Bearback Mountain
And now I'm a bear! \o/
So yeah, I've started a Druid alt, to level in the times in between raids when there's naff all to do on my mage.
To be honest, it's pretty much EZMODE. You have your tauren caster form, then at level 10 you have to do this pain in the ass quest chain to get your Bear (tank) form, as you can see above. Other shapeshifting forms include Aquatic (for speedy travel in water), travel (cheetah), cat (dps) Moonkin (laser chicken DPS. Bwark!) Healing Tree (caster heals) and finally flight form, which saves on buying a flying mount tbh.
The good thing is you can collect herbs while still shapeshifted, so nipping about in flight form collecting herbs in Northrend will be a damn sight quicker than on my mage. So I'm dumping Herbalism on the mage, and switching to engineering on her, purely for the haste buffs engineering can give you. And I need more haste. If they sold it on street corners, I'd be there, gaunt faced, with a well used fiver in hand, looking for a hit.
As for the EZMODE comment - Fire off a couple of DPS casts in tauren form, and when the mob approaches instantly hit bear form and tank the mob the rest of the way to 0hp. Piece of piss. And you can self heal. Easier than a mage tbh, who can't tank whatsoever, and has to be constantly on the move kiting mobs. Which is a contradictory play style to the mechanics of playing a mage, who, for the most part, needs to be stationary to cast.
As for the guild, we've finally managed to get to the Lich King in 10 man.
Note I say get to, not kill. That's still a bit off as yet, but we're getting there!
So 25 man tonight, and we're off to Valithria Dreamwalker. Another boss I've never downed in 10 or 25. But most of my time raiding seems to be spent in progression fights - last 10 man was Putricide progression for a lot of people who'd never been to him before. I think I've maybe had 3 nights farming since I began raiding last month. I don't mind, but I am still trying to get a lot of my level 232 gear shot of, and replaced with more level 264 gear via Frost Emblems. Better gear = easier & faster progression.
Either way it's still fun! 
ME2: Mission Accomplished.
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!
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.
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…
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 [item]Reins of the Onyx Netherwing Drake[/item], 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!