December 2008

A Quiet Night

stargrace December 6, 2008 0Comment

A sure sign of a happy gaming week, last night I had some weird dream about doing an article on a new MMO that was some sort of table top 3D game that was fantasy based but all I remember is physically touching where I wanted my character to go on an actual landscape, and the fact that for some reason my group looked like playmobil toys and were wearing saftey helmets. Weird.

Anyhow, last night I spent most of it decorating and talking to friends. I headed over to the Antonia Bayle server for a few minutes to talk to Malfi who was decorating his hobbit home (with ideas that I am most certainly going to steal borrow), he did a fantastic job of it. I am really enjoying the smaller scale homes. Almost my entire EQ2 career I’ve been thinking that the larger homes were the way to go, more room for items, more space. I think they are over doing it though, and characters can manage just fine in the smaller abodes, especially the alts.

So no adventuring for me, I didn’t do any dungeons, and I didn’t do any crafting instances. I did still have fun though, decorating my home and talking to people. There’s always a wonderful social aspect to the game that I can fall back on when there’s nothing in particular that I want to do.

I do need to start actually working faction for the Moors some day, or I’ll never be able to craft the new furniture. Also, FROSTFELL will make its way to Norrath next week, and I am REALLY excited about that. Granted, the first few days will be filled with people clawing at each other to try to harvest the nodes and make the new pretties that will be in game, but then things typically settle down.

Today I’m off to my parents place (little brother in tow) to visit, taking my camera so hopefully I’ll get some shots while I’m down there, oh, laptop is coming too (I still need to finish off those Beckett articles).

Safe travels no matter which game you find yourself in!

Gaming

Plundered House Items – PartII

stargrace December 5, 2008 1Comment

Azure Rug of the Forsaken – Comes from Befallen, Cavern of the Afflicted. Be careful, as this item does NOT (at this time) respawn for people. There is a named in the room and it’s quite easy to accidentally pick up the rug when you mean to do something else.

Azure Tapestry of the Forsaken – comes from Halls of the Forsaken, the last room in the zone.

Dark Sathirian Tapestry – (not sure exactly where this one comes from yet, will update when I find out)

Grimberry Bush – Comes from Halls of the Fallen

Shredded Tapestry of the Ykeshan Stronghold –

Ykeshan Wraithguard Guardian – From Ykesha’s Outer Stronghold

Frost-rimmed chandelier – Comes from The Crucible

Frost-rimmed Chair – Comes from the Scion of Ice

For more detailed information, as well as any updates, be sure to keep reading this post in the Norrathian Homeshow, where people have been sharing what they’ve found.

There’s a few pictures I haven’t added as well, there’s a maroon tapestry of the forsaken, and another shredded one.

Gaming

Plundered House Items – PartI

stargrace December 5, 2008 1Comment

While you’re adventuring through the newest TSO instances, be on the look out for furniture that you can steal and take home with you. There are a number of house items that can be collected by adventurers and brought home, something that I find absolutely amazing.

You may want to set up a rule for your group before you even enter the zone, as only some of these house items seem to respawn (the rug in Befallen is an example of one that does not seem to respawn).

In each of the Loping Plains instances, one of three paintings can be found with the same title – “Mysterious Painting”

The one of the woman can be found in Evernight Abbey, from a clickable coffin. Keep your eyes open for the other two in the other instances.

The paintings look fantastic, the details are wonderful and there’s a lot of character in them. I only have two of the collection so far, but hopefully I’ll be able to get my hands on the rest before too long and add them to my museum (which is still a work in progress).

Keep in mind that you CAN find these on the broker. They’re treasured house items, tradeable, and are worth 250 status points each. There are a lot more items besides these three paintings, including tapestries, rugs, bushes, chandelier, and even a chair. I’ll post pictures of those next.

Gaming

Swamps of Rumug

stargrace December 5, 2008 1Comment

At level 45 most players spend the rest of their levels to 50 working on armor sets. These are known as ‘Swamp Armor’ because of the areas that you need to work for faction in. There are three faction and each one rewards the gear with a different focus. I’m still two levels away from 45, but it’s never too early to start working on faction (when some of it comes from kills) especially when you’re also working on harvesting. I was anxious to get lumberjacking over 400. At 500 I can harvest aged wood, which is actually T6 wood and worth a pretty penny. I’m hoping since Galleons come out this month that the price of wood will go up. Right now dusky is going for 1g a stack, since there’s just so many people sitting at T5.

I headed to the Swamps of Rumug to duo with a ranger in guild, taking down treants. That’s another aspect of VG that I really enjoy, you can get lumber from killing treant type creatures or you can get it from harvesting trees. Leather also comes form the area in the form of skinning trolls. After looking at a few sites and trying to figure out how swamp armor works exactly, I’ve decided I’m going to go with a gorgalok set. There’s no real base healer cloth set for blood mages, and since most of my heals are based off of my damage output anyhow, there’s nothing wrong with going for a caster type set of armor. The gorgalok set focuses on +damage and +crit which is perfect. It requires me to kill in Ichtakhta, which is in the chunk just North West of Rumug. One problem which I’m sure to run into is that my partner in crime, Growlius, mentioned that he may be playing VG again as soon as this weekend (excited!) and he’ll probably want to work on the Ichtakhta set of armor, which is +mitigation and +absorption. This puts us at odds as far as faction goes. Working on one faction will lower it with the others. I guess we’ll just have to see.

After spending an hour or two wandering around killing trees I gated back home and sold the little bit of vendor trash I had, and put the crafting bits on the broker. I’m finding it a little difficult to make money. There is a huge surplus of artificers who wander the lands of Telon, and I’m just one of them. Crafting supplies used to sell quite well, but there’s so many people harvesting and so many people end game that it’s hard for me to find a little niche to settle into. With the new guild hall for Safe Haven comes dues, and I’m expected to pay 5g a month or 10g if I manage to level to 50. Which this is by no means a huge amount of coin, it is if you play casually and don’t exactly have a lot of money to spare. Or if you ended up giving away all your money in a scavenger hunt you hosted before you left last time. I imagine it will take me a bit to find a way to make coin again. It’s funny to see all the quests I’m doing reward me with 6s and 7s when I get anything into the double digits as a reward even at level 43 I jump for joy. Aside from my skills every two levels and repair bills I don’t have a great number of costs, so for now this works out just fine.

Edit: Forgot to mention! In the general channel today someone mentioned if anyone had tried to /setfog 777777 and said that it made the game nice and clear. I was aware there was a command to remove the fog from game but had never played with it, and at first I thought the person just wanted to fool people into the whole game being VERY foggy or something like that. So I tested it out. Low and behold, when the fog vanished so did every ounce of lag I had. Yes, it removes a little bit from the atmosphere of the game, that screen shot above has fog on, with it off you can see the ruins in the background crystal clear. I don’t mind looking at everything crystal clear though without that hazy feel to it, and like I said, lag is completely gone and no sputtering. I think I’ll leave it off.

Gaming

Miragul’s Phylactery: The Crucible

stargrace December 5, 2008 0Comment

There’s only one main down side I have to having so many characters in this new TSO expansion. Because everything is purchased with void shards or Far Seas Tokens, I have shards spread out on multiple characters but no one character has amassed a large amount. There’s about 20 crafting tokens spread over 5 characters, and 10 void shard tokens spread over a few characters as well (I know, I have been slacking in the adventuring department). A few people had raids cancelled so they asked me if I wanted to head to Everfrost and do an instance with them. Sure! The group was made up of a Shadowknight, Assassin, Templar, Dirge, Fury, and myself as Coercer. Albrta and Eyenstein both went, something that has been rare as of late, and we had a blast.

We had a great amount of DPS and the mobs dropped easily enough. When you zone in there is a hallway to the left and the right, and you’re offered a quest right away too. We cleared all of the rooms along the way on the first floor, headed upstairs and took a right. We cleared the rooms there and then it was time to place the little statues. If you stand in the center there are special windows that you can look through that tells you where to place each statue. Easy enough. Killed the named and nothing too impressive dropped, but it was fun. We had to be careful of some minor AOE’s.

When it came to burning the room of named down to 50% before placing them over their little coloured platforms, we had a lot of fun. I wasn’t sure if we burned just one to 50, then put them over their stand, or burn all to 50 and place them. Turns out they all come. We had the shadowknight tank all three of the name (who also spawn adds during the fight) and then once we worked them all down to 50% we moved them over to their proper coloured platforms and there they stayed. The named talked for a bit and then we took him down as well. He does have some aoe’s. Seems like everything has aoe’s these days.

Nothing really phased us until we got to the final named, we did die once because we forgot to pull the named out of the center so that people can see the books and scrolls that spawn on the floor. We had the dirge and assassin on book duty, this allowed us to slow our fight down enoough not to be worried about when the items would spawn. You just have to click them, and as long as you have two people in the center who have their effects on high enough to see the items drop, you’ll be fine. Make sure they grab the torches first. There is an aoe that goes off just before the scrolls and books drop in the middle, so if you’re not sure when it’s about to happen (even though it’s every 20%) you can always look for that. The adds that spawn after the books are clicked are single one up mobs, the dirge and assassin in the center took care of those while we continued to take down the mob.

There are other methods of doing this encounter. You can stun / stifle the mob so that his text doesn’t go off and he doesn’t spawn the books. You can put up an aoe avoidance spell so that the aoe doesn’t touch you. Or you can just have two people click the books, which is really the easiest way to go. Slow your dps right down and just take it easy. We didn’t have any issues with the named once we set our book clickers in the center while we were off to the side, but I realize that since I was with 4 mythical geared people (templar and myself are not raiders) the encounter may not be as easy for everyone else.

A nice legendary earring dropped that was an upgrade for Shadowgeist, it was nice to see since it’s rare that any of the raid geared people want something from the zones. We also got our void shard key on one of the very first mobs, and the chest was on the main floor, so we got our shards after not even clearing the first floor which was nice.

The mission sends you around the zone to click items, chests and book pages. By the end of the evening I walked away with two void shards and had a lot of fun with good friends. It was nice to see a zone where you don’t HAVE to have an enchanter along to beat it. I did no mezing at all. However, I would say that this zone does need two healers. Deep Forge is the only zone I’ve been in so far that we didn’t take two healers (I solo healed it with only one death on the warden).

I am enjoying how each zone has a different feel, and looks different, and has a different puzzle. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do the Guk ones before too long, as well as the loping plains ones, I haven’t been there yet.

A Quiet Night

Plundered House Items – PartII

Plundered House Items – PartI

Swamps of Rumug

Miragul’s Phylactery: The Crucible

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