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ArcheAge Impressions

May 9, 2014 by Belghast

Peach Fuzz and Pretty Boys

As I said yesterday, a friend of mine hooked me up with access to ArcheAge alpha and throughout the day it downloaded and installed. I came home over lunch to take a breathing treatment, and when I got there it was ready and waiting for me. I didn’t get much time to play at that point, but I did manage to create a character. I have to say at this point my hopes were a bit dashed. I generally have a problem with the Asian and specifically Korean graphical style, in trying to create a character I really liked. I had this problem with Aion, GW2, and to some extent Rift. It very difficult in these style of games to create any form of a male that is not a “pretty boy”. I went into FFXIV with the same fears but found myself pleasantly surprised that I could create a character aligned to western ideals with a very nice beard and everything.

ArcheAge unfortunately… this was not the case. They have beard options but essentially they were choices between “Five O’clock Shadow”, “Peach Fuzz” and “Well Trimmed Peach Fuzz”. There was not a single “real” beard option available. This is a little bit disappointing considering from everything I have heard there are some massive configuration options available for the female models. So Trion if you are reading… not sure if this is something you can do but both ArcheAge and Rift for that matter need better beards for the human models. The above character is as “close” to the standard Belghast appearance as I could get out of the system. I can live with it, but I am not exceptionally happy about it. I feel like my choices were as good as possible with the system.

Solid Combat

Complaining about the character models aside, the game feels very good once you actually get into it. The first several levels are the same as every fantasy MMO with a series of punctuation leading you around the map and showing you the things you should do. Right now the experience feels a little disjointed since you are supposed to be getting treated to nice cutscenes… that happen to all be in Korean. This also causes some odd shit to happen… at one point last night a rock on the ground was speaking korean to me… and I never quite figured out what was happening there. It was some sort of a tutorial system, and I ended up disabling. The world feels good, and combat feels responsive for standard MMO fare hotbar combat.

I chose to go “BattleRage” for my initial tree and it is pretty much standard warrior fare. At level five I was able to pick a second tree, and I went for Defense… which is as you would expect the archetypal “tank” tree. At that point I had a kit that included a ranged pull, a charge, a multi modal combat attack that could hit multiple targets and a really powerful long cooldown shield bash. That is a pretty great start for any game that only a few levels in I feel like I have a complete enough kit to absolutely run wild with. At level ten I was able to pick up my third tree, which I went Occultism with. Basically this is the “Dark Knight” build from the Korean version, or as it is called here “Doomlord”.

My ultimate plan is to try and create a Shadowknight like tanky character with life drains to and maybe a cool summon or two. Right now I have this really awesome attack called “Hell Spear” that impales every mob within a radius around me on a fiery spear that comes up from the ground. They are rooted and take damage when it fades. This honestly is one of the aspects of the game that most appeals to me, that I can build pretty freeform classes. While it is zero shock that I ended up trying to create a Dark Knight given my love of Shadowknights and Deathknights… I am happy that I am in fact able to craft it however the hell I want to. Looking at the trees it looks like I will be able to build a tank with a charge and a deathgrip type yank ability, which should give me a pretty solid kit for tanking instances… if those even exist here.

Rift and FFXIV Had a Child

One big take away from last night is that the world is gorgeous. Not everything is amazing… and there are plenty of generic fields and forested nooks to explore. However every now and then you are just awestruck by how breathtaking a vista is. Overall like the subtitle says the game feels as though Rift and FFXIV had a child… and then spent time raising it with LoTRO and even an odd Warhammer Online feel to some of the quests. That description will either make you think “man that sounds great” or like some of my friends cause you to affix a firm “NOPE!” sticker to it and move on. I happen to like the mix and this is probably going to be my new “off night” game. I still plan on playing the shit out of Elder Scrolls Online, but this game is probably going to fill that space that SWTOR has recently been filling. The game world has plenty of downtime, so it doesn’t feel like I have to be “constantly on” like it does in ESO.

Granted all of this might change as I move out of the more themepark areas into the more serious sandbox ones. At some point soon I will be turning off most of the channels. I would say already it has one of the worst communities I have seen in a game. At one point I was given a quest where I had to cross a bay on a shitty rowboat. The folks with huge ships took a perverse sense of pleasure ramming into me and trying to capsize my boat as I moved across the bay. Granted they could not actually attack me, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t make my life hell for a few minutes. This “griefer spirit” seems to be infused with the game community so far, and ultimately will probably be the biggest problem I have with it. If you look at most of the streamers, they seem to be almost entirely devoted to ruining someone’s day. Although if you want to watch some streams that are not blatant griefing and high seas piracy… I highly suggest Kiwidream or IRLJasmine.

Systems Within Systems

That is the oddest thing about this game honestly, is that it can be so many different games to so many different people. From my limited experience so far it is very much a straight forward themepark style game. However after watching lots of streams on the game, I can see just how detailed the various systems are. You could in theory live your entire life in game as a crafter, doing nothing but running trade deliveries and crafting goods for sale. You could spend your time raising crops, or animals, or doing nothing but building really awesome houses for people. However you can also spend your time adventuring or as the community seems to be doing… griefing other players. Wading into this game is much like wading into Everquest 2 at this point. There are just a ridiculous amount of systems to try and figure out, and even though the game gives you a summary introduction to each… the depth there is almost staggering.

I still stand by my statement on the MMOPRG Game On podcast… I feel like this is going to be the game that has finally arrived for the Star Wars Galaxy player. One of the hallmarks of that title, was that so many different play styles were embraced and supported. ArcheAge so far feels like a spiritual successor, but with a really good combat system. I’m sorry to the SWG fans out there, but combat in that game felt horrible, even compared to what was available in Dark Age of Camelot at the time. What it had going for it however was all the open world goodness and player created content, and I feel like even with the seemingly asshole community… there might be a place to carve out a niche among the lawless. I know they are targeting free to play for this game, but it almost makes me hope that there might be a “patron only” server. I feel like a game with this much potential to ruin your day, needs a more curated environment.

Final Thoughts

I am starting to get used to the character especially now that I am starting to shift away from leather armor into plate gear. I feel like there will be a point where I actually enjoy playing the character and the way it looks. As far as the world goes… while it does not inspire me yet to go absolutely batshit crazy with the exploration like Elder Scrolls Online does… I figure as it opens up I will start to feel that way. Right now I am most concerned with staying on the path, since I don’t know where the free for all boundaries are. I want zero part in the pvp aspects of the game, so I will be doing my best to avoid them. I really like the way combat feels, the animations are nice and the abilities while essentially spamming hotkeys… feels good. I feel like it gives any wow-like combat system a run for its money. It is not extremely deep, but what is there is enjoyable. I feel as I keep unlocking skill points and subsequently new abilities it will keep feeling more “fleshed out”. While I do not feel like abandoning all other games and declaring ArcheAge the one true king… I enjoyed myself enough to keep playing periodically and see where the journey leads me. There is a lot to like in this game, and I feel as it progresses, that will increase.

#ArcheAge

2013 Retrospective

January 1, 2014 by Belghast

Grand Experiment in Review

2012 was an extremely horrible year for me and at least professionally I would rank it as quite possibly the worst year I have ever had. I would put it as worse than the year I was out of work for six months after the dotcom crash. On September 11th 2012 my company suffered what they thought was a network attack, that only later the security guy pulled his head out of his ass and realized it was a regularly scheduled security scan… that he himself authorized. The results of this was a massive overreaction that caused me and my team to spend the rest of the year and a good chunk of the beginning of this year rebuilding damned near everything that touched the web. Why did we have to do this? Because they quite literally pulled the servers out of the racks and sent them to the FBI, leaving us next to nothing to work off of.

So next to that year, this year has seemed like an absolute dream. However it has been more than that for me. 2013 has been a year of personal growth and exploring new things. In April when I finally pulled my head above water after the “faux” security incident, I really wanted to make a break back into blogging. I fell off of the planet shortly after the security event and simply could not bring myself to write about anything. Coming back I devised what I called a “grand experiment”, namely to blog each and every day even if I didn’t think I had much to write about. At this point there are 237 posts categorized as “The Grand Experiment”, and without fail I have blogged every day even when it was a struggle to do so.

Has the experiment worked? Well functionally yes I have managed to blog every day, but more importantly has it provided an interesting stream of content? Quite honestly I don’t know. Most of the time I feel like I am a little kid writing to a make believe audience. When I talk to someone who mentions something I have written… I am always shocked. I feel like no one actually reads my stuff, that I am mostly just writing it for my own benefit. People seem to enjoy what I write, and I have a regular stream of readers… but I will never have the type of audience that the bigger bloggers have. I am just too rough around the edges for that sort of thing. For the most part I am happy with the results of a year of blogging and my long-term goal is to make it at least one full year of posts without pause. That of course will be up April 26th of 2014, which seems like it is far in the future right now. However I don’t see myself losing steam at any point soon.

A Healthier Me

Another big change in my life over the course of 2013 is that I am considerably lighter. In March my wife and I began to shift the way we relate to food. I say it in terms like that because really we have completely changed our relationship to food as a whole. To say we went on a diet doesn’t really encompass the level of change. Diets are about the short term, but we wanted to make permanent and long-term changes in the way we ate. Namely we focused on trying to find a new and sustainable way to live. At this point I am 70 lbs smaller and have hit a bit of a plateau over the last month. However the fact that I survived both Thanksgiving and Christmas without breaking that plateau makes me happy enough.

My wife on the other hand continues to lose at a steady pace and is now down roughly 60 lbs. At some point I need to get super serious again, as I have become lax of late. However the current weight seems to be a place I can comfortable stay without any real intervention. I have reached my goal and it is time for me in this new year to refocus myself and set a new one. I will never be a small man, I come from a long line of really big people. I am however happy enough being able to say I am a “smaller” man. The thing I was not expecting to be honest were the health benefits. As a whole I am far healthier than I was a year ago, and the primary benefit is that my Asthma that I have struggled with my entire life… and have even been hospitalized for… is really a mere nuisance these days. I can go months on a single inhailer, and that is not a thing I have ever been able to do in my life.

Professional Growth

In the last year I have grown more into the role of the manager of my group. I have learned to delegate more, which is something I have always struggled with in my life. I was good at accepting assignments, but never very good at passing them on to my troops, instead trying to take them all on myself. My team is pretty amazing and I would be lost without them. I guess in some small way I have learned to have more faith in them, and trust that they will do as much diligence with an assignment as I would have. As a result I have shifted more into the architect role for my group and part-time project manager and full-time traffic cop. Making sure all of the assignments are going to the right places and all seeing at least some progress.

We usually have 50-60 active projects for a team of three people. So it involves lots of juggling. Various forces in my company want me to move up into a permanent management position. However I simply do not want to distances myself from the “real work” enough to take them. Additionally right now I am responsible for three extremely highly functional people, and I don’t think I could cope with being put over less functional people that I would some how have to whip into shape. I am not really great with confrontations, and as a result I think I would flounder. Either that or it would be similar to me as a raid leader, and I would turn into a real asshole. For the time being I think I am happy with where I am and what I am doing.

I Wrote A Novel

One of the things I have always wanted to do in my life was to write a novel. I made several false attempts at various times over the years but never could seem to push myself to do it. This November I joined the NaNoWriMo event, and over the course of the month knocked out my first novel. I have no idea if it is actually any good, because honestly I have not even read it since finishing it up. I plan in the new year to tear it asunder as I edit it, and fix any issues. However regardless if it completely sucks, I have accomplished a goal. I managed to write a novel, and that is a thing most people can’t say about themselves. I didn’t do it to get famous, or be published, I did it mostly just to prove to myself that I could.

The weird thing about it is, November seems like a lifetime ago. The whole concept of writing 1500 words per night was just absolutely draining. My entire life revolved around that novel for those thirty days, which is honestly longer than I have stuck with anything like that in my life. More than anything I feel like it was a venue of personal growth. I did a thing I never thought I could, and I did so in a methodical way in which it felt like success was assured from the moment I started. Sure I faltered a few times along the way, and there were a few days I didn’t write a blessed thing. However I kept moving forward towards the eventual 50,000 word count goal and I achieved it. I think more than anything I am proud of this accomplishment from 2013.

A Year of Gaming

This is a gaming blog afterall, so during 2013 I played a lot of games. I played way more games than I can ever manage to remember, but I will try and run down a few of the big ones. The list of major titles is as follows.

Oddly enough I am beginning this new year not entirely differently than I began the last year. January 2013 I was still involved in the launch of Mists of Pandaria, and it was not until April that I really began to distance myself from that game entirely. World of Warcraft and I have this love/hate relationship. I get frustrated with it so much, because it seems that they always seem to take the most short sighted solutions to problems, and there are so many games that there that do various things it does…. so much better. However as a total package I feel like the game is unbeatable. It offers the most good things in one package. The realization for me however after my 2+ years of absence from being serious about the game is that it is not about the game at all. World of Warcraft is about the people playing it, and I had missed the ragtag group of people known as House Stalwart immensely.

The game I probably played the most often during the year however was Rift. I want to love rift so badly, the promise of the game is really great. The problem is it just lacks something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It is a technically superior game in every aspect, but it is like it lacks a cohesive narrative that makes me care about the world every single day. The dragons were a thing I thought I could get behind. But now that we have systematically killed each of them off, I cannot say in a single sentence what the world of Rift is. I think that might be the problem, there is no one clear narrative to the game. You cannot say “this game is” and have even half of the people agree on it. I still play it occasionally and there is still an incarnation of House Stalwart there that Psynister and Fynralyl are keeping alive. I thank them so much for being there, but I just can’t seem to care about the game right now. I am sure at some point I will again.

Final Fantasy was another major force for the year. This was a game I never intended to like because really I feel like me and Japanese RPGs had a messy divorce quite some time ago. I had a group of friends actively wanting to play it, so against my better judgment I went along for the ride. What I found however was a really well crafted narrative and dungeon experience. If I could have kept experiencing new bits of immersive content, I would have likely stuck around. However once you reached the end of the game, it was exactly that… the end. All paths lead to massive amount of grinding, and for whatever reason… while I can stomach grinding all day long in World of Warcraft… I could not stomach the particular FFXIV brand of grinding. Namely I blame this on the overall lack of meaninful drops in the game. If I have a chance of getting something cool while killing mobes, no matter how remote the chance… it feels exciting to me each time I open a loot window. There was nothing that could drop from mobs in the world that I would ever care about. Additionally gearing up to get to a point where we could raid, was just not a bridge I was willing to cross.

Games for 2014

There has been a game I have been in super secret closed door testing since February. I cannot name the game by name, but I have to say I am still extremely excited about it even after most of a year testing it. I have watched the game grow from something that felt polished to something that really is amazingly rich and polished. I don’t think I will quit WoW this time for another game, because I have set down some pretty solid roots there again. However I know I will also be playing this game, at the very least two to three nights a week. It is probably the least wow-like game I have played in a long while, and because of that I feel like there is room in my heart for both games to have a unique space.

Past that I am really not certain what 2014 will hold. I know that I am not really interested enough to purchase a PS4 or an XBox One, so I think I will be exiting the console mainstream once again. I am mostly a PC gamer to be honest, and since my gameloft has been taken over by my wife I am okay with not having access to the consoles. More than anything I am looking forward to the various stores beginning to liquidate their stocks of PS3 and XBox 360 games, so I can pick up the titles I always wanted to play but didn’t have the desire to pay for. Additionally there are still a lot of things on the DS/3DS that I want to play, and I am looking forward to picking up the newest Zelda game. I am sure there will be a number of surprises along the way, games that catch my fancy enough to deserve lots of blog posts.

I hope that 2014 will be as positive force in my life as 2013 has been. Additionally I hope each and every one of you out there can say the same. My friend @AlternativeChat has declared 2014 the “Year of Faff”, and I am down with this notion. I think we all need to learn how to faff about in the game worlds we are in, because stopping and smelling the roses is the only real way I know to break the cycle of burnout. I have tried my best to embrace this concept, and hope to continue to do so in the year to come. More than anything, I feel like I am sick of jumping games every three months, and I get the sense that the gaming world as a whole is somewhat sick of that as well. I hope we can each embrace our own faff, whatever that might mean.

Social Justice

December 26, 2013 by Belghast

Happy Holidays?

Yesterday was a mixed bag, I am not going to get into the awkwardness that was Christmas with my family. I should have taken a picture of the gallon jug of holy water that my grandmother for some reason seems to think she needs, however I did not as it would have been too obvious. Suffice to say it was fine while it was just my parents and grandmother, but once people started showing up the fight or flight instinct kicked in and I had to get out of there. We stayed long enough to be socially acceptable, or at least long enough to see everyone and then got back on the road. I really don’t deal with large groups of people in confined spaces very well.

When I finally got home that night I went back to my LFR madness. I really would have thought that the holidays would have made people better natured, but instead it seemed like only the worst people were running dungeons. I guess it makes sense, as most of the “good” people probably have families and such that they would rather be spending time with. The highlight of the evening, as far as horrible goes came when my Downfall group finally got to Garrosh. We had a few people drop like usual, and one of the warriors that joined in immediately started moaning that he had waited in queue for an hour and missed the entire dungeon.

Instead of doing the right thing, and just dropping group and taking the deserter debuff… he proceeded to pull Garrosh while we were still getting prepared screaming “For Mother Russia”. Obviously his ploy was to get us to kick him which doesn’t cause the debuff to happen. He was running across the screen just about to aggro him again when the kick happened saving the day. The problem is… there needs to be a better way of managing this. The systems in place don’t give us a way to flag this guy letting other people know that he will likely screw their group over if things don’t go his way.

Social Justice

League of Legends has had in the past the most notoriously toxic community in online gaming. As a result they knew that this was ultimately hurting their product and keeping players from participating on a deep level with it. Instead of sitting back and saying “pugs will be pugs” they took matters into their own hands and tried to devise a way of dealing with this. As a result they created two systems that work hand in hand. The honor system allows players to provide “endorsements” that are positive, such as Teamwork, Friendly, Knowledgeable, and at the same time provide a venue for reporting bad behavior. When a player has received enough negative reports they go into another system called the Tribunal.

One of the problems with social reporting is that there is a sea of false positives and downright minor infractions that clog the customer support staff. As a result the Tribunal system is innovative in that it brings each case before a jury of “peers” aka other players who have signed up to be willing to sit on these peer based juries. You can view all of the results on the public Tribunal page if you are logged into your league account. The image on the right side is an example of a tribunal ruling. Of course warnings for language should apply as it states exactly what the player said during the match to warrant being reported.

Be Proactive Blizzard

These systems really do seem to work out in the wild, in fact with the big 2.1 patch in Final Fantasy XIV Squaresoft introduced a very similar endorsement system with some big rewards that can be gained through this positive behavior. In the past there were unofficial systems on the servers that permanently labeled disruptive players as pariahs from the social circles. There was a time where you could look at the guild a player was in and have a fair shot at gauging whether or not the player would be a positive influence on your group. Additionally just talking to a player for a moment before inviting them to fill a group gave you a good idea of their future behavior. When Blizzard introduced systems to automate these processes it completely removed the element of social ramifications, and such the “greater internet fuckwad theory” came true.

When it is perceived that there are no consequences for bad actions… players tend to behave worse. Sure there are awesome people out there that are awesome all the time regardless of who is looking… but that is quite simply not the majority of people. These systems work to bring a tally of someone’s misdeeds to bear each time they step into a group. The guy who wiped the LFR because he didn’t want to be there… would bring with him a black mark from each and every player that flagged him for doing what he did. I feel like blizzard does an excellent job of policing and banning players who are actively exploiting the game.

However it is quite literally against their best interest to ban players who are paying them a monthly subscription. Each time they ban one of these players they lose his money, and over time it adds up. What systems like the tribunal do is introduce a neutral third party, the player. The tribunal works because no only does it hold players accountable for their actions, but it also holds the players who are making these decisions accountable. Every decision that is made, and the players who participated in making it is posted publicly for the world to see. Since this relies on the players justice is usually far more swift than waiting for customer service to sift through their backlog of cases and deal with it. It is my hopes that with the rollout of Warlords of Draenor, they will investigate a system like this, and hopefully make it applicable to ALL battle.net games..

Richer Than You Think

December 19, 2013 by Belghast

A Patch Awoken

Monday evening the Final Fantasy XIV servers were down to deliver the brand new 2.1 patch. This is the one that everyone had been waiting for, that was supposed to deliver a ton of new content. At one point I was anxiously looking forward to this update, because it held the promise of player housing as well as new dungeons to run to collect what we lovingly refer to as “bookrocks” aka Tomestones. Now that the patch is live, I find that I can’t seem to be bothered to actually patch the game up. Tuesday and Wednesday night I spent a bit of time hanging out in mumble with my friends who are still playing it, and they seem extremely excited about it overall. The video below shows all the reported changes, and I will admit it seems pretty staggering.

However several of these things seemed to be tarnished by somewhat bad design. The biggest of these that I have heard of is the housing system. Currently it is oppressively expensive, the day it was released I saw a tweet (that I seem to be unable to find at this moment) stating that they gained the first million gil towards their house… only 99 more to go. That apparently is cheap… here is a listing of the housing prices on the various servers. We are in group three, on Cactuar so right now it would cost 125 million gil to purchase the largest home… aka the one suitable for a guild house. Considering prior to 2.1 there really was no way to make money at 50 other than crafting… this seems insane. The highest I have ever gotten with my character was 200,000 gil, and repair bills and components for my artifact weapon whittled that down to around 75,000 gil the last I checked in on the game.

Supposedly they have added in a bunch of new ways to earn money, which I guess is a positive. However it does seem silly to roll out such an expansive and impressive system… that no one can actually use on day one. Supposedly over time the housing prices will fall, but that still puts the large house at 100 million gil at the absolute cheapest possible price. Listening to my friends, they seem to be enjoying the new content. The new dungeon Pharos Sirius seems to be genuinely difficult and to the best of my knowledge they have not beat the final encounter. That was one of the interesting things about FFXIV dungeons, is that they had a 2 hour timer to get through them. I feel like I should be excited about the prospects of the patch, but I just fine myself not caring at all. Whatever magic I felt towards FFXIV seems to be gone for me, in the same way it has flickered away for so many other games.

Richer Than You Think

This morning I achieved a personal goal… too bad it comes 2 expansions too late to be terribly impressive. I have never been extremely successful at making money in MMOs. I guess in the grand scheme of things it just has never really been a priority. As a result I have always thought that I was broke, or at did not have a ton of liquid assets in game. While I am still not anywhere near some of my guild members, I am was apparently doing better than I ever thought. Awhile back I installed Titan Panel again, to help organize a lot of my informational gadgets in one place. In trying to keep track where I was with all of my tokens I installed a Currency addon. Interesting thing about it… is that it started to keep track of all of the money spread across all of my characters.

As of last night it showed that I had 25,000 gold distributed among all of my alts… five of which are 90 and in various stages of “raid ready”. No character had more than 5,000 gold on them specifically, but spread out among all of the characters it added up. Because of this I decided to realize something that had long been a goal for me. With Wrath of the Lich king they added what has been ubiquitously referred to as the “Repair Mount”. Since I do a lot of random killing out in the world, and solo farming of dungeons/raids… I find myself constantly searching for a repair vendor. So many times I have thought to myself “man it would be awesome to have that mount”, but even with faction and guild discounts it was still 14,000 gold… which seemed like an insane amount.

I never would have purchased this back in the days before account-wide mounts… but the idea that I just gave every single alt the ability to repair whenever they hell they felt like it? Sure 14,000 seemed like a reasonable price, especially considering I have branched out onto a second account of characters. So this morning before sitting down to write my blog entry I shifted back and forth between all of my characters and began pooling my money on Belgrave to make the purchase. I knew for certain he was exalted with Kirin Tor, the faction the mount vendor is sold on. I have to say… I am freaked out a little that I just spent all that gold on a single mount, but within a few days that will pass and I will be happy with my decision. There really is very little I want to purchase in the game at this point that my army of alt crafters cannot eventually make. So I figure thanks to the mount I will be able to farm up more goodies to fill the coffers again.

Lucky Streak

Most of the yesterday evening I spent working my way through Siege of Orgrimmar. The first section of the dungeon went extremely smoothly and the loot gods seemed to be smiling upon me. I managed to get a usable drop off three of the four bosses there. Of course the first drop of the evening was a neckpiece… after purchasing the one with honor last night. That seems like it is always the way however… when you upgrade a piece, you end up getting a better one almost instantly. The second part of Siege however went extremely slowly as I had to complete it in two passes. I was on the second boss of the first pass when my wife came home last night and needed my assistance. After killing Iron Juggernaut I bailed from the LFR and did what she needed for a bit.

After coming back that meant sitting through another 30-60 minute queue and repeating the first two encounters without loot. However that second run went far more smoothly than the first, and we had no wipes at all until folks lost focus during the Nazgrim fight. That is not the type of fight that you can “burn down at the end”, since the not dealing with the adds means he very rapidly heals back all of the damage you are dealing to him. During the second attempt however, folks stayed focused on the adds and we managed to defeat him in near record time. My hope is tonight to come back and finish out the last two parts. At 11pm I attempted to queue for the third, and it looked like roughly an hour queue so I gave up and went to bed. Still no love for a weapon, but this next segment has the chance of dropping a weapon I believe. So between it and my nightly habit of running a Heroic Scenario… I might have a chance.