Monday, August 8, 2011

Games 08/08/2011

Was a fun weekend. I spent a lot of time doing other stuff (not as much as I would like, but still :P ) and so didn't have as much game time as other weekends. Had a new dining table delivered, also. It's big, it didn't seem anywhere near this size at the store as it does in my apartment. o.O

For warcraft. Sunday was a raid night. I was partially right about ryolith. Healing with my heal lead (holy priest) is much easier than healing with the other healing officer (holy pally). When it was me and the holy priest there, I didn't even feel like my mana was being stressed at all. I saved my fiend almost all the way to p2. But this disguises the more important point. We're not failing due to healing, even with the pally in the raid. A very clear pattern emerges, wipe after wipe, of our volcano debuff getting up to a combined 9-10 stacks or higher and then healing never really catches up again. A lot of that is range, with peeps running all over the place so we can't use very effective group heals. Ah well. We didn't get the kill. Maybe next week. I dunno, we're not even getting consistently to p2. Maybe our peeps doing the turning are horrible, but maybe there really is just too much rng about which volcano gets fiery next.

Anyway, after we gave up on ryolith, we switched to reg and killed him so we could clear the place before reset. Staghelm is such a fun fight for disc priests. I always end up doing like 50-60% of the healing, with 3 healers. Spam poh when you know that all your aegis's (aegises? aegii?) will be used up by the next cleave. Having everyone already grouped up for barrier is awesome, too. Our heal lead is all sadface about how he doesn't have a raid-wide mitigation/healing cooldown (divine hymn sucks), and he's not leading on healing. I get the feeling he'd go disc priest except I'm already around. o.O Rag was uneventful. Felt kinda like we were short dps the whole raid, tbh. Maybe the ryolith attempts made people sleepy. On a plus side, I got a sexy new necklace with spirit on it. Small upgrade, only 372->378, but hey, I'm happy. :P

Spent some time in eve, but it didn't really feel like I actually got that much done. Ran some 3's. Did a long annoying rogue drone exploration site, but it didn't escalate, nor drop anything good. I need to do more 3's and get my rep up enough to get better refining yields, for drone parts and stuff. Ran around in a wormhole a bit (brought my core probes on my drake this time!) Found a radar site, took forever to pound down the first couple waves. Then the third wave warped in, two battleships and some frigates. O.O Bit beyond me. Oddly enough, they didn't aggro immediately. I was able to grab 4 of the 8 archaeology bins before I strayed close enough to aggro them. Got a bunch of wrecked stuff, wrecked weapon, wrecked thruster, etc. Someone in my corp said that they're worth a half million to a couple million each. Fun times. There were a couple normal deadspace areas (perimeter whatevers, hangers?) but I didn't want to press my luck on the wormhole back home staying up. This time. :P There was this amazing visual in the worm hole space. At first I thought it was the sun, but then I realized it was just part of the background. A big pulsar or black hole or something. Light beams radiating out of it and a sort of aura of light flowing out at intervals into the clouds around it. Should have taken a screenshot! :o

In the blog community. Nothing too objectionable today. Tobold is talking a lot about the announced Diablo 3 real money trade auction house where you can sell your in game epics for real money. I dunno, it's a nifty idea. Maybe I'll even buy or sell a thing or two. It's a bit early to judge how it'll work out, I want to see it in practice.

Gevlon is talking about how boss fights are unrealistic, as there's no reason to think that a real life boss will be physically stronger or more powerful than his underlings, merely more influential. I'll go with that, but I don't see it as much of a problem in WoW. When the final boss is a dragon, you kind of expect the dragon to be more powerful than the humans he deals with. In current content I think they handle this very well. In firelands, you never really get an impression that all the bosses are working together. Instead, you've stepped into a new realm, where there are various Powers who are fighting among themselves, and you have to clear the others in order to get to staghelm and rag. The trash reflects this, with spiders attacking everything else, flamewakers binding elementals, etc. Going back to the original idea, it's worth noting that in real life, the difference between a footman and a knight was pretty much just the ability to afford a suit of armor and maintain a horse. Being the leader of a group has its perks, and even if any grunt would be powerful with the stuff the boss has, it's the boss that has it. :P

Spinks is talking about player generated content and the blurring of the player/developer distinction it causes. I'm all for player created scenarios, I loved that aspect of City of Heroes. Apparently Star Trek Online has them too? I didn't know that, maybe I should try that game again sometime. It's free to play now, I think. But yeah, turn players loose on content generation and they'll create elaborate and fun areas, just for more likes or pluses or rating. It's like with oblivion, the original game is fun, but it pales next to what they addon community has developed in the years since it was released. Even ignoring all the porn, stuff like Better Oblivion Cities are just amazing. I think it's a real tribute to how well the game was designed to allow a complete enhancement of the imperial city and still not crash and break half the quests.

Now I want to play oblivion but I'm stuck at work for 6 more hours. >.<

My mood: Still elevated, but feels fragile, declining. 6/10.

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