Tales of the Aggronaut

Less of Me

June 8, 2013 by Belghast

It is officially the weekend and I’ve made my trip out to get sausage rolls once more. We have a bunch of stuff to do to get ready for my wife going out of town for a week.. So I am assuming that I really need to speed my way through this mornings blog post, so we can get on with that stuff. Additionally I forgot to pick up the cleaners on the way home… so we have to go do that as well. I’ve had breakfast at this point, showered, and had a 5 hour energy… so I am ready to confront anything.

Less of Me

This morning is a pretty monumental day for me. Not the date or anything about the day itself… but the fact that I weighed this morning and I am at my lowest point since I can remember. Back in 2003 we went on a pretty epic diet and were extremely successful with it. However we went on a cruise… and with in ability to really watch what we eat we fell completely off the bandwagon. We maintained a decent weight until a death in the family, then we completely fell apart. At that point we lost all the progress we made and then some.

Last year as a new years resolution we attempted to get back on the wagon… but for reasons that I honestly cannot remember the fell off the wagon again. The first week in march this year we started a new, and treated it as a completely new process. We have not been doing much of anything special, other than just religiously keeping track of our food intake. The process has finally reached a point where it is ingrained in our nature now. For once I feel like I am not really missing anything, and I have been able to log the food without actually feeling shame about what I am eating. If I eat something expensive calorie wise, I can still be okay with being under for the week.

This new view towards food and out intake has really paid off. The reason why today is so monumental is the fact that as of this morning we are on week 14 and I have lost 42 pounds since starting. That is an average of 3 pounds per week, which has been a fairly breakneck process. There have been so many changes as a result of this. In general I feel better about myself, and I think the result has been my willingness to continue to blog daily… and open up more about myself. I will never be small, it is just not a thing in the cards for me. I come from a family of big people, but I can be smaller. The stupid thing is… the only thing I really want is the ability to wear geeky t-shirts… which is ironic that they don’t really make those in big and tall sizes. You can get them in big sizes… but at 6’4” there will never be a time at which I do not require that T added onto whatever size I wear.

Survivalism

Last night I spent some more time with the survivals of State of Decay. I have to say the more I play the game the more I love it. This game really tweaks whatever instinct there is in me that comes out when I play Fallout and Skyrim. I was given a task of meeting up with some other survivors at a church… the objective was marked on my map… but I had hell bringing myself to keep driving the station wagon I had pilfered past all the houses I could be clearing. The whole “I wonder what is in that building over there” is so ingrained in me at this point.

The two big negatives I have encountered… and just personal ones. First off… melee weapons will always be what I favor for ease of use and ability to keep from drawing extra attention with gunshots. The only problem is melee weapons break super fast… I am really hoping that I either find a way to repair them… or find stronger melee weapons. I have an assortment of guns, but since ammo is so limited I really don’t want to use them. The second negative is that night is really dark… you can turn on a flashlight but it really doesn’t do much of anything to help you out. It is really only effective when you are exploring a building during the night.

One resounding positive is the fact that I managed to successfully make my way to the church without a melee weapon at all. I ended up just taking it very slowly and relying on kicks to finish off the zombies. I am sure there would have been no way for me to deal with a horde of zombies… but so long as I took them on one at a time I could kick them down without much issue. I found the flashlight extremely helpful as a way to draw attention to random shamblers that happened to be in my path. I could flash them with the light, and get them to charge me… at which point me and my entourage finished the job.

So another huge thing I have to say about the game… is how gracious and personal the response from Undead Labs has been to the success so far. I watched twitter for awhile yesterday afternoon… and sent my congratulations to Undead Labs for just how overwhelmingly positive the response has been. Before I knew it I was being tweeted by Annie Strain… wife of Jeff Strain the founder of Undead Labs… thanking me for my kind words. This has only made me want even more success for them… because that kind of personal touch is really unheard of these days.

It added a completely different dimension to this whole process… it feels very much like I am rooting for the little guy and when they win it feels like we win as well. The game really is amazing, and so far I have only encountered a couple of bugs. The entire experience is extremely polished and feels better than most traditional AAA release titles I have played. If they can follow up with a PC release, multiplayer, and DLC content packs… I feel it will continue to be an amazing success. The figures I saw floating around yesterday put it at just over 130,000 sales on the first day, which I believe puts it in the top ten of XBLA releases.

Come Back Haunted

So another big thing that happened this week, is that the new Nine Inch Nails single has been released… Come Back Haunted. This was a massive surprise since at one point Trent Reznor had said that Nine Inch Nails was essentially over. The upcoming album is the aptly labeled “Hesitation Marks” which is scheduled for release September 3rd. NIN will always have a special place for me, it is one of those projects that has been so much to me over the years. There always seems to be something that speaks to me, regardless of which “Halo” we are listening to. Every doubt, every fear, every indecision seems to be reflected somewhere in his library of songs.

I’ve been a loyal devotee since the Pretty Hate Machine days, and Down In It is still among my favorite songs. This new era feels like a blending of everything that has come before, into a new sound… almost retrospective. More than anything it feels like a strong mix of the Downward Spiral era mixed with the Pretty Hate Machine. Whatever it is, it feels fresh, vibrant and new… and I am in love with it. I will be anxiously waiting for September when we can get the full Halo. Here is hoping that a few more tracks get leaked in the process.

Wrapping Up

So in the name of full disclosure… I have been listening to Nine Inch Nails Year Zero while writing this mornings post. I have found that if I listen to something, I can tune out the television and other background noise and focus on what I am writing easier. The same thing goes for when I really need to crunch through code at work… but in that case I tend to listen to movie and video game soundtracks. Otherwise I find myself naming my variables after songs… the same way I named the SoD section above after a NIN song. Anyways… I hope you all have a great day… and I hope we can find all the things needed to get my wife on her way this week.

Shinobi Jones

June 7, 2013 by Belghast

I am struggling with existence this morning. I have always thought the saying “Thank God Its Friday” was a little trite, but I have been telling myself for the majority of the week “all you have to do is make it through Friday”. I am not really sure what about this week has made it so stressful, but I am certainly feeling it. It might be the fact that I know I am just about to be completely alone for a week as my wife has to go to a conference thingy. Have I mentioned that I don’t really embrace change well?

The Hills have Dead

One of the games I have really been looking forward to on the Xbox 360 is State of Decay. This is the open world exploration based zombie game from Undead Labs. It was available as of yesterday on the Xbox Live arcade for 1600 points… aka $20. Additionally it seems that Undead Labs is trying the failed 38 Studios approach of launching a console game and then bankrolling that success into a MMO version. So as I look at the game, I am also in the back of my head thinking about how well this will work in MMO form.

Basically in a quick sound byte… State of Decay is Dead Island but done better. You are given a more interesting world to explore, populated with less random encounters and a stealth mechanic should you choose to deploy it. I am about as subtle as a hurricane, so this is usually lost on me… but stealthier folks will love being able to sneak up on the shambling dead and get a silent take down. There is a lot going on in the game, and most of it really good… especially for a Xbox live title.

The premise is simple, you are at a campground when the world falls to shit… and you and your friend Ed (poor bastard) agree to go around searching for survivors. By saving other characters you essentially end up building a pack of stalwart zombie hunters. I believe later on you can develop an enclave of survivors and protect them, building influence with each of them. This influence seems to dictate the type of things you can do.

There are some really cool mechanics as you go out and explore the world. One of the niftiest things is that you can at any point essentially fortify your position. While this defies reason a bit, because as you fortify your position you magically brandish a hammer, nails and a stack of bedraggled board. However this function allows you to protect yourself from zombies busting through windows to come attack you and the human target… Ed. This will buy you more time to rifle through the bags and chests in an area to scavenge for materials.

So far I have encountered two kinds of undead. The first is your normal shambling kind that if they hear you comes running but can pretty much be beat down with a bat easily unless they swarm you. When I was searching the camp I discovered a maintenance shed that was guarded by a half dozen of a completely different kind of undead. These were far more dexterous and had an almost demonic appearance with glowing eyes. As a result these were much harder to take down… and quite honestly damned near killed me. However as I said earlier… the game really rewards risk taking, because the maintenance shed was completely loaded with stuff to scavenge.

At this point I have not really played the game for very long, as I had some things I was planning on doing in The Secret World. However the content I have played has left me wanting to play it more. If you like zombies and you like Fallout style open world exploration… then I would give this game a look. Additionally it has some pretty good voice acting and writing so far, even though I have not really experienced a lot of it. As a whole it very much feels like Dead Island meets Fallout meets Walking Dead by Telltale. If that sounds like an enjoyable combination… then you should totally check this one out.

Shinobi Jones

Last night we lacked our quorum of five members, so nothing really coalesced in the game around a “group activity”. Since I had not yet done the “Last Train to Cairo” sequence, I figured it was as good a time as any to go get my whip. First off I have to give Funcom major kudos because this is hands down the best issue they have released. The feel of this mission goes above and beyond everything we have experienced to date. It makes me extremely anxious to see what seven and eight are going to be like… especially with seven supposedly having a 007 flair.

I am going to try to keep from spoiling any of the content… but essentially the mission pack is a wild ride of sabotage, puzzles, stealth, and the most epic train sequence you have ever seen. All the while you have these great flavor references to the Indiana Jones movies. This is made all the more surreal by the fact that of late I have been rocking a combination of the shinobi outfit… with the glowing draugr mask… to produce a ninja with glowing blue eyes. Jones. Shinobi Jones… with my subtle rocket launcher combat style.

As always the puzzles are extremely puzzling. There was one deadly floor trap that took me over thirty minutes and probably a dozen deaths to get the hang of. All of the risk however is well worth the reward, as you not only get your spiffy new whip… but also get a 10.1 epic helm in the process, as well as some currency with a new faction of the Council of Venice. I have heard rumor that through the upcoming expansions, there will be similar 10.1 epic items, all designed as a way to ease someone into being able to do the NY raid content. If so I fully support this notion of gear through truly epic quest sequences.

I really need to go back and complete the Tyler Freeborn sequence of quests, as I have left that one hanging as well. Quite honestly I am sure there is a lot of content I have missed, as the only issue that I have fully explored was the first one, with the awesome prom night sequence. Carter is still one of my all time favorite protagonists in this game, but after taking the train to Cairo… I am starting to really like combo of Nassir and Said. Quite honestly almost all of the content is extremely well written and memorable.

The Secret World has been one of those games that I fired up every few weeks and piddled around a bit in. However it has been months since I had actually played the game seriously. Each time I come back for awhile, I marvel at just how well crafted it is. It still has some very rough spots around the edges, but they have improved a lot in the last year. I hope that they manage to find that point of equilibrium at which they are able to continue producing introducing content, and as the same time sustain their work force. The game always gives me some awesome experiences.

Wrapping Up

I have more things I could talk about, but honestly my head is killing me and I want to wander off and find some headache medicine. Additionally it is already getting late in the morning, and I need to gather laundry for the cleaners. I might do a few bonus posts this weekend, because I have a few ideas that need to congeal in my head for awhile before throwing out onto paper. I hope you all manage to survive the coming work day, and that it ends up turning into a weekend quickly. Ours is going to be dictated by preparation for my wife to travel, and by myself mental preparation for being alone for a week.

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.