Saruya
Life as a gaming geek, husband, WoW Mage….
ME2: Mission Accomplished.
Mar 9th
Mass Effect 2 – Complete.
Overall impressions are that it was a good game, albeit weaker than the first game. Story line and game mechanics were less impressive this time around, but it does set up the third and final game in the trilogy fairly well. Unless you managed to get Shepherd killed off at the end. God knows how that save game will play out in part 3…
But some parts of the game were infuriatingly stupid.
Gas giants orbiting their sun at half the distance Earth orbits the sun (aka an Astronomical Unit, or au) once every 25 days? Seriously? That thing must be whipping round its sun so feckin fast that it’s egg shaped. Not to mention temperature and the fact that its atmosphere should have boiled away almost instantly…
One among a slew of niggles that, while certainly not enough to ruin the game, certainly went some way towards taking the sheen off of the experience.
Next on the list to complete is Dragon Age. Bioware’s other big recent release. There are niggles there as well, more related to the game’s DLC. But that’s another post for another day…
And yes, I have been making more of an effort to post recently, as you have no doubt noticed. Made a fair bit easier by installing a Wordpress application on my HTC Hero, which means I can write posts from anywhere at any time.
Hellscream’s Warsong – Sing along now!
Mar 8th
So the new ICC zone buff went online last week, and with it everyone, for the moment at least, gets a 5% buff to health, damage and healing.
Now that it has been implemented, Blizzard state that they can increase it at any time, and indeed it has been stated that it can go as high as 30% incrementally in 5% notches. But for the moment it’s only 5%.
So the question remains, with it being an optional buff (you can opt to play without it on a raid wide basis) do you take the help, or do it “naturally”?
IMO everyone bar the hardest of the hardcore should be using it. Why the hell not? Why make life difficult for yourself otherwise? We downed Festergut in 10 man on the day the buff went live, and it’s the first time, despite number beyond measure of attempts in both 10 and 25 man, that I have been involved in downing him.
Did the buff help? Undoubtedly. We took him down on the enrage timer thanks to a DOT effect, as the raid had wiped when he enraged.
Did we care? My Frost Emblems don’t care. The new bits of gear I’ll be picking up certainly couldn’t give a monkeys. Why the hell should I?
Sure, we only managed to do it because of the Warsong crutch. But caring otherwise would just be, as a wise man once said, “Pride fuckin with ya”.
Wow Free Days.
Mar 7th
I think I’ll do this more, take a holiday from Azeroth.
Haven’t logged on at all today, and feel much the better for it. So I managed to get quite a bit further into ME2 and also played Trine for nearly 90 minutes. Really nice game, with a good mix of puzzles, platforming and combat. One to get a bit more playtime into I reckon.
So one more mission or so to clear up in ME2, then it’s off to the Collector homeworld. No idea how close to the end of the game that puts me, but it can’t be a million miles away.
To be frank, it hasn’t been as good a game as ME1. Some of the design decisions are completely nonsensical to me. Weapons for one. You’re living in a galaxy where weapons use no ammo, and you only need to stop them overheating in order to use them indefinitely.
So why in the name of good fuck would the entire galaxy decide en masse to start using ammo in the two years between games? If you run out of ammo (the game tries to state it isn’t ammo, but clips for the weapon’s cooling systems – and then tells you in a loading screen to remember to reload often, as you don’t want to run out of ammo mid-fight! Nnnnngh!) you’re basically fucked.
Would the enemy forces not just stick with the old system of weapons design and fight ground battles on an attritional basis?
No! Apparently they were all invited to this big secret meeting and all agreed to play fair at blowing each other’s brain matter out.
Sigh.
Listen Bioware. It’s an RPG, not Gears of War. Sort it out for ME3. Pretty please?
Time for a change…
Mar 6th
Thought I’d change the theme, the old one’s been up a while and it was starting to look a bit samey.
So new theme, new year (erm, nearly – chinese new year good enough?) and a new post!
God I am slacking at the post writing recently…
Anyway, things have been quiet on my end, as if you couldn’t tell already. Can’t believe I’ve only made 3 posts in the past 5 months! Time to start writing more again methinks. Yeah, I know I say that all the time, but it’ll happen sometime right?
So since the last post, Shill has joined Thunder on his Shadow Priest, Cesc, I have continued gearing up, begun raiding on a regular basis in Icecrown Citadel (finally!) and generally having a laugh. I did recently complete a fair old grind to get the [Reins of the Onyx Netherwing Drake], which is a funky looking flying mount. Took about 4 weeks of daily quests to get from hated to exalted with the Netherwing faction, whereupon you get one drake for free, and you can buy the other 5 or so for 200g a pop.
Glad I stuck with it tbh, because most players fly about on Proto-Drakes, so it’s a bit different, because not all players are willing to put in the time and effort to get to exalted…
This weekend is a free re-activation weekend on City of Heroes, so I popped on to see if any of the old faces were still knocking about, and to see how the old Supergroup (guild) were doing.
It was desolate. The SG is completely defunct – 2 players other than me have even logged in during the past 3 months, 1 that day and the other 18 days ago. The server, Defiant, is virtually empty. I went on originally at 1:30am this morning and there were only 74 players online. Back in the day, at that time on a Friday night/Saturday morning, there used to be 300-400 players still online. Not these days. I called back on about 10:30 this morning, and the population was only marginally higher at 94. So it looks as though the old saying, you can never go home, applies equally to MMOs.
Out of interest, it had been 524 days since I last logged on, which is nearly 18 months. So I checked to see, in the 2 years I played, how much time I had racked up on my main toon, Sar. Now bear in mind I’ve been playing my mage for just short of a year now (two weeks or so), and in that time I have amassed about 780 hours played on that single character. I did a check on my main CoH character: 506 hours.
Man, I play waaaay too much WoW. 150% of the time /played in half the time (1 year) is 3 times as much spent playing WoW than I ever did in CoH. Hell I’ve spent 200 hours at level 80, and I only dinged 80 on January 2nd. Half the time logged in 2 months that I spent playing CoH on my main there. Sheeeeeit bitch.
I really need to see about conquering the games-mountain I have built up atm. Off the top of my head I have:
- Mirror’s Edge
- Mass Effect 2
- Assassin’s Creed 2
- X3: Gold
- Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Dragon Age: Origins
- Colon: The Revenge: Part 1: The Attack of the Colons: !
Ok, that last one is made up, but that’s just the immediate list. There’s plenty more on top of that, for instance:
- Torchlight
- Grid
- Guitar Hero 5
- Braid
- Trine
- Left for Dead 2 (borrowed copy)
- Maybe a bit of Quake Live!
They all need some attention as well, because while playing WoW, I tend to either not play any other games at all, or just play one or two for a bit and go back and do something else in WoW.
So perhaps I should resolve to play WoW during the week, and at the weekends try and give some of the other games a bit of a go, because they ain’t gonna play themselves…
Infact, I think I’ll go play some ME:2!
Level 80 – To Icecrown!
Jan 25th
The Lich King awaits…
This has been a while in coming this post.
I hit 80.
About 3 weeks ago infact 
After months of playing, about 530 hours of lazily levelling and farting about, I finally saw the final yellow ding glow in Utgarde Pinnacle with my guildies running in a 5 man dungeon.
Since that I have managed to massively upgrade my gear, so much so that I think I’m about ready for the hardest and highest level raids in the entire game: Icecrown 10 and 25 man raids.
I also spunked 4,000 gold on epic flying, which really hurt my wallet, as all I had was 4,181 gold :p
But I made up 1,000 gold in a couple of days through selling my alchemy produce and grinding out quests, so back up to respectable levels, although each new piece of gear needs re-gemmed and re-enchanted, which runs into hundreds of gold per item.
So thought is being given to dumping Herbalism, especially as the ability to find Frost Lotus for Flask of the Frost Wyrm is extremely low and taking up mining again or maybe jewelcrafting, as alchemy will allow me to produce the raw gem through transmutation, which I can then cut and socket myself. Saving me thousands of gold potentially, especially if I’m going to level another character to 80 (which should be a lot faster this time round!).
So I’m finally at the level cap, at least until Cataclysm hits, which looks to be in November of this year.
Merrymaking in the Fungeons!
Dec 27th
Because Dungeons are Fun!
So it’s been a month since the last post, and WoW wise I’ve got on a fair bit. I’ve hit level 77, done the Merrymaker meta-achievement (the first step towards the biggest Meta-achievement in the game: What a long strange trip it’s been), got the title Merrymaker, got Cold Weather Flying meaning I can use my flying mount in Northrend now, and hit the 1000 spell power level!
I also started using the random dungeon tool last night, and it seems to be a very quick way of levelling your character up. I did 2 dungeons last night and got 10% of the way towards 78! 20 randoms and you’d level! That’s fast going, but the fact is it takes you about 20 minutes of queuing as a DPS role in order to get into a dungeon. But I suppose if you use in while you’re questing and levelling up otherwise, it’ll help give me a big hand in the grind towards level 80, Icecrown Citadel and Heroics!
Also, 10 days ago Quake 3 celebrated it’s 10th birthday! I remember making a similar post to this when Q2 hit the decade mark, and it doesn’t seem that long ago (it was 2 years ago). Time flies eh? TBH I’ve not played a lot of Quake Live since the closed beta ended, mainly due to playing WoW, but once I hit 80 and I don’t have to grind all day for XP then maybe I’ll have a bit more time for other games…
Speaking of which, it was Christmas the other day!
I had a good one, got 60 bottles of Budweiser from various people in work, Batman Arkham Asylum (PC), Assassin’s Creed 2 (Xbox 360) and the guitar pack of GH5 (360). Using that guitar is a mare, because it kills my left arm trying to use it. Ah well, more practice needed methinks 
Hope you all had a good Xmas! And as it’s likely I’ll not bother my ass before the New Year, have a happy New Year, and here’s to more awesome games & gaming in 2010 (apparently The year we make contact)!
A bad ass Pilgrim at 70
Nov 27th
I ain’t been drinkin, honest officer…
I hit level 70 earlier this week, which leaves 10 left until I hit 80 and can begin gearing up for raids!
And I bought some new gear giving me an extra 2100 mana, which means I can chuck damage out permanently without running out of mana, as it takes 3 minutes to burn through the 12.2k mana I have, and with a 2 min cooldown on Evocation (a spell which refills 60% of my mana and health) that means I can sit firing out damage all day long 
I’ve also been made an Officer in Thunder, one of 3 newly promoted Officers in charge of dealing with the Guild Bank, which was done shortly before completing all the Thanksgiving event achievements to earn the Pilgrim title. I also got a pet turkey along with the title
And as you can see in the screenshot above, my character is finally looking like a high level character, rather than looking like a pauper wearing a mish mash of different gear. Finally!
It takes a Hero to bite the Apple
Nov 18th
HTC’s latest phone beats the iPhone 3GS and I’ve got one! More >
Server failures and Epic Downtime
Nov 15th
Or what happens when your Webhost’s server has a nervous breakdown… More >