8-Ball on MMO Choice

Tobold: Do Players Choose MMORPGS Rationally?

Magic 8-ball says:

"My friend plays it."                                                       (Camaraderie / Relationships)

"Gee, this looks like fun."                                               (Snap Judgement via Apperance)

"XX feature seems cool and awesome."                         (Bought into the Hype)

"Maybe this MMO will be better than the last one."        (Hope)

Not that I'm guilty of any of the above... Really... Honest...

Soylent Green is PEOPLE!! Part 2

Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!

Picked up Dragon Age again. Gave up on Haven and went to Orzammar. Decided not to muck around in the mazey, dungeony parts and tried to make a beeline to where I'm supposed to go.

Good parts:

The Lost Roads definitely look inspired by Moria. Armies of darkspawn marching below, a giant gate, and a bone-dragon-thingy-archdemon flying around. Now all we need is the Archdemon (Balrog) and the Grey Warden (Grey Gandalf) to slug it out and fall into the fiery pits of the Deep Trenches (Depths of Moria). Naaaaah...not going to to happen.

Bad parts:

Spoiler...

Spoiler, I'm warning you...

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Darkspawn is PEOPLE!!!

I had the notion that Dragon Age is some kind of horror fantasy, with what the blood splotches, mishappen/swollen/fleshy abominations. And yes, what is horrifying to people can be generally irrational. But. This is just wacky. This is like Evil Dead meets Baldur's Gate meets Alien.

So darkspawn blood is poisonous. People who come into contact with it go insane and die. Right?

Kinda.

Apparently, as is revealed in Orzammar, contact with darkspawn blood (virus) causes humans/dwarves/elves to mutate into flesh-eating darkspawn(become flesh-eating zombies). Male sentients go insane. Female sentients turn into ginormous bloated darkspawn-spawning queens.

Anyway. The process goes like this. Darkspawn captures sentients. Darkspawn eat some males, then gang-rape the females and force them to ingest darkspawn tissue. Females mutate and eat the rest of the males, then keep eating and eating until they become gigantic. They then give birth continously to more darkspawn. Eggs or life-birth? No idea. Different types of sentients turn into different types of queen darkspawns to give birth to different types of darkspawn.

*facepalm*

This really doesn't make sense if you look at it from a Hive perspective, that the whole process is supposed to resemble. Sex organs on disposable drones consume energy, and is wasteful. In a sensible case, the queen darkspawn would just give birth to sexless/female clones. After all, birthing male darkspawn requires sperm, a huge storage of sperm. Unless it's supposed to be one giant incestuous orgy where the queen darkspawn will give birth to tons of male darkspawn who then inseminate her continuously to provide a steady source of sperm to give birth to more male darkspawn.

Why do the darkspawn need sexual reproduction and DNA diversity anyway? The whole enterprise is doomed from the start. They take over humans, humans die off eventually, only darkspawn are left, so no new queens, and then the darkspawn die out.

I guess one of the huge horror themes people have in their minds is (for men) watching their women get gang-raped, turned into cannibals, and then eaten by said cannibals. Or (for women) getting gang-raped, turned into cannibalistic bloated immobile baby-making machines.

Right...

*facepalm*

One wonders which of the bioware developers came up with this idea.

DMing in an MMO

Finally managed to do a "dungeon-mastering" session with my RP-supergroup. Somehow everything is now anti-climatic and I'm in a funk.

There was a lot of work put in collecting bank missions on an alt, finding a coherent plot, writing an Mission Architect mission, getting people to know of a time, then hitting another event that day and moving it, and then trying to get people to even join the team...

Then frantic switching of alts trying to squeeze my way back into a full-server Virtue, sending tells to each member feeding them clues and instructions to act, and on top of it being an active member of the team fighting mobs.

Then everything was over. Delete useless alt. Delete Mission Architect mission. Clear the contacts of the bank missions.

Then throw a minor (secret) tantrum that only four people turned up and one left early.

Mope around, stay quiet on the Sg channel because I'm feel completely drained emotionally.

Then start thinking if I want to run another session, and what the story is going to be...

Forward to an FPS Future: Global Agenda

So the big news is that APB crashed and burned and closed. Mostly due to RL company dysfunction and mismanagement. Shock reactions have circled around the blogosphere for a couple days but no one is fantastically surprised. Just fatalistic. "Shortest MMO evar," and all that.

Global Agenda has jumped in, and sent some people - goodness knows how and through what means they got their emails - an opportunistic advert that commiserates in the fall of APB as a fellow MMOFPS, and invites the now server-less APB players to try out the GA trial, and a 30% discount on the box price.

Global Agenda went subscription-less a while back. A clever decision for them. The box price has also dropped to around $29.99. A 30% discount makes it around $21.

This is a rather tempting offer by any means, so I perked up and decided to give the Steam demo a try, despite not being a homeless APB player.

Purely personal opinion, but Global Agenda is Tabula Rasa done right.

More on that later.

Back to A World: Everquest 2

This weekend sees me trying out two trials that can't be more different, and yet the same in terms of MMO gameplay.

Massively posed the question of the F2P (or in more semantic terms, pay-as-you-play) models of LOTRO and EQ2X - which won?

In typical fanboi fashion, since I was playing and enjoying LOTRO at the time, with no monthly subscription, one is inclined to give the trophy to said game. However, in an attempt to be fair, and since I have always wanted to try the Everquest brand, I pulled up the EQ2X faq to consider giving it a shot.

Alas, the faq lost me at the race/class limitation, which is such an essential part of why one plays MMOs that I can't imagine placing any such limits on it unless it's a prestige class or race. Especially for Everquest, since the beauty of the oldschool model is in the flexible customisation option of race and class for your avatar.

The pricing plan for this server's ruleset is also off-putting. One would think that the price of a monthly subscription on these servers would net you everything, but no, the race limitation is still in effect. What the heck? They have essentially made all non-humanoid races into 'prestige' cosmetic items to be paid for.

All new players are now funneled into this EQ2X server. The old 14-day trial is no longer in effect, so the only way to access the subscription servers now is via a refer-a-friend trial. That's kinda slimy. Goodness knows if they will convert all the monthly servers if EQ2X takes off.

Still, it occurred to me that I had previously signed up for a 14-day trial of EQ2 about the same time I was giving Vanguard a spin. I made a SOE Station account and everything. The nice thing about that trial was that it only activated on logging into the game.

To my surprise, that trial was still active and claimable. This was a good chance to finally sample the world of Everquest. Helping my resolve along was a coffee table book commemorating 10 years of Everquest 1 and 2 that I stumbled over at the National Library - lots of pretty fantasy art pictures, not many real screenshots (I suppose the graphics quality wasn't up to snuff), one or two nice developer insights consisting mostly of stories that spoke of more nostalgic, MUD-like times.

For example, one developer who had just been made a GM, took his brand new level 1 gnome character out for a spin in Everquest after having carefully toggling on the GM tag and all his special functions.... And accidentally hit forward for a couple seconds too long, plummeting out a window and splatting on to the steps of the building below in front of two bemused normal players, who went "Um, you ok, dude?" and offered him rezes and power-leveling.

Then there were the stories of the giant riddling gnome, played by the head developer, who would port in front of players and ask them riddles. Get it right, and he would give you fun gifts. Get it wrong, and he would kill you (and rez you after that).

It was all rather reminiscient of the good/bad ol' MUD days of imm slaying and trans-in CRs. It also mentioned the difference between EQ1 and EQ2, the first taking more genre conventions from MUDs and designed on purpose for forced grouping (such a taboo term now), and the second with a mind towards catering for increased soloability.

Well. Increased soloing options in EQ2? By design? That sounds rather encouraging, in this newfangled day and age. So what the heck, I would finally take time to taste the world of Norrath.

---

The choice of servers was an interesting experience in itself. There were PvP servers, and PvE as per normal. (Though I have to wonder about how new citizenry not exposed to MMOs would comprehend the difference in terms. See this fascinating thread from LOTRO about a completely new to MMO player. He points out many of the genre conventions we take for granted.) RP and non RP. 

And something mind-boggling known as Exchange Servers. Wut?

What is Exchange? There was a PvP Exchange server and a PvE Exchange server. I sat there, scratching my head, wondering if I would be forever gimping myself by going exchange or non. Could it mean something about server transfers maybe? Were you able to swap characters in some way? After aborted attempts to understand something so enigmatic, I resorted to Alt-Tab googling.

It took some hefty googling, but I eventually gathered that SOE has something going known as Station Exchange, wherein one can 'exchange' in-game items for real world cash. Buying gear via RMT by any other name. Ok, scratch those servers then. It's nice they have a server for people who like to play that way. Just not for me.

Seeing as it is a 14-day trial, I didn’t agonize too much over the server I picked eventually. There was only one roleplaying server option that wasn’t full PvP, Lucan D’something, so I picked that on the offchance that it would have a more pleasant environment. (Turns out there is another more crowded, more official roleplaying server known as Antonia Bayle or something like that, but well, not a biggy.)

Race-wise, I just -had- to be an Iksar. Wtf Comics gave me a thorough if lore-subversive coverage of Everquest races and *twitch* lizardmen by any other name...

(I looked at the dragon-man, or Sarnak, for a while. About 3% less cool, so Iksar it was.)

Classes were a substantially significant challenge, Everquest appears to have a gazillion nonstandard named classes similar to MUD days of yore. Well, Iksar were evil, according to the lore, so all the good-aligned classes were handily sifted out of the picture. Though all the mage subclasses sounded quite interesting, prior preference has indicated that I don't really take well to squishy ranged casters as mains. Bards were right out.

I drooled over the Fury and Defiler (druid and shaman types) for a while, was tempted by the brigand and assassin (rogue types), seriously considered the Shadowknight (rumored to be somewhat OP) and settled on something that sounded straightforward and simple for a tall strong not-too-sophisticated fighter-type Ikstar - the Bruiser.

Turned out to be one of the most serendipitous choices ever.

Being all evil and such, I was given the choice of two hometowns, a place built by the Sarnaks, and Neriak populated by dark elves. Given my limited knowledge of Everquest lore, wherein I had vaguely heard that the Sarnaks enslaved the Iksar once upon a time, and by the look of the two start areas (they helpfully provided a picture. The Sarnak place was grey, mountainous, kinda gloomy red lava. Neriak was distinctly purple and drow-ishly Evil), I went for Neriak.

Dumped off in a small village adjacent to Neriak, known as Hate's Envy, one was introduced to the standard tutorial quest NPCs. There were distinct user interface differences. Double-clicking was apparently the way to activate stuff, though by default, single-clicking has now been enabled. Left-clicking, mind you, not right clicking like WoW or LOTRO.

NPCs produced speech bubbles and often engaged in some text-heavy conversation for a few branches before offering you the standard quest popup.

Building doors and cave entrances, most startlingly, did not bring up a loading screen before showing you the next instance. It was all connected!

And sophisticated connection at that. Deep cavernous buildings similar to Oblivion or Morrowind. Tunnels that rival City of Heroes 'cake room' tunnels without any prior load screens. Load screens come up per zone (Darklight Wood was one, the city of Neriak another) but within the zone itself are very 3-dimensional buildings and caverns. 

Yes, I am aware I am coming at this game all backwards in time, since many others have whined about the frequent instancing and subsequent lack of immersive 'world' feeling in modern MMOs. Helping the sensation of world immersion along was the choice of scale to the world.

Everquest 2 puts the character and surrounding buildings as significantly larger than say, World of Warcraft. It's about the same scale as Age of Conan. The character takes up a good 4+ inches of screen real estate. World of Warcraft and City of Heroes are on a mid-range scale, imo. Warhammer is somewhere in between here as well. Smallest of all are Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars, wherein I am most often scrolled out till the avatar is about 1.5-2 inches on the screen.

The graphics were nothing spectacular, but passable. The one memorable stand out feature for me, the thing I'll point to when mentioning Everquest 2, are the quality of the character animations. I hear the bruiser has especially good ones. They are crazily expressive. And smooth.

By level 10, I was skill chaining attack skills and looking like a kung fu master with roundkicks, big swings of a maul, and other such dramatic effects. Swimming is fantastic, the Iksar takes on a streamlined body shape and sways side to side like a fish or crocodile. (They also get free underwater breathing, I think, which is cool. And an aquavision skill that clears up underwater fog into something like above-air clarity.)

For whatever mysterious reason (I can't recall if I entered my Vanguard serial number into the Station Account, I thought I only played the trial), I had about 1300 Station Cash, freebies or otherwise. That's about $13. Curiosity got me scrolling through the nag screen store that popped up on log-in, and I ran into some prestige mounts. There were epic uber prestige mounts at 2700 SC, which were unaffordable, but there were a couple of normal prestige mounts which looked pretty cool. A warg, a white charger, a dark deathknight type horse, and... a rhino.

Yes, a fat-arsed, white, head-swaying beasty with small ears and pointy horn. After due consideration, seeing as I have no idea where the Station Cash came from, and that I was deathly curious to see if my lowbie was allowed to ride a mount at his level, I clicked the 'buy' button and used up 1250 SC.

The rhino dropped into my inventory. And yes, I could ride it. Did I mention Everquest 2's animations are spectacular? I laughed myself silly for 5 minutes straight as I gallumped (not galloped) through the zone I had been slowly walking at a sedate pace, my Ikstar hanging on like a stubborn jockey to the head-tossing charging rhino.


It wasn't an Age of Conan Killer Rhino. But it sure came close.

Mount handling was a lot more like World of Warcraft, but even better. In LOTRO, you are forced to mount/dismount to interact with NPCs, forcibly dismounted on fighting, and basically spend a lot more time clicking on the 'H' for horse hotkey than actually riding.

In WoW, I believe that the mount load time is quite instantaneous, and you can chat with NPCs and do stuff while mounted, except you get dismounted when you begin combat and have to call it to ride again.

Well, in Everquest 2, you can interact with NPCs while mounted, pick up nodes while mounted, and while not strictly having mounted combat, it loads in the unmounted animations and causes you to appear on the ground fighting... the mount is actually a buff that lasts for hours, so the speed buff is always on you, and when you leave combat, you are automatically back on your mount without having to summon it again. Score one for EQ2 and uber convenience factor.

Zone structure of the lowbie/newbie zone was a LOT like World of Warcraft. A small village, mobs spread apart by very distinct level ranges that increment from 1-4, moving down the road to the next outpost, with mobs at levels 5-8, and then the next quest hub, unsoweiter. And along the way, there is the big city (Ogrimmar/Neriak) that you can visit for a change of pace.

I have to give the win to Everquest 2 for being less obviously on rails. Some of the quests make you backtrack a little. There are a couple of named mobs in each area that are a tougher but soloable fight. A summonable quest mob broke the "being funneled and handheld" pace by being abominably hard. Some of the mobs fly - and not just hover about the ground flapping wings like WoW's harpies, and flap down to fight you - ranged attacks pull them, and if you position directly below them, a melee attack will hit them, but not if they fly off erratically. A couple of mobs in the teens levels showed off some scary aggro mechanics, as they would call out and attract the attention of the 3-4 other mobs nearby, and you could be halfway through those mobs and get another 3-4 on you.

And yes, I could fight multiple mobs and win. 2 was fine, 3 was a bit touch and go. 4 was ouch, but doable if they were a couple levels lower.

"Con" ranges are very tight in Everquest 2. White-con, even-level was ok. +1 or +2 yellow cons would tend to kick my arse as the hit rate dropped off abominably. -1 and -2 light blues and greens were quite easy.

And to my surprise, I found myself capable of surprise in Everquest 2. Halfway through the many standard "here's an excuse to go kill a bunch of level-appropriate mobs" quests, a scholarly dark elf wanted me to exterminate and genocide ALL the nightmare walking mushrooms in a particular area.

Hang on, ALL, you say? Yup, all. Um, ok...

So I wander over, wondering if I can kill all of the mushrooms fast enough before they respawn. On killing one, it spawns a bunch of baby mushrooms that wander off. Hmm, problem, says the quest. You better go back and tell the dark elf that it's quite impossible to genocide them when they multiply like that.

Wow, says the dark elf. That's interesting. You better go back and get me a sample of the baby mushroom spawnling so that I can figure this problem out.

So I head back and do just that. Kill another big mushroom, pick up baby mushroom.

On my return, -whoa-, why are there 3-5 baby mushroom wandering around by the dark elf's feet? I assumed there was someone else that had maybe completed another stage of the quest. To my surprise, the dark elf acknowledges the situation around his feet.

Here's your baby mushroom, I say.

Uh huh, as you can see, he says, I already have quite enough samples.

Where did those come from? I ask.

Goddess only knows, he goes. Probably from you. You must be crawling with microscopic baby mushroom spores. Don't stand so close to me!

Hmm, guess you don't want this one anymore...

So the dark elf thinks of another way to get rid of the pests. Ha, I know! He says, and he gives you a pet boarfiend (cross between a boar and a humanoid demon). Go back and kill them and the boarfiend will eat the baby mushrooms.

The boarfiend sticks to me like glue as I head back. Score one for Everquest 2's pathing over CoH. I kill a mushroom, the boarfiend eats the babies. Hey, this is working. Alright. Time to genocide. I kill another. He eats the babies. I kill a few more, and the boarfiend is struggling and panting as he stuffs them in his mouth. Suddenly the boarfiend explodes. Uhh, think his stomach couldn't take it.

And I head back to dark elf to report that it was a good try but no dice. And then I stop and LOL as I run into the encampment, because there are about 50-60 baby mushrooms spread across the entire outpost.

I'm not sure if that's phasing technology at work, but it was hilariously amusing and a fun storyline that continued on to finding the cure for the infestation and so on.

The last thing of note is EQ2's player housing. The trial seems to offer lots of freebies, because it gives you a free basic house too. The housing is amazing. Along your quests, you earn lots of housing items. You can pluck these out of your inventory and arrange and rotate them nearly wherever you want, similar to CoH superbases, except slightly more responsive. Resizing is possible too.

Haven't tried much of the crafting yet, looking forward to giving that a spin.

Alternate Advancements are an interesting system in EQ2. It extends the xp grind somewhat by allowing you to apportion a fraction of the xp earnt to AA. Each AA point allows you to select skills on a talent tree, in standard WoW/Diablo/Torchlight style.

Collections are a sidelong minigame. Shiny random nodes on the ground that you pick up. There is a lottery as to what you found. And they can be arranged in moth, bone, shard collections and given to NPCs for rewards.

Mobs drop items that give faction rewards too, if I could find the proper head of class guilds I was supposed to give them to in the city.

EQ2 is chock full of systems. After six years, I guess they would be.

And they are fiendishly good at keeping the achiever bug going, because the very first quest awarded to me was "Reach level 20 in 14 days." It eventually dawned on me that it was the trial offering a quest itself.

And it's very achievable. Someone did it in 7 hours or so. My more sedate pace will probably be 7 days.

Chinese Gold Farming

That suddenly seems to be the latest activity I've been indulging in with my MMOs, as in the rampant crazed genocide of any and every speck of random wildlife on patrol amongst the background scenery.

I've been playing LOTRO F2P, y'see. In the optimistic but possibly badly aimed attempt to try out group content, I decided to switch servers away from the very deserted Nimrodel and level up a new alt from scratch.

Caught between the roleplaying and fantastic community allure of Landroval, versus the promise of an Oceanic more-appropriate timezone Elendilmir, I decided to err in favor of folks that probably played the same time I did. While there seem to be more people logged into the GLFF global channel, the rest of the place smells a lot like Nimrodel unfortunately, few groups going on, most at max level asking for 1-2 more, and a tiny random PvMP clique that takes up the bulk of the global channel cussing each other out for being cowardly worgs and cheating manhealing captains and what not.

I haven't fled to Landroval yet, because my characters slots are full, and the new baby Runekeeper I am playing kills stuff like a dream compared to my Guardian.

Yea, yea, I'm comparing a reactive tank known for crap damage until they reworked it to give it an Overpower stance for pathetic soloists like me, to a new Moria class built for dps/healing and to assuage cries of LOTRO not having a true combat mage and combat being clunky as a whole.

The key thing they did, imo, with the runekeeper was to give it a zero-induction no cooldown passable damage lightning skill. That means you can spam the hell out of this skill like a basic autoattack, your only delay between skills the length of the animation cast time, and this gives it the 'instant button press = instant cast' feeling that WoW refugees kept complaining they missed.

From there, all the skills just ramp up in damage and utility with cooldowns and so on. They apparently reworked some of the order of the runekeeper's skills lately, in order to get lowbie RKs more familiar with the healing side of their equation. Seeing as I've had no groups, I can't say how effective my heals are, but they appear to have an interesting stackable HoT effect as compared with the minstrel's simple green number pump.

So why I am killing bits of random moving scenery? If you incentivize it, people will kill it.

LOTRO's individual mob xp has always been low as compared to the xp gain from quests. This, coupled with a Guardian's low kill ability, previously stopped me from mass genocide and as a result made me very broke on my first character, since vendoring trash items from these random mobs is a primary source of income for LOTRO. And I was an inveterate hoarder of stuff, with constantly full bags anyway.

Deeds, while a nice achievement counter, set the bar a little high. Kill 30 + 60 (spiders, goblins, boars) to unlock a title, then a virtue? And the number ramps up from there uncomfortably.

But now, for the first deed, you earn 5 Turbine Points. For the second, you earn 10 Turbine Points.

To ease the bag crunch, the trash items stacking has gone up from 20 to 50, and they've done numerous passes on it to reduce the number of different types. We started with purple, warty legs, hairy, rough legs, smooth, scaled legs, and so on and so forth. And after the patch passes, they all boil down into "misshapen legs" or something similar that only take up one bag slot.

My runekeeper finds killing a lot easier. I picked Explorer as a crafter profession from hindsight, which means I can harvest the ubiquitous ore and wood nodes that I run past, instead of having to specially lurk around ruins to find scholar nodes. And while strictly speaking, the total TP earnable is worth about a measly 15 cents, the deeds stack up. In the Shire, I've found that you can kill wolves, spiders, harvest-flies, brigands, goblins, slugs for deeds, and I have a dourhand racial deed as well. 8 x 0.15 = $1.20, and that's not to mention the other questing and exploring deeds and so on.

To my surprise, after I resigned myself to parking in one position for an hour or so to take advantage of the increased mob spawn rates post F2P patch and work on deeds for fun, I also noticed my xp bar sliding inexorably upward.

Perhaps Aion has worked on my expectations on how fast the xp bar should creep up. Perhaps I never factored in that while one mob has pathetic xp, after going through 100 of them like a lawnmower, one can earn an amount equivalent to two quests or so. And I'm not even killing on-level mobs, I've been working on pale greens and blues, which are around -1 to -4.

It's really surprising, but I've had to rework my previously held mindset. It seems like mob-grinding is viable to some extent in LOTRO. Especially when you factor in the xp/time cost as opposed to absolute xp reward. The time spent running from location to location fed-ex'ing news and pies for various NPCs is time not spent earning any money, and in fact may bleed away money if you ride horses from stables. When you kill a ton of mobs, you make a ton of money from vendor trash and earn a small but steady stream of xp.

It seems the LOTRO designers cleverly optimised in obvious favor of quests, which after all, is the heart of LOTRO. But also snuck in under the radar a certain viability for mob grinding, now more so than ever.

This has not escaped the notice of a few people over the Internet. F2P has brought out some interesting ironman experiments. Ysharros, one of the folks on the MMO blogger scene, has been experimenting with a no-quests Captain and has hit level 20 from just grinding away deeds, in a totally not-out-to-grind waffling around traveling manner. There's another guy over youtube, WilliamHillard, with an even stricter ruleset of no spending any Turbine points ever (but quests ok, I think), who is out to see just how viable Turbine's free/Premium limitations are. Since all but epic quests are locked out past the early areas, that's a lot of mob grinding and skirmishing for him in the near future.

My grind tolerance for street hunting seems to be a lot higher than most folk, so I don't mind running a simple little circuit in a small area decimating any mobs that cross my path as I harvest nodes like a botting Chinese Gold Farmer. It has been quite relaxing.

In fact, it's been SO relaxing, given the LOTRO's elevator-lift "muzak" that plays in The Shire, that I find myself invariably with a case of sudden threatened narcolepsy, at which point I haul myself awake long enough to find the "exit game" button and roll out of my chair onto my bed right beside me and fall dead unconscious for 2+ hours.

It's not that disagreeably boring, but I can't seem to last without feeling the chronic urge to sleep. Maybe I'm sleep deprived. I wonder how real gold farmers manage.

---

This weekend also happens to be the build up to Talk Like a Pirate Day. Guild Wars is dropping random bottles of grog off any kind of mobs killed.

As I have the vague unfocused desire to maybe one day actually get enough alcohol in storage to work on the "drunk" titles, I find myself in Guild Wars with the urge to go out and kill mobs. (Gee, that sounds familiar.)

I also fell prey to the storage sale they were having and picked up 3 panes of Xunlai chest storage at half the price. Amusingly, $5 for each storage pane is of ok relative worth to me, $10 meant I had to agonize over buying my first pane of storage and rationalize that I had lost about a storage pane's worth to keeping miniatures and festival thingamjigs (including alcohol.)

In an effort to not run around like an idiot and zone in and out of instanced areas with nothing to show for it, I thought, since I'm out to kill mobs anyway, I should attempt... *dadadum* VANQUISHING.

I much preferred my Nightfall paragon's skill arrangement and heroes, which are much sturdier and can conceivably stand up to hard mode with less frustration factor than the Prophecies ranger, so I decided to try vanquishing Elona first.

It wasn't so bad. Even with the hidden mandragors in which I had to run about zig zagging over the red lines that tracked my map progress in order to uncover them.

I did get strong cravings for sleep and urges to give up about 3/4 of the way in, which tended to be around the 45min - 1h, 170 mobs killed mark.

I dunno. Is it a character flaw? Do I just start things and not want to finish them? Or is it more of a bad thing not to listen to the "egad, I want to be out of here" feeling, especially when it seems to be a desperate urge for sleep, and I really shouldn't be playing a crummy game and pushing myself beyond my limits?

I compromised and stuck through it, before quitting for a break, often to sleep. The "where are the last mobs" hunt was almost as aggravating as in City of Heroes, with the exception of being able to see where you've been, so I got to do a lot of trotting back-and-forth around the areas I hadn't covered with a red track. The reward and change of symbol for a vanquish complete was quite satisfactory, though.

Two areas down, 32 to go.

I can see this sort of content lasting a good month or two for a casual.

Completely New or Plunge in Midway?

I can't help but feel a little hypocritical. Or at least actions and emotional experiences not congruent with words. Tobold pointed out that Larisa was kinda down about coming in halfway into an established game, and feeling all excluded and unwanted by irritating vets who always seem to love to wax nostalgic about a time which you never experienced. So I popped on over to give some pep talk in the comments.

And while I do think that no one person can see it all (the entire length and time of a game's history / culture / development) for all freakin' games - because even if that hypothetical person had no life, they would be spread too thin to really experience and participate in the culture buildup of each game.

And I certainly do think that each person comes to a game differently, at different times, and by golly, it's a good personal story to trace your unique pathway through various multiplayer experiences...

I have to admit, on my own personal blog, that I kinda like getting in at the ground floor and experiencing it all from the get-go.

If only because there are no veterans to spoil it all... everybody learning the game for the first time, and everybody has incentive to group up and discover it all anew and get perplexed and run screaming from horrible things and encounter awesome emotional experiences for the first time, together, wowee.

It's not that I haven't come in to existing games. I can't claim that I was the first to discover Kingdom of Loathing. I came in midway through A Tale in the Desert's lifespan, though at the beginning reset of Telling 4. I believe I joined Team Fortress Classic and TF2 not quite at the start, even if I did manage to time my TFC gameplay to its heydays when the game was still popular. Ditto Natural Selection, I joined mid patch 2 or whatever.

I surely had FUN. I surely learnt many things in my time with those games and improved myself to the point where I didn't want to give up any more of myself and my time for increased mastery. I think I even successfully integrated with some of those communities - ATITD and TFC had nice local communities.

Contrast that with games like Guild Wars, LOTRO, AoC, Aion, (and to a significantly lesser extent CoH, six months off from launch date) where I did come in from the ground up.

I had fun too. I also learnt different things. I don't know that I integrated myself that successfully, but I did mix with some people and enjoyed my unique experiences with them.

So actually, they are the same. I had equal amounts of fun with them all.

But somehow, the atmosphere is more exciting when everyone is new.

But then even if everyone is new, they have different levels of experience because they bring in baggage from other games. So it should be the same.

But then the game culture hasn't begun to form. To the point where people start dissing other people as noobs and losing patience with them.

I wonder if that is what I dislike about games where I did not come in from the ground up?

Did the games I enjoy joining in half way somehow mask that away from me? Or did I just not take those people to heart and find folks who liked to help newbies generously?

Why am I doing this to myself again?

After some tinkering around with City of Heroes and finishing up the Loyalist Responsibility arc, I wasn't game enough to withstand Bobcat's Loyalist Power arc after the rather epic ending fight chock full of named opponents. Since the Dragon Age DVD hasn't come out of my dvd drive since mid-August, when I tried my ill-fated attempt to wander through the Brecilian Forest and/or go to Denerim, I thought - what the heck - let me try out the newly patched difficulty level.

The attempt was nearly stillborn, because I foolishly got intrigued by some weird differently-coloured yellow icon appearing on my world map. Gee, this place looked new. So I clicked it.

Blood trail somehow made it there without a hitch. Open cutscene. Some guards. Unarmed man. No indications of conversation or discernable gestures, just both facing each other. Option to study the guards and the unarmed man. Oh I think I recognise the man from somewhere. The guards are wearing the livery of some minor noble who owns the forest or other. Option A: Jump down and join the fray. Option B: Hang back and watch.

Hang on... what fray? Am I starting a fight just because two parties are facing each other and one of them is kinda familiar and the other guards are some strangers I've never met? So maybe I'm overthinking these things for a game that is pathetically and caricaturely simplistic...

...Still. I'm not that violent. So I take the watch and wait route. Next thing I know, the guards stab the unarmed man and stroll off. Now waitaminute, don't I get the option to jump up in righteous fury and ambush the buggers? Haven't you heard of a very common philosophy known as "never start a fight but always finish one?"

Nevermind. Primitive programming design. I will go over and click on the stabbed man because I see an exclamation point type of thing over his downed body. Maybe I can heal him or something.

1. Aid the Man (Click here to buy premium content "Return to Ostagar")
2. Walk Away and Leave

Ok. WTF. Your premium DLC can't sell enough on its own so you have to create a dramatic scene and attempt to guilt trip people into buying the content so that they can come to the aid of a wounded virtual man?

Anyhow, I walked off like the miserly bastard elf I am. To paraphrase Penny Arcade, it's your fucking stab wound, you buy the DLC.

Five seconds later as I attempted to get to a non-yellow map marker somewhere in the actual game, eight wolves ambushed me in a random encounter and made it a very short lived affair.

Fine. Evidently, one Morrigan hastily forced into taking up a heal spell was not cutting it. I also had tons of elfroot, Morrigan with an alchemy skill, and zero flasks. Order of the day: Get new healy mage. Buy empty flasks.

For my next reloaded save, I decided to linearly go straight to the mage's tower to pick up Wynne without passing GO or any stray towns. A random encounter jumped me, but I amazingly survived that one because there were three white demonspawny mobs and only one yellow big bugger.

Happily, there was an inn right outside the mage's tower that was selling x99 flasks. So I bought and brewed up every single one of my elfroots into lesser health poultices, yielding ~25 of them for Alistair and my rogue PC to share as emergency quaffs, and getting an immersion-breaking crafterly badge achievement for having too much free time crafting stuff.

The tower was surprisingly uneventful. Many fights were survivable - even if one or two died, the rest managed to keep on carrying on. I think the patch did indeed help increase how frequently or reliably the melee types hit. Either that, or I picked the correct level-appropriate area to adventure in.

That is, until I hit tower level 3 or so and ran into a darkened room in which there was some type of demon that had around 4+ charmed templars under her control. Obviously you can't tell what is IN the room until you open the door, and by that time, it is a little late to shut the door again screaming. Chopped into a gazillion pieces by steel clad templary tanky things.

Fortunately, I was a paranoid freak and was saving my game every 60 seconds or so. Didn't take long for a reload and then a very careful walking away from ever opening that stupid door.

Tower level 4, and oh egads, -another- desire demon with a bewitched templar, except there is a conversational cutscene to this one. The choice is kind of catch-22-y because if I'm roleplaying here, and I almost always play a neutral good gal unless I'm purposefully being evil, I can't condone ze demon eating this guy's brains and soul. So ze demon must die.

Except that the demon chooses to fight, and when the demon fights, the templar also fights and BOTH must die, no two ways around it - you cannot kill the demon first and then have the guy wake up from his dream, he's either hallucinating for the rest of his lifetime or dead by your hand. Or at least, dead by your hand would be a GOOD outcome, because the desire demon also summons up some other white undead besides the yellow-con templar and jumping into the fray as some monster-spell slinging yellow-con thingamajig.

So I die. Again. Your Journey Ends Here.

And I roll my eyes and reload and decide to walk away from THAT door as well because there is a note on some forums about "omg, how do you defeat the desire demon and the bewitched knight" and while some people claim they have no problems, other people acknowledge it is one tough doozy of a fight and recommend doing the abomination fight/quest first because you get some skill that helps in this fight.

So promptly armed with a spoiler, I proceed onto the Abomination room and end up going into the Fade. Whereupon I am expected to solo three white-cons, 2 archers and 1 fighter. The hell. I am a fucking rogue, I unlock chests, charm things with conversational options, fail to detect traps and hit things from behind - I am not a crowd controller, a healer, or a tank!

Nevermind. I liberally use some of the potions I had pre-brewed. I also happily slurp down the lyrium vein that has been conveniently placed nearby. The codex entry about addictive dependencies and hallucinations is kinda scary, but the wiki itself says that it just heals me, so I trust the wiki, screw the lore.

The problem arises when I creatively deviate from the recommended wiki solution. It's rough, but I manage to solo the random rage demons that pop up in my travel through the Fade quest. I talk with Niall about solving the intricate puzzle. And the moment the choice comes up to pick five locations from the Fade pedestal, I cleverly pick the hardest location of the lot (so says the retrospective wiki consultation.)

I picked the Templar's Nightmare because I thought, hey, the name sounds like it maybe contains Alistair, and I sure would like a tank to help me out.

Turns out the Templar's Nightmare contains especially tough mobs that benefit from a shapechanging skill that I patently do not have yet, and consists of one-way directional doors that I cannot use yet, or while in combat - and what do you know, I seem to have aggro'ed four angry mobs.

And my journey ended yet again.

Which was a good stopping point for the night before I popped the DVD out of the drive and hurled it out the window.

Why do I ever bother to roleplay or attempt creative choices with this stupid game? I should just play the fucking thing with a walkthrough open on the other monitor and go in a straight path from A to B to C. Then again, should I even bother if that is the extent of the entertainment? I know how the story ends - whoopdedoo, I kill a dragon or four. The evil Teryn Loghain is defeated. The darkspawn threat is ended, for now. That sort of thing.

Maybe I should just go make Kormir a god again for a bigger lore kick.

Aimless

Lately, I've been in a very peculiar state of not being able to get excited about currently playing any game.

Besides an intense craving for Guild Wars 2 nao! (except it will obviously get here when it gets here irrespective of the hype machine), any other game is producing a vast quantity of "meh."

Guild Wars is the obvious choice if I am on a GW lore kick, and to a certain extent, it can quell some of the hunger pangs. However, I have managed to consume all basic storyline content, leaving a) methodical grinding to achieve some manner of goal, b) beating my head against "hard" content and c) both of the above.

While I rather like a) from time to time, I had to confess that my attention span is notoriously flighty and while I may -begin- a grinding project with the greatest of intentions, I tend to never end them, instead beginning other grinding projects that allow me to immerse in my one of my favorite flow activities - grinding, but in novel locations - accumulating heaps of "useful one day if I ever collect 5 or 10 or 50 or 100 of these, instead of 2-3" piles of junk.

b) is my nemesis. Maybe it's a girl thing. I really don't see what is THAT immensely fun about trying something, failing miserably, picking yourself up and trying again and again getting your butt kicked in various painful ways, until YAY you finally win. Yes, there is a certain triumphant satisfaction in ultimately being victorious, but the way my emotions are built, it produces a very -fleeting- sensation at best, and yields more of a "oh god, FINALLY, it's about time I got through this" sense of exasperated relief, rather than satisfied triumph.

I keep running into this style of gameplay in Guild Wars now that I've conquered the basic story, as it were. I don't mind this in challenge missions, which are a specifically stated metagame of "repeat this over and over striving for ultimate mastery, get onto a leaderboard and win uber prizes."

I'm not sure I like it in group-based high level content like The Fissure of Woe, The Deep, maybe Tomb of Primeval Kings or stuff like that, but I understand why it exists since some people crave a group-based hard experience. Since I am a staunch soloist, I will probably never get to see much of those places unless I follow and practice a FoW farming build for a specific area and/or develop my second account for 3 extra heroes so that I can have a team of 6 heroes at my beck and call, leaving me a fighting chance of survival in those places.

I can handle the concept of "hard mode" which is a really clever way of extending the existing storyline content and exploration areas. I tend to get utterly bent over and swamped in hard mode, but recently, I've noticed an improvement in that I can actually survive the beginning Lion's Arch areas in hard mode and find them more of a challenge when the mobs are level 24 instead of level 10-14. So yes, I can understand that some people like hard mode, even if I find the concept of utterly vanquishing every single area in hard mode an extremely ambitious year-long type of project. Vanquishing being, of course, a rather OCD sort of "defeat all" minigame.

I have to admit that the concept of Dungeons as introduced in GW: Eye of the North is rather intimidating. While the variety is certainly impressive, click and scroll down for a plentiful pictoral plethora of precious chests, no getting bored of the one same-old endgame dungeon/raid for this game! The actual thought of going through 1-5 levels of mobs, in order to get down to the one uber dungeon boss, is kinda off-putting in a "gee, this sounds like a raid" way.

Last night, I tried out a 2-level dungeon (in the assumption that two levels is less annoying than three, and five levels of dungeons would be quite insane for a dungeon newbie to attempt). The Sepulchre of Dragrimmar. I was somewhat perplexed as to whether I had completed any of the related quests, being that it had been a LONG time ago, but eventually worked out that I probably managed to kill the 'defeat named' quest, yet mysteriously still had not finished the overall dungeon quest.

After about 2 hours of methodically killing my way through lots of elementalist mobs, and getting snowballed by various wintery traps, the reason for this became less mysterious.

The 'named' mob was on level 1, and quite easily killed, relatively speaking. Its spike only killed off one or two of my group. And with my new friendly PvE Pain Inverter skill in my pocket, it pretty much off'ed itself.

On level 2, the big ultimate boss was level 29, and there was a very nearby altar to resurrect. The reason for this shortly became very clear, as it had some kind of unique monster skill that decimated my party repeatedly. After repeated attempts to apply pain inverter, I had only managed to have it at about 50% of hp remaining, and I had to admit a humiliating and frustrating defeat.

Two hours "wasted" says a nagging little voice in my head that also wonders if I am a little crazy for recreating the aspects of raiding that I'm not super keen about, with the sole sanity-keeping exception that I'm alone and solo and do not have the whole social interaction aspect to really drive me over the limit.

Turns out, after reading the wiki most carefully one more time, the AoE it was laying down was the equivalent of "don't stand in the fire!" I had previously assumed that it was only a 33% attack speed debuff. Turns out that it applies the debuff for 10 seconds, after which, the debuff becomes a 140+ hp attack. Which would explain the simultaneous decimation of my monks and the subsequent party wipe.

So if I feel like braving this boss again, I would have to be alert enough to flag my entire party out of these areas... and if staying out of the area does not remove the condition, I would probably need to take Extinguish myself - since I can't rely on my hero to fire it off properly without lots of micromanagement.

I can just about envision myself giving it another try. Except I can't imagine myself running all around level 1 killing things, unlocking and opening doors just to get down to the staircase to level 2.

I suppose if I actually got off my arse and started, I might follow through on it. It's the inertia factor that is irritating. I hope GW2 gives dungeons a significantly more unique twist.

In other news, I seem to have hit a City of Heroes standstill when faced with the dilemma of my fire/fire scrapper potentially outleveling both Loyalist contacts halfway through the story arc, and yet being unwilling to *gasp, shock, horror* turn off xp. Just shows, I'm just as bad an Achiever as the rest of them.

I'm at an ATITD standstill because I haven't convinced myself that a second account in the second Telling is worth it yet. I'd have to concoct a goal, and I seem to have run out of them in my aimless mood.

I was also going to attempt maybe Ascending in Kingdom of Loathing at 777 days. I'm at 740ish, so that's about a month to go. Except that I am exceedingly frustrated by the continual application of new changes to the game over and over for the sake of the hardcore spades in that audience, necessitating long and endless wiki reading for a casual player, and extending the rabbit hole so far and so deep I can't even begin to think about maybe facing the Naughty Sorceress until I find an item to unlock an area to unlock a quest to unlock another quest to get another item which can be found in an area which requires a 3rd item to unlock that requires more subsequent unlocking and while you're in this area, did you know that you can get this shiny if you unlock item 4, which unlocks area B, which unlocks area 51, that unlocks the... hey, have you run out of tabs in your Firefox browser yet?

So yeah, I have no idea how people keep track of it all. Just makes me want to throw stuff against a wall rather than play a game. Any game.

Dragon Rage!

Dragon Age? How about "Dragon Rage"? A variant of "Road Rage" or "Nerd Rage", it's when you want to rip out the game bodily from your hard-drive and toss the discs out of the window.

Wiped >5 times while trying to kill Flemeth. Finally the game itself crashed from the reloading. Gave up, tried travelling to Redcliffe village instead, and wiped 3 times on a random encounter with what I swear are 30+ mobs. Finally managed to survive it with two party members dead and the other last two hanging on somehow to make it to Redcliffe.

Did quests. Ran around, talked, Fedexy-style. Then a protect the village against incoming skeleton hordes which went quite well with all the cannon-fodder NPC knights and villagers. Went into the castle proper.

Whoa! Suddenly ambushed by a pack of skeletons. Just as I finished the first ambush, another pack appeared. No stamina. No endurance. Splat.

This is on "Normal" difficulty. And after I used a mod to spec my mage into having more AoE damage (then, it gets hard to nuke when the mobs jump you from nowhere in a narrow corridor and you're knee-deep in skeletons and zombies).

Guhhhhhh. *bangs head on keyboard*

Dragon, what dragon?

Played maybe 24 hours of Dragon Age, enough to get through the origins story (Mage), finish Lothering, the Tower and Brecilian Forest. Then tried to off Flemeth as Morrigan suggested and -- whoa, WTF huge dragon. Got stomped, and stopped.

Throughout, I'm trying to put my finger on why the game isn't very exciting for me. It's a bit like Mass Effect. Extremely playable but somehow...boring.

It's the Dragon Age. Ok so it's not a Dragon but an Archdemon. Except that the Archdemon looks like a dragon. And it's a Big Bad Guy (tm) that we got to kill. Why? Cos we gotta! You're Grey Warden and you're going to konk over in 30 years so you gotta do something in the meantime which is kill darkspawn. Uhhh darkspawn are dark spawn, monsters, evil stuff. Oh wait, since when did I sign up to drink darkspawn blood, poison myself and die in 30 years?

Sure, long ago we played games like that. Dungeon Crawl until your are Strong Enough to Kill the Big Bad Guy. Plot, what plot. Just do it. And we loved it. We chopped our zombies and crushed our skeletons and drank our potions and we sucked it up and loved it.

Times have changed. Standards are ...higher. I understand that a lot of work has been put into the game to make the multiple origins and how the world responds to the different origins differently. But despite that, something is lacking. There are other games with similar premises as Dragon Age and were enjoyable.

Maybe I just dislike the game mechanics. Here I am, half-a-healer and half-a-crowdcontroller. I have Wynne stuffed with healing spells. I throw my warrior and rogue in, and it honestly feels like the one-and-a-half healers are just spamming the heals and doing barely anything else. Maybe I should play and AoE nuker instead and fireball the mobs, give up on the debuffing. Maybe my skill/spell selection is just a mess, but I hate tank/heal0r type of mechanics.

Not everything is bad of course. I really enjoy the Fade quests. The surreal world where you shapeshift to go through an obstacle course thing is quite fun. The question is, is the rest of the game more like the Fade, or more like Brecilian Forest / ruins?

Not sure whether I should continue playing. Or just go through the different origins for the origin specific quests and leave it at that. Or even, just give up.

Oh yeah, who's bad?!

The Great Destroyer explodes into a gazillion pieces

Who's bad? We're bad!

Eat hot lava and dirt, Great Destroyer!

Thankfully, the quest for pain inverter wasn't -too- tedious. I had the map waypoints already, so it was just a matter of blinking all over creation and looking for an easy to kill spawn per quest.

Then it was the quest for finding skills that could save me from burning. Frigid armor was out, my elementalist was fire magic spec, and I hadn't unlocked Nightfall on the ranger yet. Ward against elements? Not a clue where it could be got. Fortunately, Extinguish was sold in Kaineng Center, and I had a map point there, and Ogden was healing prayers and prot specced, so that fit in nicely. Breath of the Great Dwarf was my other goto skill, except I needed 3 Destroyer cores to get it. I had one.

I wasn't about to delve into a massive dungeon complex in order to farm Destroyer cores, so I latched onto the G.O.L.E.M. mission. After failing twice, I sat back and scratched my head wondering why the heck I couldn't seem to melt these Destroyers at all. Eventually, after staring at the wiki, it finally hit me on reading the words - Destroyers are immune to burning. This makes skills like searing flames useless against them.

...

My elementalist was a searing flames spec, reliant on creating burning, and then toasting things. I had Cynn, the fire elementalist in my party as well. NO WONDER none of them were doing any significant damage to the Destroyers. Bah.

Most luckily, I was a ranger, and a ranger has a wonderfully useless 85% of the time skill called Winter. That changes all elemental damage into cold. Which not so coincidentally, Destroyers are weak to.

Now armed with one spirit, the same mission suddenly proved much easier. Pain inverter helped too. I lol'ed at one poor Destroyer who managed to position himself to AoE Executioner strike my henchies, and hit himself for 80x5 damage. He didn't last long after. Repeat mission x 4 until 2 Destroyer cores finally dropped.

Ran back to High Priest Alkar full of glee, and got Breath of the Great Dwarf in return. This time I was ready, two nullify Burning skills, Winter to make Destroyers vulnerable to my fire elementalists, and Pain Inverter for kicks.

It was still pretty touch and go, especially since the Great Destroyer didn't pull very well. But I managed to find semisolid ground at one spot and flagged the henches there, spammed the extinguish heal, and kept Pain Inverter on at all times. Was as well that I did, because one of my heroes or henches liked to interrupt. As I got blasted for damage, so did Mr GD himself. A few scary blasts later, praying that my monks could catch up, down he went.

YAY!

The Epilogue rocked. It was full of GW2 hints, which is amazing when you think about how far back the planning went. (Big hint in the screenshots, there's a big ol' dragon in the background!)

I have officially completed the four primary quest storylines of GW... albeit on different characters. If only I could now decide which one I want to focus on, and what I should be aiming toward next.

Sheer Bloodymindedness

After a literal year or two at being stuck at Heart of the Shiverpeaks, I decided to give it another shot.

Somehow, my ranger's hero team feels much less effective than my paragon's team. This stymied me for a while since I was using PvXwiki builds, more or less. Possibly less, as I don't think the heroes' equipment is up to snuff. I had to swap Healing Breeze back in before my hero monk felt strong enough to heal. Either that or Dunkoro is just somehow more OP than Ogden.

Went through an aborted attempt at bringing in an untouched necro and a ranger/necro, in order to use lifesteal and whatever was recommended on the wiki. Turns out we lacked enough firepower to get through the three dungeon levels, and we ended up on 60% DP before getting to Cyndr. Apply poison was a joke, it didn't drop his life at all, his regen was strong enough to offset it. Lifesteal was better, but I could barely get through 2 vampiric gazes before his pyroclastic shot one-shot my heroes.

I ended up doing a solo run to dump barrels on him, getting blown up every so often, and rezzing. On the off-chance I managed to get his carapace off, I would unflag everyone hiding at the entrance and they would dash in and try to kill him before getting blown up by pyroclastic. The best I got was him dropping about 3/4 health before his carapace regenerated.

I gave up. Damage output was bad. I had 3 monks and no melee (thinking to keep everyone flagged out of range behind a wall and spamming lifesteal - he never spawned near enough, bah.)

Tried again with my standard hero team, and took 2 melee tanks this time. The dungeon was much easier, and we dropped down to Cyndr's level quickly.

On my first go, we got him within a sliver of his health. Unfortunately, he decided to spawn far away from the entrance the next few rounds, and his health regenned back up to full rapidly.

By now, I kinda had the barrel dropping thing down to a science. Run near the entrance, select my name, click on protective spirit, once the enchantment triggered, run back to the NPC, hit spacebar to collect barrel, hit dodge for faster run speed, strafe like a madman while running forward to wherever Cyndr was, hit drop item hopefully before getting blown up. If successful, rinse and repeat. If blown up, unflag party and proceed to die, because there was no way I was getting back to the entrance with -7 health degen from  burning, unless I was very near and could dash to my monks for help.

After another 2 hours of this, I finally got lucky. He spawned west of the entrance - relatively near - and we got him down to about 1/4 of his health remaining before carapace regen. Then he popped up in the best possible spawn point - near the entrance, on top of the NPC, with his health still low. This was it. I knew I had him.

Made sure the party was healthy, and I pretty much hurtled back in and spam click/drop, click/drop, click/drop 3 barrels in succession as fast as the NPC would give them to me. Then we ran in and eliminated the last half (he regenned) of his health until the bugger died. Yeesh.

Cyndr the Mountain Heart collapses at last

Turns out I have traded one problem for another. Because the last mission, a Time for Heroes, is in a cave full of LAVA.

My ranger can just about slowly snipe one of these Destroyers to death, out of their range, but it is long and slow and painful because they have a health regen monster skill. But if I bring the whole party in, they have MORE elemental spells that do damage and heal themselves, so they remain at full health while they destroy my party. This is problematic to say the least.

Then the other problem is that I cannot reach the Destroyer on the right without standing on lava and burning.

And as you get closer, the Great Destroyer gets triggered, and he turns all those safe zones into molten lava, and everybody starts burning. Heroes and henchies on fire are a horrible sight on the party health bar.

I'm not sure how I'm getting past this one. I might try for one of those cheaterbug PvE skills, Pain Inverter, and see if that does anything to the Destroyers. Pain Inverter is at the end of a Loooooong quest line though.

*sighs*