Month: November 2016

MMO Obligations

Occasional Hero

Life is full of obligations. It’s not always fun, but we have to put up with it because that’s life. So it’s weird that, as MMO players, we so often set up so many obligations for ourselves in our free time.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few weeks playing SWTOR for the Dark vs. Light event. I keep trying to write about it, but “I did solo dungeons repeatedly until I couldn’t stand it, then I did some story quests” didn’t seem like it would make for a very interesting read. About a week before the event was over, I finally made it to the Eternal level, which was my goal. That’s the highest I was ever interested in getting, because I basically just wanted the extra companion (it looks like it’ll be the Chiss Jedi, which is the one I was really hoping for, since…

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Bastion with a vengeance

Tactalicious & Craftalicious

I don’t like Amrath quests sometimes; it’s either a quick romp through corridors, ambushed by leagues of devil hordes or it’s a corridor by corridor slog until death – lost, backtracking ‘what now?’ kind of thing.

It’s easy to persevere when you’re a fighter. You either live or die – it’s harder as a healer. You have to heal and when the waters runs dry – you suck pots.

This time I played my ranger. It’s something to say about the diversity of multi-arrow and tempest 2 weapon fighting. I just wish I had a straight earth and mineral II Khopesh already to make life easier. And while I’m at it – lightning II bow. And that’s why I run Amrath quests – for the remote chance of large (read scales) mats. So I can get the party started. Ironically – so when I run these quests again it’s even easier. Yeah…

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The War Report: Theorycrafting

Me Vs. Myself and I

mtg

I’ve been consistently playing Magic The Gathering with my friend lately, and that’s meant plenty of playtesting for the various decks that I’ve created. We’ve stuck with “Standard” legality, meaning the cards from the current block and the last two are the only ones that we can select cards from. My friend has two decks so far and only one that is really dominant. I have been testing my decks against that one primarily and have had mixed results. One of the biggest (and most fun) parts of playing MTG is theorycrafting, which goes hand in hand with deckbuilding. For me, theorycrafting starts with a card or cards that have a large impact on a game. Building a deck around those cards or themes is more difficult than it might seem, but isn’t so difficult that it’s overwhelming.

In my time back with the game, I’ve managed to create a…

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DDO is like Jell-O…

Even Now

… there’s always room for it.

When real life gets overwhelming, often the first things we cut are the “frivolous” things that make us happy. We drop the things we WANT to do to have more time for the things we HAVE to do.

With one very notable exception and a couple of moderate note, 2016 has been pretty damn sucky for me. Family obligations now take up – well, pretty much any time my family notices I have. I’m short on patience and time and oh yes, sleep.

The past few weeks have been exceptionally bad. Found out my pesky cough was a bit more than pesky; nothing life-threatening but something that will be slow to improve and chronic in nature.

Then my kitty Victoria, who turned 14 in September, got VERY sick. Victoria’s gotten to know Dr. Dave and Dr. Stephanie, her vets, pretty well over the years…

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LE/EE raids week 6

Micki's Delirium

This week LE Shroud didn’t go so good. In fact, on our first attempt, we didn’t even get through p1. I was ready to switch to hard, but with a couple of new party members and a bit better tactics, we decided to give LE another try. This time we go through p1, but struggled a lot in p2. When the reds didn’t all die at the same time, and 3 of them respawned, I called forfeit on the run. We decided to do a hard run instead. This was of course also the week when I had decided to record the LE run, so I recorded the LH run instead. Note: Not everyone in the hard run was in the LE attempts.

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Try-It Tuesday: Duke Grabowski Mighty Swashbuckler

Bio Break

duke1

A month or so ago, friend of Bio Break Spagomat reached out to me and offered me a free copy of a game that he and some ex-LucasArts devs had worked on. I’m hardly one to turn down free games, particularly in the adventure game vibe, so I ended up with a copy of Duke Grabowski: Mighty Swashbuckler. A Thanksgiving weekend is a good a time as any to get all piratey, right? Sure, why not.

I’d never heard of it before, but right from the get-go I was on the receiving end of some serious Monkey Island vibes. That’s probably intentional, considering the art style, irreverent tone, and subject matter. Instead of a gawky, ambitious pirate, the titular character of Duke Grabowski is a hulking dullard of a man who throws in his sword to become the new ship captain. Nobody’s really having it, so they send him on a…

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A Monk with Magic

The Order of Syncletica

archer

I have not been a fan of mixing up cross-class features experimentally on my Monks until recently when I just decided I need to let my virtual hair down and see if some skills could be used to benefit my characters.

I’ve not created a spellcaster character yet. And I wasn’t generally a fan of mixing features up between classes because I wanted to maximize my learning and experience on everything that the Monk could innately do.

But I also had a clear bias: Mages, specifically the evil ones, were the enemy. The Monk is a melee fighter that’s also a potent anti-mage with high saves, spell resistance and mobility. Perhaps I was taking a page mentally from Diablo II’s Assassin, a player class of that beloved game that was also very Monk-like with charging moves and effects that emulated magic to fight evil mages.

Over the years of…

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The Steam Awards

Me Vs. Myself and I

steamawards

Coinciding with the annual Steam Autumn Sale (not to be confused with the annual Steam Summer Sale or Holiday/Winter Sale) where discounts are aplenty, this year there was a new activity to partake in: The Steam Awards. Apparently Valve have decided that we should be able to nominate games of any age for various categories, and rather than restrict the categories to “best-evers” they have created ones with a little more character. I’m not sure if this will be a new annual tradition, but I assume that this is a lead up for the Xmas sale, and those games that get the most nominations will be put up for votes during that sale (or perhaps before). Then, we’ll see discounts on those sorts of games. This sort of defeats the purpose if we are in fact voting for games that will get discounts, because to nominate a game we probably…

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Shopping Spree

Tactalicious & Craftalicious

30% discount whatever and 5k later I have XP pots, some hirelings another character slot etc. All in all a fine haul.

And with my upcoming birthday (and my kids – DDO point cards or else) wish I hope to add to that pile and waste it promptly on greater tome of learning.

That’s right. I want to be able to have a perma +50% first time bonus and +20% bonus for as long as I level.

The hard part is of course to decide whom to put it on. I mean my arti yes – but I could also consider any of my level 20 guys. Most likely my ranger followed by my Fighter.

Party because I’d like to keep my arti at 20 for a while and get him some more gear but also because he’s the crafter and TRing different type of characters always demand one item…

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