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SWTOR Early Access and Other Sundry Stuff

13 Dec

So… It’s 2:15 pm in my time zone.  I still haven’t received an early access email for SWTOR, yet I was able to log in this morning at 7:00 am. My 1st character auto-joined my guild and everything.  I reserved some names for myself and tonight plan to actually go back in and create the characters’ appearances to match my ideas for the names.

Still can’t get over the fact that I could log in 7 hours ago and yet still haven’t received notification.  Too weird.  and yes, I checked my junk and spam folders — it ain’t there.  Go figure.

Some useful links I’ve seen:

Server List

Holocron Locations

How Crew Skills Work

***

Even though I let my EQ2 sub go, it lasted a few days after the new expansion.  I logged in to check out the new look for Freeport.  It definitely looks nicer than it used to — better colors and lighting, no more dead trees — feels like it’s more alive.  I was a bit surprised that the “racial ghettos” were just plain turned off — I’d have thought that also would have been redone, but no biggie.  I got an email saying the door to my Mistmoor Crag estate had been moved, but even though I went to the inn it said it’d been moved to, I only found doors to the inn room housing.  Not that I cared much and looked too hard for it either.  I thought it odd that that door had moved while the portal to all the other specialty housing had stayed in South Freeport, byut. . . devs decide what devs decide, no?

Sadly, nothing really made me go “this is awesome and I should keep my sub going and log in a lot” so I have let the subscription lapse.  I may come back sometime and buy the expansion so I can check out a Beastlord, but. . . who knows?  I did love the game, and don’t know why it just doesn’t “have it” for me anymore.  Perhaps it was just burnout from having played it more or less exclusively for so long.

***

On the Rift front, I’ve re-discovered the joys of the melee rogue yet again.  I shot up from level 38 to 43 in about 5 hours over this past weekend.  I had a bunch of rested xp, which helped, but I also decided to scrap the “melee ranger” build, since it looks like it’s designed more for level 50 anyway, and go a bit deeper into Bladedancer and Assassin as a hybrid.  I’ve seen variants on this called “BladeSin” or the cruder “AssDancer,” and thought they looked interesting.  At 39 all the base points for the 2 main souls were where I wanted them, and I started adding in Riftstalker for the Attack Power bonus and (eventual) healing on kill, though currently I really don’t need it.  Build is here if you’d like to see it.

It’s pretty much a single-button macro and the parses on solo mobs jump all over the place, ranging from 350-ish to 700-ish, depending on which cooldowns are available, hit rate, crit rate, etc.  Even with that dps being a bit spotty, I’ve soloed even-level elite mobs with it, so I’m pretty impressed with how much hurt it lays out.  The 40% poison proc rate plus Leeching Poison makes me more or less invulnerable to groups of 3-4 solo mobs, and I can pull entire rift groups including the nerfed “boss” of the cycle and come through just fine.  Amazingly non-squishy with that healing poison on.  Downside is the build has no range, but between RS’s teleport and Flash of Steel I can still usually close gaps pretty quickly.

Got into a dungeon finder group last night and tested out my Marksman/Ranger group build to see how it’d do.  Early on the tank had a bit of trouble with aggro, both with me and the healer, but once he got settled in the run went smoothly.  the overall zone wide parse wasn’t terribly impressive, but I still felt like we killed mobs really quickly and my parse was the highest ZW, so I won’t complain.  Got 3 nice gear upgrades from the dungeon too, including a new chest piece that looks nice enough that I changed all my appearance slots around and re-dyed all my armor to match it.  I didn’t get a screenshot for this post, and I’m not actually sure when I’ll play Rift again, what with the “New Shiny” and all of that, so you don’t get to see, but. . .hey it’s free to read and you get what you pay for ;-)

Interest in EQ2, More Rift Stuff, and More SWTOR thoughts as well

28 Nov

EQ2 stuff 1st:  I decided to buy the new expansion coming out early next month and re-subbed to EQ2 in order to re-familiarize myself with the game.  I played a couple of evenings, found a guild of “old-timers” (ages 30+ IRL) to join, had the “Thorg Armor” crafted for my level 90 toons, was very disappointed that it was WAY better than the other armor pieces that I either endlessly ran instances ot get enough tokens to buy or else was rare drops from those instances, and also finally ran the Cella instance on my SK in order to complete my Mythical Conversion quest.  All in all fairly productive time.

And after that I simply wasn’t interested in logging in again.  I don’t feel like leveling up alts, I don’t feel like running instances.  Frankly, I don’t feel like logging in at all.  EQ2 wasn’t boring to me, but it was uninteresting.  So I canceled the subscription, canceled the pre-order of the expansion, and I think I just might be completely done with EQ2 after all.

***

Damn! That's a BIG dragon!Rift dropped patch 1.6 recently.  The only thing in it that’s really affected me is that there’s a new level 50+ zone added for my capped toons to play in and some of the souls in mage and rogue were re-done so I had to re-allocate some points.  I’ve done some minor exploration of the new area (see the screenshot :-P ), but right now I’m more interested in leveling up my 2 non-capped toons on Faeblight, so my mage is now level 32 and my rogue is level 38 and both are steadily climbing.

Something I actually like about Rift is the way the skill trees seem to have enough “good stuff” in them that there’s almost always something just a point or 2 out of reach that you want to level up so you can get it.  Even if that “just out of reach” thing is on a different soul tree.  Right now on my rogue, for example, 1 build I’m working toward is a “melee ranger” (also called the Hoku spec).  It has 23 points in Bladedancer soul, 24 points in Ranger, and 19 in Assassin.  I’ve got the 23 and 24 in BD and Ranger, but only 3 in Assassin as of yet.  And there’s a nice skill called “Puncture” that I get with 6 points in the soul, so it’s only 2 levels away (since I get 2 points at level 39) so…. there’s incentive.  More “good stuff at 12, 15, 18, and 19 points as well, so no goal feels like it’s very far off.  And thus my interest is still piqued and Rift keeps me logging in, even if not on my capped out toons that I don’t want to endlessly grind instances on.

***

Finally, SWTOR Beta.  I was in it 2 weeks ago, but not last week, and then again this week.  No character wipes yet, so I even had rested XP on the ones I’d logged out in cantinas.  TBH, since I know i plan to play as a Trooper at launch and didn’t want to spoil any of that story, I wasn’t all that excited about logging in this weekend.  But since I had the bonus xp sitting there and I did kinda want to see the animations for the dual-bladed lightsaber, I fired up the Jedi Consular and played with it.

Due to having the rested xp and my penchant for “grinding” any red mob between me and a quest objective (no avoiding mobs for me) and also that I got in a group for the “Chamber of Speech” heroic quest, well….. at the point the story seemed to think I was level 7, maybe approaching level 8, I was already level 10.  Once I hit 10 I decided to see if I could go up to the fleet and get my advanced class, and. . . yup, sure could.  So suddenly I had these nice passive skills as a Jedi Shadow and a nice Blue-level dual-bladed lightsaber.  It started green — the consular color — but we all got the pre-order crystal in the mail so I slotted that in and it turned it black with a yellow outline.  I tried to get a few screenies, but the beta client doesn’t do them and apparently it somehow disabled my Windows thing too, as when I tried to paste into MS Paint it didn’t work either.  And no, I don’t have any other things like SnagIt or whatever, so. . oh well.

My next fight vs multiple mobs back on Tython was kinda fun as the toon would flip the saber back behind her to block attacks.  I don’t know that it was actually blocking or just animating that it was, but it did make it look pretty cool.  Sadly, this did break some immersion, as the next series in my story line sent me to go craft my 1st lightsaber.  Except I already had one I’d been given up in the fleet.  But I still got up to “The Forge” and said “Finally!  A lightsaber!” just before crafting it.  And after crafting that (single-bladed) saber (which wasn’t as good as my dual-bladed one so I didn’t use it at all) I went back to my master and the Jedi Council who I’d already talked to with the saber-staff hanging from my belt and they made a big deal that since I *now* had a lightsaber that meant I was no longer a Padawan.  Oops!

After I’d done that, I didn’t really feel like “testing” anymore.  Anything I do will be wiped anyway, and I’m really only interested in the Trooper class to start and didn’t want to go past the level 10 I already did 2 weeks ago on it and just be repeating content once the go-live happens.  All in all, still enjoyable, but I want the launch to happen before I do anything more.

My only complaint about this beta was that the “Next Target” and “Closest Target” keys never worked for me.  I asked in chat and was told they were buggy, so I ended up just click-targeting everything or letting the “auto-target-back” feature move me on to the next mob that was attacking me.  Not really enjoyable as a melee class with a forced close-in camera so it was hard to see or click on things behind me, but not the end of the world either.

Rift Pet Peeves

9 Mar

Getting the obligatory “Love Rift and have canceled EQ2 and EVE for at least a month while I focus solely on Rift since it’s so much friggin’ fun!” out of the way.  And now that that’s said, there are several things that bug me — either features missing, features badly implemented, or things I just plain don’t like.  This isn’t a comprehensive list and the TL;DR version would probably be summed up as “Copied WoW when they should have copied EQ2.”  And then my personal conspiracy theory that since Hartsman came from SOE and EQ2 that to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest he avoided blatantly copying the better features from EQ2 so as to not be sued or something.

Oddly, this might end up more or less sorting out for myself why I’ve always loved EQ2 yet couldn’t really get into WoW.  So here we go:

Missing things are:

  • Appearance Slots — C’mon, how many games have these now?  I like my sets that I craft for myself and don’t want to break up the look.  The “level capped rainbow look” was a running joke in EQ2 before appearance slots we re added in.  Heck, even DDO has appearance armor anymore.  How could any game ship without them anymore is beyond me.
  • Shared Banks — You allow 6 toons per server, yet each has an individual-only bank and has to mail anything to an alt?  Really?  EQ2 shipped with a shared bank 6 years ago. . . I know the technology is out there. . . . .
  • Guild Banks — I’m still scratching my head at how such a polished game is missing this feature.  Especially since. . .you guessed it. . . EQ2 shipped with them.  Sorry to harp on this EQ2 thing, but um. . .Mr. Hartsman. . . you were THERE and saw how popular these features were and ARE in that game.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
  • In-combat sprint — Granted there’s really no death penalty at all, but it’s still nice to be able to sprint past a mob or 3 in a high density area after it’s aggro’d on you.

Badly implemented things are:

  • The UI  — It’s HUGE.  I’m told there’s someplace in the settings where I can scale it down, though, so I need to look for that.  Still… I’ve never cared for the WoW UI and this one is pretty much a straight copy across from it.  Your party window with its massive portraits and small health bars don’t help when I’m playing a healer either.
  • The mounts — for the love of god, stop making me recast it every damn time I do something.  You had it right in EQ2, Scottie — make me lose the runspeed when in combat, but don’t make the frakking thing go poof and need a 2s recast just becuz a grayed-out mob looked at me funny.  An option a la EQ2′s recently added “don’t show mounts just let me look like I’m running fast” wouldn’t be a bad thing to add either.
  • Player Faction on the PvE servers — EQ2 got this one right too, Scott.  It lets EVERYONE on the server play together.  We chose a PvE server becuz we don’t want to fight the other side.  If I want to play with my friends and I like my Eth while they like Dwarves, why can’t we play together?  Oh right, becuz you have your stupid PvP in my PvE server too.  Newsflash:  People who choose PvE servers don’t want PvP.  Even in “pure PvP games” like Eve and Darkfall something like 80% of all players never leave the non-PvP areas.  PvP is a *niche* and shouldn’t be on every damn server including the PvE ones.  And if you must keep it this way, at least let me add cross-faction friends so if someone logs on I can see that to know to switch to an alt in that faction so I can go play with them.  This whole “never the twain shall meet except across the point of a sword” is utterly ridiculous on a PvE server.

There’s more, but this is long enough and I’m actually itching to log in and play so. . yeah, the negatives really don’t outweigh the positives in any way shape or form, but. .. while I’m a fanboi, I can still say that it’s not “perfect” either :P

Rift Headstart with a Side of Destiny of Velious

25 Feb

Due to a recent change in policy at work, I had yesterday afternoon off, so I figured I’d use that time to jump into the rift headstart.  I’ve decided to go with the Multiplaying.net crowd’s “Circle of Trust” guild on the Faeblight server, so when I 1st logged in I picked that shard and. . . estimated 5 hour queue.  I expected a queue, but 5 hours?  Yowza!  So I started clicking around on various other shards and found one with a mere 20 minute queue on it and started to wait on that one.

While I was waiting I logged in to EQ2 since it was “Free Server Move Day” for up to 5 toons and I’ve been wanting to move at least a couple of toons off Oasis and over to Antonia Bayle.  I’d actually done the prep work for them to be able to move in the morning, so at this point it was largely just a matter of logging in the toons I wanted to move, grabbing the coin, and using it.  Sounds easy, but my EQ2 client tends to crash when it’s supposed to go to the character selection screen, so there was much restarting of the client.  On the bright side, this let me watch the queue for Rift easily since it was sitting behind the EQ2 client, so when it crashed out . . there was the queue countdown!

Once the queue was done I made a toon on (I think it was) Dimwood server and started running through the tutorial zone.  realized about halfway through that since this wasn’t my “preferred server” that one could argue (and I am “one”) that I was wasting my time doing it, but it all worked out becuz they brought all the servers down a few minutes later for “performance tweaks.”  I still had 2 more toons to move in EQ2 so I logged back in there to do that.  Once done, I went back to Rift andf checked Faeblight and it was only showing a 40 minute queue!

So I selected that and pulled up Hulu to catch up on Castle.  I’d missed 2 of the 3 past weeks, after all.  The counter fluctuated a bit and actually went up to over an hour, but then started to drop at about 3 positions per minute and was actually only about a half hour, all told.  So I still have to catch the end of the episode I was watching later, but such is life.

Surprisingly, the tutorial zones were fairly empty.  I guess with the throttled login queue keeping people logging in relatively infrequently and only half-ish picking a faction that it made it seem. . .there were people around yes, but at the end of the zone the public groups for that fake rift event was only me and 1 other person 3 of the 4 times, and we had 3 people on the 4th time.  Yes, I made 4 toons in order to reserve my names that I wanted.  With the removal of the racial characteristics other than a little fluff spell, I found during the open beta that I prefer the Eth (Human) sprint ability to the Bahmi (Barbarian/Orc) leap, and I didn’t like the Kelari (Elf) fox illusion at all, so. . .I have 4 Eth toons.

I’ve already run the tutorial zone many times in the beta, so I just blasted through with each character, which easily gets them to level 6.  In the actual starting area I immediately ran to the mailbox to get their mounts.  Grabbed the harvesting skills I’d want for the planned crafting classes and started trying to get as many resources as possible, since that’s been the bottleneck on the crafting in the prior betas.  Between last night’s session and an early morning one today (baby woke up and once I had her back down I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep before my alarm went off) I have the ability to craft items to level 11 for all of them now, but the characters are only level 8 or 9, so there’s a bit of growth to go before I can be “fully kitted out.”  Which is a good thing, IMO.

This morning there was an armorsmith getting server discovery dings for the T3 crafted items.  Pretty impressive to be making level 23 gear already, I thought.

As it is, for me I’m going to try to get my toons all to level 11 at a minimum this weekend to be fully geared up.  I will probably try to get the “main” (my mage) up to level 16 and do a few runs through the Iron Tombs as healer (love that Chloromancer!), and if I have time, might try to get 1 or 2 of the others to level 13 to be able to start their soul quests.  Time will tell on that.

Happy gaming wherever you find yourself!

EQ2 verses LotRO Free to Play

17 Feb

As the days go by, more and more games seem to be jumping on the (what I will term) “Freemium” band wagon. They’re not exactly Free to Play because you can barely play them without spending *something* but certain aspects of the game are free, and you can get by paying a lot less then the regular monthly subscription fee if you want (especially if you’re a casual gamer, and wait for deals).

Surprisingly enough I have NOT been playing the Lord of the Rings Online as a free to play member. I’ve got VIP access until February because I purchased a bunch of 60 day time cards for cheap before the game went F2P. I have been reading up on everything though, and I’ve got a few friends who are playing as cheaply as they can as a test. We’ll call it our online roulette games experiment for the time being, my money is on LotRO being the ‘cheaper’ way of playing compared to EverQuest 2.

I am far more likely to play LotRO as a ‘free’ game then lets say, EQ2, and I’m going to explain why with a few points that really stand out to me as being winners.

  • - Turbine points can be obtained in game for completing deeds. This is a great selling point to me. If you enjoy completing every single deed and title you can get your hands on then you’re going to earn yourself turbine points that you can spend in their store. You may even be more willing to spend a few dollars here and there to round out the points you have earned when you make purchases. After all, if they can entice you to spend a little when you would have spent nothing, that’s good. You don’t feel like you’re spending that much because after all, you’ve EARNED points, you just want a few extra to pick up that <whatever> from the store. I am far more likely to spend a smaller amount numerous times, then one large amount.
  • - Items in the store are pretty cheap. A piece of cosmetic gear could be as low as 100 turbine points, or as much as 295. Each 100 turbine points is $1 which means you’re not even paying $3 for a nice piece of cosmetic gear. I’ve seen some stores that sell appearance gear for as much as $25 – the smaller your prices SEEM (even if you’re selling each piece individually) the better. I don’t want to buy an entire set, some times I just want a chest piece, or a back piece. I’m far more likely to spend $2 then $25. The most expensive items are the shared vault, and mounts and even those are a far more reasonable price then a lot of games I’ve peeked in at.
  • - Sales. If you’re patient, you can purchase what you “need” over the course of time at a very reduced price. For example the riding skill was 75% off a few weeks ago. I picked it up for my characters for less then $1. Three adventure packs were also on sale for 75% off, less then $1 per adventure pack (three were for sale) which is fantastic. Wait long enough and I have no doubt that even more items will go on sale, enticing players to spend just a little bit here and there. If you get a large number of people purchasing a little bit here and there you more then make up for the few who would have paid the $15 subscription fee.
  • - VIP perks. As a VIP I have access to everything in game AND I earn myself 500 “free” points a month. Why is this great? Because when my account finally lapses from VIP I’ll have stored up enough points to continue playing on as a free to play customer – an idea that I absolutely love. I also get accustomed to their store as I purchase a few items (mostly appearance so far) here and there with my points.

That doesn’t mean I love everything about this new model, there are a lot of restrictions that I don’t enjoy. Skirmishes, channels, etc. that are locked without making purchases or being VIP etc. I’ve never been against F2P, or Freemium, or any other idea that follows, call it what you will. What I do have issues with is how some games have implemented these ideas, namely EQ2 (as of late). I was a fan of Wizard 101 for a good while, loving the idea of unlocking content as I came to it rather then purchasing $15/m for something I may only play twice.

My issue with EQ2X is as follows:

  • - Separate servers from the main player base. I think this was an incredibly poor idea, no matter how many times the red names on forums say that they had the best interest of the players at heart. It turned into an us (regular live servers) vs. them (freemium players) model instead of trying to merge all of your players into one happy family.
  • - The cost of items. Things are expensive. Cosmetic gear especially. I am not going to be buying a handful of things in EQ2X for the same price that I would in LotRO, which makes me less likely to spend anything at all as I have to hum and haw over what I’m going to spend my money on.
  • - The confusing tiers of subscription plans and what they all unlock. It is not needed. In order to get the “full” subscription to EQ2X you’re paying $18/m on an EQ2X server vs. $15/m on a ‘live’ server. Wha? That also STILL does not unlock everything, as races require further payment.
  • - The cost to copy a character from a live server to the EQ2X server. It’s $25 to MOVE a character between live servers. It’s $35 to copy your character to an EQ2X server. I don’t understand the need for that cost, either make it the same amount or simply don’t allow it at all and have everyone start from scratch. Is this an attempt to discourage the current player base from moving over to EQ2X? If so it’s a poor attempt.

Those are my main issues. As you can see it’s nothing to do with what is in the shops, but how the basic designs are set up. With LotRO I don’t feel as though I am being pressured to spending a lot of cash. In EQ2X I feel as though they’re trying to milk players for all they’re worth and then some. Perhaps this is unfair of me, after all you CAN play EQ2X completely free IF you are satisfied with what you will get. That means incredibly limited everything. Gear, spells, classes, and races. Now for some, this is not an issue, but I hardly go to a free to play game expecting it to actually be free, I’m always going to spend *something* – I just think that turbine did a far better job setting their games up.

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