WoW

Post-Christmas.. Post. #SWTOR #Christmas

My Operative managed to obtain her first space ship last night as I sailed into level 17. This means I also earned a second companion, one I can send out on crafting missions without having to sacrifice my safety. I actually enjoy crafting in SWTOR, even though it’s not very hands on and can take a lot of time if you haven’t earned standing with your crew members.

Santa was very good to me this year. I got a new video card, a Radeon HD 6950, which replaces the two crossfired 4850’s that I was using. There was nothing technically wrong with the cards, I’ve been able to game just fine – but they were INCREDIBLY loud. It felt like a jet was flying overhead any time I started up a game. This new card is a dream, silent, and powerful. I used to use Nvidia cards, but one year I burned through three of them so I switched over and haven’t looked back. I moved all of the settings up to high quality and it runs very well.

I’m still playing WoW despite the lack of posts lately. I’m doing the Twilight dungeons, and this week I won three pieces of gear from the LFRaid tool on my shaman. She had not won a single thing before now, so I’m quite pleased. I have been taking a small break from leveling up the druid, I was a bit burnt out after getting her to level 70. I’m sure I’ll get back to leveling her once the holidays have calmed down.

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas, filled with lots of loved ones. As always, happy gaming. No matter where you find yourself.

 

Holiday Events In Our Games of Choice #MMORPG #EQ2 #WoW #Rift #W101 #GW

Hard to believe that today is already December 15th – where does the time go! My apologies for those who may have been trying to access MmoQuests these past few days. My host was hacked and so the site has been less-than-stable while they resolved issues. It looks like everything is a-go now, so I should be able to get back to posting here on a regular basis, so long as something shiny doesn’t come along and distract me along the way.

There are numerous holiday festivals taking place in MMOs this time of year, and I love hearing about them all. A few of my favorites happen in Guild Wars, Wizard 101, EverQuest 2, Rift, and of course World of Warcraft. That by no means lists all of the events out there though, so make sure you take a peek into your GoC (game of choice) and take part in the yearly events (if there are any, not all games have these).

Dragon Flight (my Argent Dawn alliance based guild) managed to take down a few more encounters in some Outlands raids last week. This was quite a feat for us because we’re still only three people (actually, now we’re five, but two of them are too small to participate in these raids). We’ve been doing them for appearance gear and my shaman won herself a pair of neat shoulders that have a graphic of glowing broken up molten infused rocks.

Aside from that I’ve been working on leveling both a DeathKnight and a Druid. The druid managed to grasp on to level 62 tonight, and the DK is 61. I do have a recruit a friend account, so they’ve only got a few hours played if that. While getting to ‘end game’ is not everything, I’ve taken my time and enjoyed the ride on a handful of alts and this time I just wanted to get to Cataclysm content.

In true nomadic gamer style I haven’t really settled on a ‘main’ although I tend to play my shaman more than my other characters. I also spent some time playing Plants vs. Zombie, and Skyrim. The majority of my friends are all playing SWTOR – and it’s been really hard to hold out and not just pre-order the game for myself. In fact, there is a copy in the house, belongs to my other half. He’ll be playing and I can make a character on his account and play while he’s at work to see if the story actually does suck me in as everyone says it will. A few friends have pointed out that Star Wars has very little to do with ‘space’ and has far more to do with fantasy and magic, which is a big point in its favor (for me at least). I even sat down to try to watch the Star Wars movies today, so who knows, give it some time and perhaps that will be my GoC.

In sadder news, Beckett MOG shut its doors today. For those who don’t know I’ve been writing MMO related articles for them for a number of years now, as well as moderating their forums and writing news articles for the web site. They just weren’t pulling in enough money (or so I assume) and in this age of digital media, it’s not a big surprise. I hope that everyone who is now searching for new work (I’m looking at you, Jason) finds the job of their dreams, and I personally am incredibly thankful for the experience I’ve gained while working there.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

 

Changes to the Darkmoon Faire #WoW

The Darkmoon Faire is a topic I actually meant to write about last week, when it was around, but alas time slipped away from me as it so often does and so you’ll have to deal with this post being a few days late. Remember that festival that came at the start of every month and has for years but no one actually participated in? Well, the good folks over at Blizzard finally gave it an overhaul, and boy did they do a fantastic job. The Darkmoon Faire now actually feels like a festival. There is an entire zone dedicated to the happenings now, which you can access by being ported (there are NPC in the capitol cities) or by visiting the front gates:

There is an all-new selection of things to do at the Faire including some awesome new games, loads of quests, and new pets and mounts to collect. Wowwiki.com has a great write up of the new event and if you’re an achievement seeker you’ll find new ones added to your achievement window. I had a blast in the shooting gallery (literally), although I did discover that I’m not very good at the human cannonball. Maybe next month I’ll finally be able to get that bulls-eye.
My favorite part of the faire this year was fishing up a little seahorse that is trapped in a bubble players can drag around as a pet. Of course it does inch me closer towards having 100 companion pets, so I am a bit biased.
If you didn’t check out the faire while it was in town this month, don’t worry, there’s always next month! If you did manage to check it out, what did you think? Is it an improvement over the old version?
As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

 

Christmas Cheer #WoW

While I’ve been wishing that people would simply be nicer to one another, some others have gone a different rout. I’ve been doing the new twilight dungeons quite a bit (for both gear upgrades and valor points) and have come across some folks that I think could use a little Christmas cheer.

Player 1: “Wow DPS sucks.” – a few things to note here. Number one, not a single thing went wrong with this group. We killed everything, there were no deaths, in fact the entire run was as close to perfect as I’ve ever seen. If there was DPS lacking I certainly didn’t see it. The person making the comments threw out a number of snide remarks while the rest of the group said nothing at all (well, O.K. that’s not true, I did mention that if they found the DPS lacking they could leave. Remember folks, it doesn’t matter what role you play in a group, you ARE replaceable).

Player 2: “Look at all my cool stuff I am the awesomesauce” – Do you REALLY need to link every piece of your gear into chat before we’ve even started the dungeon? Is this supposed to make me think that you are amazing? A better sign would be to move out of the gosh darned fire that spreads on the ground instead of dying.

Player 3: “LULZ TANK FAIL” – This actually comes from one of the Dragon Soul raids. They’ve been a great test in my patience and my skill of selective reading. The first four raids go incredibly well, there’s not really a lot to them. The next four raids I have had little to no luck with so far. People are either incredibly impatient and start the encounter before half the raid has arrived on the scene, or they decide explanations are not required for new players. Or something else happens like they ‘forget’ that the entire encounter is based on clicking on a single button in the center of your screen when the mob casts twilight. Whatever the case, the blame is NEVER theirs, and ALWAYS someone else’.

There are a few other types of players that I think could use a little Christmas cheer this year, hopefully I get my wish. If not, that’s what selective reading is for. I rarely ever let someones comment in game get to me, I can always change it to something pleasant in my mind.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

A Weekend of Dungeons #WoW

As I do every year the week that NaNoWriMo finishes up, I took a week off and decided to do nothing but relax and game, and a LOT of gaming was done. It was basically my ‘calm before the storm’ as December gets under way with the hustle and bustle of Christmas holidays and everything that entails. I had a lot of time to spend working through the finer points of 4.3 which released last Tuesday, and this weekend was spent doing as much as I could with guild mates (a huge thank you to Toargo and Detch who put up with more PUG dungeons than anyone deserves to see in a single weekend).

I enjoy the latest WoW patch but there’s one small issue I have with one of the new features that was added. This probably comes as no surprise to those who are playing, but for those who are not, it’s void storage. See, void storage is supposed to be considered ‘long term’ storage. The problem I currently have with it is that you pay 100g to unlock the void storage slots – and then you pay 25g for every item you put into storage, whether or not you’ve put it there before or not. Also unique items can not be placed there (such as some tabards that you may actually wish to store long term). I’ve come to the conclusion that this is nothing more than an annoying money sink for those who have too much coin. Thankfully I don’t suffer from such an affliction.

The three new dungeons are fun but a little quick and quite simple. You need to do them in order the first time to unlock the next, and out of the three the first one is probably the hardest. ilevel 378 gear drops in abundance and I managed to boost all three of my 85 characters to raid-capable (ilevel 372 using the LFRaid tool) in short time. My favorite encounter is the hourglass fight on the first dungeon where one person in the group gets to re-set time (and you can do this up to five times in the encounter) and you watch everything roll back at hyper speed. It’s a great fight because you get to blow all of your cool downs at once and you don’t take any durability hits for dying because sooner or later someone is bound to die and time will be re-set. I also love the second dungeon, where you stealth around the zone avoiding demons and then eventually fight masses of them all at once while being protected by NPC. The third dungeon is also quite a lot of fun, you escort Thrall and he helps your group. In fact he managed to defeat encounters that my groups have some times wiped on. I think he should just solo the entire zone.

Thanks to all of these amazing dungeon runs the little guild of three managed to ding level 5! This was a huge accomplishment for us, it means we start earning cash for completing dungeon runs and we also earn a little for each mob that we kill and loot (5% goes to the guild bank). It has taken us quite a lot of work to get there, but I’m pleased.

I hope everyone had an amazing weekend, no matter where you found yourself! As always, happy gaming!