Tales of the Aggronaut

More Than Just Bandaids

March 15, 2014 by Belghast

Lack of Sleep

This morning is likely going to be a deeply personal blog post. Yesterday was a pretty horrible day, for many reasons… most of which did not make it into yesterdays post. For starters like I said yesterday I only managed to get about two hours of sleep thanks to a massive panic attack over the health of one of our cats. She is the closest thing I will probably ever have to a daughter, and she’s been with us since 1999. Turns out I was partially right to be concerned, and partially just being a nervous parent. I went to the vets about 11 am yesterday and they gave her some more meds, this time a steroid and she seems to be improving.

However while I was at the Vet I got a text from my mom. It seems like she found my grandmother on the floor completely unresponsive. At that point they thought she had really bad pneumonia, and rushed her to Nowata General Hospital in the town I grew up. Something of not… Nowata General is a bandaid station and nothing more really. Its great if you need stitches, or are dehydrated and need fluids… but they lack the kind of equipment a modern hospital should have. At that time the paramedics that came to get her thought she likely was just really dehydrated and she could come around with some IV fluids.

Black 3 Red 4

Since I was already off work because of the sick animal I hopped in my jeep and drove the hour to my home town. When I got there… grandma was not the grandma I would recognize. Firstly she was struggling to breathe and was breathing in a very panicked fashion. Here eyes were wide and pupils dilated… and she wasn’t really responding to us. Instead she kept saying things like “yeah a black one”, “black three”, “I think red four”, “red twelve”. We immediately thought she was playing solitaire in her mind, since she does this and has always done this for hours. She didn’t really recognize who I was, or that I was there… when I tried to tell her she would say things like “yes he’s my grandson”.

She acted like she could not see the world around her. Finally after a time I realized after a time what she was doing when she started to say “black T” or “big black E”. She was reading an eye chart. During the day Thursday she had a really busy day with my mother. They went to the eye doctor and out shopping, and I think she was in a way having a dream while awake about going to visit the eye doctor. When we told her that the eye exam was over she responded “good” and closed her eyes and went to sleep for awhile. If I didn’t know better she was having some sort of a nightmare, but one while her eyes were wide open.

Moments of Lucidity

When she woke back up about twenty minutes later she was lucid again. She knew who I was and talked to me a little bit. What makes this whole thing all the more difficult is the fact that she has really poor hearing, even with her hearing aides. So something just feels wrong about “gently screaming” at your grandmother that you love her. The thing we noticed is that she seemed to be unable to recognize anyone directly in front of her. If I sat off to the side she could register who I was immediately, and throughout most of the afternoon she grabbed hold of my hand for dear life and squeezed it tight. However when the nurse or doctor was standing directly in front of her, she could not see them or make out any details.

For being a bandaid station, I have to say the nurses at the hospital were extremely good with her. One in particular worked with her and helped her transition from bed to chair to bed again. She would say “now give me a big hug” and would help lift her across so gently. Thing is I sympathized for Grandma, because I know how panic inducing simply not being able to breathe can be. On an absolutely perfectly day she is about 50% lung capacity thanks to pretty bad COPD, but yesterday she had to be down significantly further. She kept wanting to sit up and lean forward, and having done that myself so many times I knew how much better it felt to breathe like that. So I would sit there holding her hand, trying to let her lean against me or at least be there to try and keep her from falling.

More Than Just Bandaids

It was about 5pm that the doctor decided that she needed something far more than what they could offer there. Something was wrong with her that kept causing her to snap in and out of lucidity. At this point she had gone back to reading the eye chart, and not really responding well to anyone in the room. Thing is the hospital did not have a CT Scan or even a respirator, so they really needed to transition her to Jane Phillips hospital in Bartlesville. I am wondering how things would have gone had she just been taken there in the first place. No offense to the local hospital but there is never a situation where I would have ever asked a family member to be taken there. Essentially that hospital is equipped with exactly the same kinds of things that a modern ambulance is… and nothing more.

They got her situated in ICU where at least she has around the clock monitoring for her vitals. The other hospital was primitive enough that she was not even hooked up to any form of a monitor. They had to come in with a little cart and take her vitals periodically. She seemed to calm a bit, and they cranked up her oxygen significantly. I talked to her for a bit, and she recognized who I was, and who else was in the room with me. My mother arrived at the hospital again from taking my aunt to dialysis, so I decided that was a point for me to transition away. I wanted to make sure there was someone there lucid enough to respond to the doctors when they talked to us. At this point I was getting near a place where I was not sure if I could safely drive home if I stayed much longer. So I said my goodbyes and stopped off at QuikTrip to get an energy drink.

Ten Hours of Sleep

When I got home I picked up some food from Arby’s, and immediately after eating I gathered up Little Shit and went to bed. She snuggled into me and I was asleep before I knew it. At one point I woke up because my wife was changing the ferret cage, and needed help with our oldest ferret… who is really barely hanging on in the world. So I remember helping her clip his nails but I went back to sleep and don’t remember much more after that. According to fitbit I got a little over ten hours of sleep last night. I can’t say I feel completely rested, but I am in a much better state than I was. I had grand plans for this weekend, but pretty much they are all out the window at this point.

I just got off the phone with my mother and it seems that my grandma took a turn for the worse last night. They have now put her on a ventilator but as she improved over the night they are tapering it back. I think she said it is now down to 40% and when they reach 30% they can consider pulling it back out. Right now she is not responsive, but her vitals look good otherwise. If I had to guess she is just flat out exhausted from fighting. She had a busy thursday, far busier than normal… then all day yesterday she struggled to breathe, and for a woman that normally goes to sleep 3 or 4 different times a day… she is just past the point of going. I know at some point we will head back to bartlesville and visit, but I need a little bit of downtime before having to deal with my family again.

My Family

Throughout the day yesterday it was the best I could do to tune my aunt out. She was trying to put grandma in the grave even when she was being perfectly lucid. She is one of those people that knows everything and always has an answer to whatever the problem… and the answer is generally some tinfoil hat theory. Needless to say in general I am not comfortable around my family. My grandmother is the exception. Even from a young age she got me on a level that no one else in my family has ever been able to.

From infancy until elementary she was my babysitter, and I was there every single day. So her house has always been as much of a home as my own. Seeing her struggle like this is rough on me, but even when she is not lucid… she is still there as she grips my hand tight. So at some point we will go back and participate in the vigil. Right now I need a few minutes to myself before going back to the madness that is my family. I want to thank my internet family yesterday for showing support. It really meant a lot to me. Your friends are the family you choose.

Technically Alpha

March 14, 2014 by Belghast

I Need an Off Switch

There are times I absolutely hate that my wife can sleep through almost anything, and get to sleep so easily. There is this thing she does that drives me insane, where right before sleep she winds up my brain by revealing some tidbit of knowledge that my mind takes the next hour and a half to digest before it allows me to go to sleep. Over the week we have had a really sick cat, and are treating her for her hyperthyroidism with a cream that I have to rub into her ear twice daily. She is getting better, but doing so very very slowly, so I had planned on calling the vet this morning to see if she needs to be seen again. Moments before my wife went into her nightly coma, she dropped the bombshell that she is not sure that “Little Shit” has been peeing.

Not only did this wake me up, but I went into a full blown panic attack playing the “what if her kidneys are shutting down game”. There was absolutely nothing I could do to calm down and I was up half the night literally… I finally laid down around 2:00 and drifted off to sleep about thirty minutes later when “little shit” decided to join us in bed. Her constant purring I guess clamed me down, because she “seemed fine”. This morning one crisis was adverted when I saw her pee in a place she isn’t supposed to, and another one started when she vomited and there were little red spots in the mixture that looked suspiciously like blood. All the while I am envious of the fact that my wife can sleep on command, and I end up fighting incessantly to get the few hours a night I end up getting. There was one night this week, that I thought was a “normal sleep” and my fitbit told me I had 32 periods of restlessness throughout the course of the evening.

Woah We’re Halfway There

I guess that is a bit misleading since dinging level 30 is by no means halfway to 60 effort wise… but it is at least numerically! Once again I engaged in leveling my Night Elf Mage while hanging out with friends on mumble. These are starting to feel a bit like impromptu podcasts, since we end up talking about the days gaming news and various sundry bits of geeky information. We seem to talk about everything other than the game I happen to be playing at the moment I am streaming. Originally my intent was to stream some Landmark last night, however the servers did not come back up until the wee hours in the morning. I know this because I also streamed some of that during my panic attack state to try and calm the hell down.

All in all as much as I hate to admit it, I am starting to like playing a mage. I am beginning to feel more useful in dungeons now that I have some semblance of an AOE in the form of Cone of Cold. It is still not my preferred method of game play, but I am not absolutely disliking the experience of pushing this character to 60. Yesterday the Godmother of Faff herself, @AlternativeChat posted about a new contest of sorts. The idea is with all the boosting going on, to level your way to 90 proudly with purpose. While I am fully in support of this notion, I am not sure if I qualify for it.

I currently have 6 90s, 2 85+, 2 70+, and my baby mage that my intent was to push to 60 and boost the rest of the way to 90. I feel like I have experienced the leveling content in World of Warcraft more times than most players. So I don’t really feel any shame in using my free boost to jump the character class I am least likely to play to the finish line. However I do feel that most of the folks who have never had a 90, and are using their boost to get there are missing something in the process. Some of the quests you have to struggle through along the way become a shared cultural experience. As much as I hate the “poop” quests of Burning Crusade, I like that I did them and shared in the same frustration as other players. Maybe that is an odd thing to say, but there are very few moments that all players have experienced. Anyways… you should definitely check out the post that sparked this discussion.

Like There is No Tomorrow

Also on the docket of last nights streaming, I decided to take a break from the mage after dinging 30 and play some Wildstar. In truth, once again I checked to see if the Landmark servers were back up yet… and since they were not, I opted to play the thing with the most current NDA drop. I have to say there are certain aspects of the game that are growing on me. The “soldier” archetype and the quests associated have definitely nailed my personal style of game play. Namely… explore the world and kill everything that gets in my path. Once again the “impromptu podcast” aspect of my streams continued as we discussed lots of gaming tidbits. I have literally considered stripping the audio from these videos and stitch them together into a podcast.

This is what nights on mumble are usually like, as we discuss more than just what we happen to be playing at any given time. I still am not really used to hearing my own voice yet, but I will get over that. As far as Wildstar goes… I cover this in the video, but after this weekend the Beta is significantly changing. Up until this point I have had essentially 24/7 access to the servers, and feel like I have generally squandered that by not playing. Once this change occurs I am honestly not sure what kind of access I will have. I know preordering gives you something, but I do not believe that we will keep fulltime access unless we have a 32+ character when the transition happens. Additionally I think those players will be unable to progress past level 17. The whole scenario is rather complicated, and I am not sure yet if I really grasp it. As the thread says, the only sign of a successful compromise is that no one is happy.

No Sleep Til… Landmark!

I had attempted to sleep for about thirty minutes, and then I realized that I was on the verge of going full blown panic attack… I opted to get up for a bit to try and calm myself with the dulcet tones of gaming. Generally speaking in the past when I have needed to relax like this I would play Minecraft, and since Landmark is my new Minecraft… I was thankful the servers were back online. I figured while I was running around anyways, I might as well stream some of it. I didn’t broadcast the fact I was doing so, because really I did not intend to be entertaining or talkative. What the video does show however is the inside of my claim and my latest project… completely redoing the dungeon. I have to admit at this point… it had been a few weeks since I had played Landmark.

Essentially I had gone high center on some of the crafting requirements. In order for me to get better machines and better tools it involved absolutely silly amounts of Burled Wood farming. For those of you who need a refresher, Burled Wood was a rare drop from almost any tree. You originally needed 100 to make a single Burled Wood plank, and then most of these extremely high end crafting machines and tools required 50 or more of these planks. This was one of the worst RNG grinds you could imagine. I simply reached a point where I could not bring myself to chop down the number of trees that it would need to get the things crafted that I wanted crafted.

Thankfully in yesterdays patch they completely turned this mechanic up on end. Now when chopping down trees they drop a single guaranteed “Heartwood” drop, with a rare chance of dropping more than one at a time. These are now the items needed to craft machinery and tools, and Burled Wood has been relegated to a “lesser” and also more reliable drop crafting material off of certain trees. What this means is if you need 27 Heartwood, you know that you will have to farm a maximum of 27 trees to craft that item. Even if you need 90 Heartwood… still having a fixed point that you have to farm is so much better than relying entirely on luck to get the drops you need to complete your projects. Thank you so much for taking this one back to the drawing board.

Technically Alpha

Another very exciting thing happened yesterday… I received an invite to the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the more interesting tidbits about this, is that there is apparently no NDA. We can blog about it, stream it… do whatever we want, with the caveat that we treat it like the alpha that it is. I am perfectly fine with this notion because I have been looking forward to “HotS” as it is lovingly referred to… for some time. Essentially Heroes seems to be set up to fix one of the problems I have with League of Legends. I am all about team play, and when I am playing as a team I only really care about the end objective… our win. When I play shooters I tend to be heavily objective and role based shooters that focus on the win condition and not individual player stats.

So much of the way game play works in League seems to be counter intuitive to playing as a team. Progression is almost solely based on personal performance, not performance of the team. One of the most frustrating mechanics I have experienced is that of “last hitting”, and this concept is entirely gone from Heroes of the Storm. Granted I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with the game play… since I did not realize I even HAD access to the Alpha until about 1 am in the full force of my panic attack. I think I made it about halfway through the tutorial before I made another futile attempt to sleep. So far everything feels like I expect it to, and the tutorial character of Raynor was rather fun to play. I look forward to cracking this open and experiencing the content for real over the weekend. I hope to stream some of it, but with the last beta weekend going on in Elder Scrolls Online… not sure how much of that will actually happen.

Wildstar Impressions

March 13, 2014 by Belghast

The NDA Drop

The big news from yesterday is that Wildstar dropped the NDA and announced an official launch date and that preorders start March 19th. I have been in closed beta testing for quite some time now, and as a result have tried my best to maintain radio silence about the title. I have occasionally referred to it as “that space game” when I absolutely needed to, but generally speaking it is just safer not to say anything at all. Granted I have not played a ton of hours, in part because the game really doesn’t move me to play a ton of hours. Every so often there is a game that just doesn’t feel “right” to me, and Wildstar falls into that category firmly. Of note the other major release that also did was Guild Wars 2 and a few days ago I wrote about my feelings there.

For a long while I simply had trouble playing the game. For whatever reason there was a specific graphical glitch that would cause my frame rate to absolutely tank. So the game itself became extremely hard to play at 5 frames per second. However the last several builds have fixed the issue and I have tried to poke my head in several times to continue to give it the old college try. In part much like with Guild Wars 2, I keep wanting to try and figure out what everyone sees in this game that is so spectacular. For a long while segments of my friends list have been completely devoted to it. Combine that with the fact that a friend of mine now works for Carbine… and I really want to know what it is about this game that makes it special.

The Las Vegas Strip

One of the things that distracts me about the game is just how “busy” it is. The design ethic the Carbine has employed is one where something is going on in every possible corner of every screen. So the above picture is on the Dominion starship, and while you can’t really get the full effect in a still frame, there is literally motion everywhere. While this makes the game feel more dynamic and alive, it also makes the game feel a bit like the Las Vegas strip, with lights and sounds and motion everywhere. While playing I get a sort of sensory overload most of the time. This would be fine if this was just a city phenomena, but even when you are out in the world there are doodads and holograms floating about waiting to be clicked on. The “more is more” design ethic almost gives me a headache at times.

The characters are well crafted, and the voice acting is at times extremely good… and even when it is not it is at least passable. One of the weird disconnects is that the dialog the npcs are voicing, rarely syncs up with what is actually saying in the chat box. So this adds a bit to the feeling of too much going on screen, since I have to watch the chat box and listen to the npc at the same time. Additionally the UI feels like it needs a bit of work, namely in the minimap. I find it hard to determine where I need to go to reach my next objective without constantly opening the main map. There are symbols and indicators on the minimap, but it is simply not clear to me what they mean. I have not really noticed something akin to an arrow off one side of the map to show me where the next quest I have highlighted is.

Confused Control Scheme

The game employs a rather unique combat style, in that the game does not rely heavily on hard targets but instead involves a lot of cone and arc based attacks that fire in front of the character hitting everything in the path. This in itself is really cool, but the experience while playing the game feels really odd to me. I feel as though Wildstar really wanted to be an action combat MMO, but stopped just one step short of doing so. For a long while I was using an addon that allowed you to toggle on permanent mouselook, and it drastically improved my enjoyment of the game. I feel like the game overall would be more enjoyable if it had a control scheme more like Neverwinter or Elder Scrolls Online, where mouselook controls the view and primary attacks are on left and right mouse buttons with a targeting reticle in the center of the screen.

The combat itself feels too busy for the wow style movement interface. Maybe this is not as evident with the games ranged classes, but as a melee class I feel like I am always working at cross purposes to get out of the big red “stupid” on the ground, while still trying to keep my attack facing at the right target at the right time. Controlling the game makes me feel like I should have an extra pair of hands. Last night when I streamed for a bit, I did not bother downloading the latest version of my mouselook addon, and it greatly diminished my enjoyment. Since it is not likely that we will see an action combat interface this far from launch, it would be great if they simply added in the ability to turn on perma-mouselook by default instead of having to rely on a third party addon for it.

Extremely Content Dense

Last night I had all sorts of technical difficulties, so I ended up getting a late start. As a result I did not stream for terribly long… and for whatever reason Twitch decided to stop recording 20 minutes into the stream. However you can see enough footage to get a feel of the game. I feel like I have been a “wet blanket” so far this morning, but I don’t really intend to be. This is just one of the few MMOs that I was not immediately in love with… and like usual I keep trying to figure out why. One of the big positives is that the game itself is EXTREMELY content dense. While this gives the game the busy, almost migraine inducing characteristics… this also means there is a hell of a lot of stuff to do. I was swimming through a lake at one point last night, and ended up engaging a lake race minigame similar to the one in Moonshade Highlands in Rift.

Similarly there are always “hold the line” type events out in the wild where you help the citizens of an area defend against baddies. So the game itself is exceedingly rich and for 100%ers it will take you a long time to unlock all of the secrets in an area before moving on to the next. Problem being, I have not been a “must get all the achievements” person for a really long time. However I do find myself wanting to do the little combat challenges along the way as I unlock them. In the video above I kill a single snail and find out that I need to kill a certain number within a time limit to get a bonus prize. My goal from that point on became finding more snails so I could get the doodad. The bonus prizes are never that good, but just the fact that I get to kill stuff with a purpose is enough for me to enjoy it.

Extremely Torn

Right now I am completely up in the air as to whether or not I will play this game. There are certain aspects I really like, and certain aspects that turn me completely off about it. It is like a pair of ill fitting shoes, that look really cool… but no matter how many times you wear them they just don’t quite fit. At this point I am not sure if I could honestly say what would need to change to make me love the game. I plan to keep playing the beta off and on and seeing if I can reach a point where the game just feels like magic. I think if I can ever reach the housing system, that may in fact be the hook for me. I do love that as I am out and about in the world various housing things can drop. The gameplay is not “un-fun” but it is not the type of thing that just drives me to play more and more of it.

Right now the biggest deterrent to playing is the price tag and the subscription that goes in tow. I have no problem with a subscription model, in fact I tend to prefer them for a game I am really serious about. The problem is, Wildstar is not a title I am extremely serious about. Were it like Guild Wars 2 where I could pre-order my copy and play it at my leisure with no strings attached I would gladly do so and have my order in on day one. However knowing that I have 30 days to decide if I like the game well enough to continue playing, means I really need to time playing the game in the first place during a time when I have a lull in other games. The June launch date is likely too close to Elder Scrolls for me to really get into it seriously. I think they are planning to pick up the people for whom ESO was not that great of an experience, and also grab the people who are tired of waiting on Warlords of Draenor to launch.

Wish Them Luck

Ultimately I wish them the best of success. I still stand by the statement that I have made multiple times that we need a lot more success in the MMO world in whatever form it comes. Specifically we need more stable games that are not named “Warcraft”. When a game launches, specially one with friends working on the staff… I feel personally invested in its success. I feel like they are launching at the best possible time this year. I just hope they have enough time to set their hooks into players because Warlords of Draenor comes along and pulls people back into a new World of Warcraft adventure. I feel like so many games are vying for the same pool of players that has not really gotten much larger over the years. Someone is going to lose as a result of this, and my fear is this game is more likely than anything to pull players away from Rift than it is from WoW.

Being Bad at Mage

March 12, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

This coming weekend that leads into Spring Break here in the United States, represents the last public beta weekend before the 4/4/2014 launch of the game. Now the beta client you will be getting to play has a significant number of changes in it. For point of reference the one that was used during the last public beta weekend was from early December, and lacked a ton of the polish changes that have gone in since. As a result even if you had completely written off the game based on past public beta experiences… you really owe it to yourself to patch the game up and give it another go this weekend. While December doesn’t really seem that long ago, what has happened between now and then is what I like to refer to as a “hallelujah” build… aka the one that fixes so many bugs and makes the game feel nice and tight and polished.

So many of the quests that have been perennially bugged out during the beta weekends should now be fixed and working smoothly. In many cases this involved subtle tweaks to the flow of the quest to make it work more reliably. Additionally this build is the one that introduces mob collision and the ability to skip the starter island. The mob collision seems to fix some of the complaints about “floaty combat” that players have made, and the combat animations themselves have tightened up considerably as well. There are still a number of features missing that are in the private test build, but overall I think players will have a more enjoyable experience. The game is very much an Elder Scrolls experience, but unfortunately if you were hoping it would morph into a standard MMO interface… that has not and likely will not happen.

Another cool thing about this weekend is with my dabbling in twitch streaming with my “Bel Faffs About” series, I recieved an email from support saying that I could stream the entire weekend if I wanted to. Granted we likely have quite a bit of things to do over the weekend, and Saturday since it is going to be nice out we hope to go out and do some photography. However as much of the weekend as I can, I will be streaming out my gameplay. I am not sure at this point if I will be starting a fresh character, or picking up where I left off on my Orsimer Dragon Knight from the previous beta. For those who have not already tested the content, they are asking each of us to start a new character and test the new starter experience sans islands. It works pretty well but is considerably more difficult since at the level you fight some of the encounters, you really don’t have a full set of gear yet.

Technicolor Voxels

I am still very much learning this streaming thing… and I feel like I still have so much more to learn. I was having some issues with FFSplit, namely in the inability to stream Trove. So after a suggestion or two from friends I loaded up Open Broadcaster Software overall I like the way it is set up, and it seems more intuitive to me. However it has copious amounts of settings, and I made the mistake of just accepting the defaults. The above video is passable at times, but pixellated as all get out anytime there is action going on. After some tweaking I improved the results with the WoW stream later in the evening. Additionally I am noticing that I really need to drop the volume of the game by about half so that I am not fighting to speak over it. I was honestly being fairly quiet last night… and I need not to do that.

It had been awhile since I had patched up Trove and played around on the server. With all the excitement over “pretty voxels” and Landmark… my enthrallment with Trove’s simplicity fell by the wayside. This is one of those games where if you stop playing for a bit, you are absolutely shocked at just how much has been done the next time you play. One of the coolest things from the above video is when I find a tree fort in a higher tier zone, and go hunting for the mushroom king that rules it. Last time I played they did not have real “dungeon bosses”, and they actually do hurt significantly. I cheat quite a bit in that the community chest was stocked full of rainbow weapons. However in my travels last night I did manage to pick up an upgrade that looks like the gun from Portal.

The gunslinger class is extremely fun, and it feels more responsive at times than the Knight does. Granted the Knight was their “first class”, so I figure at some point down the line they will apply a round of tweaks to make it feel more unique. If you watch through the video, you can tell I am heavily addicted to using the “rocket jump” attack, that shoots your character up into the air. I am one of those players that jumps constantly, so this only adds to my enjoyment when I can hurdle over big obstacles. One of the things I never could find however was the snow biome full of robots. I am wondering if they made robot parts significantly harder to farm, by only making them drop off punch bots and the dungeon boss robots. I will try doing another stream soonish with fixed settings to make sure the pixelization is gone completely.

Being Bad at Mage

So as I said above, by the time I got around to streaming World of Warcraft last night, I had tweaked my settings significantly. While the gameplay in WoW never includes the kind of spastic jumping that Trove does, it seems to be smoother and not pixellated. I continued my quest to push my Mage to 60. Night Elf Mage is pretty much the least possible “Belghast” character in existence. I have always had a problem with Night Elves, and I do not do amazingly well at “Finger Wigglers” as I call them. That said I have this silly idea that I want to get one of every class to the level cap, and I figured the only way I would actually do this is by using my free boost to 90 on a Mage. Traditionally the characters I was least interested in playing were the Mage and the Priest. When I accepted a scroll of resurrection some time ago, I made an instant 80 priest. So that just left the mage, that I have never really managed to level past about 20.

Firstly I am fundamentally bad at playing a Mage. I know this. I had been using Frostfire bolt all this time… because it was “the prettiest”. Really though the animation does look amazing as compared to the stock Frostbolt… so that meant it had to be better right? Wrong… apparently it is a spell that no self respecting frost mage would ever cast except in the rare case of a mob being frost immune. Last night oddly enough I had one of the best mages I have never known watching the stream. Helkim was commenting over twitter, since I fail at using Twitch chat and gave me the realization that I should never press frostfire bolt again. Sure enough my damage went up to respectable levels in dungeons… viva la shorter cast time!

Towards the end of the video someone took the bait. I made this channel on our guild Mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming”, and since my friend Drathis has no self preservation instinct… he decided to join me. Within a few minutes several other friends had popped into the channel, and I think before too much longer we had all pretty much forgotten I was streaming. As a result you guys get a glimpse into what our mumble sounds like on an almost nightly basis. This might be confusing to the listeners because we end up often times playing completely different games, and there will be cross conversations going on about each. Everyone else in the channel that was not me, was playing Diablo 3 torment mode I believe. If I did not have this burning desire to get my mage to 60… I would likely be doing the same. Basically I decided that I would far rather level a character to 60, than level tradeskills to 600.