LOTRO

EQ2 Arasai

Not bad :) I made an Arasai Shadowknight while working on my EQ2 guide. I made her on Antonia Bayle since that seems to be the en vogue place to do so.

Infected Mushroom - Becoming Insane

Love this video!

MMM Cake

Vanguard: Saga of Picking Characters

Here I am again, starting a new MMO - Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, and here I am again, not knowing what to play. I really enjoy healers, so I have so far made a Blood Mage and a Cleric and well -- I like them both! This is a first time that two healers feel so differently in play. Clerics can take a beating, and Blood Mages can barely take a hit. Clerics can tank somewhat and Blood Mages can do insane DPS. They both heal well. Blood Mages require a lot more macroing with combo points called Blood Union and three stances to be effective. So the Blood Mages are definitely more advanced to play.

But on top of all that, it seems some of the other classes would be fun to play as well. I don't want to make the mistake of choosing only one early on and never going back to try anything else. I typically do that and it often lowers fun factor and replayablity at the end game for me. I often pick one, stick to it like glue, then get bored when I'm max level and have no desire to make an alt. This time I'm making a few alts, then I will max one out but not having to repeat the really low levels will probably encourage me to try something different.

VG Harem

My Life for the Horde

Currently on Maiev where strangely the A:H ratio is almost a whopping 1:2.
It's like a foreign concept to me not to be constantly ganked, let alone on the Horde side. Prior to Frostmane I had always been Horde, but never gotten very far, and certainly not PvP.

Poor Xanafae is retired now, but I can't stand being a Dwarf and I cannot stand my name. The only thing that I miss is Fear Ward, and well I may get my fix from my Draenei Xiantai.
Here is my new beauty:

So far it's real quiet on the Maiev front and I think it will be an excellent place to level. Good hunting and good AH in that there is a lot of demand. Hopefully it will be a good place to be guilded as well.

Updates....

So I got Xanafae to 40ish, but I got bored with TBC coming so she's pretty much retired. (I should have known better than playing a Dwarf.) I have been doing the new raid content in Echoes of Faydwer in EQ2. It's ok,but with Vanguard coming its pretty clear where SOE's attention is. I even have a piece of the end of EoF Inquisitor set.

I'll be starting over with my proper name Xianthe as a Blood Mage in TBC. Lately I have gone back to Anarchy Online and have been enjoying getting Domynatryx up to level 80s.

I do really wish WoW allowed cross faction alts on the same server and had cross server tells. It's unfortunate there are so many ways that WoW separates friends. I shouldn't have to argue with them all about what server/faction we should all be on.

Testin

More WoW

I'm currently having a blast with my friend Pyrena and some of the old (and new) folks from Paragon on Frostmane PvP server. Here is lil' Xana @ ~25:


We are currently running through Deadmines, Stockades and Wailing Caverns while doing various quest with only the occaisional gankage. (I even killed a level 60 the other day being stupid.) I have no idea why horde level 50+ thinks its fun to try an gank newbs, only to end up ganked themselves half the time.

And these are quite possibly some of the best forum avatars evar (thanks Myst for the rain one):



And yes I hear a gallery of pleas not to have any more revealing Tarique pics:

Archlord Beta Ends.

Archlord comes out today at retailers. I have been fooling with the beta for the last three weeks. The game has low minimum PC requirements, and runs; however, I cannot believe they released the game. It had quite a few glaring bugs and often you would see Korean text throughout the game. Some windows didn't scroll properly for the English text. It did not feel polished in the slightest. Folks are gonna complain about the lack of customization in the faces (similar to Lineage II), and the whole point and click move thing. They did have WASD and key mapping support, but WASD was way slower than using the mouse/camera to move. I honestly liked the point and click this time. I zoomed the camera out to a 2/3rds view like in Diablo, and felt at home.

The good thing was the game is playable. It had quests, I didn't see any real combat issues or anything of that sort. My ablities worked. I played an Elementalist, so yes my pet did his job slowing mobs. I looked awesomely cute. (See Xianthe the Elementalist above... ((^_~ Y.)

Even with all the bugs, I fully support the concept of the game. Not every game needs to be an EverQuest or a WoW. It's nice to take a break in a PvP oriented game with PvE elements and not care about your gear cause it doesn't take long to level. (Although during beta it didn't seem like you lost gear even though some of the game text talked about it.) It reminded me a lot of playing Diablo with quests and crafting and a keke ^.^Y feel.

I actually enjoyed it and may have picked it up if they spent more time fixing the client bugs, but no way am I paying $14.95 a month for a truly buggy MMO. I would have preferred to see a smaller monthly fee ~$5.00 then I would have been tempted. I cannot possibly fathom why they would need $14.95 a month to run this MMO. Its not going to be a ton of servers, they probably aren't going to release a ton of content, and events will be done related to PvP. The players are making the content beyond the leveling grind.

Maybe I'll check the game out again in 6 months or so. If it's really good then they will have fixed those text/client issues. But I must say I was impressed with the amount of quests for this sort of game from what I saw.

Beta's Beta's Beta's

Right now I am in three different beta's. To say that I am busy would be an understatement. I take beta's as priviledges to ensure quality releases for games I love, as well as getting a sneak peak before having to drop coin and buy a game.

I have been writing bug reports, and giving feedback as much a possible, all while trying to have fun.

Once the NDAs are up I'll post pictures.

Matron Down - Permafrost Server First

Last night we gathered and took down Matron in about two kills after the right folks logged on. We did have two new members last night as well and they made all the difference. Not to mention a World Wide 1st!!!!!11111 of FoH all being on Ventrilo.

WoW Expedition #3

I played in Beta WoW then EQ2 and ended up choosing EQ2. Since release after pretty much maxxing my EQ2 character we have given various games a try. We are back giving WoW try #3 this time just before The Burning Crusade. Today's MMOs simply don't take up all your time like EQ1 or FFXI did unless you make alts or attempt to do every quest in game or something like that. So here are my cleric, druid and rogue. (Please note how elite my rogue is).

The marked difference this time is that we are trying to play with friends. I know sometimes it doesn't work out but we have hooked up with our old friends from Paragon (Hi Julie, Lola, Butters and Baruach!) on our old FFXI server, Sylph. We are all playing on the PvP server Frostmane in League of Trouble. They are all uber 60's in AQ40 headed to Naxx and we are all newb, but so far everyone has been nice to us and helping us level and what not. (Thanks all for making us feel at home!)

Some Screens From the New PC

So now that I have the new PC I have been turning up the graphics fairly high on raids. I took all these in at least Balanced settings. (Keep in mind I forgot to turn up the screenshot quality.) Its a large improvement from the old box with regards to lighting etc. I'll try to take some on extreme quality as well, as the new rig can pretty much run around all of Norrath in that quality as long as I'm not on raids. Balanced is the new raid setting.

Tarique in all his glory!

Off topic

I am a good cook, and I would go so far as to say a great one...but I cannot compete with Tarique whatsover in the plating/creativity department. (Terrible photo skills not withstanding.)

I'm sorry Tarique, but if I cook its not gonna look like this!

Computer go ~*BOOM*~!

So in the last two months, all my precious hard drives and beautiful screenshots are now sitting on my desk. But now I have a really nice new PC:


Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz 4MB Cache 1066MHz FSB
Power Supply: 650 Watt Alienware® Multi-GPU Approved
Motherboard: Alienware® Approved NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Motherboard
Memory: 2GB DDR2 Performance SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 x 1024MB
Graphics Processor: 1024MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ 7950 GX2L

Sure its Alienware, sure its commercial, but I got it in ~2 weeks and didn't have any issues. I'm happy with my purchase. Next time I'll probably go to a more indie computer builder, but this was all definitely not planned.

Wow, I'm lazy.

First, I was supposed to put up all the nice pictures on my hard drive - i.e. one of the main reasons I made this blog, and I have sorely failed. (Well, not so much lazy considering the amount of work I have been doing, but that's neither here nor there.) Secondly, stuff has been occurring.We have bounced from FFXI to WoW to Anarchy Online to now the EQ1 Progression server. Lots of pics, and stories to tell, so I will endeavor to make entries for each.

I'll give an update on EQ2 as well.We started out pretty OK with the adventure pack. It seemed like small group content and suited to all the folks taking breaks for various reasons. We came fairly close to getting a world wide first on the Nizara instance, and while that isn't much, I thought it boded well for our hitting this pack hard. We even defeated the winged bird encounter fairly quickly. But now, its weeks later and we have tried the turtle dragon all of 4-5 times and really only seriously once or twice. We got folks complaining about how hard this is and how we won't get it. They are right, to some degree. This encounter is beyond us at the moment, but I kinda feel thats how MMO raids should be. I came to EQ2 to get away from staying up 'til the wee hours camping named, only to find out the spawn happened while I was at work, but one night's worth of tries and people don't wanna do it.
It isn't like its even an hour most of the time.

I have come to the conclusion that MMOs are in a definite state of flux. No one plays just one anymore, and if they do, they play in very short bursts of time. Which I actually think is great; however, it seems we have lost our global ability to buckle down a few times a year and actually kill the hard stuff. In our guild, this has pretty much been going on since the D'Jinn Master. We did an awesome job of doing Pedastal of Sky and really trying the event, but we lost our drive when it came to Poets and the Godking. Its been downhill since. Obviously, all of this is driven
by what others want to do. It is simply not possible to map your play style onto a guild of 100 or even 40 people. Right now for me we are playing enough, but not enough trying hard when something really difficult is in front of us.

Meh.

Mutagenic Overlord down Sunday!

So that big bad mutant mantis is down now, and we can call Kingdom of Sky complete!