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Heroes of the Storm

March 17, 2014 by Belghast

Odd Weekend

With all the excitement of the weekend, yesterday I needed to just recharge a bit and do a bunch of stuff around the house… namely lots of laundry. My wife got up early yesterday morning, as she had planned a trip to Dallas for the day with friends, so this left me completely up to my own devices all day long. I ended up sleeping in until around 9:30 at which point I did my FTL Steampowered Sunday play, and the subsequent blog post. Then it was lots and lots of laundry for several hours. I feel like I might be coming down with something, so I really wasn’t much more useful than that.

On the Grandmother front, she is doing as well as could be expected. She woke up yesterday for a bit before they sedated her again. Her kidney functions have not returned, but she was severely dehydrated. They have a nephrologist coming into the hospital today that is going to look at her and see what they can do to stimulate activity. Once the kidneys start working again they will be much closer to “in the clear”. Mostly they think she just needs to rest and let the body do its natural recovery. She is a really tough woman, so I have faith that she is going to pull through this. Her vitals all look okayish and seem to be improving by the day. so here is hoping time is really all she needs.

As far as the sick cat, she seems to be doing much better. She was extremely needy of attention yesterday, and her appetite seems to have returned. For the majority of the week she had not eaten much of anything, so yesterday whenever she acted hungry I was opening a cat of food for her. I think she ended up eating five different times yesterday. She had lost quite a bit of weight over the course of this ordeal so while I will taper back her feeding eventually… for now I am just happy she is eating. She demanded attention, which is good… because while she was sick she was pretty scarce. Preferring to just lay down on the couch by herself instead of wherever we happened to be in the house.

Elder Scrolls Final Beta Weekend

Since this past weekend is the final beta weekend before launch in a few weeks, and since we had been given leave to stream whatever we wanted… I did as much playing and streaming as I could fit in. All told I think I streamed a little bit over four hours, split up between four different videos. Most of the time was spent faffing about on my Orsimer Dragon Knight in the Daggerfall covenant area. I closed the weekend sitting a little bit away from thirteen. However because of the absolutely illogical pattern I followed I know I missed a good number of the quests from the first area of Glenumbra. I would love to say that the beta weekend was completely smooth, but it seemed as though a lot of the systems were bugged out. Dark Anchors for example seemed to spawn, and then just stay active even after the forces had been defeated and a player got credit for destroying them.

One of the systems that was completely new to me, were the Dark Fissures. These are essentially mini versions of the Dark Anchors and can just spawn almost anywhere around the map. Think of these as “soloable” Rifts. I say soloable in quotes because really unless you are prepared to take on boss level monsters they will be pretty freakin hard. I defeated two of these and did so just barely. If you go into them make sure you have your health potions hotkeyed and ready to go. The awesome thing about the Dark Fissures is that they seem to drop really awesome stuff. The final one I closed out yesterday evening dropped a level 12 blue fire staff, which I am sure would have been awesome… had I used staves. If the beta weekend were going longer I would have tried to find that a good home.

Heroes of the Storm

I know I mentioned this the other day, but I am still pretty pumped that I am in the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the really cool things about it is that it is completely sans-NDA. This means that I can stream the hell out of the game, and I intend to. I recorded a few videos over the weekend, the first of which was just me playing around in practice mode working on the weekly quests for getting victories with heroes from each of the franchises. The second video however I dipped my toes into cooperative mode fighting bots with other players. I have to say I found the jump in AI to be quite extremely between practice mode and cooperative. I earned enough gold through the various quests to purchase two of the cheaper heroes Muridan and Raynor. At some point I hope to pick up Falstad, because while he is in the free to play rotation currently… I am sure this will change similar to how it does in League of Legends.

Right now I am enjoying the game far more than I ever did League. Basically it has all of the aspects of league that I really enjoyed… namely fighting people with awesome champions, and none of the aspects that I didn’t like. League build path was always an enigma to me, and I tended to play champions that I could use the same build on over and over. League gameplay is far more nuanced, but Blizzard has done for League what they did for the MMO genre. Streamlined, simplified, polished and created something that the masses can latch onto. Instead of a huge list of items for you to purchase, you build your character by making a few simple choices. In the beginning at least all of these are either or choices like “survival” or “damage”. Over the course of the map this ends up building a semi-custom champion.

However once you reach level 8, they open up these choices significantly. While playing Muridan yesterday there was one of these levels where I had five different choices for how I wanted to proceed. Each choice causes you to give up other options with no real way of getting those back. For me… a player that found the item buying system of League completely unfathomable this works so much better. For a player who wants a deeply nuanced and unique approach to each match… they are probably still going to favor League. The champions as a whole feel more well rounded than League champions, in that they have a wider “kit” of abilities and the option to choose between two different “R” attacks really seems to help this.

The place where the game really shines is in their map creation. At their core, each of the maps is essentially “Summoner’s Rift”. That said each of the maps has a unique sub game to them, while League tries to do this with the various map types… it simply does not work as well as it does here. For example in the map shown above Blackheart’s Bay… you have a really awesome coastal city/pirate theme going on. When one team collects enough doubloons they can turn them in to call in a bombardment from the pirates on the enemy team. In one map the mini game is all about controlling two shrines which allow you to waken the Dragon Knight. When you do so the player transforms into this unstoppable juggernaut perfect for diving straight into towers and destroying the enemy resources. I have only played the game a little bit, but I have to say I am deeply hooked.

Gamer Hangout

Another odd happening this weekend is that I ended up participating in Beau Hindman’s Gamer Hangout show. I’ve been friends with the members for some time, and there was a week where they had asked me to join in the show… but I until recently I simply did not have a camera. Now you will be able to see the WHY I didn’t have a camera. I have always been pretty closed with separating the real me from the gamer me… so it took quite a bit of courage to appear on camera like this. I am always far more comfortable behind the scenes than being out front and animated. What was cool about the show is that in essence they based this week on one of my blog posts.

It just happened to be where I was available to join in and chat about it. While most of us only actually got through two different games on our list, we somehow managed to talk over an hour about them. They have apparently extended an open invitation for me to participate more in the future, so I guess that means I did not completely make an ass of myself. My office is a pit, and if I do this more often I think I would want to rearrange things some… however that involves me cleaning and moving and not sure how likely that is to happen. It was really enjoyable, and the other folks were great. Was very much an odd end to an odd weekend. I just wish that youtube would not have picked a thumbnail of me talking for the video.

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.