Bloggy XMAS 5 – An Old Soul

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I’ve been gaming for a long time, I can’t really think back to a time where I didn’t game.  It’s one of my two main hobbies – hockey and gaming.  I’m 35 now, and I’d bet dollars to donuts I’ve been doing it for 30 years.  As with most folk, I’ve had ups and downs.  My hobbies have kept me sane through them.  In a particular rough spot, at the tail end of my teens and early twenties, I was having issues with home and finding some direction in life.  It got pretty dark for a while.  Ultima Online and Everquest were my two main releases.  Given that high speed wasn’t around, a modem was required.  That took up a phone line, so I ended up playing overnight to avoid conflicts with the house line.

Aside from that, you should know that I’m a high-functional introvert.  It’s getting better with time and practice but my wife is the family extrovert.  Makes for a solid team.

Social Gaming

Ultima Online I was pulled in through a magazine ad a friend pass my way.  We played together at launch for a few weeks but he moved on and I delved deeper.  I eventually became a PK hunter and that meta aspect to the game made me a fair amount of friends.  The actions I took were such that I ended up “grey” most of the time, rather than hunting the Illustrious title of pure nobility.  It was my first real foray into social groups and it really taught me a solid amount about group play, delegation and responsibility.  I was fairly active, even after the Trammel split in 2000.  I made a few alt accounts and used my personal house as a base of operations.  EBay was my friend and I sold/bought property and characters which subsidized my gaming hobby for a very long time.

Everquest came out in late 1999 and it honestly took me a while to get into the game.  The inability to see in the dark was a major roadblock and I didn’t really swap over until 2001, when the guild I had in UO finally dissolved.  EQ I started playing with another real life friend but he also moved on.  This was probably the lowest of the low for me in RL. EQ was crack, came at a perfect time, and it was common to have 8-16 hour sessions go through without knowing it.

I ended up settling with a Dark Elf Necromancer, as the late hour sessions made it somewhat harder to find groupmates.  That said, things took a turn once I found this Barbarian Warrior in my mid-teens.  We’d play together all the time.  ICQ was a mainstay back then and we’d be chatting all the time.  He worked shift-work, was married (at 16 on Hallowe’en of all dates) and had kids, even though we were both the same age.  I can distinctly remember camping the isle in OoT for days trying to get through the hell levels.  The only recourse was our chats.  While this certainly kept me afloat, I’d like to think I did the same for him.

I printed out dozens of these maps

Time has a way with things and eventually we parted.  He found another job (with Gateway if I recall) with different hours and he had to work things out with his wife.  We’d still chat every week or so but clearly there was a gap.  I would say he was my first real online best friend.

I did keep up with EQ and met a nice couple from California, in a small social guild.  That was a ton of fun and that lasted many years.  We all merged into an adult guild, the Companions, back in the RoK days.  I think that lasted an extra 2 expansions, as I clearly remember raiding in the Vellious expansion as well and starting planes.  The guild had a requirement that people be over 30, though made an exception for me.  These were professional people, lawyers and doctors for a large part.  I think I grew up 5 years in 1 during this time.  I managed the website (which cemented my direction in IT) and did all the art and updates.  A bunch of the folk were related too, so it was like being part of an adopted family.  That was an awesome feeling – of belonging somewhere.

But the time in EQ had to move on and I moved off to Horizons and the promise of player-built housing with a subsection of the guild.  This was my first foray into group projects.  We’d set out build orders and collect/refine the material.  It was a lot of fun collecting everything and working as a team on a non-combat goal.  Everyone could participate. Unfortunately, the higher end part of the game was seriously broken and that prevented future growth.  Even more bad timing was EQ2 and WoW on the horizon (pun not intended).  We split ways here because after playing both betas, EQ2 held no appeal while WoW seemed to hit the right nerve.  This also coincided with a rather dramatic shift in the personal space and a relative uptick on future outlook.  UO and EQ both helped me get through a heck of a funk.

I think in hindsight the social aspect really filled a need I had at that time.  As I’ve grown older and matured, I’ve found other ways to meet my needs.  I have a great wife who understands and supports my gaming habits.  My kids are amazing and are so much more fulfilling than I had thought possible.  The social aspect at work is great and my friends outside of work fill in a huge gap as well.   Games, in of themselves, are less a social thing for me now and more of a hobby to get the brain ticking.  It’s also challenging in today’s gamespace where there’s no whitespace or dead time.  There’s a reason EQ implemented the /gems function after all.  Today it’s more about voice chat and that option just isn’t so viable with 3 other people in the house.

Social Blogging

With that gap in social from gaming I have moved on to blogs.  I’ve owned this domain for 11 years now, blogging for nearly as long.  A social network has been built over the years, supported through forums, games, twitter, podcasts and cross-posting.  The NBI is a great example of this, where the community comes together to help some new bloggers.  Blaugust was a cool challenge to post something every day.  Bloggy Xmas is obviously the most recent example of this.

With so many games available for our attention, the odds of a single community in a single game are long gone.  The bonds last across games but you still need a mechanism to share stories.  Blogs are an amazing way to do that.  While my blogroll isn’t as long as it should be, it’s a decent sample of the various folks sharing their ideas, with very little overlap.  In fact, there are a few that conflict with each other which provides some great counterpoints.

The community is small enough that everyone seems to know each other yet big enough for everyone to be able find something they can relate to.  I hope everyone reading this can find a few more friends through this Bloggy Xmas event.  We all share a same passion for games and that’s certainly something worth sharing.

Dragon Age – First Impressions

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So I found an online deal that shaved about $15 off of Dragon Age Inquisition.  Why not?  WoW servers are melting something fierce lately and SWTOR won’t open for a few more days.  26gig install was something else but interesting difference between Steam and Origin is that the download includes the install.  There have been more than enough times where I was sitting staring at a screen for an hour for a Steam game to install.  I mean, I know why it happens, just irksome.

So a few technical things to start.  You need a controller plugged in before launching the game.  Which is stupid but I guess since it changes the UI… I’ll live with it.  AMD video cards.  Now, I don’t have the best laptop.  It was top of the line 3 years ago and I paid mint for a custom one (actually, my guides paid for it) but it still handles every game I’ve thrown at it since, and at a decent clip.  Wildstar on max, ESO pretty darn high.  Even Tomb Raider was running everything but infi-hair.  But DA:I (if I can call you that) doesn’t like AMD chips.  I can get maybe 45 minutes out of the game before it locks up due to a memory leak or an invalid command.  I’m fully patched too, which makes it even more annoying.  But such is the master PC – video cards are always suspect.

Why is my hair shiny? I look like a plastic doll.

Why is my hair shiny? I look like a plastic doll.

That aside, the game plays fairly well.  I made a mage, playing on normal.  I find the actual skills much less interesting this time though the world is more engaging.  Instead of bits and pieces, now you have a relatively open world to fight in.  Combat has been streamlined too, so it’s closer to Mass Effect 2 than any other DA game before it.  I think the pacing is well done but I don’t like not having healing abilities or the ability to regenerate out of combat.  All I get are healing potions, shared across the group.  Why give me 4 characters to play with if the tank ain’t can only keep 1 target active and the support provides a temporary shield?  Bah.  It’s no longer strategic, it’s all tactics.  Take the heaviest hitting skill you can find and then support it with knockdowns/stuns to avoid taking damage.  Chain stuns keep you alive.

The story is neat. The characters so far interesting.  The quests are far from the fetch quests as they often involve exploration or dialogue.  You response choices are varied enough and the voice acting is decent.  Inventory management sucks, as usual with any RPG.  Things get tagged as junk when they clearly are not.

I’m kind of thinking this is in final beta right now and there’s a big kitchen sink patch coming my way – or at least in time for the holidays.  Let’s see how far I can get without the next crash though.

#WoW – Bodyguards

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A neat little feature in WoD is the ability to “hire” a bodyguard from one of your followers.  Now, there are only 5 per faction and they are set in stone.  You can’t miss them.  Each has their own perk, unlocked through faction with that specific bodyguard.  You gain 10 faction per kill, no exceptions.  It only works in the wild, so no dungeon runs.  And you need 2,000 kills to unlock the perk.  They also scale to your level, and have some decent skills.  Pretty good support actually.

I opted for Leorajh, as he comes with the ability to launch garrison missions in the field.  I already have a mailbox, a quick hearthstone to the garrison and repairs anywhere.  The summon a friend requires another person with you… so pretty useless out in the wild. Important note. While you can get a bodyguard to max faction earlier, you can’t complete the quest that unlocks the skill til 100. And even then it’s by knocking out a boss in a level 100 zone.

The hiccup here is the 2,000 kills.  My monk played the most out of MoP of all my characters.  From 1-100, including the bodyguard work, he’s amassed only 30,000 kills.  My rogue is sitting around 150,000 but he has way more hours in.  Anyways, 2,000 is a LOT.  I thought perhaps through normal play I’d see some decent progress but after a week, running the 1000 apexis dailies in a raid, I wasn’t making a huge dent in that number.  In comes Google.

For a while, 1hp critters gave you faction.  There was a neat spider spot in Talador that was just ripe for this action.  That got squashed a week or so ago.

Instead, through of all things archeology travels, I stumbled upon a neat spot in Gorgrond.

Stoneshard Grubling

Stoneshard Grubling

Now, in this 1 location there are 3 distinct spawning areas of these grubs.  A single run through all three will get you about 70 kills.  They respawn pretty much as fast as I could kill them.  I did the last 1,000 kills in less than 10 minutes.

The first 1,000 kills were done in Talador, at the Burning Front.

Burning Front

Burning Front

This place spawns demons, non-stop.  There are a few NPCs who can tank for you.  The mobs, while weak, still have decent hp so it isn’t a single shot deal.  If you’ve invested in the Artillery for this zone, then that works pretty well.  This one moves along at about 50 kills a minute, more if you’re lucky.

So yeah, neat feature. It’s time-gated, so my optimization subroutines kicked in.  The ability is sweet, the extra damage and healing is welcome and it’s nice to have a sidekick.

#WoW – Molten Core Run

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A funny thought occurred to me.  Blizzard’s trolling Wildstar, or at the very least, making fun of everyone who says 40 mans are the best.  I say this after having gone through a Molten Core 10-year anniversary run.

Now, I did MC back when it was cool.  Roster boss was a pain but sheer bad play was another one.  I can clearly remember dying multiple times to the core hounds, or the crazy respawn timers.  All of that glory is back if you want it. It took the group a solid 3 hours, with only 2 people leaving while it was underway.  I got my mount and lucked out on an ilvl 640 helm.

For those saying that LFR beats the roster boss, I disagree.  LFR, if anything, is a perfect example of the roster boss from the 40 days.  In those raids, you had a solid core of 20 carrying 10, with the final 10 more a hindrance than anything else.  LFR is exactly this.  A hunter pulled Shazz by accident.  A knockback into a pair of hounds wiped as well.  Mages who didn’t know they could decurse caused 2 wipes.  Players who honestly said “I don’t have any AE abilities in my bar” were a ton of fun on the hound packs.  It took the tanks a fair bit to understand that they couldn’t all taunt, which made many of the enemies spin around and AE the entire raid.  Every boss was a 1 shot deal but Shazz was the only one who took us to town (see decurse comment).  All told, out of all the 15 or so wipes, I would only consider 1 that wasn’t caused by someone doing something drastically wrong.

To compound this, the ilvl requirement is rather low in my opinion.  The difference between 615 and say, 630 is significant.  When I queued for LFR, it was by chance as I saw the option up.  I checked the eyeball and it indicated a 30 second ETA.  I found this interesting as most queues for DPS are around an hour.  When I actually got into the raid, I got assigned to heals.  And the raid leader since my name was the first alphabetically.  Hah!

I healed to the best of my abilities but clearly my gear was pretty crappy.  Monk healers are pretty crappy in terms of burst healing, though they apparently scale quite well.  After having healed as a shaman, woo, what a difference in a high damage raid.  I kind of like the mechanics of a monk healer but there are certainly some additional tweaks that are needed to balance out the good heals from the bad.  Let’s just say that of all the healers, I think the monk would have the hardest time overhealing anyone.

The fun part of the raid was that there were 2 core groups of raiders in the field, both from different servers than mine.  The banter was great.  It was a drastic change from typical LFR chat.  I really found myself chuckling at some of the stuff being said.  Tanks were smart, heals were smart.  DPS generally avoided the bad stuff.  In a raid where 1 bad move can wipe 39 other people, you can find some tough spots but here for some reason, people were good.

Now, would I want to spend another 3 hours doing MC?  Nope.  I have my mount.  I’m good.

#WoW – Where I Learned to Pay Attention

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Previous to WoD, if you played a second specialization (outside of mages, hunters, rogues and warlocks), you needed a 2nd set of gear.  Tanks, DPS and Healers needed different stats and you ended up with a full 2nd set of gear in the bag.  Leveling up this was even more ridiculous, as you’d hit cap and not have a single item for the 2nd spec.

WoD turns that around a fair bit.  Regular armor has multiple mail stats that vary depending on the spec in use.  So my monk is either Agility or Intellect based, depending.  This applies to the helm, chest, shoulders, legs, arms, wrist and feet.  I found this out the hard way, let’s say.

In order to run heroics you need to pass silver in the proving grounds.  Very similar to the Guardian challenge in TSW and in my opinion, the 2nd best thing MoP brought into the game (outside Flex raiding).  There are bronze, silver and gold runs for tanks, dps and healers, in increasing difficulty.

I had leveled as physical DPS, so the dps proving grounds were extremely easy.  I was geared, knew that I needed to interrupt and could move around to avoid stuff.  Simple cakes.

I mentioned before I wanted to try healing again, what with the DPS queues being stupid.  So I reset my macros and tried healing again.  Of note, I did heal as a monk on MoP, just not often.  I knew the rotation and the buttons.

I still failed bronze.  Badly.

I didn’t really understand why.  My skills were set up, my UI tweaked a bit.  I was pressing the right buttons.  So I tried again, and failed once more.  I started looking at the amount I was healing and realized it was quite low.  I looked at the gear quickly, sure enough my chest was Intellect as were other pieces. Try again, lose once more.

Frustrated at this point, I went over each piece on my character and noticed a big chunk was wrong.  Necklace, 2x rings, 2x trinkets, cloak and weapon did not have Intellect.  I was running at half power, at least.  So I looked at my handy treasure map, found a few intellect pieces I could collect, bought a weapon on the AH and went to work.

I passed silver without any real issues on the next attempt.  My healing normal healing throughput was what I was getting as a crit before.  Astounding difference in power and it just started going together.

So yeah, the proving grounds did what they were supposed to do.  Make me pay attention.  Lesson learned.

#WoW – More Things to do at 100

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I think last night was my first full session at 100.  I mentioned previously that I was sort of dropped to my own devices when I completed Nagrand.  So what did I do?  I installed some mods.

Ok, not so fancy sure.  But this was a fresh install of WoW a month back and I didn’t really do anything that merited a mod.  This time, I opted for a few items.  Curse has all the mods listed, or a link at least.

  • A full UI replacement.  There’s not a lot to be said here than I think this should be the new default WoW UI.  It seems every game today allows the end user to manually move the elements around and ElvUI does that and more.
  • I’ve had this mod since Vanilla.  I have a long history with fishing.  WoW’s is the simplest implementation and casting in my garrison is great.  I’d have to triple check but I’m pretty sure I have 4 characters over 500 fishing.  I won’t bore you with the math about how many casts that took.
  • DeadlyBossMod.  Eh, don’t really need this yet.
  • HandyNotes + WoD treasures. This updates your map to show the location of treasures, points of interest and the rare spawns. There’s a fun part about discovery, certainly.  Then there’s the “where the hell is that box” part of it.
  • This gives you a popup anytime a rare is spotted near you.  I used this with my Hunter to find rare pets.  Works great in WoD since there are dozens of rares per zone.

So that stuff took a bit to set up.  But it’s good now.

I then focused on my garrison followers.  WoWhead has a good guide on it.  I had already collected 20 or so, so this was more of a stragglers issue.  In particular Leorjah who is practically hidden and the Archmage Vision (throwback to the TBC version).  In the process, I hit ~30 followers so I had to de-activate quite a few.  Considering I like some of the companions, that’s an odd choice to make.  So my thought process on hiding them is as follows:

  1. Focus on green-ranked followers
  2. Is one of the traits tradeskill based? A tradeskill I won’t use? (skinning).  Hide ‘em.
  3. Do they have traits that increase success, XP gained, reduce mission time or are a bodyguard? Keep ‘em.

I now have a few at level 100.  One in particular rolled great and has half mission time, double garrison rewards.  In a play session, I can get 2-3 missions out of him due to the short times, so I can collect ~200 resources.  Actually, I think I made about 1000 resources in 2 days because of that guy, combined with work orders on the mill.

This process had me running around the zones, finding folk and other rares I had missed.  I found some other treasures, completed some archeology (maxed now) and stored those results in my garrison.  Of really cool note, the back of your keep has a room built just for archeology finds.  That is amazeballs.  They are pre-slotted, so you can’t move them but it’s something.

Two particular notes to close off for now.  Archeology was/is/will be a pastime tradeskill.  Every other tradeskill interacts with some other feature (fishing is actually a big deal again) but not this one.  There’s some pretty cool lore and you get some items for the garrison.  What’s a little bugger is the way the zones work.  As an Alliance, I had 3 digsites in Frostfire – which is a massive pain to get to the first time and there’s only 1 flight point for the entire zone.  Eh.  Nagrand has digsites in the level 100 zones, where enemies have about a million hit points and you dig under them.  Since archeology dig sites are manually placed (I mean literally, someone picked the exact spots) there was obviously some logic applied here.  Why a flavor skill would put you in a heavy combat zone is beyond me.  As a monk, I send my cat to distract the enemies while I dig, then run away like a coward.  Works great.

The second part is a note on the music.  I typically play games with the music and sound are near equal levels.  Sound is a cue for action and there’s a certain rhythm to it.  WoD is a bit different in that the music has been updated but none of the sound has.  The speeches given by characters are still at near full level but the sounds – mounting, combat, clicking – are all disabled, while the music is full blast.  And there’s different music all over the place, 4-5 tracks per zone at least.  The garrison has one for the keep alone.  I am incredibly impressed.

#WoW – Level 100 Review

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I hit 100 sometime over the weekend.  A week to clear “all” the content for leveling and I’ve upgraded my garrison to level 3.  When I completed Nagrand (which had a pretty neat cinematic) the final quest just dropped progress forward.  It was an odd feeling, sort of like hitting the finish line and then a lack of fireworks.  I was expecting some breadcrumbs to lead you to the other features.

The zones themselves are pretty well done.  Spires of Arak is my favorite zone as the lore is interesting.  Skettis has always piqued my interest and this zone does a super job explaining what happened to make them as they are.  Plus, there are next to no orcs in this zone.

The one I liked the least was Talador.  It was like a rehash of TBC and was more of an homage than actual progress.  Using a Shredder to attack hundreds of orcs wasn’t a whole lot of fun.  The garrison artillery skill was pretty cool though.  I went through Tuurem and didn’t notice til the end.  I spent the majority of my time in TBC within Terrokar, as it was the final point of leveling, was the central hub and had level 70 content as well.  I came out feeing “meh”.

Nagrand is an odd one.  There is a lot more vertical movement in this zone than I expected, in particular in the middle of the zone.  The elemental plateau was neat, as well as Oshu’gun.  That I took down the earth element lead in 10 seconds seemed pretty stupid to be honest but the story was solid.  The final quest taking on Garrosh was neat.  Also, the solo arena section was pretty cool, somewhat similar to the Brawling Guild.  The garrison buff that I took was a mount that I could use in combat, which is essentially a zone-wide speed boost.  Maybe there’s more content at 100, with what I hear about hunts.  Overall well done.

If I was to rank, favorite to least, it’d be something like this:

  1. Spires of Arak
  2. Shadowmoon Valley
  3. Nagrand
  4. Gorgrond
  5. Talador

What to do at 100

Well the first thing is to keep the garrison going and the missions.  I am running short on resources to update the buildings I have and still have an empty slot.  But that makes sense if there’s a long game.  I have an odd issue with the gathering garrison nodes.  The way the game works with these items is that you no longer need mining or herbalism.  Skinning can only be done in-field, so that still has some use.  Fishing is the odd one out, since it’s used for cooking and alchemy.  I have so many herbs and ore, I don’t know what to do with them.

The daily quests in the garrison are broken outside of the dungeon runs.  I say this in that the progress is for each takes a while and heavily contested.  If there was open grouping it wouldn’t be so bad but the way it’s implemented now is very poor.

Treasure hunting is neat but only 1 time.  There’s some interesting acrobatics involved to find some of them.  Rare hunting is fun too, with some interesting rewards.  It’d be better if the rewards reset on a weekly basis though, would keep people in the zones a bit more.  I mean that the rewards themselves are neat but of such low ilevel, that once you hit 100 there’s not much point to go back.  Timeless Isle worked because of the meta game, you gained faction/currency for something else.  The zones need this – and not just Nagrand.

I’ve yet to run a dungeon.  The first few weeks of an expansion are all about tweaking the content.  I think I’ll wait another while before giving it a shot.

Overall Impressions

The leveling experience of WoW 2.0 is pretty good.  My Timeless Isle gear was replaced pretty quickly and my monk had a good power curve for the entire process.  I took my time, did all the quests I could and really enjoyed the scenery.  I appreciate the lack of flight, it makes the world seem busier.  The open world content works well, with rares everywhere, treasures to find and things to do.  If they can make that content repeatable, then it’s gold.  The plot/story is confusing at times but decently executed.  There’s a heavy saturation of Orcs but that’s expected.

I took the time to read all the quest text, which certainly stretched out my adventure.  I think the first time through it took about an hour for the intro quest up until I had a level 1 garrison.  I did it the other night with an alt in about 20 minutes, just to have the resources generate.  I can see how people got to 100 so quickly, and really, I sort of feel bad for them.  There’s a ton of good work and the data motivates your character.  I’m thinking the writers had a lot of Game of Thrones viewing because main characters just dropped dead in every zone.  Understanding why they did is kind of core to the game, no?

Garrisons are a neat feature that has a fair amount of potential for the “long game”. That said, this is the first expansion in a long time that is so alt-unfriendly because of the garrisons.  I realize this must be something that’s hard to balance in terms of power output.  The old MoP gardens were just resource farms, simple an just made gold.  WoD’s garrisons actually give you tangible power rewards and sharing that across a slew of alts (I have 5 that are 90+) would “break” certain parts of the game I guess.  The social aspect of garrisons is also lacking.

But I guess the final question/answer boils down to, is it fun?  And the answer there is yes, 90 to 100 is fun. Lots of fun.

WoW – A Reboot by Any Other Name

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The more I think of WoD, the more I think it’s an attempt to reboot WoW in its entirety –  WoW2 if you will.  Here are a few items to support that theory.

  • Everyone is given a “free” level 90, with the option to purchase more. This bypasses 10 years of content, provides you all the gear you need to start as well.
  • Each profession can be completed from 1 – max in WoD through catch-up mechanisms. This invalidates any gathering node from 1-90 and all crafting items, which also guts a fair chunk of the economy.
  • The story is a 30 year return in the past with new characters. The actions of the past 10 years have next to no impact on the events in WoD, with the exception of Garrosh breaking out of jail. The lore context is not used at all (Illidan, Lich King, Death Wing) might as well not have existed, other than a kick off point. Reminds me of Marvel’s What If?
  • A near brand new graphics engine for combat and presentation. The game doesn’t look 10 years old and the new architecture is based on merged realms.
  • All mechanics have been drastically simplified, which has dropped the skill cap by a large amount. It’s much less an RPG as it is an action game.
  • The only reason to do any of the “old” content is for achievements or pets/mounts/toys/transmog. Given the power curve, you don’t need other people to do this.

In reality, the game is more accessible today than it has ever been.  If you skipped 2 expansions, you can easily jump in.  Never played before?  Probably the easiest MMO to get into on the market today.  It’s clearly the least feature-rich expansion ever launched and you’d have trouble convincing me that it took 13 months between patches just for garrisons.

Simple sells.  It sells enough to put the game back above 10m subscribers.  Are garrisons enough to keep those people around longer than 3 months?

It’s certainly an interesting balance of changing the game enough to attract new folk while not alienating their core audience.

SWTOR / WoW – Stuck in the Middle

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Safety Note to start the post.  Be smart, don’t tailgate a vehicle that you can’t see around.  My bus got rear-ended by a car today.  The bus won. It will always win.

Day 6 was better, so I’ll start with SWTOR first.

SWTOR

Today was credit making day.  Given that I’m only able to run a single session of crew skills, what with them each taking 20-30 minutes, it was a cycle session on the GTN.  I found a few items that didn’t sell, namely items in the 47-55 range since Makeb/Oricon replaces it all.  It’s funny how a level 46 item will sell easily and a 47 won’t get the light of day.

I also remembered that my older characters had bank accounts.  Bank accounts full of materials.  Materials that are worth credits.  My Sorc and Powertech both hit the 50 GTN cap well before the bank was empty.  My Operative and Juggernaut are still rookies though, so the bank is relatively empty except for legacy/custom gear.  Side note, weapons in SWTOR, while customizable and quite unremarkable.  Which is an odd contrast to other games with customization.  Reminds me a bit of the Esper in Wildstar, where the weapon is an afterthought.  SWTOR does have the best looking gear though.  That stuff is sweet.

My Sorc 3 days ago was at about 700k.  He’s at 1.2m now.  I think I’ve made about 1m across them all, which gets me closer to the Tatooine stronghold.  It’s nice to have a goal.  All this working up to Patch 3, the Shadow of Revan expansion, which I should be more than prepared for.

Side note for a future post.  I am confused by the Dev Blogs for SoR.  The goal of the expansion (in particular disciplines) was to get rid of skill bloat and hyrbridization (it’s now a word).  That the dev blogs are introducing new skills that supercede old ones is conflicting.  Not a new skill that’s standalone – a skill that replaces an old one.  I’ll get into that closer to release.

WoW

At 7:30 the queue was just short of 2000 but dropped relatively quickly – 45 minutes or so.  There were only a dozen or so servers with queue times based on the realm status page.  Area52 and Stormrage the only PvE ones as well, at least from what I could see.  Once I did get in, the server was relatively stable with only a few lag hiccups.  I was in long enough to complete Gorgrond.

Shadowmoon Valley kicks off the campaign for the Alliance.  It’s an decent story of the Draenei foothold in the lands, their massive attack by the horde and some cool sacrifice/birth of a hero substory (Yrel is neato – the only female lead I’ve even heard of in this expansion).  It’s very intro-based and the zone is open enough to have a view of everything.  The zone starts with orcs, goes to a bunch of animals that are poisoned, then finishes with orcs.  There’s a scenario of sorts to finish the zone.

Gorgrond is half about orcs and half about poisoned natural folks (a theme maybe).  You get to meet some Gronn as well.  I read all the quest text but it had nothing to do with anything outside of shamanism (you resurrect what appears to be a demi-god) until the last scenario quest.  That one was all orcs and you take on attacking a huge base.  I died.  A few times.  I could have just stayed back and let everyone else manage it.  Yrel was there and the demi-god.  I didn’t get the point of this story at all.  The outpost was a Lumber Mill which gave me a giant shredder.  The thing did no appreciable damage but did let me find some garrison resources, so yay?

2 zones in, level 94 now.  Can’t figure out what perks I’ve gained, though it almost appears as if they reset every log on.  I’ve gotten the improved chi(?) 3 times now, since every time I log back in I’m at 5 chi.  I am of the firm opinion that random perks while leveling is a stupid mechanic.

Garrison is still a tossup for me.  I upgraded my mine for 1000g.  Ore sells for about 6g per, so 3 days or so and I make my money back.  My follower missions are annoying, with only a single interface point per zone.  What happens is that when I get to that interface, all of them have completed, so there’s no actual decisions to be made about who’s going on the mission.  I see what’s there, it automatically sorts on who’s best and I just assign from the top down.  My 2 year old daughter plays more complex games.  94 and still haven’t figured out how to get a follower with me in the field.  I cut trees to get more resources, to do what exactly?  Run more missions?  I mean, it’s polished to high heck and you have decision points while leveling but it doesn’t yet have any real impact on the game.  I get 5 different quests per zone.  Whoopie.  I think the thing that annoys me the most is the complete lack of customization.  I can’t put trophies, or medals or items that represent my progress in a zone.  All I get are followers, who I can’t actually see outside of a menu.

So far, my experience is one of high polish but no depth.  And I’m simply a stone skipping across the surface.

Restarting the Story

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Day 5.  Kids were tired so I was able to start WoW at about 7EST.  That had a queue of ~2400.  I just left it open and played some SWTOR in the meantime.  I think it was about 10pm when I could finally log in.  From the garrison to any other flight point gave me an error that the instance could not be loaded.  It also told me that the world server had crashed.  Quit that pretty quick.  Good news is that I have 5 more days of game time, so yay?  We’ll see tonight but from what I can tell, there are still a few dozen servers that are in the red.

SWTOR

I had mentioned that I cleaned out my bags and re-focused on making some credits right?  Well, the previous night’s purge gave me about 500K in sales.  I collected my crew skills, assigned new ones, posted on the GTN and then moved on.

To a Jedi Knight of all things.  I’ve heard that a Knight and Smuggler are somewhat on par in terms of story quality and I have an odd dislike for the Smuggler (due to the IA), so knight I went.  Funny story actually, as I had played a knight in the beta, so there were quite a few spots that were a sort of déjà vu feeling.  I had tried to do a few of the Tython quests in addition to the class ones.  I completed 1 of them total, due to the way the items and drops were spread out – which I remember as being a grind issue back in beta.

See, while leveling my other characters, I tend to pick up the nearby quests.  Incidental completion means free credits, exp and sometimes gear.  If a quest was above 75% complete, then I’d take the time.  If it wasn’t, then I’d drop it.  This was if it was even in line with where I was going.  So assuming the quest was in the path, I’d say about 50% or so could be completed.  Makeb was more like 100% but that’s an odd one.  That I only did 1 on Tython was odd.

So I leave Tython at 11 and completed Coruscant by 20.  I was leveling at a crazy pace and it was hard to keep a trainer nearby to stay on track.  Eh.  I also wasn’t paying a ton of attention and forgot to get my advanced class after Tython and only did it at 20.  You forget about the playstyle differences between the classes.  I opted for a DPS only knight (sentinel), who from what I hear is the highest DPS class in the game.  We’ll see how that runs out.

Story-wise there’s not much to report.  The decisions given strongly push you to light side.  The dark side choices aren’t evil per-se, just a strong push for an emotional response.   Feelings lead to the dark side I guess.  I do find it funny to be called “the strongest jedi ever met” and I’m only level 10.  I’m fighting apprentices and masters like it’s a big deal.  From a story perspective, I get that line of thinking.  The level is an MMO mechanic, so that a level 10 sith master is technically weaker than a level 54 frog, but lore-wise it’s the opposite.

Story closing Tython and Coruscant is 2 folks who turned dark (or were always) and I hunted them down.  I’m the jedi police.  Balmorra is next I think.  I took slicing to get some cash while levelling.  The speed of progress meant that I was too low level to pick up boxes in the sewer portion (there are like, 50 friggin’ lock boxes there) but I’m good now for the next planet.  Companions are ho-hum, with a droid and a jedi padawan at my side, neither of which has much of a character to speak of.  I hear the story gets a lot stronger later on, in particular when you get Scourge at the tail end.  Looking forward to that.

What’s neat is that when my night was over, I logged into my Dromund Kass (Empire) stronghold with my jedi.  I think it’s a smart thing to have a single house for all alts.  Quite a few games support this today, or at least access from an alt to a main’s house.  SWTOR isn’t super alt friendly, but with legacy perks, collectible gear and strongholds being shared, it’s a solid step.