. Tonight we will be attempting to deploy a new ruse… coating the corner of the cage she uses to get out in plexiglass… so she cannot climb there.

Spikey Bits on his Spikey Bits

After this little back and forth with the ferret mastermind… I needed to kill lots of things to vent my frustrations. Roaming around in an MMO laying waste to entire segments of a continent… is a thing I do. I had also logged out at roughly 60% through my level, and really wanted to push further towards 59. While roaming around doing my thing I stumbled across the guy above. This little beauty goes by lXxalgol the Lurking Horror, and while the lurking part is a little ambiguous… they definitely got the horror bit down pat. I thought for a second I was playing Warhammer again, and had just stumbled onto a Chaos War Machine.

I posted on G+ last night about this guy, saying I lacked the crazy to attack me. I was wrong. Seriously… I cannot find a mob like this and NOT try him at least. I figured it would end in tears, but before giving it any further thought I hit my charge key and gave it a shot. Surprising enough, he was not nearly as bad as I expected… granted I had remembered to put my buffs on at this point. Overall however he was quite manageable, and I killed him before I had dropped below half health… which for a 59 elite at 58 player level… seemed good.

The funny thing is, he dropped nothing but coin. This combined with the fact that his respawn is insanely fast, as over the course of the evening I killed him five times… leads me to believe that he is somehow tied to a quest or other objective. I was able to turn up no details on either Rifthead, or the various wikis, apart from a stubbed out entry for the guy. If anyone out there knows what he is for, and how I can start this magical mission… please let me know! I feel like I need to kill him with a purpose!

Rift World Problems

I have come to the realization that I have a problem with Carnage Quests. No, this is going to go in the opposite direction you are probably thinking. It has been well established that I like killing things in video games… and am extremely prone of fits of mindless bloodlust as I ping pong across the map. Carnage Quests are like crack for me… they give my bloodlust a purpose. I take forever to move out of a zone, because I keep finding new mobs that have new carnage quests… and then find myself not being able to leave an area until I have killed 16 Rabid Wombats.

This has lead to an additional problem. I have entirely too much leather… far more than I could ever use, and far more than I could likely ever need. I literally have hundreds and hundreds of Storm Legion era leather… and the problem is… I cannot stop myself from skinning the corpses. Too many years of playing a leatherworker in wow, have ingrained me that leaving an un-skinned corpse is a cardinal sin. I even find myself going around and cleaning up the handiwork of others. I hate using the auction house, but if you are over on Deepwood and find yourself in need of leather… look me up.

Coffee and Rambling

Well it looks like I have squandered yet another morning drinking my coffee and rambling about the games I play. This is now day five of my little experiment, and so far has been the day I least wanted to blog. I managed to find focus and keep pushing forward, in spite of the fact my head is pounding and I just want to go back to sleep. Since comments are kinda a thing of the past, and all my readers are picking up my posts via RSS… I feel like I am rambling into the void most of the time. That is perfectly fine, since right now I am mostly doing this for myself. If you’ve managed to make it this far in the post, I wish you the best of days… hopefully mine will suck slightly less than yesterday.

Oh… as a footnote… I managed to ding 59 in Rift. So one more level to go, and then I can stop feeling like a such a failure!

Nostalgia Wins

June 22, 2012 by Belghast

Of all the topics I thought I would be blogging about, it is pretty safe to assume this is the last one I ever expected to be writing. However over the last couple of weeks I have been giving in to my nostalgia, and I feel like I need to come clean about it. About a week before my birthday, I found my way onto the guild mumble, in the guise of helping a long time friend test their mumble connection. It was not long before a few others showed up, and we had a lively little discussion going.

When you get a bunch of old friends together, sooner or later they are going to start talking about the “good ole days”. While none of us were actively playing it, those cherished times were all raids in World of Warcraft. Over the last year and a half, since leaving the game, it has pretty much been my regular whipping boy. I’ve said so much, and blamed so many things on the game and its players, but at the end of the day we really did have some amazing times there. It wasn’t long before I found myself accepting a Scroll of Resurrection, and reactivating my account.

Sealing the Rift

I expected that much like reactivating Rift, this was going to be one of my short lived whims. I had a good deal of fun wandering around Telara for about a week, before the same feeling from before had set in. Rift is without a doubt technically superior to every game on the market. It has every feature I could ever possibly want in an MMO. The problem is that once again I find myself not really caring about the world of Telara and its two warring factions.

What hooked me on MMOs all those years ago, was this always on and deeply intricate fantasy world to explore. Norrath will always be my first love, with its interesting races, brooding gods, and vast landscapes. I can remember spending hours, reading quests, trying to gather up every little tidbit of this rich world. Years later I developed the same connection to the land of Azeroth. The setting was already familiar to me, and knowing a little bit about it already, made World of Warcraft and its lore all the more addictive.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, I just can’t seem to develop the same connection with the races and world of Telara. The game does everything right, and has every bells and whistles I could ever want in an MMO, especially now that they are adding mentoring. At the end of the day however, I just don’t really care about my characters the same way I normally do in these games.

Home is never the same

So in a fit of nostalgia I have been playing WoW once more, and I have to say I am enjoying myself quite a bit. I think it is a testament to just how good a game it is, that I can return after almost 2 years, and a ton of frustration and bad feelings towards Blizzard, and be able to have fun. I honestly had the intention of never playing the game again. I had mixed emotions about trying to “return home”, and the ramifications that it might mean.

So much has changed, the guild I spent seven years building up is very similar, but it is definitely not the same guild I left. Little things have changed, gone are a good number of the people I cherished the most, and with them some of the easy banter that used to go on in guild chat each night. However, there are moments, especially on raid nights when some of the veterans show up, that things return back to “normal” for a bit, or at least the normal I remember.

In addition to folks that have moved on like I did, there are tons of new names and faces that I don’t know. I used to pride myself on trying to know everyone in “my” guild, but truth is from the moment I passed on the hat that guild stopped existing anywhere other than my mind. I think this is all the more noticeable by the fact that Argent Dawn once again is going through the pre-expansion doldrums. The guild is still a great group of people, just not as outwardly friendly as it once was.

Normal is a moving target

I’ve hit on this multiple times, but the truth is while it feels like the guild has changed, it might simply be because I myself have changed. When I was last wearing the green and black of House Stalwart, I was a burnt out Guild and Raid leader, unable to stand the thought of playing the game anymore. I have realized that a good bit of that frustration that built up was because my reality was changing around me.

When I built up House Stalwart into what it was, I was a relatively unhappy code monkey, working under a boss with a penchant for passive aggressive micro-management. Nothing I did was ever good enough, and I felt like I had no control over my work world. At the same time there was a good deal of turmoil in my personal life. During a five year stretch, we lost something like 15 family members. The first and worst of these was the suicide of my nephew.

Everything simply felt wrong, and out of control. I think in a way I built up House Stalwart to be this stable, safe environment to hide out in. Over time my life started to shift back into normality, I didn’t need my support structure as much as I once did. I changed jobs leaving the constant stress, feelings of inadequacy and that horrible boss behind. The problem is, I had built a guild full of great people who had come to need me that I did not want to let down.

The more responsibility I had thrust upon me in the real world, the less I wanted to deal with it in the game world. So when I moved jobs, to one I had more of a direct role contributing to, I pushed back against being the main tank. When I had a coworker leave, and have to pick up the slack and essentially do two jobs at the same time, I pushed back against raid leadership. As I picked up some management responsibilities, I pushed back against guild leadership eventually left the game. So it seems impossible to separate the frustrations I had with the game, from the changes I was going through outside of it.

Am I really back?

So over the last week I have been getting adjusted to the game again. I find myself actually looking forward to going home and playing at night. More than anything that is something that has been missing for awhile. While I have found enjoyment in whatever I was playing, the actual drive to log in and play has been gone. Now I think ahead about what I might accomplish each evening, and it is refreshing.

There is a question my friends keep asking that I don’t have an honest answer for yet. I am not sure if I am really back, or honestly what being back even means. I figure if I am actually playing a month from now, then chances are I will be playing for awhile. I am enjoying this present trip down memory lane in the meantime. Last night I soloed most of AQ40 and AQ20, then later duoed a good chunk of the Black Temple. I am enjoying the experience of rediscovering this game I used to love so much, with no expectations.

I am having a blast playing my Deathknight, probably more than I have since originally leaving the game. I am not really sure how to quantify it, but World of Warcraft does melee right. I’ve played melee characters in roughly a dozen games since leaving wow, and in every case they didn’t quite feel right. They either were too simplistic, too slow paced, or somehow didn’t truly capture the fun nature of swinging a weapon at a monster. I have to think that it is all the attention to detail and smooth animations that make playing a melee just feel correct.

Future uncertain

Right now I am not sure what my gaming future will bring. There are so many big games on the horizon, and I am sure I will play several of them. I am not sure if WoW will stick, or if I will just float along to the next big thing. Currently I have access to WoW, Pandaria Beta, Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, Diablo 3, Rift and Everquest II. So far however, the only two I am actually logging into are WoW and EQ2. In each case, those are the two universes I am most nostalgic about. I guess that no matter what I say or do, I will always love Norrath and Azeroth. It has been just as shocking to myself, as it has been to my friends that I am back in WoW.

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.