I had a funny experience on Test yesterday. There I was, slotting enhancements into Guernica's PvP build (v2), when a dominator started asking on arena if anyone would help him test a new PvP build. Everyone ignored him, so I told him I'd help him.
We started a match, and it turned out he was a mind/ice. It was a fun, evenly matched fight, which kind of tells you how pathetic we both were. But what was more pathetic was the fact that I had no attacks on Guernica's PvP build, and he couldn't kill me either even though he was spamming his attacks. Finally, I told him I would stand around, not use break frees, and just heal myself. When domination came up (after him futilely pounding at me for minutes), he finally managed to kill me. After that, it was back to futilely pounding again.
After that, someone advertised for a match and we ended up in the same team. To the credit of the opposing team, they didn't just quit in disgust after checking who was in match. Spines/Regen + Ice/EM + Storm/energy vs Energy/Energy + Kin/Rad + Mind/Ice. It was a pure, utter disaster, to put it mildly.
At least the good thing about test arena, was that people never trashtalked. Even if you are obviously utterly lame, they'll say "good game" and keep their thoughts to themselves. Same can't be said for whenever I step into Siren's Call. The amount of verbal abuse you can get there is amazing -- most of it translates to "It's not fair that you are not standing still so I can one-shot you with AS, so you are stupid/cowardly/lame/newbie/etc". "Play fair ie stand there and let me BU + AS you!". Except it's so mixed in with trashtalk and personal insults you wonder what is actually going on in the other person's mind.
I think the best I did was dropped the ice tank's armors with transference in another match. Other than that, it was basically running and dying so badly I could barely keep SB on ID on everyone, much less be offensive. I was really newbie of course, and couldn't really keep up with all the chaos as 16 human-controlled avatars zoom around in their own player-determined ways. I just wish I'm better at not-dying, because the deaths mean my team always loses.
Still, it's pretty addictive, even if I do spend most of the match dead or dying. Fighting people is very different from fighting AI. I think I'm starting to get preoccupied with it, thinking of seriously respecing my other toons for PvP. Or levelling up my fire/ice corrupter for villain PvP. Except that the guy is pure pain to solo...though he really does resemble Statesman's vision of player = 3 minion.
But then blasters are supposed to be gimpy in PvE. They are completely deadly in PvP, especially the large numbers of Ice/EM running around. I don't think anyone can survive their alpha assault sequence. Good thing is, it's harder to pull that off in arena. Bad thing is, they don't need the entire sequence to kill something with the wussy hp of a defender. Did you know that defenders have lower hitpoints than controllers? I was pretty amazing when I found that out, but it is true.
I feel something strange changing in me. I won't call it "hate", because it's not the fault of the players I'm fighting against. It's natural to pick the strongest combo if you want to fight in a competitive arena sense. But it really spoils my taste for PvE, somehow. I just don't want to do PvE anymore. I want to PvP, and PvP, and keep PvPing. The frustration and "hate" kind of gets directed to, in some sense, PvE playstyle as a kind of artificial environment hiding the reality of AT/powerset balance behind stupid AI.
It doesn't really help that there is that guy in my SG who thinks he is so great and boasts about it, and everyone else thinks he is great. I can be "great" too with tanker hp/armour, running three toggles (guess which, hint:acrobatics is one of them!) and spamming axe attacks like a scrapper, playing like half-witted scrapper. Or, go ahead and think you're superfabulous, but don't boast about it.
You're a bad player. You're a god-awful player who plays on a team as if he is soloing. You're just hiding behind the AT balance.
Same guy that refuses SB and runs out of endurance spamming his stupid axe attacks.
Same guy that declares he needs an empath for so-and-so AV.
And the mostly casual players in my SG are happy to oblige him by logging empaths. Now we have three empaths running around trying to get healing badges for the SG. I just feel like something's not the same as it was with multiple storms and controllers. I'm going crazy... I don't know why but I just can't stand the "Get an empath over here, we need one" crap.
Oh yes, everyone loves having empaths run around and heal them. That's what empaths are good for: babysitting. No need to learn anything else, the empath will heal you and buff you.
Ugh.
I feel like I need to, somehow, duel him with one of my "non-empathy squishies" and beat him, just to prove something. There is pretty much no way I'm going to team with him again. And I guess that means I have to not team with the SG when he appears. Too bad.
But then they're all enamoured of getting "healers" to wipe their butt. Fine, go have your healers... I will continue fighting my +5s with my double kinetics + bubbler teams.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Double Lives
Currently, I'm working on my project of getting Guernica to 50. Grinding is much easier nowadays, with the mission bonuses. People, despite the nerfs, still want to fight +4s. Last night's team was no different, except that we managed to pull it off. One stone tank, two kinetics defenders, a force field and an empathy controller. Oh, and a fire/kin SBer. I was mid-levelled in the group and I was fighting +5s. It was a wonder we could hit, but stacked tactics and irradiate went a long way. Five bars in three missions, amazing. The Infernal mission yielded most of the xp and was pretty insanely fun too. In fact, a +5 Infernal gave me so much xp it was shocking.
This wasn't your random "stand around and heal" team either. Nowadays it's all different. Nobody cares if you blast if they are alive. In fact, people enjoy the steady damage input the defenders output, because everyone doesn't have that much damage anymore. Blasting is normal, the real xping teams, where xp flows like water, are run by generally experienced and enlightened players who will just as happily kidnap rads as they kidnap empaths, to beat down AV after AV. Now that everything is harder, the pretenders are revealed to be what they were. They are still trying to do high levelled missions and failing miserably, while screaming for "find us a healer!". The min-max mission grinders just adjust and continue.
And Plevelling is still happening, in a softer manner. Someone will inevitably invite along some lowbie character to be sidekicked up. I see a lot of fire/kins, ill/kins, and stone/fires. *polite cough* I know what they are doing...I just pretend not to see because I need the xp, and it's somewhat a softer form of plevelling. If they are useful they stand around and SB me (I like SB), so that is ok. If they aren't they leech. There was one who just whined about making us teleport her around, never once passed me SB, and generally died every two spawns -- not because she was trying to contribute and got hit -- but because she tossed bonfire below the tank. This is generally a bad idea when the tank has three spawns stacked on top of him. She probably confused bonfire with ice slick. She then whined some more about dying. I felt like slapping her because everyone else was already generously giving her a huge share of the xp (because she's the tanker's girlfriend, *sigh*); you can sk them up and give them free xp, but you can't teach them to play.
Other than this, I am trying to get over my thin-skinnedness and get down the the Arena nights. The regulars are complaining about people who sign up and don't appear. Whoops, I'm one of those people. But there is some strange barrier that is stopping me from just jumping on test arena. I think it's the inner competitive freak in me. I don't want to be thrashed mercilessly and laughed at for being N00b. But the irony is of course, if you never get thrashed mercilessly, you won't learn. That happened in RoD, and it has to happen everywhere. I recalled dying multiple times every fight when I started RoD pk, but my clan leader just kept tossing me more eq from his infinite storage. Jim was a great guy, one of the last great pkers of that era when people were leaving RoD for MMOs.
So my project: start going to arena nights in the evening, and grind a bit every night.
* * *
Nevertheless, I feel like I'm heading for some sort of depression of the late. Partly RL-related. Bigger things like when I didn't get into grad school (though to my surprise I found it didn't really matter than much to me) and have to find a new job (which is the main thing). Small things like finding out I have to pay IRS $800 more in taxes outside of normal withdrawing and trying to force myself to write that check, because if I don't they'll eventually get me. Or my stupid radiative transfer code that's been taking four days to run and still hasn't finished. It seems like I'm getting jammed in my life and it's reflecting in my entertainment.
Then there's the gaming part, which is of course a big part in my life. I hate standing around being a buff-spamming squishy. But acc debuffs are just about dead until I7. Fact is, nobody in a grind team wants to fight anything lower than +3s. Debuffs just weren't great once the cons got to the purple end. Buffs are more reliable. If you took damage, you got healed. You got resists. Defense buffs were worse off, but being put on the toons, they weren't double-scaled, just single-scaled. Still very weak now but will be better in I7. But if you want to grind in the deep purple range, you jolly well just get a stone tank and pump him up.
Yes, it's STONE tank, not any other tank and certainly not an ice tank. I had an exempted blaster laugh at me during a TF when we were fighting redcaps. In the first spawn, a couple of bosses did that dagger total focus thing on me and I nearly died in the alpha. Taunted and hibernated in a hurry. "Those things sure hit hard", I commented. The blaster made fun of me and said he noticed I was an ice tank. Yay, that explains why everything hits hard, I'm just squishy? I just tanked 10 Mary Macombes non-stop in the first mission, and now I make the comment on Redcaps hitting hard, I'm suddenly "of course" gimp. If it was a fire tank making that statement he would have agreed, and ice > fire nowadays. Some people are still trapped in some delusional other-dimensional CoH.
I consider it really insulting a BLASTER dares to laugh at me for being squishy. I have twice a blaster's hitpoints and infinite times a blaster's defense (a finite number divided by zero is infinite, right?).
But if I took that tank to do the type of mission I was doing with Guernica, that tank would really have just faceplanted at every spawn. XP uber alles, all the non-"top" builds be damned style of missioning.
There has to be some kind of compromise. I like to think I have builds that do that. I've never had a complaint that my mind/storm or my earth/TA doesn't control well. The only complaint is that if they want to grind, they are going to get some stone tank with attending harem of defenders, and they just want me to have the so-called "useful" secondaries. Between the completely clueless bunch who screams healzor non-stop and the min-max grinders, I'm just stuck to soloing my own missions.
But I can't really stand playing in the other spectrum either. I know it doesn't bother anyone else in my SG. But it bothers me because I am not a pure RPer; I have a very strong powergaming streak that is only expressed through an idiosyncratic RP style. What's worse than a tanker can't even be bothered with aggro? An exempted level 50 tanker, to whom debt doesn't matter, and can't even be bothered with aggro either. I really have no idea how some people have no sense of shame. Obviously even though you are "squishy" compared to a stone tank, you are less squishy than the real squishies. How can anyone have no sense of shame when their teammates are getting hit, when they know they can take those hit with greater ease. Even scrappers can feel that sense of obligation, a lot of them have a squishy-bodyguard streak. If a tanker pretending to be a scrapper doesn't even do that, then they aren't even scrappers...they are less than scrappers. Heck, even blasters run around with the medpool zotting teammates and helping out with holds. I'm talking about the AT that has the highest incentive to play selfish.
I find myself somewhat frustrated by the semi-clueless tank too. But at least it is just frustration not a negative feeling, because you really can't expect casual players to be that into the game to know what to do. Especially when they model their play after some kind of less-than-scrapper. Turn on your aura! Don't go off to one side soloing your own mob without making sure the main bunch of mobs are trained on you. Why not stay inside the main bunch and taunt the runner to you?
And. Seriously. Run. Your. Armour.
No, really. There's a reason why you have a primary full of armours.
Run it.
Arrrrgh!
This wasn't your random "stand around and heal" team either. Nowadays it's all different. Nobody cares if you blast if they are alive. In fact, people enjoy the steady damage input the defenders output, because everyone doesn't have that much damage anymore. Blasting is normal, the real xping teams, where xp flows like water, are run by generally experienced and enlightened players who will just as happily kidnap rads as they kidnap empaths, to beat down AV after AV. Now that everything is harder, the pretenders are revealed to be what they were. They are still trying to do high levelled missions and failing miserably, while screaming for "find us a healer!". The min-max mission grinders just adjust and continue.
And Plevelling is still happening, in a softer manner. Someone will inevitably invite along some lowbie character to be sidekicked up. I see a lot of fire/kins, ill/kins, and stone/fires. *polite cough* I know what they are doing...I just pretend not to see because I need the xp, and it's somewhat a softer form of plevelling. If they are useful they stand around and SB me (I like SB), so that is ok. If they aren't they leech. There was one who just whined about making us teleport her around, never once passed me SB, and generally died every two spawns -- not because she was trying to contribute and got hit -- but because she tossed bonfire below the tank. This is generally a bad idea when the tank has three spawns stacked on top of him. She probably confused bonfire with ice slick. She then whined some more about dying. I felt like slapping her because everyone else was already generously giving her a huge share of the xp (because she's the tanker's girlfriend, *sigh*); you can sk them up and give them free xp, but you can't teach them to play.
Other than this, I am trying to get over my thin-skinnedness and get down the the Arena nights. The regulars are complaining about people who sign up and don't appear. Whoops, I'm one of those people. But there is some strange barrier that is stopping me from just jumping on test arena. I think it's the inner competitive freak in me. I don't want to be thrashed mercilessly and laughed at for being N00b. But the irony is of course, if you never get thrashed mercilessly, you won't learn. That happened in RoD, and it has to happen everywhere. I recalled dying multiple times every fight when I started RoD pk, but my clan leader just kept tossing me more eq from his infinite storage. Jim was a great guy, one of the last great pkers of that era when people were leaving RoD for MMOs.
So my project: start going to arena nights in the evening, and grind a bit every night.
* * *
Nevertheless, I feel like I'm heading for some sort of depression of the late. Partly RL-related. Bigger things like when I didn't get into grad school (though to my surprise I found it didn't really matter than much to me) and have to find a new job (which is the main thing). Small things like finding out I have to pay IRS $800 more in taxes outside of normal withdrawing and trying to force myself to write that check, because if I don't they'll eventually get me. Or my stupid radiative transfer code that's been taking four days to run and still hasn't finished. It seems like I'm getting jammed in my life and it's reflecting in my entertainment.
Then there's the gaming part, which is of course a big part in my life. I hate standing around being a buff-spamming squishy. But acc debuffs are just about dead until I7. Fact is, nobody in a grind team wants to fight anything lower than +3s. Debuffs just weren't great once the cons got to the purple end. Buffs are more reliable. If you took damage, you got healed. You got resists. Defense buffs were worse off, but being put on the toons, they weren't double-scaled, just single-scaled. Still very weak now but will be better in I7. But if you want to grind in the deep purple range, you jolly well just get a stone tank and pump him up.
Yes, it's STONE tank, not any other tank and certainly not an ice tank. I had an exempted blaster laugh at me during a TF when we were fighting redcaps. In the first spawn, a couple of bosses did that dagger total focus thing on me and I nearly died in the alpha. Taunted and hibernated in a hurry. "Those things sure hit hard", I commented. The blaster made fun of me and said he noticed I was an ice tank. Yay, that explains why everything hits hard, I'm just squishy? I just tanked 10 Mary Macombes non-stop in the first mission, and now I make the comment on Redcaps hitting hard, I'm suddenly "of course" gimp. If it was a fire tank making that statement he would have agreed, and ice > fire nowadays. Some people are still trapped in some delusional other-dimensional CoH.
I consider it really insulting a BLASTER dares to laugh at me for being squishy. I have twice a blaster's hitpoints and infinite times a blaster's defense (a finite number divided by zero is infinite, right?).
But if I took that tank to do the type of mission I was doing with Guernica, that tank would really have just faceplanted at every spawn. XP uber alles, all the non-"top" builds be damned style of missioning.
There has to be some kind of compromise. I like to think I have builds that do that. I've never had a complaint that my mind/storm or my earth/TA doesn't control well. The only complaint is that if they want to grind, they are going to get some stone tank with attending harem of defenders, and they just want me to have the so-called "useful" secondaries. Between the completely clueless bunch who screams healzor non-stop and the min-max grinders, I'm just stuck to soloing my own missions.
But I can't really stand playing in the other spectrum either. I know it doesn't bother anyone else in my SG. But it bothers me because I am not a pure RPer; I have a very strong powergaming streak that is only expressed through an idiosyncratic RP style. What's worse than a tanker can't even be bothered with aggro? An exempted level 50 tanker, to whom debt doesn't matter, and can't even be bothered with aggro either. I really have no idea how some people have no sense of shame. Obviously even though you are "squishy" compared to a stone tank, you are less squishy than the real squishies. How can anyone have no sense of shame when their teammates are getting hit, when they know they can take those hit with greater ease. Even scrappers can feel that sense of obligation, a lot of them have a squishy-bodyguard streak. If a tanker pretending to be a scrapper doesn't even do that, then they aren't even scrappers...they are less than scrappers. Heck, even blasters run around with the medpool zotting teammates and helping out with holds. I'm talking about the AT that has the highest incentive to play selfish.
I find myself somewhat frustrated by the semi-clueless tank too. But at least it is just frustration not a negative feeling, because you really can't expect casual players to be that into the game to know what to do. Especially when they model their play after some kind of less-than-scrapper. Turn on your aura! Don't go off to one side soloing your own mob without making sure the main bunch of mobs are trained on you. Why not stay inside the main bunch and taunt the runner to you?
And. Seriously. Run. Your. Armour.
No, really. There's a reason why you have a primary full of armours.
Run it.
Arrrrgh!
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
GW: Fucking Incredible
Ok, so the CoX servers are down for maint and I end up looking for stuff to do. Since we were just talking about GW, I thought I'd start updating it and taking it for a spin...
While updating, I ran GTA: San Andreas and realized the last time I played it was in July 2005. Wow, how times flies. Of course, I promptly forgot all the gamepad commands, and ended up shooting random people with my gun out of frustration, finally discovered my enter/exit car command by actually bothering to open my commands window, ran a stolen car through miles of railway tracks, ended up in a wooded area where I promptly hijacked a police Ranger vehicle that drove like a drunken pig, tried to run down some suspects but kept being minutes behind, thanks to said hopeless steering, got out, 'jacked a pickup lorry and promptly got busted by the pursuing police officer. :P
Well, for a ten minute amusement, it was sure funny.
By now, GW had finished the initial update, and was trying to start the login screen - except my 3D card had been busy with GtA. Restart GW, and WOW...
My jaw drops. They redid the intro login screen for Factions.
It's this BEAUTIFUL scene of two wooded islands surrounded by the MOST REALISTIC WATER I have seen this side of Half-Life 2. In the background, haunting Asian-style music, reminiscent of Kitaro, is playing.
Character selection now has a portrait of each character you own, a summary of where he is, etc.
Frankly, I'm sold. And I haven't even logged back into the game proper. I'm so buying GW: Factions. It's not gonna cost me a monthly fee, and I can sure support this kind of excellent improvements with the price of a sequel expansion.
While updating, I ran GTA: San Andreas and realized the last time I played it was in July 2005. Wow, how times flies. Of course, I promptly forgot all the gamepad commands, and ended up shooting random people with my gun out of frustration, finally discovered my enter/exit car command by actually bothering to open my commands window, ran a stolen car through miles of railway tracks, ended up in a wooded area where I promptly hijacked a police Ranger vehicle that drove like a drunken pig, tried to run down some suspects but kept being minutes behind, thanks to said hopeless steering, got out, 'jacked a pickup lorry and promptly got busted by the pursuing police officer. :P
Well, for a ten minute amusement, it was sure funny.
By now, GW had finished the initial update, and was trying to start the login screen - except my 3D card had been busy with GtA. Restart GW, and WOW...
My jaw drops. They redid the intro login screen for Factions.
It's this BEAUTIFUL scene of two wooded islands surrounded by the MOST REALISTIC WATER I have seen this side of Half-Life 2. In the background, haunting Asian-style music, reminiscent of Kitaro, is playing.
Character selection now has a portrait of each character you own, a summary of where he is, etc.
Frankly, I'm sold. And I haven't even logged back into the game proper. I'm so buying GW: Factions. It's not gonna cost me a monthly fee, and I can sure support this kind of excellent improvements with the price of a sequel expansion.
Seas of Change
Actually, it’s amazing what a bit of change can do for a person. I can’t remember when I respec’ed Black Jeremiah now, but it was probably after the frustrating episode I ranted about the last post.
Getting the respec itself was a lot like pulling teeth, we didn’t use the cheat, a lot of people kept running up into the front of the Thorn Tree and dropping dead and having NO CLUE why they just dropped dead – so they did it again, and again – despite my calling umpteen times to frickin’ kill the vines that had respawned in the BACK, out of LOS of the Thorn Tree. No one listens to the gimpy dom or the wussy defender anyhow…And yes, we wiped on the CoT ambush and had to regroup yet again, and somehow we got the respec done.
Much to my relief as I promptly turned around to drop smoke and hotfeet and pick up fireblast and aid self, while shifting some other powers around.
Having aid self is a liberating experience. No longer are you at the mercies of a PUG so-called teammate with the reaction time of a drunkard. Especially when you couple that with my instinctive blastery bastardy reaction times when I’m pretty much around the corner before the mobs’ incoming attacks hit, it makes sitting around waiting for heals extremely impossible.
But my instant coward reaction does make for a key area of breathing room where I can lean on the ‘aid self’ button and get my hp bar shot back to normal. Which is just great.
The only downside is that I’ve become a lot more careless about leaving myself in harm’s way, and a lot slower on the ‘active defence’ reaction times because I can green number myself back to normal – who cares about that one Longbow Flamethrower shooting crap at me, I can take it…(Even when my hold is recharged and really ought to be fired.)
Fireblast is an excellent attack. I don’t know why I thought I could get away with not having it. Now that I actually have it, I’ve replaced my ‘Flares’ tray slot with it, and use the wussy first level attack as a finishing blow brawl.
I’ve scheduled hotfeet for level 35, but I’m having serious thoughts to replacing that with consume. I’m running out of end fast these days (even if I regain it back quickly with stamina after each fight) and I can’t seem to get into the spirit of hotfeet. I feel squishy as a dom, I can’t just make myself turn on an aggy obtaining aura and running into things like a tank…That just seems like asking for immense amounts of aggro quickly – says the tanky part of me. Sure, I can fiery embrace it, but what’s the point of the measly amount of ticks? The important part is that the mobs need to be feared and try to run away = less aggro, and it needs to be slotted so that they can only run away slowly. I might just keep hotfeet for the patron pool slots, if the ppp’s aren’t too immensely tempting when the numbers come out.
Level 30 and awaiting the onset of fire imps very eagerly. At 7000xp a pvp mission pop, that’s quite a few missions I’m going to be soloing to get there, unless I find a good group (on Pinnacle, sureyeahright).
Oh yes, I took a break to go do the costume and cape missions. That was rather fun. And I discovered a free costume token so I went hog wild on my second costume and changed all the colors, a couple of bits here and there, and tried to make myself look like a pale greenish ghost pirate.
Alas, translucency only goes so far. I need auras to make the effect better, but I'm enjoying my new periodic look.
Since I'm too embarassed to go running around pastel green all the time (black is so much sexier for a villain, eh?), I made a...*drumroll* Domination costume bind.
One of the nifty things about the dominator class, if I must say so myself. And inspired by ShrikeX's own bind where he goes "I feel myself changing", pops the boom, and turns into a werewolf.
I haven't thought of any nice phrase to local just yet, but I think it's hilarious to go boom and have the entire screen just flash this awesome white, the colors all wash out and my costume washes out as well from black into pale green as the light dims back down.
Too fun. I hope they don't do anything awful to the domination button. If it comes up more often or recharges more easily, that'll be great, but the fun is being able to control the boom.
Getting the respec itself was a lot like pulling teeth, we didn’t use the cheat, a lot of people kept running up into the front of the Thorn Tree and dropping dead and having NO CLUE why they just dropped dead – so they did it again, and again – despite my calling umpteen times to frickin’ kill the vines that had respawned in the BACK, out of LOS of the Thorn Tree. No one listens to the gimpy dom or the wussy defender anyhow…And yes, we wiped on the CoT ambush and had to regroup yet again, and somehow we got the respec done.
Much to my relief as I promptly turned around to drop smoke and hotfeet and pick up fireblast and aid self, while shifting some other powers around.
Having aid self is a liberating experience. No longer are you at the mercies of a PUG so-called teammate with the reaction time of a drunkard. Especially when you couple that with my instinctive blastery bastardy reaction times when I’m pretty much around the corner before the mobs’ incoming attacks hit, it makes sitting around waiting for heals extremely impossible.
But my instant coward reaction does make for a key area of breathing room where I can lean on the ‘aid self’ button and get my hp bar shot back to normal. Which is just great.
The only downside is that I’ve become a lot more careless about leaving myself in harm’s way, and a lot slower on the ‘active defence’ reaction times because I can green number myself back to normal – who cares about that one Longbow Flamethrower shooting crap at me, I can take it…(Even when my hold is recharged and really ought to be fired.)
Fireblast is an excellent attack. I don’t know why I thought I could get away with not having it. Now that I actually have it, I’ve replaced my ‘Flares’ tray slot with it, and use the wussy first level attack as a finishing blow brawl.
I’ve scheduled hotfeet for level 35, but I’m having serious thoughts to replacing that with consume. I’m running out of end fast these days (even if I regain it back quickly with stamina after each fight) and I can’t seem to get into the spirit of hotfeet. I feel squishy as a dom, I can’t just make myself turn on an aggy obtaining aura and running into things like a tank…That just seems like asking for immense amounts of aggro quickly – says the tanky part of me. Sure, I can fiery embrace it, but what’s the point of the measly amount of ticks? The important part is that the mobs need to be feared and try to run away = less aggro, and it needs to be slotted so that they can only run away slowly. I might just keep hotfeet for the patron pool slots, if the ppp’s aren’t too immensely tempting when the numbers come out.
Level 30 and awaiting the onset of fire imps very eagerly. At 7000xp a pvp mission pop, that’s quite a few missions I’m going to be soloing to get there, unless I find a good group (on Pinnacle, sureyeahright).
Oh yes, I took a break to go do the costume and cape missions. That was rather fun. And I discovered a free costume token so I went hog wild on my second costume and changed all the colors, a couple of bits here and there, and tried to make myself look like a pale greenish ghost pirate.
Alas, translucency only goes so far. I need auras to make the effect better, but I'm enjoying my new periodic look.
Since I'm too embarassed to go running around pastel green all the time (black is so much sexier for a villain, eh?), I made a...*drumroll* Domination costume bind.
One of the nifty things about the dominator class, if I must say so myself. And inspired by ShrikeX's own bind where he goes "I feel myself changing", pops the boom, and turns into a werewolf.
I haven't thought of any nice phrase to local just yet, but I think it's hilarious to go boom and have the entire screen just flash this awesome white, the colors all wash out and my costume washes out as well from black into pale green as the light dims back down.
Too fun. I hope they don't do anything awful to the domination button. If it comes up more often or recharges more easily, that'll be great, but the fun is being able to control the boom.
To Team or Not to Team
I found this little rant I wrote a while back. Thought it was interesting enough to post. Just a warning though, the first part is a little bleak, I was in a bad bad place when I wrote it. :P
I have a dilemma. It exists in every MMO game I’m playing right now – CoX or DDO.
See, I’m going off on a business trip next week – that’s 6 days without an MMO – rest assured I’m going to be installing a lot of Angband, text adventures and various simple classic single-player games that can be run on a crap company laptop so that I don’t drop dead from game or computer withdrawal. Plans are to do some writing in my free time. And hopefully, I’ll have an inet connection somewhere where I can get my daily KoL fix.
But what this means is that I’m in desperate need of a fun experience in my MMOs in the limited time left sans packing and preparing and generally working my ass off.
And I want TEAM fun experience. I’ll be singleplayering with no choice soon, so dammit, I want a team.
Unfortunately, the time it takes to get into a team is driving me up the wall. I’ve taken to running all kinds of ‘equipment-exchange’ and ‘gather new quest’ errands with my LFG flag up in DDO. Takes about 30 mins to get a group, which is starting to piss me off a little. Soloing in DDO has become challenging. I think it’s still doable, but involves a lot of tavern trips aka hospital visits.
Which is alas mirroring my Pinnacle experience. I want fire imps, dammit. Hell, I want better control too and I’m looking forward to bonfire – which tells you how desperate I am. I’m starting to get very very bitter. Pinnacle appears to have bought into the spiel that doms suck – because I get absolutely zero invites. It puts me in a foul and villainous mindset, but then it kills me off because I get so aggressive I want to mutilate 3 mobs at one go without single pulling. Which makes me even more fouly angry.
It got so bad that I accepted a barracuda farming mission. +2 mobs, I try to use flashfire, but as usual, I just end up pissing off 8 freaks who decide to pound me into the wall instead – because the corruptors and the mms are just single-targeting their precious mobs. And the lackeyed /thermal corruptor has the nerve to count how many times I died and tell me to watch my aggro.
Fine. The next time I completely lay off, I single-target my own minion off to the side and just lay into him with ranged attacks. Now aggro flies all over and not solely on me. A whole bunch of bots die. The mms drop dead. The corruptors end up at slivers of red health, but they spam heal themselves back up to normal again. The mms get rezzed without a word. Barracuda is picked away slowly…much slower than when I was near her and laying all my melee into her, but she’s dropping, so I just spam char and stay far far away from her nearly-dead psychic nova this time around. Now a mm that was too near drops and bites it. Again, rez without a word. ‘cuda dies.
I dunno which is more annoying. Me trying to do something useful, and then getting blown into the pavement and get a telling off from the ‘healer’ that I need to watch my aggro. Or me NOT doing anything useful and seeing them succeed, albeit slower and steadier, and with the odd seriously dropping hp bar now and again. Of course, since corruptors have higher hp bars than I, they can survive it whereas I can’t. And they get easy mode buffs, and higher damage to boot.
I dunno. I’m not one to get jealous easily or believe what the other dominators whine about on the forums that corruptors rule so much more over doms. But if this was the everyday experience of a dominator, I can see why they are so belligerent – because I’m pretty fucking mad and carrying a huge bundle of hate at the moment. The dormant volcano of my temper is kinda about to bust its cap and blow. If only for a little while.
I don’t think I’ll feel this way on an ice/ dom. Ice slick is always useful. Plant/ has seeds of confusion. I’m sure mind/ is ok too, they have so many tools. So it’s not all doms.
I just feel so gosh darned HELPLESS on a huge team with a fire dom. If I do anything, I fucking pick up ALL the goddamn aggro. And I die because no one can react in time to heal me – and none of the stupid godforsaken healz0rs know how to use their shield buffs anyway. Nearly 1/3 of the damn team (a stalker, a corr, a mm) had the gall to share with everyone that they were barracuda pleveled – otherwise, they wouldn’t be this high in levels, they said. Since level 18. (And everyone was about 24-27.)
Fuck this. Fuck stupid people who don’t know how to play in a team. Fuck stupid people who think they know everything about the goddamn game and tell you how to play it. Fuck a group going after a +2 and +3 farm and fuck me for whoring myself out cos I wanted a team and for thinking I could control that kind of spawn single-handedly. Oh, and fuck a team who can’t control aggro well enough so that I can use my control powers without dropping dead.
*sighs* Me angry. And happy to indulge in it. If only for a little while.
And what makes me most angry of all is that I can’t just wash my hands of them and forget the whole issue – because there aren’t enough random people around to make random teams. I’m starting to miss Freedom rather badly.
If I go back there though, I may never come back to Black Jeremiah until character transfers happen. If ever. And I still want fire imps. :(
And I’ll admit it. A little part of me does not want the forum nay-sayers to ‘win.’ If I take a vacation on another AT, it’s like betraying the ideal of dominators – to me, anyhow. I’d like to get Jeremiah up to 40 before I move off and do something else. Unfortunately, without a team in the upper levels, it’s going to become painfully slow progress.
Kinda masochistic.
Dunno. I was in the blackly hating mood for quite a serious time. Enough to wish some nerfs on the corruptor side of things. /kin and /rad is so damn powerful. It seems like everybody and his mother is ice/kin or fire/kin – which so happens to be the current ubergod on the controller side of things as well. Seems like there’s a dark side of human nature that says “well, if I can’t have it, no one can have it either.”
I try not to indulge for too long. The kind of people I don’t like most in real life are those who have to constantly put others down to feel good about themselves. See, what’s the point of wishing nerfs anyhow? All it does is lower everyone, make things less fun, and make people more sensitive and upset. Out of some misplaced ‘sense of fairness’ which involves cutting off the arm to spite the nose to seek some elusive ghost of “balance.”
I think what’s most frustrating is this search for optimal effectiveness taken to an absurd point in a computer game. And it’s sooo common in online games. If you’re not playing class X, if you don’t have skill Y, you are gimp and worthless and not worth teaming with, etc, etc. Wtf?
Part of it is the game design’s fault. In RoD, if you didn’t go running with a thief or vampire, you’re setting yourself up for higher chance of failure on the bigger mobs.
But part of it is also player culture and acceptance. Hell, we’ve all done funky RoD runs before. All-cleric runs. All fathomer-runs. All druid-runs. I still believe my most memorable RoD run was the one where we hit Mandor with three Rol na Feinners. A paladin, a vampire and a mage. Eating black packets. Talk about gimp. Talk about ferocious battle. But we did it.
It was a lot more painful than the standard way, of course. Warrior-type tank with triggered pickup weapons. A whole gaggle of thieves to circle and do damage. But you know, Mandor this way, you can kill every repop but it becomes mechanical and boring and not fun.
But yet, people do it. So that they can get the loot. So they can sell it and get rich. So they can do the same crap again on a bigger mob.
It’s the whole stinking real life rat race again, more salary, bigger house, bigger car in a fucking computer game. That I thought people PLAY to get away from real life. Evidently NOT. Because some people feel the need to be superior by having more ‘prestige’ than everyone else by being richer, more mercantile, more effective, whatever.
Grrr. I dunno. The whole thing makes me angry.
I get groups more easily in DDO. I have a cleric tag next to my name, after all. What bugs me in DDO is how long it takes a group to get going. Takes an hour before we’re finally in a goddamn dungeon, and another half hour to get through it so that –some- xp is gained. Visible time sink, anyone?
It’s nice when you’re in a good group in DDO. Things work smoothly, everyone feels useful.
Again it’s been my luck to get on some dysfunctional ones. Stupid ass warriors need to learn how to BLOCK with their shields. They are just swinging like morons and expecting to be healed. Well, take it from the cleric who’s watching: you sir, are a drain on a limited resource – my mana.
At least CoX defenders have an end bar that refills by itself, but they still get pissed off about stupid idiots who run off by themselves down three corridors into 28 mobs and beg for or expect heals.
I get to watch the same thing with the moron diving headfirst off high places and right through traps to boot.
Oh, and my most recent group had a rogue who didn’t know when it was his turn to DISARM the fucking trap, and we had to sit there for 15 minutes waiting on him. In the end, I had to go visit a rest shrine, memorize immunity to cold, and buff everyone up to get by it. I love the flexibility of a cleric.
I’m tempted to put something into my bio that goes in this vein:
Unless I’m taken by surprise or caught unawares, the speed at which you are healed is inversely proportional to how suicidally foolish you are being.
This would involve things like: deliberately running through not-yet-disarmed traps without any form of protection, falling repeatedly off high places, running off by yourself instead of staying with the party, triggering monster ambushes over here while the rest of the group is way over there, etc.
Later: Writing really makes one cool off. I’m not as angry or indignant now as when I first started ranting about all this. I went and reread some really old blaster guides – before you make a blaster – and the 3b bible. I’m oddly tickled that the blaster hero has a villain counterpart.
Doms are kinda like blasters, except we just sacrificed significant damage for more control.
So we’re on hard mode. So what? If I blew a brute or a corruptor or an mm to 40, it would be sleepwalking, probably. Blasters take pride in the challenge, and dominators should too. We’re on hard mode because we have no defence but active defence, and that’s just how things are.
There’s no need to be oh so unhappy that this guy is so much more super than you or whatever. I do pve things with my invul/fire tank that I wouldn’t dream of doing on any other AT. (Like take apart an entire Rikti Crash Site spawn without pulling to separate them.) I suppose someone skillful at a controller might manage the same feat, but 3-4 rikti bosses? Can they really not die to them? I dunno if a defender could with an anchor’ed debuff, but it’s not something I’d personally want to try. A scrapper would drop dead if he tried to tank them all, he would probably do fine if he single or clump pulled them. And a blaster nova wouldn’t take ‘em all out.
There’s always going to be a class slightly better than them all, and it’s human nature to turn that into the superman FOTM class. RoD thieves for example. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few more, useful in different situations – ie. RoD vampires, CoX fire/kin/fire controller.
If you (in a general sense of whoever) want to play that way, then play that way. I don’t. I might even like the added challenge of something more tough.
The one thing which does cause friction between us is when you start cherrypicking teams for uber FOTM builds that meet your abnormally high standards. Frankly, if you were just a single picky person, I wouldn’t care. There are some random freaks I’ve seen on the forums who had this ‘ultimate’ criteria for perfect teams and what not. Random freaks are what they are, as long as others aren’t as picky, we’re all good.
I guess the disturbing part is when too many others start to believe the propaganda you spread, and then ignore so-and-so class for teams “because they are gimp.”
I kinda feel a little sorry for TA/A, in a way.
Ah well. Life goes on.
I have a dilemma. It exists in every MMO game I’m playing right now – CoX or DDO.
See, I’m going off on a business trip next week – that’s 6 days without an MMO – rest assured I’m going to be installing a lot of Angband, text adventures and various simple classic single-player games that can be run on a crap company laptop so that I don’t drop dead from game or computer withdrawal. Plans are to do some writing in my free time. And hopefully, I’ll have an inet connection somewhere where I can get my daily KoL fix.
But what this means is that I’m in desperate need of a fun experience in my MMOs in the limited time left sans packing and preparing and generally working my ass off.
And I want TEAM fun experience. I’ll be singleplayering with no choice soon, so dammit, I want a team.
Unfortunately, the time it takes to get into a team is driving me up the wall. I’ve taken to running all kinds of ‘equipment-exchange’ and ‘gather new quest’ errands with my LFG flag up in DDO. Takes about 30 mins to get a group, which is starting to piss me off a little. Soloing in DDO has become challenging. I think it’s still doable, but involves a lot of tavern trips aka hospital visits.
Which is alas mirroring my Pinnacle experience. I want fire imps, dammit. Hell, I want better control too and I’m looking forward to bonfire – which tells you how desperate I am. I’m starting to get very very bitter. Pinnacle appears to have bought into the spiel that doms suck – because I get absolutely zero invites. It puts me in a foul and villainous mindset, but then it kills me off because I get so aggressive I want to mutilate 3 mobs at one go without single pulling. Which makes me even more fouly angry.
It got so bad that I accepted a barracuda farming mission. +2 mobs, I try to use flashfire, but as usual, I just end up pissing off 8 freaks who decide to pound me into the wall instead – because the corruptors and the mms are just single-targeting their precious mobs. And the lackeyed /thermal corruptor has the nerve to count how many times I died and tell me to watch my aggro.
Fine. The next time I completely lay off, I single-target my own minion off to the side and just lay into him with ranged attacks. Now aggro flies all over and not solely on me. A whole bunch of bots die. The mms drop dead. The corruptors end up at slivers of red health, but they spam heal themselves back up to normal again. The mms get rezzed without a word. Barracuda is picked away slowly…much slower than when I was near her and laying all my melee into her, but she’s dropping, so I just spam char and stay far far away from her nearly-dead psychic nova this time around. Now a mm that was too near drops and bites it. Again, rez without a word. ‘cuda dies.
I dunno which is more annoying. Me trying to do something useful, and then getting blown into the pavement and get a telling off from the ‘healer’ that I need to watch my aggro. Or me NOT doing anything useful and seeing them succeed, albeit slower and steadier, and with the odd seriously dropping hp bar now and again. Of course, since corruptors have higher hp bars than I, they can survive it whereas I can’t. And they get easy mode buffs, and higher damage to boot.
I dunno. I’m not one to get jealous easily or believe what the other dominators whine about on the forums that corruptors rule so much more over doms. But if this was the everyday experience of a dominator, I can see why they are so belligerent – because I’m pretty fucking mad and carrying a huge bundle of hate at the moment. The dormant volcano of my temper is kinda about to bust its cap and blow. If only for a little while.
I don’t think I’ll feel this way on an ice/ dom. Ice slick is always useful. Plant/ has seeds of confusion. I’m sure mind/ is ok too, they have so many tools. So it’s not all doms.
I just feel so gosh darned HELPLESS on a huge team with a fire dom. If I do anything, I fucking pick up ALL the goddamn aggro. And I die because no one can react in time to heal me – and none of the stupid godforsaken healz0rs know how to use their shield buffs anyway. Nearly 1/3 of the damn team (a stalker, a corr, a mm) had the gall to share with everyone that they were barracuda pleveled – otherwise, they wouldn’t be this high in levels, they said. Since level 18. (And everyone was about 24-27.)
Fuck this. Fuck stupid people who don’t know how to play in a team. Fuck stupid people who think they know everything about the goddamn game and tell you how to play it. Fuck a group going after a +2 and +3 farm and fuck me for whoring myself out cos I wanted a team and for thinking I could control that kind of spawn single-handedly. Oh, and fuck a team who can’t control aggro well enough so that I can use my control powers without dropping dead.
*sighs* Me angry. And happy to indulge in it. If only for a little while.
And what makes me most angry of all is that I can’t just wash my hands of them and forget the whole issue – because there aren’t enough random people around to make random teams. I’m starting to miss Freedom rather badly.
If I go back there though, I may never come back to Black Jeremiah until character transfers happen. If ever. And I still want fire imps. :(
And I’ll admit it. A little part of me does not want the forum nay-sayers to ‘win.’ If I take a vacation on another AT, it’s like betraying the ideal of dominators – to me, anyhow. I’d like to get Jeremiah up to 40 before I move off and do something else. Unfortunately, without a team in the upper levels, it’s going to become painfully slow progress.
Kinda masochistic.
Dunno. I was in the blackly hating mood for quite a serious time. Enough to wish some nerfs on the corruptor side of things. /kin and /rad is so damn powerful. It seems like everybody and his mother is ice/kin or fire/kin – which so happens to be the current ubergod on the controller side of things as well. Seems like there’s a dark side of human nature that says “well, if I can’t have it, no one can have it either.”
I try not to indulge for too long. The kind of people I don’t like most in real life are those who have to constantly put others down to feel good about themselves. See, what’s the point of wishing nerfs anyhow? All it does is lower everyone, make things less fun, and make people more sensitive and upset. Out of some misplaced ‘sense of fairness’ which involves cutting off the arm to spite the nose to seek some elusive ghost of “balance.”
I think what’s most frustrating is this search for optimal effectiveness taken to an absurd point in a computer game. And it’s sooo common in online games. If you’re not playing class X, if you don’t have skill Y, you are gimp and worthless and not worth teaming with, etc, etc. Wtf?
Part of it is the game design’s fault. In RoD, if you didn’t go running with a thief or vampire, you’re setting yourself up for higher chance of failure on the bigger mobs.
But part of it is also player culture and acceptance. Hell, we’ve all done funky RoD runs before. All-cleric runs. All fathomer-runs. All druid-runs. I still believe my most memorable RoD run was the one where we hit Mandor with three Rol na Feinners. A paladin, a vampire and a mage. Eating black packets. Talk about gimp. Talk about ferocious battle. But we did it.
It was a lot more painful than the standard way, of course. Warrior-type tank with triggered pickup weapons. A whole gaggle of thieves to circle and do damage. But you know, Mandor this way, you can kill every repop but it becomes mechanical and boring and not fun.
But yet, people do it. So that they can get the loot. So they can sell it and get rich. So they can do the same crap again on a bigger mob.
It’s the whole stinking real life rat race again, more salary, bigger house, bigger car in a fucking computer game. That I thought people PLAY to get away from real life. Evidently NOT. Because some people feel the need to be superior by having more ‘prestige’ than everyone else by being richer, more mercantile, more effective, whatever.
Grrr. I dunno. The whole thing makes me angry.
I get groups more easily in DDO. I have a cleric tag next to my name, after all. What bugs me in DDO is how long it takes a group to get going. Takes an hour before we’re finally in a goddamn dungeon, and another half hour to get through it so that –some- xp is gained. Visible time sink, anyone?
It’s nice when you’re in a good group in DDO. Things work smoothly, everyone feels useful.
Again it’s been my luck to get on some dysfunctional ones. Stupid ass warriors need to learn how to BLOCK with their shields. They are just swinging like morons and expecting to be healed. Well, take it from the cleric who’s watching: you sir, are a drain on a limited resource – my mana.
At least CoX defenders have an end bar that refills by itself, but they still get pissed off about stupid idiots who run off by themselves down three corridors into 28 mobs and beg for or expect heals.
I get to watch the same thing with the moron diving headfirst off high places and right through traps to boot.
Oh, and my most recent group had a rogue who didn’t know when it was his turn to DISARM the fucking trap, and we had to sit there for 15 minutes waiting on him. In the end, I had to go visit a rest shrine, memorize immunity to cold, and buff everyone up to get by it. I love the flexibility of a cleric.
I’m tempted to put something into my bio that goes in this vein:
Unless I’m taken by surprise or caught unawares, the speed at which you are healed is inversely proportional to how suicidally foolish you are being.
This would involve things like: deliberately running through not-yet-disarmed traps without any form of protection, falling repeatedly off high places, running off by yourself instead of staying with the party, triggering monster ambushes over here while the rest of the group is way over there, etc.
Later: Writing really makes one cool off. I’m not as angry or indignant now as when I first started ranting about all this. I went and reread some really old blaster guides – before you make a blaster – and the 3b bible. I’m oddly tickled that the blaster hero has a villain counterpart.
Doms are kinda like blasters, except we just sacrificed significant damage for more control.
So we’re on hard mode. So what? If I blew a brute or a corruptor or an mm to 40, it would be sleepwalking, probably. Blasters take pride in the challenge, and dominators should too. We’re on hard mode because we have no defence but active defence, and that’s just how things are.
There’s no need to be oh so unhappy that this guy is so much more super than you or whatever. I do pve things with my invul/fire tank that I wouldn’t dream of doing on any other AT. (Like take apart an entire Rikti Crash Site spawn without pulling to separate them.) I suppose someone skillful at a controller might manage the same feat, but 3-4 rikti bosses? Can they really not die to them? I dunno if a defender could with an anchor’ed debuff, but it’s not something I’d personally want to try. A scrapper would drop dead if he tried to tank them all, he would probably do fine if he single or clump pulled them. And a blaster nova wouldn’t take ‘em all out.
There’s always going to be a class slightly better than them all, and it’s human nature to turn that into the superman FOTM class. RoD thieves for example. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few more, useful in different situations – ie. RoD vampires, CoX fire/kin/fire controller.
If you (in a general sense of whoever) want to play that way, then play that way. I don’t. I might even like the added challenge of something more tough.
The one thing which does cause friction between us is when you start cherrypicking teams for uber FOTM builds that meet your abnormally high standards. Frankly, if you were just a single picky person, I wouldn’t care. There are some random freaks I’ve seen on the forums who had this ‘ultimate’ criteria for perfect teams and what not. Random freaks are what they are, as long as others aren’t as picky, we’re all good.
I guess the disturbing part is when too many others start to believe the propaganda you spread, and then ignore so-and-so class for teams “because they are gimp.”
I kinda feel a little sorry for TA/A, in a way.
Ah well. Life goes on.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
The PvP Defender
I'm not sure what made me sign up for the PvP League on test. I'm a newbie at PvP, really, and I'm not going to pretend to be anything else. But at Hobo_Healer's urging, we're going to field an all-defender team.
I'm not brave enough to field a dark defender though, so I'm sticking with the tried and true kinetics buffer. MrQuizzles is the tragically brave guy.
I guess after a while you get used to the buffbottage. Which leaves me with the project of getting to 50 (three more levels) and a respec (I'll miss you, AoEs). I'm just feeling it's a bad idea already. Call it competitive nature, but I suspect this is going to end up dragging me into hardcore PvP.
What was annoying me all Saturday was the amount of buffspamming I had to do, without doing anything else. The tragic part was, villains were trying to teleport foe people in our team out, but everyone had ID...except me, so they'd just teleport me out and kill me before anyone could do a thing.
Sad thing was, my SG leader running an ice/dev was doing the same to every villain he saw. I found that utterly ironic because he hates stalkers with a passion and rants against them any chance he has. But he does the teleport into mines thing all day long, all week long, which isn't all that different; you are teleported, mines explode, you die or get killed with the follow up bitter ice blast.
This will be interesting. The number of Ice/EM blasters, Spines/Regen scrappers, and Ill/Emp controllers outnumber everyone else by an enormous margin. More reports to come...
I'm not brave enough to field a dark defender though, so I'm sticking with the tried and true kinetics buffer. MrQuizzles is the tragically brave guy.
I guess after a while you get used to the buffbottage. Which leaves me with the project of getting to 50 (three more levels) and a respec (I'll miss you, AoEs). I'm just feeling it's a bad idea already. Call it competitive nature, but I suspect this is going to end up dragging me into hardcore PvP.
What was annoying me all Saturday was the amount of buffspamming I had to do, without doing anything else. The tragic part was, villains were trying to teleport foe people in our team out, but everyone had ID...except me, so they'd just teleport me out and kill me before anyone could do a thing.
Sad thing was, my SG leader running an ice/dev was doing the same to every villain he saw. I found that utterly ironic because he hates stalkers with a passion and rants against them any chance he has. But he does the teleport into mines thing all day long, all week long, which isn't all that different; you are teleported, mines explode, you die or get killed with the follow up bitter ice blast.
This will be interesting. The number of Ice/EM blasters, Spines/Regen scrappers, and Ill/Emp controllers outnumber everyone else by an enormous margin. More reports to come...
Sunday, April 16, 2006
KoL: Unique One-Offs
This is something I haven't quite made up my mind on: is it something really fun, cool, and special? Or is it just irritating to latecomers that the oldbies have kewl oog shit they'll never get?
Be it in RoD or KoL or even CoX with the special events and Celebrant badges - is it a good idea to create a sense of history by having unique stuff happen, and have special loot only for that particular time?
It provides 'bragging rights' for your regulars, your oldbies, and it makes them feel part of a special 'in club.'
But at the expense of the newcomers - whose hope, after all, is that they can be part of the game community and one day aspire to the same heights...
I was never really happy that certain pieces of RoD eq had become oog. But I entered with the hope that, oh, glory is a currency that can allow me to obtain this stuff, so I still had hope that I could aspire to those goals. Of course, when glory trade locked in, my hopes were burnt most brutally - but by that time, I was enjoying my own infamous fame and the oldbies were looking outdated and clinging to their precious past in the taverns.
Take CoX. I entered just after the Halloween badge event, so I'll never see those badges - and they look cool. :( On the bright side, I did catch all events after that on various characters. What I'm -not- happy with is that my eventual main and 50 and designated badge whore, Invictus, was made after the May Celebrant badge, so he doesn't have that.
On the 2nd anniversary, we'll get a 2nd Celebrant, and folks with both will apparently get a special gladiator... Well, my older characters will have those, and 'me' the player will have it all the same, but I'm not pleased that my badge collector won't be having it.
KoL-wise, they've made an artform out of this. The KoL wiki has inscribed dates of special KoL events that correspond to RL days. Since I'm not playing this game to win, but just for amusement, I don't really care that I've missed a whole heck lot of stuff - especially not if I have to fucking pay money (ahem, "donate") to do well in the game.
Yet I confess that I found myself thrilled to find out today was a special one-off St. Sneaky Pete's Oyster Day. (I missed the other one with the Spectral Pickle Factory thing, never found out about it till after, reading the wiki.)
And since I am basically biding my time until a mysticality day to ascend into pastamancery, my 55 adventures could suddenly be devoted to the event hunt, rather than a meat farm at icy peak...
Realizing to my pleasure that I could now get drunk (having rescued King Ralph), I went and hunted for oyster eggs for about 30 adventures, and then settled down to get pleasantly drunk on green beers. Alas, I capped at 25 drunkeness. WTF? Some desperate wiki reading later, I figured out that ah, I have no Liver of Steel this time. Crud.
I used up all 6 of my 334 scrolls, trying to summon the beast to get me drunk. I ended up with 1000 extra meat, a boatload of papayas, and 140 hp damage instead. Darn! Second plan: Enter a mad Mall Search for anything that added drunkeness. I could buy dungeon potions a pop for 1000 meat, but that would get costly real fast. Yummy tummy beans were going at 100 a piece - much more reasonable. I bought about 12 of 'em and starting chewing 'em like jellybeans. Somewhere around the sixth bean, YAY, I got one that tasted like tequila and I was officially in St. Sneaky Pete's Day stupor.
What with all the eating and drinking, I was at 60+ adventures when I hit the stupor. I thought this was way overkill. Turns out, no, it wasn't. I drained down to about 2 adventures remaining before I got the four special baskets I wanted. (3 for the grass costume, and 1 to keep.)
Then I used up all the adventures before I realized meatsmithing requires turns. Oopsie. Fortunately I had a lot of enchanted bean burritos (in various states of spiciness) lying around. Ate one of the non-spiced ones and got the crucial 3 adventures I needed.
Yay, grass costume, and funky tattoo, here we come!
And I now officially have a 'special event' up my KoL sleeve, with a special basket, a special costume, a whole lotta eggs, and even a few extra corkscrews to sell for exorbitant prices or rarity bragging rights.
Question is: So what?
One part of me is foolishly thrilled. It's the part that is probably found in every human being. The lust for rarity. The obsessive desire for something hard to obtain. Bragging rights. The "Nyah nyah, I have this, you don't" feeling. It's what spawns the value for things like gold, truffles, caviar, etc.
A further argument is that it's like a special record of memories. It contains sentimental value, because special loot is like a souvenir of a memorable event.
Another part of me is staring at myself in mixed horror and bemusement, thinking logically: Dear girl, it's text. It's bytes. It's something that was invented and 'given value' by someone and you're only adding to the shared delusion by affording it value as well. Didn't you take five plus years to break free of the RoD "gotta have it all" pokemon stuff packrat phenenomenon?
Granted, I don't think I'd go and kill myself if the KoL server wiped tomorrow and everything was lost. I'd be slightly disappointed and go, "aw" but I wouldn't feel a pang of agony or anything.
(There was a time in RoD though that I'd really suffer visible agonies if I lost anything. Hence the oh-so-crippling fear of death traps. When I realized I'd accidentally let Komodo delete, special name, unobtainable lizardman race, I was stressed and desperate enough to watch who 51 for hours on end...why? To grovel at Edmond's feet and beg him to see if he could retrieve him out of a backup.
To think of it now gives me a little shiver of both scariness and vague guilt. I was -that- deeply into the kewl loot mindset. And Edmond was nice enough to actually revive Komodo from the dead for me. Alas, less than six months later, my ennui with RoD finally set in in full enough force that it finally promptly me to cast aside the chains of 'needing to own kewl shit' and let everything delete...including poor Komodo. :P)
I really wonder what deep lesson into human nature (both in general and one's own) we can draw, from this seemingly casual game design feature...
It feels like there's something deep going on in here. But all I have is a lot of memories, and a lot of small 'lessons' in the form of questions but no huge general principle that I can articulate.
Is it good or bad to want stuff? How much is too much wanting? Should one espouse the buddhist/zen mindset of not wanting anything at all? Doesn't that take away the fun of life if you walk around with no desires at all? How do we control it so that it is a mild 'wanting' zest, but not a tidal wave obsession of desire?
Be it in RoD or KoL or even CoX with the special events and Celebrant badges - is it a good idea to create a sense of history by having unique stuff happen, and have special loot only for that particular time?
It provides 'bragging rights' for your regulars, your oldbies, and it makes them feel part of a special 'in club.'
But at the expense of the newcomers - whose hope, after all, is that they can be part of the game community and one day aspire to the same heights...
I was never really happy that certain pieces of RoD eq had become oog. But I entered with the hope that, oh, glory is a currency that can allow me to obtain this stuff, so I still had hope that I could aspire to those goals. Of course, when glory trade locked in, my hopes were burnt most brutally - but by that time, I was enjoying my own infamous fame and the oldbies were looking outdated and clinging to their precious past in the taverns.
Take CoX. I entered just after the Halloween badge event, so I'll never see those badges - and they look cool. :( On the bright side, I did catch all events after that on various characters. What I'm -not- happy with is that my eventual main and 50 and designated badge whore, Invictus, was made after the May Celebrant badge, so he doesn't have that.
On the 2nd anniversary, we'll get a 2nd Celebrant, and folks with both will apparently get a special gladiator... Well, my older characters will have those, and 'me' the player will have it all the same, but I'm not pleased that my badge collector won't be having it.
KoL-wise, they've made an artform out of this. The KoL wiki has inscribed dates of special KoL events that correspond to RL days. Since I'm not playing this game to win, but just for amusement, I don't really care that I've missed a whole heck lot of stuff - especially not if I have to fucking pay money (ahem, "donate") to do well in the game.
Yet I confess that I found myself thrilled to find out today was a special one-off St. Sneaky Pete's Oyster Day. (I missed the other one with the Spectral Pickle Factory thing, never found out about it till after, reading the wiki.)
And since I am basically biding my time until a mysticality day to ascend into pastamancery, my 55 adventures could suddenly be devoted to the event hunt, rather than a meat farm at icy peak...
Realizing to my pleasure that I could now get drunk (having rescued King Ralph), I went and hunted for oyster eggs for about 30 adventures, and then settled down to get pleasantly drunk on green beers. Alas, I capped at 25 drunkeness. WTF? Some desperate wiki reading later, I figured out that ah, I have no Liver of Steel this time. Crud.
I used up all 6 of my 334 scrolls, trying to summon the beast to get me drunk. I ended up with 1000 extra meat, a boatload of papayas, and 140 hp damage instead. Darn! Second plan: Enter a mad Mall Search for anything that added drunkeness. I could buy dungeon potions a pop for 1000 meat, but that would get costly real fast. Yummy tummy beans were going at 100 a piece - much more reasonable. I bought about 12 of 'em and starting chewing 'em like jellybeans. Somewhere around the sixth bean, YAY, I got one that tasted like tequila and I was officially in St. Sneaky Pete's Day stupor.
What with all the eating and drinking, I was at 60+ adventures when I hit the stupor. I thought this was way overkill. Turns out, no, it wasn't. I drained down to about 2 adventures remaining before I got the four special baskets I wanted. (3 for the grass costume, and 1 to keep.)
Then I used up all the adventures before I realized meatsmithing requires turns. Oopsie. Fortunately I had a lot of enchanted bean burritos (in various states of spiciness) lying around. Ate one of the non-spiced ones and got the crucial 3 adventures I needed.
Yay, grass costume, and funky tattoo, here we come!
And I now officially have a 'special event' up my KoL sleeve, with a special basket, a special costume, a whole lotta eggs, and even a few extra corkscrews to sell for exorbitant prices or rarity bragging rights.
Question is: So what?
One part of me is foolishly thrilled. It's the part that is probably found in every human being. The lust for rarity. The obsessive desire for something hard to obtain. Bragging rights. The "Nyah nyah, I have this, you don't" feeling. It's what spawns the value for things like gold, truffles, caviar, etc.
A further argument is that it's like a special record of memories. It contains sentimental value, because special loot is like a souvenir of a memorable event.
Another part of me is staring at myself in mixed horror and bemusement, thinking logically: Dear girl, it's text. It's bytes. It's something that was invented and 'given value' by someone and you're only adding to the shared delusion by affording it value as well. Didn't you take five plus years to break free of the RoD "gotta have it all" pokemon stuff packrat phenenomenon?
Granted, I don't think I'd go and kill myself if the KoL server wiped tomorrow and everything was lost. I'd be slightly disappointed and go, "aw" but I wouldn't feel a pang of agony or anything.
(There was a time in RoD though that I'd really suffer visible agonies if I lost anything. Hence the oh-so-crippling fear of death traps. When I realized I'd accidentally let Komodo delete, special name, unobtainable lizardman race, I was stressed and desperate enough to watch who 51 for hours on end...why? To grovel at Edmond's feet and beg him to see if he could retrieve him out of a backup.
To think of it now gives me a little shiver of both scariness and vague guilt. I was -that- deeply into the kewl loot mindset. And Edmond was nice enough to actually revive Komodo from the dead for me. Alas, less than six months later, my ennui with RoD finally set in in full enough force that it finally promptly me to cast aside the chains of 'needing to own kewl shit' and let everything delete...including poor Komodo. :P)
I really wonder what deep lesson into human nature (both in general and one's own) we can draw, from this seemingly casual game design feature...
It feels like there's something deep going on in here. But all I have is a lot of memories, and a lot of small 'lessons' in the form of questions but no huge general principle that I can articulate.
Is it good or bad to want stuff? How much is too much wanting? Should one espouse the buddhist/zen mindset of not wanting anything at all? Doesn't that take away the fun of life if you walk around with no desires at all? How do we control it so that it is a mild 'wanting' zest, but not a tidal wave obsession of desire?
Thursday, April 13, 2006
KoL: Patience
Grr, being patient is so hard.
I just defeated the Naughty Sorceress today. 22 days, an improvement over the 37 day first run. It's sooo tempting to take the leap into ascension again, but...
...I know I will regret it the moment my 80 turns run out and I get stuck in ronin again.
This time, I am determined that I'm going to enter ascension armed with a cupboardful of appropriate statted burritos/pizzas, on a stat day. So that I can leapfrog the early levels, which are pretty frustratingly boring.
This is, however, easier planned than done.
I was trying to decide between a disco bandit or a pastamancer for my next ascension, but seeing as moxie days are today and tomorrow and a myst day is about 4 days away, I had better be sensible and go for the mysticality one.
That means enchanted bean burritos till I explode with bean gas. The flat dough is no problem, a couple of adventures at the icy peak and I'll be able to buy as much dough as I want. Let's say 30 to be safe. 1500 meat means about 8 adventures at the peak.
Enchanted beans means investing adventures killing the bean bats, with my gravy fairy attached to my hip. Probably another 30 adventures or so, for 30 beans.
(The above should take a day.)
Unfortunately, I am spoiled and insanely spicy bean burritos kick ass. Which means I better spend a day fishing crap out of the sewer. If I spend 10 adventures at the peak harvesting meat, I can afford about 60 chewing gum strings - more than enough to exceed my daily 55 adventures (not inclusive of food additions.)
(That should take another day.)
Armed with a heap of worthless trinkets, I can then spend another day fishing spices out and then trading the lot off for jalapeno peppers.
And this is if the hermit is being friendly and has a clover day handy...
Bleh. So much planning. And I actually want to find some shirts this ascension since I bought torso awaregness as a skill.
I'm tempted to just forget the whole thing, jump into another incarnation and let the disco bandit do the 'collect immense amounts of crap' thing to prepare for the next pastamancery incarnation. Since Moxie is my prime stat, I should be able to level relatively fast, if I use a crossbow. Then I can make and drink booze too.
Decisions, decisions.
I just defeated the Naughty Sorceress today. 22 days, an improvement over the 37 day first run. It's sooo tempting to take the leap into ascension again, but...
...I know I will regret it the moment my 80 turns run out and I get stuck in ronin again.
This time, I am determined that I'm going to enter ascension armed with a cupboardful of appropriate statted burritos/pizzas, on a stat day. So that I can leapfrog the early levels, which are pretty frustratingly boring.
This is, however, easier planned than done.
I was trying to decide between a disco bandit or a pastamancer for my next ascension, but seeing as moxie days are today and tomorrow and a myst day is about 4 days away, I had better be sensible and go for the mysticality one.
That means enchanted bean burritos till I explode with bean gas. The flat dough is no problem, a couple of adventures at the icy peak and I'll be able to buy as much dough as I want. Let's say 30 to be safe. 1500 meat means about 8 adventures at the peak.
Enchanted beans means investing adventures killing the bean bats, with my gravy fairy attached to my hip. Probably another 30 adventures or so, for 30 beans.
(The above should take a day.)
Unfortunately, I am spoiled and insanely spicy bean burritos kick ass. Which means I better spend a day fishing crap out of the sewer. If I spend 10 adventures at the peak harvesting meat, I can afford about 60 chewing gum strings - more than enough to exceed my daily 55 adventures (not inclusive of food additions.)
(That should take another day.)
Armed with a heap of worthless trinkets, I can then spend another day fishing spices out and then trading the lot off for jalapeno peppers.
And this is if the hermit is being friendly and has a clover day handy...
Bleh. So much planning. And I actually want to find some shirts this ascension since I bought torso awaregness as a skill.
I'm tempted to just forget the whole thing, jump into another incarnation and let the disco bandit do the 'collect immense amounts of crap' thing to prepare for the next pastamancery incarnation. Since Moxie is my prime stat, I should be able to level relatively fast, if I use a crossbow. Then I can make and drink booze too.
Decisions, decisions.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Sidetrek: Chili con Veggie Soupa and Doom
I'm definitely on cooking crack here. Couldn't tolerate the kitchen being empty any
longer - no milk, no eggs, no onions, no garlic, no meat, no veggies, no nothing - how
does one cook around here?
So I got off work early on Tues, and went supermarket shopping for a good hour or more.
Had plans to make chili con carne and cornbread. Unfortunately, NTUC being the
catering-to-local-tastes and otherwise crappily-stocked store, there was no minced beef or
chicken in sight. (Where's a nearby Cold Storage when you want one?)
Only some frozen minced beef that looked more like what you'd feed a dog. No thanks.
Looked dubiously at the fresh minced pork, but I'm nervous about cooking pork, you
don't wanna mess about with it, if it's still raw after cooking, there's prolly all kinds of
parasites and what not.
So I gave up the idea of meat, and settled on grabbing 300g of 'mushroom luncheon'
meat from the deli which looked like processed chicken and mushroom - at least it's
cooked.
Veggies, thankfully, NTUC stocks. So I got some celery, red peppers, tomatos and onions
and garlic. Assorted spices and fresh basil too. Fat-free chicken stock in a can, and
canned corn kernels. Milk. Eggs. The works.
Cornbread was easy. Had previously bought cornmeal. Cup of it, cup of flour, whack
eggs, honey in place of sugar (couldn't find the cunningly hidden sugar, heh, I am the
king of food substitutions), milk and mix. Clumped up appealingly like a muffin mix,
dump the lot in a pan, then into the oven. Rose very nicely.
Then my new invention.Chili con veggie. Butter and onions, slow fire until
caramelized. Threw in garlic as an afterthought. Fried the meat with chili powder and
cumin. Fried the peppers and celery. Fried the tomatoes until they mushed up to form a
tomato base. Dump a can of baked beans in chunky tomato sauce, and chicken stock in.
I had way too much veggie though. Got decidedly carried away when chopping. So I had
only poured about half of the veggie in, when it got thick and gloopy like chili was
supposed to be.
I couldn't bear the thought of all my hard work going to waste, so I dunked the remaining
veggie in, and topped it all off with more chicken stock. Everything got more watery.
Whoopsie. Oh well, it may not be 'real' chili, but it's minestrone soup with a chili flavor.
And it tasted real good. Nothing like fresh food, cooked by yourself. You know what
goes into it. Rather than the oily gunky mess they sell you at hawker centres and fast food
places. Ick.
As for the 'Doom' part, I got the Doom dvd, and watched it as I was having dinner. It's
kinda fun, actually. It's an action flick with The Rock in it, and based on a violet
computer game, so you know, don't expect too much in the way of plot or story, turn
your brain off, and that's how to watch Doom and like it.
The scenery and settings were fantastic, it was like looking at all those Doom computer
games in a Hollywood movie world. I especially got a lot of visual echoes of "Doom 3"
going. The UAC logo, the doors, the pipes, the lighting effects, the monsters. Made me
feel tempted to stuff the CD back into the drive and crank that sucker up to finish the
game some day.
Actors weren't too shabby, they'd apparently gone through 'basic training' to make them
look and feel like special forces. They carried it off well enough. I believed they were
special forces - in a video game, at any rate. A lot of looking around corners and shouting
"clear," - reminded me of the ideal a competitive online gamer would hope for in a good
team, be it Counterstrike or SWAT 3.
I was pleasantly surprised by the plot, as non-existent as you'd expect it to be, and
smelling of an Aliens B movie clone. There were a lot of clever 'suspense' tricks where'd
you'd expect an alien to pop up and rip someone's head off - but ended up as nothing or
a joke or a shaky sigh of relief. Just a little 'twist' on your expectations that worked quite
well.
Did feel that there was a continuity problem somewhere in the middle, everything was
slow and suspenseful, and suddenly there was a leap, oh noes, the monsters are attacking
the way out, rush rush rush. Then all the leftover extras started dying and painting the
ceiling with blood like you'd expect a "Doom" brand-name holder to. Bit wide a gap for
belief.
The most clever albeit heavy-handed bit was their treatment of good and evil - where
"Sarge," the leader of the marines gradually reveals his true colours under stress - he's an
amoral killer and doesn't differentiate between innocents/citizens and monsters. He just
wants to kill everyone and let God sort 'em out, as long as he gets out alive. I found it
quite an idea-inspiring take on heroism and villainy (which is forever on my mind ever
since CoX).
And there's nothing like a blood and guts movie who isn't afraid to let the bad guy just
plug down good guys in cold blood - Marines standing over a pile of dead people in
ordinary clothing, putting extra slugs into their forehead in the off chance that they get up
as zombies.Then a live one begs them for help. And they lift their gun and bang - it's
meant to be jarring, and it is. That's villainy.
The first-person sequence that they shot on camera was a freaking fun homage to
computer FPSes. It looked almost like a montage from various Doom 3 scenes. And the
amazing thing is that this was 'acted' out in real life, shot on camera over days, and then
gussied up with CGI effects. Damn cool re-creation.
longer - no milk, no eggs, no onions, no garlic, no meat, no veggies, no nothing - how
does one cook around here?
So I got off work early on Tues, and went supermarket shopping for a good hour or more.
Had plans to make chili con carne and cornbread. Unfortunately, NTUC being the
catering-to-local-tastes and otherwise crappily-stocked store, there was no minced beef or
chicken in sight. (Where's a nearby Cold Storage when you want one?)
Only some frozen minced beef that looked more like what you'd feed a dog. No thanks.
Looked dubiously at the fresh minced pork, but I'm nervous about cooking pork, you
don't wanna mess about with it, if it's still raw after cooking, there's prolly all kinds of
parasites and what not.
So I gave up the idea of meat, and settled on grabbing 300g of 'mushroom luncheon'
meat from the deli which looked like processed chicken and mushroom - at least it's
cooked.
Veggies, thankfully, NTUC stocks. So I got some celery, red peppers, tomatos and onions
and garlic. Assorted spices and fresh basil too. Fat-free chicken stock in a can, and
canned corn kernels. Milk. Eggs. The works.
Cornbread was easy. Had previously bought cornmeal. Cup of it, cup of flour, whack
eggs, honey in place of sugar (couldn't find the cunningly hidden sugar, heh, I am the
king of food substitutions), milk and mix. Clumped up appealingly like a muffin mix,
dump the lot in a pan, then into the oven. Rose very nicely.
Then my new invention.Chili con veggie. Butter and onions, slow fire until
caramelized. Threw in garlic as an afterthought. Fried the meat with chili powder and
cumin. Fried the peppers and celery. Fried the tomatoes until they mushed up to form a
tomato base. Dump a can of baked beans in chunky tomato sauce, and chicken stock in.
I had way too much veggie though. Got decidedly carried away when chopping. So I had
only poured about half of the veggie in, when it got thick and gloopy like chili was
supposed to be.
I couldn't bear the thought of all my hard work going to waste, so I dunked the remaining
veggie in, and topped it all off with more chicken stock. Everything got more watery.
Whoopsie. Oh well, it may not be 'real' chili, but it's minestrone soup with a chili flavor.
And it tasted real good. Nothing like fresh food, cooked by yourself. You know what
goes into it. Rather than the oily gunky mess they sell you at hawker centres and fast food
places. Ick.
As for the 'Doom' part, I got the Doom dvd, and watched it as I was having dinner. It's
kinda fun, actually. It's an action flick with The Rock in it, and based on a violet
computer game, so you know, don't expect too much in the way of plot or story, turn
your brain off, and that's how to watch Doom and like it.
The scenery and settings were fantastic, it was like looking at all those Doom computer
games in a Hollywood movie world. I especially got a lot of visual echoes of "Doom 3"
going. The UAC logo, the doors, the pipes, the lighting effects, the monsters. Made me
feel tempted to stuff the CD back into the drive and crank that sucker up to finish the
game some day.
Actors weren't too shabby, they'd apparently gone through 'basic training' to make them
look and feel like special forces. They carried it off well enough. I believed they were
special forces - in a video game, at any rate. A lot of looking around corners and shouting
"clear," - reminded me of the ideal a competitive online gamer would hope for in a good
team, be it Counterstrike or SWAT 3.
I was pleasantly surprised by the plot, as non-existent as you'd expect it to be, and
smelling of an Aliens B movie clone. There were a lot of clever 'suspense' tricks where'd
you'd expect an alien to pop up and rip someone's head off - but ended up as nothing or
a joke or a shaky sigh of relief. Just a little 'twist' on your expectations that worked quite
well.
Did feel that there was a continuity problem somewhere in the middle, everything was
slow and suspenseful, and suddenly there was a leap, oh noes, the monsters are attacking
the way out, rush rush rush. Then all the leftover extras started dying and painting the
ceiling with blood like you'd expect a "Doom" brand-name holder to. Bit wide a gap for
belief.
The most clever albeit heavy-handed bit was their treatment of good and evil - where
"Sarge," the leader of the marines gradually reveals his true colours under stress - he's an
amoral killer and doesn't differentiate between innocents/citizens and monsters. He just
wants to kill everyone and let God sort 'em out, as long as he gets out alive. I found it
quite an idea-inspiring take on heroism and villainy (which is forever on my mind ever
since CoX).
And there's nothing like a blood and guts movie who isn't afraid to let the bad guy just
plug down good guys in cold blood - Marines standing over a pile of dead people in
ordinary clothing, putting extra slugs into their forehead in the off chance that they get up
as zombies.Then a live one begs them for help. And they lift their gun and bang - it's
meant to be jarring, and it is. That's villainy.
The first-person sequence that they shot on camera was a freaking fun homage to
computer FPSes. It looked almost like a montage from various Doom 3 scenes. And the
amazing thing is that this was 'acted' out in real life, shot on camera over days, and then
gussied up with CGI effects. Damn cool re-creation.
Sidetrek: Of Kitchens and Masks
So sue me, I've been in a cooking mood, over a computering mood. For the past two
days, I've been coming back from work, putting on a good dvd, and then puttering
around with some kind of recipe. Much to familial consternation when they find flour on
the tv remote, but hem, can't make pies without breaking a few eggs or dusting flour
around. :P
To the strains of the last episodes of Charmed season 4, I have been trying out handmade
tortelli stuffed with ricotta cheese. I blame www.tigerandstrawberries.com. The blogging
cook there, Barbara Fischer, does rather amazing things with a wide culinary and cultural
repetoire (though I have to comment that her Chinese food is not as kewl as she seems to
think it is - I'm sure it's very wholesome western pseudo-chinese stir fry with real(TM)
Chinese ingredients, but I've never seen stir-fry or pau look like /that/ before. That's not
beef stir fry, that's tenderloin steak stir-fry. :P And where the heck is your sauce
anyhow.)
Anyhow, I saw her tortellini recipe. Frankly, I think her photo skills suck. (Her
southwestern and mexican stuff look good though. Unfamiliarity makes it look good, I
guess.) It looked kinda gruesomely homemade, but the good news was that I kept
thinking: gosh darn, if she can make tortellini that ends up looking more like wantonelli, I
bet I can do it too.
And the image of it smothered in tomato sauce kept drifting around in my head
relentlessly.
I have this funny thing about pasta. I hate eating out for pasta. I keep thinking that it's so
bloody simple it can be made at home for half the price and double the quality.
In Singapore, it's a very simple equation. Either the pasta is cheap and pure crap -
overboiled pasta from a packet, some pre-factory made sauce glopped on top, and if
you're very lucky, some crumbs of minced meat or factory-produced sausage again. And
this they charge 5 bucks for?! Oi, I can do better at home. For sure.
Or the pasta is overpriced and either mediocre crap again, or tastes good but is just
exceedingly overpriced.
Pasta fresca. Fresh pasta. That's a plus. Factory made though - can't win 'em all. Sauce
is cooked by a cook who at least has the basics of cream and tomato sauces down.
Generous helping. But well, it's just passable to my taste buds, and kinda overpriced for
the quality, imo. Again, I can make this level of pasta at home.
As I proved very early on when I actually followed an egg pasta recipe book, rolled out
my own strips of fresh pasta, boiled them, and then made the best carbonara sauce ever -
real eggs and cream freshly stirred in, formed the most sinful thing in the world.
Followed very closely by the best mushroom sauce ever - fresh mushrooms, a generous
helping of butter (frying stuff in butter is a surefire way of making stuff taste fantastic
and burst your coronary arteries at the same time), salt and then cream again for the
sauce.
I've had good pasta made by small little Italian restaurants, but they charge $30+ easy for
a measly four largish-sized fresh tortellini stuffed with expensive cheeses. Again, it's not
worth it! *twitch*
So anyhow, I just had to make tortellini myself. I was minus any eggs, and I was worried
about the cholestrol anyhow. So normal pasta it was going to be. Enter flour. Enter water.
Enter worried brooding about how plain the recipe seemed to be. Enter kitchen and a
desperate grab at the spice rack - and dried basil went flying into the flour.
Yea yea, I know fresh herbs rule. If I had a Cold Storage downstairs from my house, I
would probably burn a hole in my wallet everytime I got the hankering to make real food.
Unfortunately, there's only an NTUC downstairs and I doubted they had real basil, so I
went with what existed in the rather bare kitchen.
Made the dough, and started patting out flat shapes with my hand and stuffing ricotta into
them. Things got very large sized and leaky and out of hand in a hurry. Nevermind, first
time for everything. When I started to boil them, I decided that the ricotta oozing out was
too good to be wasted, so I trashed the idea of a tomato sauce and went with a soup base
instead. Being lazy by this time, I cleaned out the barren kitchen, emptying a Chunky
Campbell's Chicken Vegetable soup into it, and whacked some tomato paste in.
So I had Dumplinglini in Tomato Veggie soup for dinner. Educational experience, tasted
nice, even if it didn't look too good.
On the very next day, I was game for take 2. Real tortellini.
I found a hand roller that looked like it could roll out dough properly flat.
Then to the funky strains of Mirrormask, I started making 'proper' tortellini. That is, if
tortellini dough comprises of flour, turmeric and instant garlic potato mash. Hee. I was
rummaging around for something different other than dried 'herbs' and that was the only
thing left in the kitchen. Hey, if potato gnocchi is made with potato and flour, then well,
potato tortellini should be ok. :P
The roller helped a ton. Managed to get it almost as flat as a wonton skin. Maybe the
thickness of two stacked together. Then proceeded to stuff it with ricotta again. Very
enjoyable, very 'zen' and by the way, Neil Gaiman's & Dave McKean's Mirrormask
rules.
At first I thought I wouldn't enjoy it because it seemed too surreal. Dave McKean has a
very distinctive style of art, and it didn't appear appropriate for film. I caught a sneak
peek of the film when Neil Gaiman was in town and showing it off, it was a technically
perfect enough piece, where the protagonist is surrounded by weird jack in the boxes and
undergoing some kind of transformation. But it was very disjointed when separated from
its context, so I wasn't too impressed.
Fortunately, Gaiman's story is powerful enough that when I started watching the dvd
properly, from introduction onwards, I knew it was going to be good and everything
would fit into place. Gaiman has a knack of starting the reader/viewer off in a slightly
unfamiliar but still very real-world setting, letting them get their feet wet in the world,
and then pulling the rug from under their feet and showing them there's a much stranger,
magical, fantastical universe than they expect.
When you're grounded this way and then slowly introduced into the brave new world,
your acceptance of the fantastical expands and expands until disbelief suspends enough to
allow that previously described 'transformation' scene to take place.
Good show. Can't mention more without spoiling it. Must-watch. Especially for Gaiman
fans.
Oh, and I ended up with about 30-35 tortellini. Made myself a nice tomato sauce, and
drizzled cheese on top. Was great too.
days, I've been coming back from work, putting on a good dvd, and then puttering
around with some kind of recipe. Much to familial consternation when they find flour on
the tv remote, but hem, can't make pies without breaking a few eggs or dusting flour
around. :P
To the strains of the last episodes of Charmed season 4, I have been trying out handmade
tortelli stuffed with ricotta cheese. I blame www.tigerandstrawberries.com. The blogging
cook there, Barbara Fischer, does rather amazing things with a wide culinary and cultural
repetoire (though I have to comment that her Chinese food is not as kewl as she seems to
think it is - I'm sure it's very wholesome western pseudo-chinese stir fry with real(TM)
Chinese ingredients, but I've never seen stir-fry or pau look like /that/ before. That's not
beef stir fry, that's tenderloin steak stir-fry. :P And where the heck is your sauce
anyhow.)
Anyhow, I saw her tortellini recipe. Frankly, I think her photo skills suck. (Her
southwestern and mexican stuff look good though. Unfamiliarity makes it look good, I
guess.) It looked kinda gruesomely homemade, but the good news was that I kept
thinking: gosh darn, if she can make tortellini that ends up looking more like wantonelli, I
bet I can do it too.
And the image of it smothered in tomato sauce kept drifting around in my head
relentlessly.
I have this funny thing about pasta. I hate eating out for pasta. I keep thinking that it's so
bloody simple it can be made at home for half the price and double the quality.
In Singapore, it's a very simple equation. Either the pasta is cheap and pure crap -
overboiled pasta from a packet, some pre-factory made sauce glopped on top, and if
you're very lucky, some crumbs of minced meat or factory-produced sausage again. And
this they charge 5 bucks for?! Oi, I can do better at home. For sure.
Or the pasta is overpriced and either mediocre crap again, or tastes good but is just
exceedingly overpriced.
Pasta fresca. Fresh pasta. That's a plus. Factory made though - can't win 'em all. Sauce
is cooked by a cook who at least has the basics of cream and tomato sauces down.
Generous helping. But well, it's just passable to my taste buds, and kinda overpriced for
the quality, imo. Again, I can make this level of pasta at home.
As I proved very early on when I actually followed an egg pasta recipe book, rolled out
my own strips of fresh pasta, boiled them, and then made the best carbonara sauce ever -
real eggs and cream freshly stirred in, formed the most sinful thing in the world.
Followed very closely by the best mushroom sauce ever - fresh mushrooms, a generous
helping of butter (frying stuff in butter is a surefire way of making stuff taste fantastic
and burst your coronary arteries at the same time), salt and then cream again for the
sauce.
I've had good pasta made by small little Italian restaurants, but they charge $30+ easy for
a measly four largish-sized fresh tortellini stuffed with expensive cheeses. Again, it's not
worth it! *twitch*
So anyhow, I just had to make tortellini myself. I was minus any eggs, and I was worried
about the cholestrol anyhow. So normal pasta it was going to be. Enter flour. Enter water.
Enter worried brooding about how plain the recipe seemed to be. Enter kitchen and a
desperate grab at the spice rack - and dried basil went flying into the flour.
Yea yea, I know fresh herbs rule. If I had a Cold Storage downstairs from my house, I
would probably burn a hole in my wallet everytime I got the hankering to make real food.
Unfortunately, there's only an NTUC downstairs and I doubted they had real basil, so I
went with what existed in the rather bare kitchen.
Made the dough, and started patting out flat shapes with my hand and stuffing ricotta into
them. Things got very large sized and leaky and out of hand in a hurry. Nevermind, first
time for everything. When I started to boil them, I decided that the ricotta oozing out was
too good to be wasted, so I trashed the idea of a tomato sauce and went with a soup base
instead. Being lazy by this time, I cleaned out the barren kitchen, emptying a Chunky
Campbell's Chicken Vegetable soup into it, and whacked some tomato paste in.
So I had Dumplinglini in Tomato Veggie soup for dinner. Educational experience, tasted
nice, even if it didn't look too good.
On the very next day, I was game for take 2. Real tortellini.
I found a hand roller that looked like it could roll out dough properly flat.
Then to the funky strains of Mirrormask, I started making 'proper' tortellini. That is, if
tortellini dough comprises of flour, turmeric and instant garlic potato mash. Hee. I was
rummaging around for something different other than dried 'herbs' and that was the only
thing left in the kitchen. Hey, if potato gnocchi is made with potato and flour, then well,
potato tortellini should be ok. :P
The roller helped a ton. Managed to get it almost as flat as a wonton skin. Maybe the
thickness of two stacked together. Then proceeded to stuff it with ricotta again. Very
enjoyable, very 'zen' and by the way, Neil Gaiman's & Dave McKean's Mirrormask
rules.
At first I thought I wouldn't enjoy it because it seemed too surreal. Dave McKean has a
very distinctive style of art, and it didn't appear appropriate for film. I caught a sneak
peek of the film when Neil Gaiman was in town and showing it off, it was a technically
perfect enough piece, where the protagonist is surrounded by weird jack in the boxes and
undergoing some kind of transformation. But it was very disjointed when separated from
its context, so I wasn't too impressed.
Fortunately, Gaiman's story is powerful enough that when I started watching the dvd
properly, from introduction onwards, I knew it was going to be good and everything
would fit into place. Gaiman has a knack of starting the reader/viewer off in a slightly
unfamiliar but still very real-world setting, letting them get their feet wet in the world,
and then pulling the rug from under their feet and showing them there's a much stranger,
magical, fantastical universe than they expect.
When you're grounded this way and then slowly introduced into the brave new world,
your acceptance of the fantastical expands and expands until disbelief suspends enough to
allow that previously described 'transformation' scene to take place.
Good show. Can't mention more without spoiling it. Must-watch. Especially for Gaiman
fans.
Oh, and I ended up with about 30-35 tortellini. Made myself a nice tomato sauce, and
drizzled cheese on top. Was great too.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Vif zis Injektion I shall take over Broadvay!
Mwahahahaha!
Remember the time when we were supposed to do a computer science project in primary school, and we got out of it by renaming a text-adventure game into a computer science project, and instead spent our time scriptiong a text-adventure game? (Or three actually)
Jessica Plunkenstein and the Düsseldorf Conspiracy is the same deal, with a bunch of yale college students. Since they were college students, their game turned out more than a text adventure game. It's an adventure game scripted using AGS, with voice acting and a horrible sense of humour.
Jessica Plunkenstein and the Düsseldorf Conspiracy can be found here.
There are a few flaws in the game. The chief being the click spot on some objects doesn't really match where they are on the screen. But I found that if you aim on the imaginary upper right hand corner of the box containing object, you can hit it.
The AGS website is great. There are quite literally hordes of AGS games. Some of them are full length, like Jessica Plunkenstein. Endless playtime :P
Remember the time when we were supposed to do a computer science project in primary school, and we got out of it by renaming a text-adventure game into a computer science project, and instead spent our time scriptiong a text-adventure game? (Or three actually)
Jessica Plunkenstein and the Düsseldorf Conspiracy is the same deal, with a bunch of yale college students. Since they were college students, their game turned out more than a text adventure game. It's an adventure game scripted using AGS, with voice acting and a horrible sense of humour.
Jessica Plunkenstein and the Düsseldorf Conspiracy can be found here.
There are a few flaws in the game. The chief being the click spot on some objects doesn't really match where they are on the screen. But I found that if you aim on the imaginary upper right hand corner of the box containing object, you can hit it.
The AGS website is great. There are quite literally hordes of AGS games. Some of them are full length, like Jessica Plunkenstein. Endless playtime :P
Friday, April 07, 2006
DDO: Asian Farmer Nightz
*sighs*
(sarcasm) I just love playing MMOs by night. (/sarcasm) You meet all the broken Engrish fellowz on this side of the pond. And since most Asian adults do NOT play gamez, you sometimes get the feeling that you're babysitting a bunch of 10-12 year olds.
To make matters worse, there's not many online, so you're not exactly spoiled for choice.
Through much patience, I am, however, level 4, and I feel non-newbish enough to start to pick and choose the teams I'm in on.
Take for example, the PUG I just dropped like a hot potato even before I took the trouble to walk to the mission door. Strike 1: Blind invite. Strike 2: There's already 5 members on the team, and most of them have no hp left. They all look in various states of mangled. Strike 3: Hi, the leader says, we're doing steam tunnels.
(This is one of those long continuous 4-parters that takes a minimum of a cohesive group to do. Think a little like a short task force, eg. Hess TF. Having followed a level 6 group through it, 4 of which were in the same guild and on voice, I can't imagine a PUG surviving well unless they were pretty good.)
Strike 4, and last straw: Hey, another member mentions, did you know that you have a lvl 1 and 7 on your group? Leader says, soooo?
Now thanks to my more positive Asian farmer group that I -just- left, I happen to know that a level 4 and a level 10 on the same group garners zero xp - at least for the level 4. The level 6 was getting no xp either. Pleveling safeguard, basically.
I can only see pain ahead in the future. Either the party is going to wipe, or I'm going to spend all my spellpoints babysitting the level 1, or someone is going to whine through the entire 4 parter that they're getting no xp, or worse, -I'm- going to get no xp while healing my ass off and getting yelled at? Er...no thanks. So I just up and left. :)
<===== clerickins learning to get pickier. After all, worse come to the worse, I can always group up with American groups on non-work weekend mornings.
Oh, I mentioned my more positive Asian farmer group a while back, didn't I? This was kinda funny and enlightening, though I could only sit through about two rounds of the same mission back to back - one on normal difficulty, the other one on hard.
Good point 1: The leader of the group sends me a tell. He asks if I want to do Redwillow quest for fun. Lvls are a bit high for xp.
Ah, this person has a clue. And he states up front all the terms and conditions. So I don't freak out when I say 'sure' and join to find the group mostly level 10s, a lvl 8 and a lvl 6 and me, a lvl 4.
Inside the mission, the xp window is clear. It states in explicit terms: I am being powerleveled by higher lvl characters, therefore you get 0 XP. Ah well. I knew what I was in for coming in, I was just joining for fun, and he did prep me beforehand.
Funny point 1: The leader (a level 10 cleric) is a control freak. Literally. And he does it all in bad engrish. Which gives it some surreal WoW and EQ overtones.
Funny point 2: Most of the group appear to be koreans/chinese/japanese or something. Names like Risen, Jisung Park, Zcktwlk (whatever it was, it looked like someone banged on the keyboard) abounded, so they all seemed to comprehend explicitly whatever the leader was saying. No teamspeak, no nothing. But they all moved together like a cohesive unit.
For example, at the start, the leader's sooo lazy at typing, that he calls me "li". Before him, I've never come across anyone who truncates Liara even further. :P
He explains to me earnestly, "li, focus 4 heal, k?"
Of course, my only reply to this masterpiece of communication is "what?" as I valiantly try to recall if there's some kind of spell called 'focus' I have no clue about.
Thankfully, he's patient enough to explain further. "i use my mp for buff, u use your mp for heal, k?"
Ohhhh. Ok. Sure. He was trying to divide up labour and make a plan beforehand. Kewl enough, I suppose. You're the level 10, you know what you're doing. True enough, he did. I was sooo jealous of his buffs - his bless lasted 20 freaking minutes, while mine lasts 4. I take it it's a minute per level, and he probably has a feat that extends spell duration. (Have to look into that some day.)
Surreal experience no. 2: His way of gathering people for buffs is to type "close me" "close me" "close me" over and over.
:P
I guess he means "come close to me" but was too lazy to type or bind that. I didn't have the heart to tell him that "gather" would save typing two characters. Besides, the guys he normally groups with might not understand that. :/
I'm poking gentle fun at them, but the truth is, I had a pretty darned good time running through the mission with them and I learned a lot about the vagaries of DDO while grinning at the Asian 'Everquest' style tactics.
The group was way overpowered for the mission, of course. I had previously done this level 6 quest with an entire group of lvl 4s, and we managed it with no sweat. So you can imagine what short work lvl 10s made of it. We were running through monster encounters like a knife through hot butter, and taking longer pauses at each chest filled with loot. Hence my Asian farmer comment.
I kept getting visions of Guild Wars and the common perception that Asians 'farm' chests of loot. We were pretty much opening another treasure chest every 5 minutes or sooner. Lvl 10 cleric stacks on the charisma (which is rumoured to improve treasure pops) and then pops the lid open, we all loot our share dry. My inventory stuffed up really quick with +1 items, and I was seeing $$$ in my eyes and thinking, no xp ain't so bad when I got all this stuff to sell for gold and buy myself a new enchanted goodie from the pawnshops.
Course, according to the team leader, he was just doing this for fun cos there's giants in this quest. I suppose lvl 10s get even better chest pops if they do a higher level mission, but I was pretty darned happy at lvl 4, even with treasure scaled to my level.
Oh, and I had visions of Everquest overlapped onto Guild Wars as well. Even though I've never played Everquest. Apparently, wizards/mages in Everquest are all about the crowd control. Well the wizard we had with us was pretty much a two-trick pony, and ordered about mercilessly by the leader, because he tended to be a little too slow for the control freaky leader. "haste" "haste" "haste" - used mostly for being able to run quickly to the next point, rather than increase weapon swing speed. And "web" "web" "web" - which, I have learned, is a pretty freaking amazing crowd control spell.
One or two casts of this (except this wizard couldn't seem to aim it too well, dunno if it was the UI or the guy was just a bit weird) and the entire spawn of hobs, scorpions, giants, what have you, was entangled and stuck and couldn't hit back very well if at all.
Then everyone just had to run up and swing wildly and everything died.
I saw some other good applications of tactics as well, as some fighter tripped up a giant, who landed flat on his face and took ages standing up as all of us surrounded him and whacked the stuffing out of him.
Contrast this with the American style we used the morning earlier. Ranger pulled a giant with one shot of his bow, got him stuck on a slope/tree, fighter tank ran in to draw aggro and swing away, and I had to watch his health bar carefully, while everyone peppered the giant with damage, including the mage.
Granted, the difference in levels mighta made a huge diff as to why one group could engage an entire spawn at a time, while another pulled singles.
The good news is that the control freaky part of the leader never landed on me. Perhaps I was prioritizing heals enough to keep him content. And perhaps he had 'heal' up his sleeve anyhow, because there were a couple times when damage hit so fast my pathetic 'cure moderate wounds' didn't do much, and with one cast, he restored their health bars in a flash.
The equally good news is this: If an Asian farmer can be a battle cleric that focuses on buffs - he was right in the thick of things, swinging away - and yet heal up well when he wants to, and let's not even talk about his capacity to restore mana with divine vitality, put me to shame. :P Of course he also happens to be six levels higher than I...
...Then by golly, the naysayers are wrong. Clerics do not have to be healz0rs. If anything, the Asians will know. :P Cos they tweak their builds to be maximally effective. He's probably capable of dropping back to EQ priest on a raid if needed, but can pwnz0r in a lower level quest perfectly well.
Oh, and the last good news is that I got a rather sweet weapon out of running it on hard difficulty. Acid light mace + 1. Should be pretty cool. And I'm rich, rich! For the moment anyhow.
(sarcasm) I just love playing MMOs by night. (/sarcasm) You meet all the broken Engrish fellowz on this side of the pond. And since most Asian adults do NOT play gamez, you sometimes get the feeling that you're babysitting a bunch of 10-12 year olds.
To make matters worse, there's not many online, so you're not exactly spoiled for choice.
Through much patience, I am, however, level 4, and I feel non-newbish enough to start to pick and choose the teams I'm in on.
Take for example, the PUG I just dropped like a hot potato even before I took the trouble to walk to the mission door. Strike 1: Blind invite. Strike 2: There's already 5 members on the team, and most of them have no hp left. They all look in various states of mangled. Strike 3: Hi, the leader says, we're doing steam tunnels.
(This is one of those long continuous 4-parters that takes a minimum of a cohesive group to do. Think a little like a short task force, eg. Hess TF. Having followed a level 6 group through it, 4 of which were in the same guild and on voice, I can't imagine a PUG surviving well unless they were pretty good.)
Strike 4, and last straw: Hey, another member mentions, did you know that you have a lvl 1 and 7 on your group? Leader says, soooo?
Now thanks to my more positive Asian farmer group that I -just- left, I happen to know that a level 4 and a level 10 on the same group garners zero xp - at least for the level 4. The level 6 was getting no xp either. Pleveling safeguard, basically.
I can only see pain ahead in the future. Either the party is going to wipe, or I'm going to spend all my spellpoints babysitting the level 1, or someone is going to whine through the entire 4 parter that they're getting no xp, or worse, -I'm- going to get no xp while healing my ass off and getting yelled at? Er...no thanks. So I just up and left. :)
<===== clerickins learning to get pickier. After all, worse come to the worse, I can always group up with American groups on non-work weekend mornings.
Oh, I mentioned my more positive Asian farmer group a while back, didn't I? This was kinda funny and enlightening, though I could only sit through about two rounds of the same mission back to back - one on normal difficulty, the other one on hard.
Good point 1: The leader of the group sends me a tell. He asks if I want to do Redwillow quest for fun. Lvls are a bit high for xp.
Ah, this person has a clue. And he states up front all the terms and conditions. So I don't freak out when I say 'sure' and join to find the group mostly level 10s, a lvl 8 and a lvl 6 and me, a lvl 4.
Inside the mission, the xp window is clear. It states in explicit terms: I am being powerleveled by higher lvl characters, therefore you get 0 XP. Ah well. I knew what I was in for coming in, I was just joining for fun, and he did prep me beforehand.
Funny point 1: The leader (a level 10 cleric) is a control freak. Literally. And he does it all in bad engrish. Which gives it some surreal WoW and EQ overtones.
Funny point 2: Most of the group appear to be koreans/chinese/japanese or something. Names like Risen, Jisung Park, Zcktwlk (whatever it was, it looked like someone banged on the keyboard) abounded, so they all seemed to comprehend explicitly whatever the leader was saying. No teamspeak, no nothing. But they all moved together like a cohesive unit.
For example, at the start, the leader's sooo lazy at typing, that he calls me "li". Before him, I've never come across anyone who truncates Liara even further. :P
He explains to me earnestly, "li, focus 4 heal, k?"
Of course, my only reply to this masterpiece of communication is "what?" as I valiantly try to recall if there's some kind of spell called 'focus' I have no clue about.
Thankfully, he's patient enough to explain further. "i use my mp for buff, u use your mp for heal, k?"
Ohhhh. Ok. Sure. He was trying to divide up labour and make a plan beforehand. Kewl enough, I suppose. You're the level 10, you know what you're doing. True enough, he did. I was sooo jealous of his buffs - his bless lasted 20 freaking minutes, while mine lasts 4. I take it it's a minute per level, and he probably has a feat that extends spell duration. (Have to look into that some day.)
Surreal experience no. 2: His way of gathering people for buffs is to type "close me" "close me" "close me" over and over.
:P
I guess he means "come close to me" but was too lazy to type or bind that. I didn't have the heart to tell him that "gather" would save typing two characters. Besides, the guys he normally groups with might not understand that. :/
I'm poking gentle fun at them, but the truth is, I had a pretty darned good time running through the mission with them and I learned a lot about the vagaries of DDO while grinning at the Asian 'Everquest' style tactics.
The group was way overpowered for the mission, of course. I had previously done this level 6 quest with an entire group of lvl 4s, and we managed it with no sweat. So you can imagine what short work lvl 10s made of it. We were running through monster encounters like a knife through hot butter, and taking longer pauses at each chest filled with loot. Hence my Asian farmer comment.
I kept getting visions of Guild Wars and the common perception that Asians 'farm' chests of loot. We were pretty much opening another treasure chest every 5 minutes or sooner. Lvl 10 cleric stacks on the charisma (which is rumoured to improve treasure pops) and then pops the lid open, we all loot our share dry. My inventory stuffed up really quick with +1 items, and I was seeing $$$ in my eyes and thinking, no xp ain't so bad when I got all this stuff to sell for gold and buy myself a new enchanted goodie from the pawnshops.
Course, according to the team leader, he was just doing this for fun cos there's giants in this quest. I suppose lvl 10s get even better chest pops if they do a higher level mission, but I was pretty darned happy at lvl 4, even with treasure scaled to my level.
Oh, and I had visions of Everquest overlapped onto Guild Wars as well. Even though I've never played Everquest. Apparently, wizards/mages in Everquest are all about the crowd control. Well the wizard we had with us was pretty much a two-trick pony, and ordered about mercilessly by the leader, because he tended to be a little too slow for the control freaky leader. "haste" "haste" "haste" - used mostly for being able to run quickly to the next point, rather than increase weapon swing speed. And "web" "web" "web" - which, I have learned, is a pretty freaking amazing crowd control spell.
One or two casts of this (except this wizard couldn't seem to aim it too well, dunno if it was the UI or the guy was just a bit weird) and the entire spawn of hobs, scorpions, giants, what have you, was entangled and stuck and couldn't hit back very well if at all.
Then everyone just had to run up and swing wildly and everything died.
I saw some other good applications of tactics as well, as some fighter tripped up a giant, who landed flat on his face and took ages standing up as all of us surrounded him and whacked the stuffing out of him.
Contrast this with the American style we used the morning earlier. Ranger pulled a giant with one shot of his bow, got him stuck on a slope/tree, fighter tank ran in to draw aggro and swing away, and I had to watch his health bar carefully, while everyone peppered the giant with damage, including the mage.
Granted, the difference in levels mighta made a huge diff as to why one group could engage an entire spawn at a time, while another pulled singles.
The good news is that the control freaky part of the leader never landed on me. Perhaps I was prioritizing heals enough to keep him content. And perhaps he had 'heal' up his sleeve anyhow, because there were a couple times when damage hit so fast my pathetic 'cure moderate wounds' didn't do much, and with one cast, he restored their health bars in a flash.
The equally good news is this: If an Asian farmer can be a battle cleric that focuses on buffs - he was right in the thick of things, swinging away - and yet heal up well when he wants to, and let's not even talk about his capacity to restore mana with divine vitality, put me to shame. :P Of course he also happens to be six levels higher than I...
...Then by golly, the naysayers are wrong. Clerics do not have to be healz0rs. If anything, the Asians will know. :P Cos they tweak their builds to be maximally effective. He's probably capable of dropping back to EQ priest on a raid if needed, but can pwnz0r in a lower level quest perfectly well.
Oh, and the last good news is that I got a rather sweet weapon out of running it on hard difficulty. Acid light mace + 1. Should be pretty cool. And I'm rich, rich! For the moment anyhow.
36 Plots: 1-4
This is damned fun. It's a good excuse to exercise creativity and write stuff. Things I've been sorely lacking in, and just not doing. Here we go:
1.Supplication - Persecutor, Suppliant, a Power in Authority
Your villain is being hounded by an enemy. You've no way to strike out at this enemy directly, something ties your hands – insufficient power, or you don't want your power signature or a trail leading back to you left behind at the scene. You have to seek help from another, and a patron might be the key. Your villain may or may not realize that an acceptance of a patron's gifts is a permanent thing when he makes his decision – something he may come to regret or embrace in the future.
2.Deliverance - Unfortunates, Threatener, Rescuer
To rescue someone your villain cares about (be it himself or a relative or a friend), your villain chooses or has no choice but to accept a patron's outreached hand. The patron may or may not have been involved in the threat to the cared-for individual.
Your villain gets into a scrape that's too big for him. Someone comes along and gets him out alive where he expected to be a goner. This someone works for a patron, and an unspoken part of the rescue is an understanding that now your villain is working for the patron as well. Alternatively, your villain and his rescuer becomes good friends or comrades-in-arms, and when a recommendation is made that so-and-so is looking for a few more good villains, you join up willingly.
3.Revenge - Avenger, Criminal
This patron's faction has harmed someone your villain cared about. What better way to obtain revenge than to infiltrate and destroy it from within? Unfortunately, events may run away with the best-laid of plans. Your villain may have gotten more than he bargained for.
On the other hand, your villain could have gotten on the wrong side of the patron's faction one too many times. You know the old saying about keeping your friends close, and your enemies closer? This patron's a believer in that too. He or she obtains revenge by inducting you into his or her faction, where your movements are much more closely watched, and any act of seeming treachery more brutally punished. The patron 'gifts' inflicted on you are a way of tracking or keeping tabs on your villain, and there might be other consequences attached to them. Is your villain sure he's in control of his own mind?
4.Vengeance by Family upon Family - Avenging Kinsman, Guilty Kinsman, Relative
There's no trouble like family trouble. Your villain is somehow related to his patron. This could be an actual blood relation, or a clan or cult-like bloodbonded "family" you don't want to get on the wrong side of. Ulterior motives abound, and you're not sure who you can trust.
There's been a death in the faction and all signs are clear that it's someone on the inside that's to blame.Your villain could be responsible or framed for the murder. Instead of being overtly punished for it, however, the patron makes you his replacement. Short-lived, or eternally bonded – who can say?
Alternatively, the patron makes your villain his personal detective, bloodhound, angel of vengeance. Find the killer responsible, and ensure everyone knows who came calling to collect.
1.Supplication - Persecutor, Suppliant, a Power in Authority
Your villain is being hounded by an enemy. You've no way to strike out at this enemy directly, something ties your hands – insufficient power, or you don't want your power signature or a trail leading back to you left behind at the scene. You have to seek help from another, and a patron might be the key. Your villain may or may not realize that an acceptance of a patron's gifts is a permanent thing when he makes his decision – something he may come to regret or embrace in the future.
2.Deliverance - Unfortunates, Threatener, Rescuer
To rescue someone your villain cares about (be it himself or a relative or a friend), your villain chooses or has no choice but to accept a patron's outreached hand. The patron may or may not have been involved in the threat to the cared-for individual.
Your villain gets into a scrape that's too big for him. Someone comes along and gets him out alive where he expected to be a goner. This someone works for a patron, and an unspoken part of the rescue is an understanding that now your villain is working for the patron as well. Alternatively, your villain and his rescuer becomes good friends or comrades-in-arms, and when a recommendation is made that so-and-so is looking for a few more good villains, you join up willingly.
3.Revenge - Avenger, Criminal
This patron's faction has harmed someone your villain cared about. What better way to obtain revenge than to infiltrate and destroy it from within? Unfortunately, events may run away with the best-laid of plans. Your villain may have gotten more than he bargained for.
On the other hand, your villain could have gotten on the wrong side of the patron's faction one too many times. You know the old saying about keeping your friends close, and your enemies closer? This patron's a believer in that too. He or she obtains revenge by inducting you into his or her faction, where your movements are much more closely watched, and any act of seeming treachery more brutally punished. The patron 'gifts' inflicted on you are a way of tracking or keeping tabs on your villain, and there might be other consequences attached to them. Is your villain sure he's in control of his own mind?
4.Vengeance by Family upon Family - Avenging Kinsman, Guilty Kinsman, Relative
There's no trouble like family trouble. Your villain is somehow related to his patron. This could be an actual blood relation, or a clan or cult-like bloodbonded "family" you don't want to get on the wrong side of. Ulterior motives abound, and you're not sure who you can trust.
There's been a death in the faction and all signs are clear that it's someone on the inside that's to blame.Your villain could be responsible or framed for the murder. Instead of being overtly punished for it, however, the patron makes you his replacement. Short-lived, or eternally bonded – who can say?
Alternatively, the patron makes your villain his personal detective, bloodhound, angel of vengeance. Find the killer responsible, and ensure everyone knows who came calling to collect.
Mary Sue
I simply must comment about this. I'm finding it very funny that a good number of the "I hate PPP" posts are from people who appear to have limited imagination and a god complex. No, this is not a rant about powergamers and their worry about numbers and utility of the powers, but on the guys in the other side of the pond - roleplayers - worried about character concept and simply unwilling to use a bit of creativity to shoe in the patron powers.
Notice most of the character concepts having trouble are pretty much Mary Sues brought out into public view. My character is a super-powerful secret agent/vampire/werewolf/god/demon/dragon king/half-whatever/omnipotent/otherwise supernatural being who is numero uno, and simply will NOT accept a patron, EVER. Cos he's just so godlike in powers (WAAAAY BEYOND IMAGINING) that he roxx0rs all the patron's sockz0rs and he wouldn't stoop so low as to actually bend knee to anybody.
Lol.
Where do I start?
I think I have to start with the Baron Vega quote on solo roleplaying, because it was such a revelation for me.
With the right frame of mind, you could even create a role playing experience out of a simple solitaire card game:
"So how the heck do you roleplay while playing solitaire? There are no adventures or quests in a game of solitaire, no puzzles to solve, no dragons to slay, no princesses to rescue, no character attributes to build up - in short, none of the things we'd expect to find in an RPG. Well, in this type of situation, you have to roleplay in your mind. For example, you might put yourself in the role of a World War II Allied pilot who has been shot down and captured. Now, you're in a prison camp. You've just been thrown into a solitary confinement cell for complaining about not getting enough food. It's pretty dark, but a bit of light does manage to get in through the small slit window. And when the guards threw you in, they were laughing too hard or they were too lazy to bother searching for you. As the result of this great stroke of luck, they didn't find the dog-eared deck of playing cards that was in your pocket when they came for you. So you play solitaire. You play quietly so as not to alert the guards. And you play with a quiet desperation, not merely to entertain yourself, but to stave off the pangs of hunger - you're getting even less to eat now - and to maintain your sanity."
- From "Roleplaying Online", May 1, 1998, Ign.com
See, it's all about the right frame of mind to roleplay in. If you want to use CoX as a medium for roleplaying in, go right ahead, but then you've got to be willing to work with the media, no?
I'm a little boggled as to why someone would roleplay in CoX and completely ignore the set storyline and background. Now, I'm not a CoX trivia freak by any means, and I gloss over and can get a lot of details wrong, but in the character backgrounds and concepts in my own head, I at least make a passing acknowledgement to the setting. My Kheldian was an escaped Council recruit/cyborg/Nictus experiment, Malentis is some kind of sharky undersea predatory mutant and at least knows of the Coralax and Captain Mako.
Even in my more 'fantastical' and 'Mary Sue'-like incarnations (which, by the way, I do not inflict on anyone in badly written bios or otherwise, they only exist in my own head and now, on this pretty-much-unread-by-public blog) - ie. the tanks...Raggy is some kind of personification of a Norse god who has come to Paragon City, while Invictus is a Fallen Dark Angels Space Marine with some kind of weird Chaos curse on him, which causes him to zap through space and time at funky intervals. And one such parallel universe version of him landed him right into Paragon City where his powers manifested in a superhero-like fashion, and therein he starts his life anew here. Lookit Gruthak, some dumbass WoW refugee orc who stumbled through a magic portal and then popped up in Paragon City...
See a trend? This is a superhero genre where space aliens walk alongside parallel dimensions and mages from ancient fallen cities. I don't care how nonsensical your background is, mine can get pretty corny too. I only care about your NOT telling me in long excruciating detail about your personal character's background, because it's really only of interest to you. And it breaks my personal sense of RP immersion. If you really must scribble it in your bio, on your webpage, on a roleplaying forum, go ahead, I avoid reading those places.
But I dunno if you've noticed the trend in my character backgrounds yet. Of course, they might be so corny, you've given up reading already. Let me elucidate. They /land/ in Paragon City or in its prison somehow and basically start a new life. It's a nod to the game you're having fun in, these are 'story landmarks' that really ought to occur, since you're going to be playing through the tutorial, and all the missions and contacts, etc, etc.
There's nothing wrong with Mary Sues, per se. I think they've gotten really bad press in fanfiction because everyone has just gotten sick of seeing everyone else's personal 'god' incarnations exposed to the world. It seems to be a very common thing when you first start exercising your imagination and unleashing creativity - call it part of a child's psyche. You envision yourself at the center of the universe, and all story revolves around you. You think up a name for this magical character, and it's often a variant of your own name.
As you make more and more characters, you start breaking off shards of yourself, your personality to put into them. The ones you favor more, they become more powerful, and godlike, or magically skilled somehow. That's fine. They're you. Love them, savour them, screw what the world says about Mary Sues, because they and you can conquer the world or save the universe a million times over and be happy in your own daydreams. If you kill them, or try to deny them, imo, you lose the sense of wonder and creativity, you start to worry about 'realism', of making 'story sense', you edit your imagination and then end up with writer's block.
Of course, I do find it a little amusing that a lot of people haven't developed their imaginations to this extent yet. Hence why you're seeing all these Mary Sues pop up now, in games, when they first start to explore their creativity.
As for me, Arakor popped up in pretty much full form, prolly when I was old enough to watch and understand Sat morning cartoons.
But, and this gets back to my original point, you gotta be flexible if you wanna run stories by. And no matter how powerful your character is, yer not gonna have a story if you don't have any conflict. Sure it's nice if you can mature to the point that you can build second-string characters who don't have an ego that makes it necessary to be center of the universe. But you can craft situations where your god is willing to temporarily lower his station. Whyever -can't- you?
Let's take my Mary Sue. Arakor is pretty much an omnipotent (but not omniscient) god creature that can go wherever the hell he wants and do whatever the hell he wants. But this gets boring in a jiffy, even for him. And he's got a fritzy sense of humour, he's almost always grinning and laughing as if he's the only one who can see the grand cosmic joke of it all. So whatever does he do to create story? Basic thing - anything he wants, ie. anything that occurs to me.
He's also got a tendency to pop up limited in a single form, often a young man, and play whatever story through - even though he can get out of most bad scrapes with the deus ex machina of revealing himself to be a god, or have his magic spaceship and super-powerful disciples and hi-tech cyborgs come rescue him.
(Ok, so it's somewhat embarassing to reveal the kid frame of mind that evidently constructed this guy, but sue me, he's mine, I love him still.)
Tell me, what stops Arakor from taking ANY patron he wants, should he decide to come putzing around in the Rogue Isles? He wouldn't mind at all, that old rogue.
It's all a matter of...sucking up ego for a while. Which evidently, your characters can't even do, let alone you. :P
Speaking of old rogues, this reminds me of Ed Greenwood's Mary Sue, ie. Elminster. Again, I can't possibly see what stops El from taking a patron either. Knowing him, he'd probably shapeshift into a girl and go clamber on the laps of some of them - like Black Scorpion - as he gently manipulates them all to whatever mysterious dictates of Mystra are set.
Let's take a tough example. R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt. Who may or may not be a Mary Sue to the author, but sure freaking has become a Mary Sue-ish idol for plenty of people out there. Now I admit it's much harder to envision everyone's favorite honorable angsty drow ever 'falling' to become a villain and hence take a patron power, cos he's just so stuck up about things and well...goody two shoes. Offhand, I don't think he'd ever go willingly, but what stops you crafting up some kind of story reason?
Drizzt is sooooo sickeningly self-sacrificing that he'd do anything to save his friends or innocent lives. So whichever patron you want him to have, that patron has just kidnapped Cattie-Brie / Wulfgar / Bruenor / young nubile innocent girl and is basically holding them as a sword of Damocles over Drizzt's head. "You work for me now. These powers are a brand. They indicate you belong to me. And you better do what I say, or (whoever) bites the dust in a big tormented way. Feel free to angst about how you hate me and these new gifts of mine, but you go and do my dirty deeds all the same."
See? Just how hard can it be?
And if you develop a lil more flexibility at this, you might even one day, *gasp*, make up a character willing to play second fiddle and moxious right hand man to whichever Jabba the Hutt he wants to suck up to. (At least for the moment, until the time is right to depose the big guy and rule in his stead. *cue villainous laughter - muhahaha*)
Hating on patron powers simply because you don't have enough imagination to fit the concept into your story is the oddest reason I've heard for whining about them.
Notice most of the character concepts having trouble are pretty much Mary Sues brought out into public view. My character is a super-powerful secret agent/vampire/werewolf/god/demon/dragon king/half-whatever/omnipotent/otherwise supernatural being who is numero uno, and simply will NOT accept a patron, EVER. Cos he's just so godlike in powers (WAAAAY BEYOND IMAGINING) that he roxx0rs all the patron's sockz0rs and he wouldn't stoop so low as to actually bend knee to anybody.
Lol.
Where do I start?
I think I have to start with the Baron Vega quote on solo roleplaying, because it was such a revelation for me.
With the right frame of mind, you could even create a role playing experience out of a simple solitaire card game:
"So how the heck do you roleplay while playing solitaire? There are no adventures or quests in a game of solitaire, no puzzles to solve, no dragons to slay, no princesses to rescue, no character attributes to build up - in short, none of the things we'd expect to find in an RPG. Well, in this type of situation, you have to roleplay in your mind. For example, you might put yourself in the role of a World War II Allied pilot who has been shot down and captured. Now, you're in a prison camp. You've just been thrown into a solitary confinement cell for complaining about not getting enough food. It's pretty dark, but a bit of light does manage to get in through the small slit window. And when the guards threw you in, they were laughing too hard or they were too lazy to bother searching for you. As the result of this great stroke of luck, they didn't find the dog-eared deck of playing cards that was in your pocket when they came for you. So you play solitaire. You play quietly so as not to alert the guards. And you play with a quiet desperation, not merely to entertain yourself, but to stave off the pangs of hunger - you're getting even less to eat now - and to maintain your sanity."
- From "Roleplaying Online", May 1, 1998, Ign.com
See, it's all about the right frame of mind to roleplay in. If you want to use CoX as a medium for roleplaying in, go right ahead, but then you've got to be willing to work with the media, no?
I'm a little boggled as to why someone would roleplay in CoX and completely ignore the set storyline and background. Now, I'm not a CoX trivia freak by any means, and I gloss over and can get a lot of details wrong, but in the character backgrounds and concepts in my own head, I at least make a passing acknowledgement to the setting. My Kheldian was an escaped Council recruit/cyborg/Nictus experiment, Malentis is some kind of sharky undersea predatory mutant and at least knows of the Coralax and Captain Mako.
Even in my more 'fantastical' and 'Mary Sue'-like incarnations (which, by the way, I do not inflict on anyone in badly written bios or otherwise, they only exist in my own head and now, on this pretty-much-unread-by-public blog) - ie. the tanks...Raggy is some kind of personification of a Norse god who has come to Paragon City, while Invictus is a Fallen Dark Angels Space Marine with some kind of weird Chaos curse on him, which causes him to zap through space and time at funky intervals. And one such parallel universe version of him landed him right into Paragon City where his powers manifested in a superhero-like fashion, and therein he starts his life anew here. Lookit Gruthak, some dumbass WoW refugee orc who stumbled through a magic portal and then popped up in Paragon City...
See a trend? This is a superhero genre where space aliens walk alongside parallel dimensions and mages from ancient fallen cities. I don't care how nonsensical your background is, mine can get pretty corny too. I only care about your NOT telling me in long excruciating detail about your personal character's background, because it's really only of interest to you. And it breaks my personal sense of RP immersion. If you really must scribble it in your bio, on your webpage, on a roleplaying forum, go ahead, I avoid reading those places.
But I dunno if you've noticed the trend in my character backgrounds yet. Of course, they might be so corny, you've given up reading already. Let me elucidate. They /land/ in Paragon City or in its prison somehow and basically start a new life. It's a nod to the game you're having fun in, these are 'story landmarks' that really ought to occur, since you're going to be playing through the tutorial, and all the missions and contacts, etc, etc.
There's nothing wrong with Mary Sues, per se. I think they've gotten really bad press in fanfiction because everyone has just gotten sick of seeing everyone else's personal 'god' incarnations exposed to the world. It seems to be a very common thing when you first start exercising your imagination and unleashing creativity - call it part of a child's psyche. You envision yourself at the center of the universe, and all story revolves around you. You think up a name for this magical character, and it's often a variant of your own name.
As you make more and more characters, you start breaking off shards of yourself, your personality to put into them. The ones you favor more, they become more powerful, and godlike, or magically skilled somehow. That's fine. They're you. Love them, savour them, screw what the world says about Mary Sues, because they and you can conquer the world or save the universe a million times over and be happy in your own daydreams. If you kill them, or try to deny them, imo, you lose the sense of wonder and creativity, you start to worry about 'realism', of making 'story sense', you edit your imagination and then end up with writer's block.
Of course, I do find it a little amusing that a lot of people haven't developed their imaginations to this extent yet. Hence why you're seeing all these Mary Sues pop up now, in games, when they first start to explore their creativity.
As for me, Arakor popped up in pretty much full form, prolly when I was old enough to watch and understand Sat morning cartoons.
But, and this gets back to my original point, you gotta be flexible if you wanna run stories by. And no matter how powerful your character is, yer not gonna have a story if you don't have any conflict. Sure it's nice if you can mature to the point that you can build second-string characters who don't have an ego that makes it necessary to be center of the universe. But you can craft situations where your god is willing to temporarily lower his station. Whyever -can't- you?
Let's take my Mary Sue. Arakor is pretty much an omnipotent (but not omniscient) god creature that can go wherever the hell he wants and do whatever the hell he wants. But this gets boring in a jiffy, even for him. And he's got a fritzy sense of humour, he's almost always grinning and laughing as if he's the only one who can see the grand cosmic joke of it all. So whatever does he do to create story? Basic thing - anything he wants, ie. anything that occurs to me.
He's also got a tendency to pop up limited in a single form, often a young man, and play whatever story through - even though he can get out of most bad scrapes with the deus ex machina of revealing himself to be a god, or have his magic spaceship and super-powerful disciples and hi-tech cyborgs come rescue him.
(Ok, so it's somewhat embarassing to reveal the kid frame of mind that evidently constructed this guy, but sue me, he's mine, I love him still.)
Tell me, what stops Arakor from taking ANY patron he wants, should he decide to come putzing around in the Rogue Isles? He wouldn't mind at all, that old rogue.
It's all a matter of...sucking up ego for a while. Which evidently, your characters can't even do, let alone you. :P
Speaking of old rogues, this reminds me of Ed Greenwood's Mary Sue, ie. Elminster. Again, I can't possibly see what stops El from taking a patron either. Knowing him, he'd probably shapeshift into a girl and go clamber on the laps of some of them - like Black Scorpion - as he gently manipulates them all to whatever mysterious dictates of Mystra are set.
Let's take a tough example. R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt. Who may or may not be a Mary Sue to the author, but sure freaking has become a Mary Sue-ish idol for plenty of people out there. Now I admit it's much harder to envision everyone's favorite honorable angsty drow ever 'falling' to become a villain and hence take a patron power, cos he's just so stuck up about things and well...goody two shoes. Offhand, I don't think he'd ever go willingly, but what stops you crafting up some kind of story reason?
Drizzt is sooooo sickeningly self-sacrificing that he'd do anything to save his friends or innocent lives. So whichever patron you want him to have, that patron has just kidnapped Cattie-Brie / Wulfgar / Bruenor / young nubile innocent girl and is basically holding them as a sword of Damocles over Drizzt's head. "You work for me now. These powers are a brand. They indicate you belong to me. And you better do what I say, or (whoever) bites the dust in a big tormented way. Feel free to angst about how you hate me and these new gifts of mine, but you go and do my dirty deeds all the same."
See? Just how hard can it be?
And if you develop a lil more flexibility at this, you might even one day, *gasp*, make up a character willing to play second fiddle and moxious right hand man to whichever Jabba the Hutt he wants to suck up to. (At least for the moment, until the time is right to depose the big guy and rule in his stead. *cue villainous laughter - muhahaha*)
Hating on patron powers simply because you don't have enough imagination to fit the concept into your story is the oddest reason I've heard for whining about them.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
DDO: Patch Notes
Now THIS is what I call proper patch notes.
CoX, I still love you, you know that, but sometimes we have to compare different games and forcefully point out the places where you're severely lacking. Even if your parent company is called Cryptic, and loves giving one-liners that reflect that namesake.
The Dragon's Vault patch for DDO appears to be similar to a CoX Issue, with a lot of fixes, patches, and changes. And I have to say, on just reading the patch notes, it looks a LOT more comprehensive than the stuff that pop up on CoX patch notes.
And they -know- when they have broken something alarming and have put out a pre-emptive 'we know about this, we apologize, this was unintentional, we will fix it asap' even before the screaming starts. Not like it will stop the screaming, we all know about human nature, but I'm gratified that their playtest division actually appears to have a clue that something is wrong.
Hopefully Issue 7 - which should be its spiritual equivalent - will have ample patch notes in this vein. Nerf or no nerf, I don't care.
I just really dislike the apparent cluelessness as to what was actually fixed in each patch. Not just towards the player, but sometimes it seems like the left hand of the dev has no clue what the right hand just did...
For example: Can you tell me HOW the tanker error escaped from QA notice and landed on the Test Server for players to point out: Yo, something is SERIOUSLY not right here? Fun, but seriously NOT RIGHT?
Hello. Any tanker primary attack now hits multiple targets when they were previously single-target. How much more of a glaring oversight did you need before figuring out something be wrong? An AT /emoting something and all the mobs around him dropping dead, perhaps?
I dunno. Maybe no playtester is playing tanks or something, maybe that's why no one noticed? Anyhow, since the internal server error had to be pointed out by players inferring from one set of data, I have completely zero faith in CoX playtesters. The only one that appears to have a clue as to what 'feels' right and what the real numbers are supposed to be is _Castle_.
Dunno indeed. Perhaps I'm just not aware of the oversights made by Turbine regarding DDO, but at least the patch notes read more comprehensive. They are similar to those you'd find in GW updates too. This mission is fixed. That mission tweaked. AI for this place tinkered. This skill changed. Yadda yadda. It feels like they've actually got a proper database system for recording changes, rather than a few stickied post-its on some dev's whiteboard.
CoX, I still love you, you know that, but sometimes we have to compare different games and forcefully point out the places where you're severely lacking. Even if your parent company is called Cryptic, and loves giving one-liners that reflect that namesake.
The Dragon's Vault patch for DDO appears to be similar to a CoX Issue, with a lot of fixes, patches, and changes. And I have to say, on just reading the patch notes, it looks a LOT more comprehensive than the stuff that pop up on CoX patch notes.
And they -know- when they have broken something alarming and have put out a pre-emptive 'we know about this, we apologize, this was unintentional, we will fix it asap' even before the screaming starts. Not like it will stop the screaming, we all know about human nature, but I'm gratified that their playtest division actually appears to have a clue that something is wrong.
Hopefully Issue 7 - which should be its spiritual equivalent - will have ample patch notes in this vein. Nerf or no nerf, I don't care.
I just really dislike the apparent cluelessness as to what was actually fixed in each patch. Not just towards the player, but sometimes it seems like the left hand of the dev has no clue what the right hand just did...
For example: Can you tell me HOW the tanker error escaped from QA notice and landed on the Test Server for players to point out: Yo, something is SERIOUSLY not right here? Fun, but seriously NOT RIGHT?
Hello. Any tanker primary attack now hits multiple targets when they were previously single-target. How much more of a glaring oversight did you need before figuring out something be wrong? An AT /emoting something and all the mobs around him dropping dead, perhaps?
I dunno. Maybe no playtester is playing tanks or something, maybe that's why no one noticed? Anyhow, since the internal server error had to be pointed out by players inferring from one set of data, I have completely zero faith in CoX playtesters. The only one that appears to have a clue as to what 'feels' right and what the real numbers are supposed to be is _Castle_.
Dunno indeed. Perhaps I'm just not aware of the oversights made by Turbine regarding DDO, but at least the patch notes read more comprehensive. They are similar to those you'd find in GW updates too. This mission is fixed. That mission tweaked. AI for this place tinkered. This skill changed. Yadda yadda. It feels like they've actually got a proper database system for recording changes, rather than a few stickied post-its on some dev's whiteboard.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Adventure Gaming
Whoopee, The Longest Journey: Dreamfall is going to arrive at April 14. I should probably order it online some time soon. Meanwhile, I played a few of those free Adventure Games. It's amazing but there are some really good, free ones out there.
The White Chamber
Oh wow...just...wow. This is a completely free game, but the quality is absolutely topnotch, from graphics to music to game design. There are no less than eight unique endings, all animated. Cell animation that is, which makes it even more amazing. The creators of the game (Studio Trophis) are working on a new game, also free and promised to be even better. While playing White Chamber, I actually got scared, which doesn't happen very often. The imagery in it definitely draws from deep in the human psyche. The scary part of the human psyche.
Nick Bounty, Brain Hotel
In the Noir genre, is Nick Bounty episode I, II and also Brain Hotel, which is a parody of the superhero genre. All pretty nice flash games.
There are a whole bunch at www.adventuregamers.com's Underground section. I haven't even managed to play all of them.
On the Kingdom of Loathing side, I'm still stuck fighting the Naughty Sorceress. All my damage comes from my spells, and she just keeps dodging my spell while running me out of hitpoints and mana. Even loading up on pixel potions (took me a while to get them too, bleh) didn't work. I think I'll try to get to level 13 before trying it again.
And finally on CoH, I got to 31 on Twilight Sunder and managed to get Rage permaed. Then finally got into one of the larger SG outings against Freakshow. I got to say when I rolled out that wussy, boring little tank in Atlas, I never expected him to be the powerhouse he is now with perma-rage and six-slotted EA. And I already have various ideas on respecing him to be more tanky.
Tanker naysayers are wrong, seriously. As a tank I really don't feel like I'm being insulted if I need buffs and crowd control to survive. A scrapper can be buffed up to be tankish in survivability, but good luck trying to keep aggro. As for the mantra that "everyone can be buffed/debuffed to the point where the spread out aggro is survivable", that might be true, but then you can't concentrate on beating the stuffing out of the mobs as much, and it's a lot more dangerous when there are mezzing mobs around.
It was just +1 and +2 freaks at unyielding, but it was fun. I was pretty sure we could take on +3s, because I hardly ever took a scratch fighting (before you see three aura heals going off from two paranoid emps and a paranoid rad). Thing is, with a tank, they can just buff tank, and beat things down. Without a tank (as in the past -- or without a tank who actually holds aggro), something comes and hits you and you start backpedalling or spamming heals to keep alive, and what not. Tank is an enabler and lets you fight at a higher level and with greater efficiency/safety. But no AT is needed. There is no reason why another AT shouldn't be chosen instead of a tank, so there is no need to feel insulted if a tanker isn't a "must".
Actually I don't think a scrapper can be buffed to tanker survivability. I had the chance to play with a friend's /DA scrapper and Inv/ tanker on Guernica. Same AV (Envoy of Shadows and Terra). Scrapper, bleh, had to keep spamming heals on the silly fellow. Tanker just had slow downward creeping hitpoints that needed a slow refilling and it was a lot more relaxed as we pounded the AVs down.
I really feel like griping about Psi enemies though. If psi used to be the near invulnerable tankers' hole in the armour, then I really don't understand why every tom, dick, and harry mob has psi damage nowadays. Especially if you look at CoV mobs -- those Arachnos do plenty of psi damage. I got sidekicked up to fight Mother Mayhem. I think for most of the mobs it was hoarfrost and inspirations keeping me alive. As for the AV herself...*cough* Let's just say when a full tray of lucks (and being fed lucks by other people), and a temp power (wedding band) are actually doing the tanking, not any of my primary, it was quite utterly silly. That and the controller spamming o2 boost on me. Whenever I died the regen scrapper would try to tank and she survived better too. Except that she couldn't keep aggro off the controller and blaster even with her scrapper taunt. So I guess I was there to spam taunt >_<
The White Chamber
Oh wow...just...wow. This is a completely free game, but the quality is absolutely topnotch, from graphics to music to game design. There are no less than eight unique endings, all animated. Cell animation that is, which makes it even more amazing. The creators of the game (Studio Trophis) are working on a new game, also free and promised to be even better. While playing White Chamber, I actually got scared, which doesn't happen very often. The imagery in it definitely draws from deep in the human psyche. The scary part of the human psyche.
Nick Bounty, Brain Hotel
In the Noir genre, is Nick Bounty episode I, II and also Brain Hotel, which is a parody of the superhero genre. All pretty nice flash games.
There are a whole bunch at www.adventuregamers.com's Underground section. I haven't even managed to play all of them.
On the Kingdom of Loathing side, I'm still stuck fighting the Naughty Sorceress. All my damage comes from my spells, and she just keeps dodging my spell while running me out of hitpoints and mana. Even loading up on pixel potions (took me a while to get them too, bleh) didn't work. I think I'll try to get to level 13 before trying it again.
And finally on CoH, I got to 31 on Twilight Sunder and managed to get Rage permaed. Then finally got into one of the larger SG outings against Freakshow. I got to say when I rolled out that wussy, boring little tank in Atlas, I never expected him to be the powerhouse he is now with perma-rage and six-slotted EA. And I already have various ideas on respecing him to be more tanky.
Tanker naysayers are wrong, seriously. As a tank I really don't feel like I'm being insulted if I need buffs and crowd control to survive. A scrapper can be buffed up to be tankish in survivability, but good luck trying to keep aggro. As for the mantra that "everyone can be buffed/debuffed to the point where the spread out aggro is survivable", that might be true, but then you can't concentrate on beating the stuffing out of the mobs as much, and it's a lot more dangerous when there are mezzing mobs around.
It was just +1 and +2 freaks at unyielding, but it was fun. I was pretty sure we could take on +3s, because I hardly ever took a scratch fighting (before you see three aura heals going off from two paranoid emps and a paranoid rad). Thing is, with a tank, they can just buff tank, and beat things down. Without a tank (as in the past -- or without a tank who actually holds aggro), something comes and hits you and you start backpedalling or spamming heals to keep alive, and what not. Tank is an enabler and lets you fight at a higher level and with greater efficiency/safety. But no AT is needed. There is no reason why another AT shouldn't be chosen instead of a tank, so there is no need to feel insulted if a tanker isn't a "must".
Actually I don't think a scrapper can be buffed to tanker survivability. I had the chance to play with a friend's /DA scrapper and Inv/ tanker on Guernica. Same AV (Envoy of Shadows and Terra). Scrapper, bleh, had to keep spamming heals on the silly fellow. Tanker just had slow downward creeping hitpoints that needed a slow refilling and it was a lot more relaxed as we pounded the AVs down.
I really feel like griping about Psi enemies though. If psi used to be the near invulnerable tankers' hole in the armour, then I really don't understand why every tom, dick, and harry mob has psi damage nowadays. Especially if you look at CoV mobs -- those Arachnos do plenty of psi damage. I got sidekicked up to fight Mother Mayhem. I think for most of the mobs it was hoarfrost and inspirations keeping me alive. As for the AV herself...*cough* Let's just say when a full tray of lucks (and being fed lucks by other people), and a temp power (wedding band) are actually doing the tanking, not any of my primary, it was quite utterly silly. That and the controller spamming o2 boost on me. Whenever I died the regen scrapper would try to tank and she survived better too. Except that she couldn't keep aggro off the controller and blaster even with her scrapper taunt. So I guess I was there to spam taunt >_<
Monday, April 03, 2006
DDO: I can solo!
*muhahahahaha*
Now I get this game. Y'see, the really biiig long quests you want to do as a team. There's probably no way you want to solo through one of those. Think of them as a task force. Lots of chapters, lots of maps, lots of opportunity for each class to shine. They give you pretty darn good xp, a LOT of loot, and a sweet item reward at the end of it.
Little wonder why all the pleveling-minded, the farmers, are all after repeatedly doing these series of quests. "Waterworks 1-4" is the first. "Steam tunnels" is apparently the next one. It's also like a main storyline in that you unlock areas after completing them.
The trick I've found to soloing a cleric is twofold. First, you need to be at least a level higher than the quest you're trying to complete. Being even level tends to hurt, a lot. So just join one of these big quests, unlock stuff, heal people and be teamy until you get some levels.
I'm proudly level 3 now, and have my level 2 spells. Ah, what a day. The achievement is indeed sweet. Cure moderate wounds is much freaking better than cure light wounds (15 hp on average, vs 7 or so) at only 1.5 times the cost. My mana bar has developed a LOT more, and I can now afford to stop being stingy and only saving up for heal spells.
I'm now experimenting with different buffing spells. Bless is quite nice to keep spammed on a group, it lasts for 2 mins at lvl 2 and 3 mins at lvl 3.
And the secondfold thing I discovered is a sweet little self-buff lasting 1 min called "Divine Favor." It only affects the casting cleric, improves your weapon luck bonuses and damage apparently, says the help.
Well, all I know it's like a freaking Fortitude. It turns me into a vicious little killing machine. I can take on mobs just like a fighter with it on, much less pathetic missing, a lot more nasty hits. And it is my second secret to soloing.
I now have it permanently enshrined on my button bar.
I first discovered its power when I took a wrong turn and ran up the wrong corridor as the rest of the team. And triggered a kobold ambush. I was pretty sure I was going to die. I think everyone else thought so too. Then I noticed I had this spell on my bar, so I cast it, cast bless, and starting flailing around with my mace. Spam heals on myself whenever I dropped to half hp. People were still debating on voice whether I needed help and should they go to me...
...when I looked all around me and saw there was nothing else moving. :P One final cast to get my hp back to normal, teamchat 'coming over'.
Damn, but I felt BUFF. Especially since a ranger later fell afoul of this encounter area and ended up trapped in a corner with a sliver of hp left and no way out except to get a rescue from team.
Yea, today I decided to give my newfound level 1 buffs a try (Haven't had time to experiment with level 2 stuff yet) and went soloing some lvl 1 and 2 quests. I even turned down two blind invites because I was having too much fun by myself.
As I said, DDO dungeons really play better when you take it slow and are in control of the whole situation and can enjoy the newness by yourself. Not chasing madly and huffing and puffing after people, staring intently at their health bars as they dash through traps, ambushes, hitting random levers, wheels, valves to do this and that because they can run this dungeon blindfolded. *twitch*
You know, there is nothing like the feeling of being a true cleric owning a dungeon crawl when you can beat the mobs up with a big bad mace (I got so carried away I broke my light mace +1 on some ooze and had to use a masterwork quarterstaff for some time), heal and buff yourself, solve traps and puzzles in your own time, and did I mention turning undead?
See, the thing about turning, even on pen and paper...It always works better if you have a high level cleric and low level undead mobs. The whole 'D' for destroyed thing. As a level 3, I found out that I can turn 1 and 2 hit dice undead. How convenient then that the undead were lvl 1s and 2s zombies - I saved the turning for the zombies because they're immune to blunt weapons, whereas I could do evil things to skeleton bones. Not to mention, I forgot to bring slashing weapons for zombies, so I improvised.
(This is the fun of soloing. I'm not a ranged person, but I did have a crossbow to shoot some faraway mobs full of bolts with. Then I ran out, and searching madly through my inventory, found some Darts + 1 which worked very well. If I was teamed, the rangers would have shot 'em full of holes before I needed to improvise anything.)
It worked out like a great story. The first quest I did was a level 1 dungeon. Run around a square crypt, break open 51 desecrated coffins, pound the stuffing out of the skeletons that emerged. In three corners of the crypt, there was a tunnel leading down to 'sergeants' of the city guard, which were zombies. Tried to hit the first with a mace, worked badly, click on "Turn Undead", this great white animation popped up and bang, the zombie just vanished so fast, the DM narrator was giving me the next story text. Talk about a classy finish. Repeat for the other two sergeants. One last Turn Undead left. Go in to the Captain of the Guard, and divine favor up, pound the stuffing out of him too. I guess I could have turned and destroyed him, but I wanted a boss fight. :P
The next time I used Turn Undead, it was more than great. I was doing a long level 2 dungeon, just killing a lot of kobolds, when I turned a corner, and saw some kobold fire-throwers in the distance. I race up to get near them, and suddenly I notice a stirring in the green sewer water between me and the kobolds. Then about 7-8 undead pop out of the water. All looking greenish and zombie-ish, rather than skeleton-boney.
AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Immediate backtrack, reversing direction, all my thoughts a-flutter.
"Oh no, what should I do, I have no slashing weapons, and shit, there are a LOT of them."
Just as I back through a doorway, I realize something. Hey, I'm kiting them just like a bunch of Vahzilok. They are just stumbling forward and grouping up slowly. Cackling, I make my stand in the doorway, and run into the arms of 5 assorted zombies+skeletons, with my shield up to protect myself from blows. Give them a few seconds to gather nearer, and then "TURN UNDEAD."
Thwong, goes the sound and the blinding white animation. And when the smoke clears, I am the only one still standing.
*flex*
Oh yea, being a servant of the divine RULES.
Now given a lot more confidence, I run up, let the last two zombies gather near me, and let my 'divine symbol' kick their asses with another turn undead. Then I sprinkle on 'divine favor' and proceed to knock around the two kobold fire-throwers who have been peppering me and my half-plate armor with molotov cocktails while all this was going on.
I can't wait till I find -full- plate armor, preferably enchanted.
Yes, and this reminds me of the other sweet thing about DDO. Not all stuff looks alike. Functionally, they are the same, but a lot of the sets of armor and weapons I've picked up have cosmetic differences. So you get to customize yourself a bit more, by keeping the junk you like and selling the stuff you don't like.
I had previously been wearing some half-plate which was very bodyhugging and made me look like a rogue, clad in apparent skintight leather which was actually bits of plate. Not my cuppa tea, but when that's the best AC you're getting, you're wearing it. Then I found some half-plate which was a LOT more cleric-y to my tastes. Top half is like golden armor, bottom half is white robes and chainmail. You can guess how fast the other outfit hit the store shelves.
Fact is, I like the look of this set so much, I doubt I'm going to sell it. I'll prolly keep it in the bank as a 'dress' costume should I ever get better armor.
Fun. Now that's how you use loot well in a graphical game to appeal to one's vanity. S'not even any special armor, no magic, not even expensive masterwork, but the art people did a good job.
Now I get this game. Y'see, the really biiig long quests you want to do as a team. There's probably no way you want to solo through one of those. Think of them as a task force. Lots of chapters, lots of maps, lots of opportunity for each class to shine. They give you pretty darn good xp, a LOT of loot, and a sweet item reward at the end of it.
Little wonder why all the pleveling-minded, the farmers, are all after repeatedly doing these series of quests. "Waterworks 1-4" is the first. "Steam tunnels" is apparently the next one. It's also like a main storyline in that you unlock areas after completing them.
The trick I've found to soloing a cleric is twofold. First, you need to be at least a level higher than the quest you're trying to complete. Being even level tends to hurt, a lot. So just join one of these big quests, unlock stuff, heal people and be teamy until you get some levels.
I'm proudly level 3 now, and have my level 2 spells. Ah, what a day. The achievement is indeed sweet. Cure moderate wounds is much freaking better than cure light wounds (15 hp on average, vs 7 or so) at only 1.5 times the cost. My mana bar has developed a LOT more, and I can now afford to stop being stingy and only saving up for heal spells.
I'm now experimenting with different buffing spells. Bless is quite nice to keep spammed on a group, it lasts for 2 mins at lvl 2 and 3 mins at lvl 3.
And the secondfold thing I discovered is a sweet little self-buff lasting 1 min called "Divine Favor." It only affects the casting cleric, improves your weapon luck bonuses and damage apparently, says the help.
Well, all I know it's like a freaking Fortitude. It turns me into a vicious little killing machine. I can take on mobs just like a fighter with it on, much less pathetic missing, a lot more nasty hits. And it is my second secret to soloing.
I now have it permanently enshrined on my button bar.
I first discovered its power when I took a wrong turn and ran up the wrong corridor as the rest of the team. And triggered a kobold ambush. I was pretty sure I was going to die. I think everyone else thought so too. Then I noticed I had this spell on my bar, so I cast it, cast bless, and starting flailing around with my mace. Spam heals on myself whenever I dropped to half hp. People were still debating on voice whether I needed help and should they go to me...
...when I looked all around me and saw there was nothing else moving. :P One final cast to get my hp back to normal, teamchat 'coming over'.
Damn, but I felt BUFF. Especially since a ranger later fell afoul of this encounter area and ended up trapped in a corner with a sliver of hp left and no way out except to get a rescue from team.
Yea, today I decided to give my newfound level 1 buffs a try (Haven't had time to experiment with level 2 stuff yet) and went soloing some lvl 1 and 2 quests. I even turned down two blind invites because I was having too much fun by myself.
As I said, DDO dungeons really play better when you take it slow and are in control of the whole situation and can enjoy the newness by yourself. Not chasing madly and huffing and puffing after people, staring intently at their health bars as they dash through traps, ambushes, hitting random levers, wheels, valves to do this and that because they can run this dungeon blindfolded. *twitch*
You know, there is nothing like the feeling of being a true cleric owning a dungeon crawl when you can beat the mobs up with a big bad mace (I got so carried away I broke my light mace +1 on some ooze and had to use a masterwork quarterstaff for some time), heal and buff yourself, solve traps and puzzles in your own time, and did I mention turning undead?
See, the thing about turning, even on pen and paper...It always works better if you have a high level cleric and low level undead mobs. The whole 'D' for destroyed thing. As a level 3, I found out that I can turn 1 and 2 hit dice undead. How convenient then that the undead were lvl 1s and 2s zombies - I saved the turning for the zombies because they're immune to blunt weapons, whereas I could do evil things to skeleton bones. Not to mention, I forgot to bring slashing weapons for zombies, so I improvised.
(This is the fun of soloing. I'm not a ranged person, but I did have a crossbow to shoot some faraway mobs full of bolts with. Then I ran out, and searching madly through my inventory, found some Darts + 1 which worked very well. If I was teamed, the rangers would have shot 'em full of holes before I needed to improvise anything.)
It worked out like a great story. The first quest I did was a level 1 dungeon. Run around a square crypt, break open 51 desecrated coffins, pound the stuffing out of the skeletons that emerged. In three corners of the crypt, there was a tunnel leading down to 'sergeants' of the city guard, which were zombies. Tried to hit the first with a mace, worked badly, click on "Turn Undead", this great white animation popped up and bang, the zombie just vanished so fast, the DM narrator was giving me the next story text. Talk about a classy finish. Repeat for the other two sergeants. One last Turn Undead left. Go in to the Captain of the Guard, and divine favor up, pound the stuffing out of him too. I guess I could have turned and destroyed him, but I wanted a boss fight. :P
The next time I used Turn Undead, it was more than great. I was doing a long level 2 dungeon, just killing a lot of kobolds, when I turned a corner, and saw some kobold fire-throwers in the distance. I race up to get near them, and suddenly I notice a stirring in the green sewer water between me and the kobolds. Then about 7-8 undead pop out of the water. All looking greenish and zombie-ish, rather than skeleton-boney.
AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Immediate backtrack, reversing direction, all my thoughts a-flutter.
"Oh no, what should I do, I have no slashing weapons, and shit, there are a LOT of them."
Just as I back through a doorway, I realize something. Hey, I'm kiting them just like a bunch of Vahzilok. They are just stumbling forward and grouping up slowly. Cackling, I make my stand in the doorway, and run into the arms of 5 assorted zombies+skeletons, with my shield up to protect myself from blows. Give them a few seconds to gather nearer, and then "TURN UNDEAD."
Thwong, goes the sound and the blinding white animation. And when the smoke clears, I am the only one still standing.
*flex*
Oh yea, being a servant of the divine RULES.
Now given a lot more confidence, I run up, let the last two zombies gather near me, and let my 'divine symbol' kick their asses with another turn undead. Then I sprinkle on 'divine favor' and proceed to knock around the two kobold fire-throwers who have been peppering me and my half-plate armor with molotov cocktails while all this was going on.
I can't wait till I find -full- plate armor, preferably enchanted.
Yes, and this reminds me of the other sweet thing about DDO. Not all stuff looks alike. Functionally, they are the same, but a lot of the sets of armor and weapons I've picked up have cosmetic differences. So you get to customize yourself a bit more, by keeping the junk you like and selling the stuff you don't like.
I had previously been wearing some half-plate which was very bodyhugging and made me look like a rogue, clad in apparent skintight leather which was actually bits of plate. Not my cuppa tea, but when that's the best AC you're getting, you're wearing it. Then I found some half-plate which was a LOT more cleric-y to my tastes. Top half is like golden armor, bottom half is white robes and chainmail. You can guess how fast the other outfit hit the store shelves.
Fact is, I like the look of this set so much, I doubt I'm going to sell it. I'll prolly keep it in the bank as a 'dress' costume should I ever get better armor.
Fun. Now that's how you use loot well in a graphical game to appeal to one's vanity. S'not even any special armor, no magic, not even expensive masterwork, but the art people did a good job.
Dominator Fest
About 9+ people showed up for the Dominator Meet on Test, with a couple more trickling in later, while others had to leave early.
I must say, the one thing I've concluded from meeting these guys...Dominator players are like cats. :P We evidently like something unique, we're pretty stubborn and set in our ways, we're pretty aggressive (clawing and scratching and all that), and we may hang together but pretty much still fly solo. :)
Our PvE foray, well, let's just say 515A would have had a field day mocking us. *cackles* We may have all the cc in the world, but it's not 100% damage mitigation, which means something or someone was taking hits.
We went for a heroic Longbow mission in Warburg (no one to get pwned on the Test Warburg, alas) and managed single spawns pretty well. The problem arose with overaggro - and pets and creepers and so on can create a lot of aggy. The firing back of Longbow Wardens could get pretty ugly to a team with no inherent mez resist or buff/debuff/heals. We total party wiped a few times. :P Much to everyone's amusement. Pace was pretty aggressive, if we took it slower and wormholed stuff, etc, no problems - t'was when everyone started running around and starting fights that things could get a lil chaotic.
Then we tried a Snaptooth mission on Relentless. Equal hilarity. TPK on the Snaptooth ambushes repeated times. We reset the mission each time cos we wanted to see if we could devise a strategy for holding off +2 and +3 ambush waves, while taking down Snappy. Very hard because no one could agree on what to do. We'd agree on one strat, and then when actually executing it, people would look at the situation and start running off to do their own cc thing, sucking up too much aggro, wiping and so on. :P And some strats pretty much resulted in wiping if one faithfully followed it anyhow.
Eventually, we somehow pulled it off by a bunch of independent dominators going after Snappy, while some bravely suicidal dominators trapped the ambush around a corner. Now I'm a coward, so I don't do the bravely suicidal stuff.
Unfortunately, I happen to be a loyal supportive coward, so when Liliaceae threw her creepers around the ambush, I waited out several ticks, and then threw down ice slick when I figured creepers was just about wearing off. Doubly unfortunately, she managed to suck up too much aggro and then died. Leaving me the proud aggro owner of about 30+ Redcaps and Arachnos (I kid you not, there was two ambushes' worth in there) bouncing up and down on my ice slick.
Hahahaha. Coward turns hero in order to preserve one's own skin. Chomp down two huge defence inspirations, one resist, silently screaming in panic. Shiver the whole lot of them, arctic air running madly, pray really hard some other dominators are with me and mentally will the ice slick button to recharge faster.
Long story short, we held 'em off long enough for the fire doms to do evil things to Snaptooth and win the mission. Then we got totally overrun by the ambush again. :P
After that, a bunch had to go, so we decided to go for piccies. Again, the cat tendencies came out. We just couldn't figure out where to go. :P We agreed, "Ok, the pyramid." And then five minutes later, all of us were on different spots on goodness-knows-which pyramid. I gave up, and just teamchatted, "following Lili", and stuck with her... Some minutes later, everyone had meandered and congregated around the steadily aggregating group. Against the side of a pyramid - not the world's most scenic location, but heck, we were all together somewhere. I didn't dare suggest moving somewhere else. :P T'was like herding cats.
Lili had to quit after that and then there were six.
We went for some arena team pvp after that. And I must say, we had a blast doing that.
There's nothing like being evenly matched, squishy and mez-unresistant enough for our damage to matter, and so on.
Now granted, we weren't really evenly matched. We had a 33 dominator amongst our group of 40s, and every team he was on, lost. :P I tell you, levels matter. :( Not sure if the arena auto-exemps levels, we tried, but dunno.
Our third and last pvp bout, he wasn't on my team, and that was a blast. :P I actually managed to fire off domination in that bout. Quite thrilling. Scored the most kills too.
Certainly garnered a LOT of respect for all the dominator primaries I've seen though. They were mentioning that ice slows were really evil. I felt the full blast of fire damage, with imps and all, and that was evil too. Plant confuse drove me nuts, and I -know- I froze a few teammates :P
And the grav/energy who came along was really good at what he did. Wormhole is sweet. And he won my heart when I was frozen by two opponents and he came along, and for some reason no one attacked, then he fired off his bind saying "They have been phased for your protection." Ah kewl. :P And yea, my hold wore off, and we got them. Dual Total Focus is mean. :P
I must try a plant and a grav some time. The only non-represented was a mind dom, so alas, I cannot ooze about how kewl it is. I will just have to try it some other time. :)
I must say, the one thing I've concluded from meeting these guys...Dominator players are like cats. :P We evidently like something unique, we're pretty stubborn and set in our ways, we're pretty aggressive (clawing and scratching and all that), and we may hang together but pretty much still fly solo. :)
Our PvE foray, well, let's just say 515A would have had a field day mocking us. *cackles* We may have all the cc in the world, but it's not 100% damage mitigation, which means something or someone was taking hits.
We went for a heroic Longbow mission in Warburg (no one to get pwned on the Test Warburg, alas) and managed single spawns pretty well. The problem arose with overaggro - and pets and creepers and so on can create a lot of aggy. The firing back of Longbow Wardens could get pretty ugly to a team with no inherent mez resist or buff/debuff/heals. We total party wiped a few times. :P Much to everyone's amusement. Pace was pretty aggressive, if we took it slower and wormholed stuff, etc, no problems - t'was when everyone started running around and starting fights that things could get a lil chaotic.
Then we tried a Snaptooth mission on Relentless. Equal hilarity. TPK on the Snaptooth ambushes repeated times. We reset the mission each time cos we wanted to see if we could devise a strategy for holding off +2 and +3 ambush waves, while taking down Snappy. Very hard because no one could agree on what to do. We'd agree on one strat, and then when actually executing it, people would look at the situation and start running off to do their own cc thing, sucking up too much aggro, wiping and so on. :P And some strats pretty much resulted in wiping if one faithfully followed it anyhow.
Eventually, we somehow pulled it off by a bunch of independent dominators going after Snappy, while some bravely suicidal dominators trapped the ambush around a corner. Now I'm a coward, so I don't do the bravely suicidal stuff.
Unfortunately, I happen to be a loyal supportive coward, so when Liliaceae threw her creepers around the ambush, I waited out several ticks, and then threw down ice slick when I figured creepers was just about wearing off. Doubly unfortunately, she managed to suck up too much aggro and then died. Leaving me the proud aggro owner of about 30+ Redcaps and Arachnos (I kid you not, there was two ambushes' worth in there) bouncing up and down on my ice slick.
Hahahaha. Coward turns hero in order to preserve one's own skin. Chomp down two huge defence inspirations, one resist, silently screaming in panic. Shiver the whole lot of them, arctic air running madly, pray really hard some other dominators are with me and mentally will the ice slick button to recharge faster.
Long story short, we held 'em off long enough for the fire doms to do evil things to Snaptooth and win the mission. Then we got totally overrun by the ambush again. :P
After that, a bunch had to go, so we decided to go for piccies. Again, the cat tendencies came out. We just couldn't figure out where to go. :P We agreed, "Ok, the pyramid." And then five minutes later, all of us were on different spots on goodness-knows-which pyramid. I gave up, and just teamchatted, "following Lili", and stuck with her... Some minutes later, everyone had meandered and congregated around the steadily aggregating group. Against the side of a pyramid - not the world's most scenic location, but heck, we were all together somewhere. I didn't dare suggest moving somewhere else. :P T'was like herding cats.
Lili had to quit after that and then there were six.
We went for some arena team pvp after that. And I must say, we had a blast doing that.
There's nothing like being evenly matched, squishy and mez-unresistant enough for our damage to matter, and so on.
Now granted, we weren't really evenly matched. We had a 33 dominator amongst our group of 40s, and every team he was on, lost. :P I tell you, levels matter. :( Not sure if the arena auto-exemps levels, we tried, but dunno.
Our third and last pvp bout, he wasn't on my team, and that was a blast. :P I actually managed to fire off domination in that bout. Quite thrilling. Scored the most kills too.
Certainly garnered a LOT of respect for all the dominator primaries I've seen though. They were mentioning that ice slows were really evil. I felt the full blast of fire damage, with imps and all, and that was evil too. Plant confuse drove me nuts, and I -know- I froze a few teammates :P
And the grav/energy who came along was really good at what he did. Wormhole is sweet. And he won my heart when I was frozen by two opponents and he came along, and for some reason no one attacked, then he fired off his bind saying "They have been phased for your protection." Ah kewl. :P And yea, my hold wore off, and we got them. Dual Total Focus is mean. :P
I must try a plant and a grav some time. The only non-represented was a mind dom, so alas, I cannot ooze about how kewl it is. I will just have to try it some other time. :)