What do you mean no “Things I Learnt at the Weekend” post?

That’s correct dear reader(s), you will notice the “suspicious by it’s absense” Things I Learnt post. This is primarily down to the fact that I have had the worst possible weekend where gaming has been involved. First thing to note is that I was out on Saturday, this is purely of my own volition and had been worked out in advance. This wasn’t something that fell in my lap and put me out of kilter and delayed levelling, this absense was factored into my plan, so Saturday was a good day, spent away from the humdrum of the everyday world. Now, Sunday was a different matter, as was Saturday night. I was hoping to hit 54 on my Shaman (more on that later) this weekend. I’d gotten to 51 on Friday and was looking forward to hitting Outland in the first weekend of Christmas (December is pretty much Christmas so I renamed the month). Saturday night after returning from my outing would provide the perfect springboard to 52 and then an afternoon and evening of gaming on Sunday would leapfrog me to my target.

Wife: Enter stage left.

Now starts the derailing of an otherwise symphony of mathematical levelling precision. I paraphrase “Why don’t we invite everyone to dinner that you’re spending the day with?” Of course, wife karma means that I must accept this request (they are my friends after all and blowing them off for a game is decidely dodgy) so, everyone comes round, we have a good night, levelling plan is revised to hit 53 rather than 54, one level is not too bad. I can take that.

So, Sunday afternoon comes. “Are we OK to go to my parents for dinner?” For the love of all that is sacred……. not only do I spend the next hour drying up all the dishes that were used to entertain 4 friends along with my wife and I on Saturday night, now I have to forego my whole evening as well? Pack the laptop and some DVDs then (if I had a power supply at home I’d have taken my works laptop and a copy of WoW and used their wireless to play). I took my personal laptop and watched Transformers and the first half pf Pitch Black. I managed to get to 300xp off 52, I’ll finish that off tonight before going out. So, I got a grand total of 2 levels over 3 days of gaming. I had a plan and everything but then real life threw itself in front of my XP train and the ensuing wreck meant much delays on the line. I do however, have a mostly free week this week. I have warned my good lady that I am going to be WoWing this week. I know I have to sleep and am not anywhere near as Hardcore as I used to be, otherwise I’d really have some kind of nervous spaz over this.

This post may seem like some kind of nervous spaz, however it merely highlights the lack of time I’ve had for gaming and therefore I cannot really post a “Things I Learnt” as the only real thing I learnt was that my Shaman is awesome, an elemental and an enhancement shaman together in a group should be illegal and that nothing can screw up a weekends planned gaming quite like your better half.

Provided no more leaves fall on the track we’ll see how far we can go before the next catastrophic infrastructure failure.

<Insert amusing Monorail cat lolcat here to taste!>

See you tomorrow!

Happy Thanksgiving

It may not be a British holiday but that doesn’t stop me being nice to people celebrating the holiday. I’ll be spending my evening trying to get a group for Zul’Farrak, I’m in quest limbo at the moment running here, there and everywhere trying to get to the next “batch” I can do all in one zone. I remember 30-50 being the hardest bracket when I got my Priest to 70, now I only have 5 levels till hitting Felwood I find I am grinding to a halt. I may end up in Felwood earlier than planned, we shall see, I don’t exactly have my leveling progress and zone list planned at this moment, I’m just doing what I can and hoping that it doesn’t take too long.

Terminating Characters in EAN128 Barcodes

Is far less exciting than it sounds. It is the reason why I had no time to post yesterday and continues to be the proverbail thorn in my side. Busy start of the week also means that I have no gaming adventure anecdotes to share with anyone as I haven’t been playing. WAR is definitely on hold until patch 1.1 hits next month, I can’t bring myself to add yet another Sorceress to the guild and my Magus is neutered too much at the moment to keep me happy. That and the release of Blizzard’s new expansion and my falling back to the dark side means that WAR is not getting any love at the moment.

Monday night before having friends round I did a little bit on WoW, mainly checking my auctions to grab some more gold and then handing in a quest and going to tame myself a Gorilla. I’ll see how he performs sometime tonight when I get back in. Tomorrow will be the first proper night of gaming I’ll have had this week if everything stays on plan.

Things I Learned at the Weekend – Part 6

That’s right eagle-eyed readers, this week’s “Things I Learned” (maybe that should be “Things I Learnt..”) is under the “Gaming” category rather than the WAR category. The best laid plans of mice and men…etc….

My first ever “during the weekend” post was nothing much really, although it has no doubt shown you all what has happened and where my gaming time has been spent. This was not a decision taken lightly or made as a snap decision one sunny afternoon, a lot of thought went into it when you consider that this is just a game. I actually re-opened my WoW subscription last Saturday, I’ll write more about this later and get on with the meat of what this post should be about. Here we go.

1, Death Knight is a lot of fun to play, free Epic mount almost off the bat is ace.

2, The graphics update for WoW is pretty good actually, things look a lot sharper now, although I don’t think I agree that they have made it “less cartoony”. It still has a distinct visual style.

3, Taking my wife Christmas shopping does not necessarily disrupt levelling as much as I thought it might.

4, I had forgotten how much I actually enjoy the levelling experience within WoW.

5, Hunters are still easy mode, haven’t died once on my Hunter and my kitty Spectre does a very good job at holding aggro and ripping through anything you ask him too.

6, I don’t get the Nexus.

7, I apparently have no idea at all how to be a proper Shadow Priest.

8, Maybe I want my Death Knight to be my main instead of the Hunter I am levelling, Altaholism kicks in again….

9, MJ finds my lack of MMO taste disturbing.

10, Nothing gets my RL friends together like playing WoW again.

What have I done?

Death Knight

Ironmongery

Eagle eyed players willnow have spotted that 1.0.5b has now hit the WAR servers. This has introduced the live event that is paving the way for the addition of the two new tanking classes and has also made sweeping changes to many of the games classes. This is of specific interest to me as I want to see if my Magus has received the buff that I was hoping she would. I’ll be giving this a go over the weekend as for the short term this may decide my immediate future in WAR. I haven’t played all that much during the past two weeks, I’ve limited my time to the weekends and much as that may be OK in may people’s eyes it doesn’t support my guild as much as I would like to and also means that I have had time to assess how I am spending my time and I am not really missing WAR at this moment. Still, I’ll play some over the weekend and report back, something else has come up which may change a few directions for me, but it is gaming related and may end up being posted here on this very blog.

I can’t actually post anything authorative at this point with regards to the new patch, I’ve read some forums to see how things are from those who are far more active in game than I am. With all the spell damage increases I’m interested in finding out how much of a buff the Bright Wizards have gotten. I know that they don’t get a lot of love from Destruction players so we’ll have to wait and see what the devs did. I don’t really want to put up a lot of stuff that is essentially idle specualtion until I can go ahead and confirm things for myself and bring my own thoughts to the table, so this post may seem a little pointless, being as it is merely a statement of intentions. However, we have something new to play with and it will be interesting to see just what the first major patch has done to the game, no doubt other players are looking at things in great details as this is going to set the tone about what to expect from Mythic in the future. After all, we pay a monthly fee for this game and if things aren’t up to scratch we move on, the most recent casualty of this is Age of Conan. Luckily for me I have the kind of PC that can run it easily, although there was a distinct shift in quality from the starting area and then going out into the big wide world. If everything was as polished as those first 20 levels, I think more people would have stuck with it. Graphics alone do not make an MMO and there was a heavy PvP focus there, in fact, looking back on it, my Demonologist was pretty much gimped the same as my Magus is now…… interesting.

So, this weekend may be the make or break time for some subscribers, let’s see what happens and I’ll do a normal report on the weekends findings early next week.

WoW Vs WAR

This debate rages through communities on both sides of the gaming divide. MMOs are a massive genre these days and the amount of new games that are released is preposterous, I am sure that for every new game announcement for any other genre it is matched by a new MMO. They are that prolific. After all, why not, World of Warcraft boasts a subscirber base at over one sixth of the total population of the United Kingdom, it is nothing short of a phenomenon, bring gaming to a section of people that might otherwise not have indulged in sitting before their PCs for endless hours watching various coloured bars progress from one side of a screen to the other.

The easily accessible nature of WoW has been its success. No other game that I have played was as easy to get to grips with as WoW, no complicated crafting process that loses endless amounts of materials, easy to follow (for the most part, I’m thinking of you aquatic form quest) quests and the ability to run on a first generation Game Boy. There are many things that have contributed to the success of Blizzard’s magnum opus (not least the number of Chinese gold farmers, around 10 million of those 11 million subscribers by my estimates) but I don’t think that anyone in their wildest dreams thought it would be as big as it is.

This causes some problems for other companies however. Every new game that takes its first breath has a thread on its forums proclaiming “Is this a WoW killer” or some such other outlandish statement. WoW is like the mythical Hydra, you cut off one of its heads and two grow back in its place. Blizzard are very good at copying other games success points and borgifying them into the WoW collective (think Achievements as a direct port of WARs Tome of Knowledge). I personally think that nothing will kill off WoW, it has just become that much of a behemoth. However, what other games can do is to NOT try and kill it, such things are with WAR.

I know people who have quit WAR to go back to WoW, I have no problem with this, people are free to decide which game to spend their hard-earned cash on. WAR and WoW offer very different experiences, I’ve been in the end-game raiding of WoW and enjoyed the vast scope of RvR that is at the heart of WAR. Before playing Mythic’s new kid on the block I was never much of a PvP player, I’d done enough to get a Black War Ram in WoW but PvP is WoW isn’t exactly awesome. Try stopping the kiddies from zerging the farm in Arathi Basin and you’ll see my frustrations born out. Yet we still have arguments saying that one of these games is not better than the other and WAR will never kill off WoW. Well, I don’t want it to, WAR caters to a different crowd, sure many of us have been through WoW on the way but these games are different and although there is a competition for subscribers they each posses two different areas of the MMO market. If you want to fight other players rather than a pure PvE game then head on into WAR, there are PvE elements but a lot of the fun is going to be found grinding other players into the dirt. Sure the game has its issues, but it has only been out for a couple of months and there is a rather hefty looking patch on the horizon. It’s not like WoW hasn’t received massive updates over the years.

WoW has had the advantage of time to settle down and get comfy in its MMO gilt throne, the best that many can hope for is seemingly to bask in its shadow as poorer clones of the almighty. Yet, those who dare to be different and change the main focus of their game have much to be gained. Other games’ problems are WoWs success, it has grown to such heights that anything that comes after it will end up compared to it. This is like Golf, few doubt that Tiger Woods is the greatest player the world has ever seen and whoever comes along now is going to be judged against his standard, harshly unfair perhaps, but that is what happens when one raises the game. Is WAR good, yes, does it have its problems, sure it does, but WoW has some problems that have been unresolved for a large period of time, just speak to the Paladin community to see if they feel that their class has yet achieved a proper direction. Is WoW good, yes it is, I enjoyed all the time I spent there, even when the incessant raiding came at the expense of other more important aspects of my life. Are they as good as each other, maybe, but in different ways, there are things I dislike about WAR and WoW, there are things I like about both, yet those things are different in each game.

Rather than debating which one is better all the time we should be able to agree that they both do things well in what they choose to do, personally, if you want a PvE game I’d say hit up WoW, if you want to fight people all the time then WAR is more likely to be your cup of tea. Neither is going to kill the other off, the problem seems to merely be that because WoW came out first and has been going for such a long time that is has a stranglehold on a lot of people that may have been tempted by other games. I know that many of the people I played WoW with have gone on to various MMOs after we departed. What is interesting to me is that no matter how good a game is, if you don’t have a community to be a part of you can sour the experience. My WoW history involves a lot of cool people who I had a lot of fun with, the same with SWG. I have played many MMOs and each will retain a piece of my heart devoted to it, some more than others.

So, which is better out of the two titular fighters?

Neither…

…and both.

Growing the Family

Rather than an off-topic post about the patter of little feet for my wife and I, this of course relates to my chronic gaming condition. Over the weekend I added a Zealot to my ever increasing WAR family, everyone say their hellos to Hotcakes, the third healer I have in my collection. I played Stilleto the Witch Elf for a grand total of maybe 20 minutes over the weekend before going back to pick up where I left off on my Sorceress, a weeks worth of rest XP has enabled me to catapult her to the heady heights of level 7.

The only other character to see any kind of serious play time has been the new arrival and I must say that I am fairly impressed with the class to start off with. While it took me a while to get used to playing the Shaman getting started with the Zealot was a lot easier. I’ll admit that the damage spells seem weak in PvE but then again, doing DPS isn’t what the character is designed to do in the end. I always find it amusing that the first few levels in the healing classes expands their range of damage spells rather than heals. I don’t know what the thinking behind this is for sure, but I always try and level up my characters in Scenarios for the first few levels, stripping away the limited armour you get to maximise the Tome unlocks which increases XP further.

I managed to top the healing charts overall in one instance and was at or near the top in all the others, I like that the basic heal is a direct heal, rather than a direct heal with HoT attached. This makes it much easier to conserve your action points as you know what is going on, it may be sad to admit it but the Zealot reminds me a little of my Priest from WoW. Easy enough to use but plenty to sink your teeth into to get good at it. (I wasn’t the Priest in our raids that overhealed by 60% of her total healing and was OOM after every trash pull).

So where do we go from here? I now have a total of eight characters on Karak-Hirn. I have my Magus with more rest XP than you can shake a stick at waiting for the patch that, hopefully, restores my ability to DPS effectively. What I think I’ll be doign is rotating them round to make maximum use of the rested bonus, learning the class as I go. I need to keep my hand in with the guild as well, only two characters are in there after all and I don’t want them to think I’ve gone AWOL. We’ll see if my Witch Elf can make much of a dent in Tier 3 or whether I can eek out levelling on my Magus in scenarios only, even with the measly DPS, I need some more power before trying to tackle what have proven to be some tricky PvE quests. I know my Witch Elf would rock through them, but that’s not the point is it?

Things I Learned at the Weekend – Part 5

That’s right, it has now been over a month since I delved into the destiture realms of the Destruction side of the Age of Reckoning. This has seen me spend two weeks on a Magus only to switch over to my Witch Elf and spending another two weeks levelling that character up to the same level as the Magus. Stilleto remains a mere 3 levels ahead of Ravenmane in the rank game and the Magus is the same Renown rank as my melee, lingerie model. After a week of having virtually no time to play I actually got some time in yesterday to play, my wife has been ill over the weekend, combined with an early morning on Saturday now means I am completely exhausted. A few weekend hours have seen another addition to the Altaholic team, I’ll get around to introducing her later, all I need now is a Chosen and a Maruder to complete the set.

Check out the updated banner at the top of the page to monitor gear changes and the addition of new toons.

1, My level 7 Sorceress can crit for more damage than my level 18 Magus, even with a mere 10-15 Dark Magic built up. Hopefully this will be fixed in the upcoming patch, otherwise I will cry…..manly I know.

2, My level 7 Sorceress doesn’t run out of action points in combat very often, something that happens all too often with my Magus (who did get some playtime this weekend, I haven’t forgotten her).

3, Rest XP is awesome, I now have enough characters that not playing one for a few weeks allows me to grab a few levels very quickly, mainly through scenarios. Rotating these characters will allow me to get a nice range of experience with each as we progress.

4, Despite patch 1.04b being pushed out to servers, Tier 1 is still 99% Nordenwatch (I did get one Khaine’s Embrace though WOOT!) and Tier 3 still popped Tor Anroc.

5, Destruction is lacking healers at the moment. A few weeks ago when I was on my Shaman there was 3-4 of us in each scenario. This weekend we’ve been lucky to get 1 or 2. Order is much better prepared when we end up against 3 Rune Priests and 3 Archmages, sprinkled liberally with a few Warrior Priests (who seem to be enjoying a resurgence of popularity at the moment).

6, I actually like the Zealot up to the level 5 that I have played the career.

7, I don’t enjoy melee screaming in Scenario chat that they aren’t getting healed when I have 25k+ healing done on the summary. It also helps if you don’t go charging into the middle of all the ranged guys at the top of the hill out of range and line of sight. I can’t cast through a hill, nor do much when you’re being focus fired by three Bright Wizards and their pocket healers.

8, I really do think I’m doomed trying to get any character to 40 considering my constant switching of characters.

9, I don’t do well as a Squig Herder. I know that they can do a lot of damage, I’ve seen it done, I jsut don’t seem to be able to mirror that.

10, Finishing the Dark Elf chapter 1 influence chart at level 7 means that the next area you go to is ridiculously easy. I am going to try and keep Cryo ahead of the curve in this regard using my “level and rest” rotation policy. I may also build up that XP by playing my main for a while….. sticking with one character for a while may tilt the Earth of its axis though. You’ve been warned.

Liberating Your Disk Space

Props to Bogomils from my WAR guild for bringing this to the attention of our guild, I thought I’d share this through the medium of the blogosphere as it’s a useful piece of information.

If you look in the root folder of your WAR installation there is a file called Data.myp. Now, apparently this file builds up over time with lots of crap. I checked mine last night and it had inflated to a whopping 38Gb, one of the chaps on the guild website had over 70Gb in his. To rectify this problem you can delete the file, then the next time you log into WAR on the sign-in screen put a check in the “Perform Full File Scan” box, this will look through all your WAR installation files and sort out what is missing, in this case our data.myp, the regular unbloated version is a mere 47Mb.

Go and reclaim your disk space today!