Whirly: good to go

So, my 58 Hunter was working that same church in the Plaguelands, from the other day, doing undead. It was going quite well, I was watching aonther move. A 60 Rogue shows up and starts beating on my mob. I disengaged and camped quicker than he could kill that mob. I may be a complete fool, but I’m not completely stupid.

Later, I headed down the road and found a doll for some girl in a burned out building. She was complaining about more stuff , but hey, everybody has troubles girlie. Learn to live with it. I’m a Hunter not a Priest. She was starting to remind me of a Rogue so I camped.

We headed back into the Temple of Atal’Hakkar Friday night, we died 52 times, it’s commonly called the Sunken Temple. As I’ve mentioned before, our main problem is big groups. With only three of us we can only do so much. We ran into a group with 4 elites plus 3 or 4 non-elites. That’s a bit heavy for us, but Mark (priest) came up with a plan.

Mark would mind control one of the warriors and sic him on one of the healers. Mike would sheep the other healer just before the warrior died. I would charge the healer, the warrior was fighting, as soon as all the mobs started working on the warrior. The warrior dies, I do an AE aggro warrior thing, healer dies, and now we’ve got a more manageable group of one elite, one sheep, and some non-elites to fight. It worked like a charm. Although there is a major risk of all the mobs beating on Mark, we probably couldn’t have gotten through them any other way.

I feel good knowing Mark now has three buttons on his button bar. He now has, “Mind Control,” right up there with, “Heal the Right Target,” and “Heal the Wrong Target.” Some healers like to have a “Sorry” button, but not Mark. He likes to type it by hand.

Still getting to know Battlefield 2 by playing off line. I decided to try a support player yesterday. Unlike BF 1942, in BF 2 there are no supply spots where you can get ammo. Somebody has to come along and replenish your ammo. I gave that a try.

Turns out I had no idea how to do that. I was able to throw little packs at the feet of my guys, they didn’t seemed all that interested. Another soldier and I were capturing a flag and I thought I’d resupply him by throwing out a pack. Well, I didn’t have throw-out-pack selected and I shot him about 3 times from two yards, um, he died.

I don’t know if the AI gets pissed but I was completely devastated, not really, and decided to hang that support stuff up till I figured out how to do it without killing my guys. I don’t know if the AI was happy about my choice or not.

My 58 Hunter, while minding his own business, was killing some undead guys next to a church in Eastern Plaguelands. The guys were only 54 so the experience wasn’t that great, but I was watching a movie at the time, it was good enough. A 60 Rogue, unknown to me, whispers, “Can you help me?” I was in the middle of a fight and the Rogue shows up and starts hitting my mob. I said, “sure. What do you need?” I knew full well it would end badly. These things almost always do.

The Rogue said, “Follow me.”  I must have looked like a fool, but I’ve proven I can follow and be a fool at the same time. We had to fight one undead and then I get a group invite, I accepted. The Rogue bends down at a grave, /shrug. Pop, 4 or 5 guys, I didn’t notice their level. We killed one, maybe two before I went and visited the nearest graveyard, I disbanded on the way back without saying anything.

I get a whisper from the Rogue, “sorry.” Then, “It’s too hard.” Here’s what I didn’t say… Perhaps, if you had taken just a moment to explain what was going to happen, if we had considered a basic plan, if you weren’t a complete 60 noobie, we could have done this.

I didn’t say anything actually, but I should have said, when asked, “Can you help me?” was, “Do I look like a complete idiot?” I’m thinking the answer would have been, yes.

The boys and I were poking around in the Temple of Atal’Hakkar last night, I think we died like 50 times, and my Warrior picked up a 2 hand sword that was a nice upgrade to my current 2 hand weapon. Surprisingly, I didn’t have any 2 hand sword skill. I had to travel all the way to Stormwind to get the training. I then had level 1 skill, that’s kind of low. My level cap is 270. I had to come up with a plan to raise my skill from 1 to closer to 270. I decided to go into the Deadmines.

Deadmines is a level 20 instance, and let me tell you, a level 54 Warrior can kick some major butt in there. It was my most successful instance run in a while, well since Monday anyway. I just walked through killing anybody who was interested in me. I hadn’t planned on going through the whole thing but what could I do? They went down so fast and my 2 hand sword skill went up so quick. The boss, at the end, and his 4 buddies got me down to less than half health. Initially, I was looting the named, but most of the stuff was bind on pickup which does me no good so I gave it up.

Afterwards I gated back to Ironforge with a 2 hand sword skill of 255. I sure felt uber.

We marched into Zul’Farrak last night and knocked off Gahz”rilla easy as pie. Well, we had a little trouble. As there are only three of us, we sometimes get over run. That’s our major weakness. We came near to being over run at one point by 5 or 6 mobs, but pulled through.

This was our first look at Gahz’Rilla so we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. After you bang the gong a three headed thingie comes out of the fountain. He was headed the other way so I had to put a bullet in him to get his attention. We’d not cleared the complete courtyard and it turned out we didn’t need to. He does have a huge knock back but we’d placed ourselves with that in mind. Unfortunately, he only dropped one of the scales. I was expecting we could all loot one, but that wasn’t the case. We tried banging the gong again but it looks like one Gahz’Rilla per customer, so we’ve got to go back in there a couple more times.

The other adventure of the evening was my Hunter made 58. I’m not having much fun with the Hunter at this time. The places I want to grind are full with other Hunters doing the same thing. Plus, in the high 50s I’m now competing with the 60s who are doing I don’t know what. I was hopeful for getting the Hunter to 60 before the expansion that opens up 75, I’ve heard, but that seems like more grinding than I’m willing to do at this point.

I had an EQ dream this weekend. I haven’t played EQ in about a year, so it was a bit of a surprise. I was playing solo, I don’t know where, and working inside a maze kind of building. I entered a room where I had to complete some tasks. My reward was a thing that turned out to be a crank that fit a wheel in the next room. I turned the crank and a garage door opened. When I walked out, I found I was outside in the real world. I had reached the end of EQ.

I ran into a co-worker, Bruce, who used to play EQ as well. I offered to show him the end of EQ, but he wanted to bring all his characters, so we re-entered the end of EQ with his five characters. All of them looked exactly the same and I couldn’t figure out what was the point of having five characters that were all the same. We climbed on a walkway and saw a group of real people passing down a cross hallway including two policemen. It seems something had happened down the hall. I never found out what as I decided to exit the end of EQ about then.

When we entered the room, with the garage door, we found a street person sleeping on the floor of the room, oh great. Plus, the door was now mostly closed. The crank seemed not to be working properly and I could only get the garage door open a little. It looked like we could crawl out, but I woke up.

I’ve tried to figure out what it all means, but have decided it doesn’t matter. I don’t play EQ anymore. Dreams about games you don’t play don’t count do they? Even if they do, I’m not counting it.

I finally purchased, and installed, Battlefield 2. I’ve been fighting the urge since its release because you can’t play online with a friend, against the UI, like you could with Battlefield 1942. The problem with playing online, on a public server, is that you never know what you are going to get. The quality of play can vary greatly. It’s like joining a 24 person pick up group.

That being said, and with only an hour of play, It’s been fun so far. I’ve mostly played solo against the UI, but I did go online last night, it wasn’t so bad. Sure there was some ganking, but if you are trying to take over a spawn point, you’ve got to kill anybody who pops there. There’s still a lot of mechanics I’ve yet to learn. I think it will be fun. First good thing to know, your side is always blue and the enemy red. I should probably scan the mini manual.

I’d give BF2 four stars out of five so far.

Mike and I played our Pally(32)/Druid(31) today in Desolace. We were continuing with our quest to make the Gelkis horse people our friends by killing the Magram horse people. There are some guys walking through the Magram camp with a small pack of dogs that can be problematic. When we get jumped by them, or other bad boys, all I have to do is outrun the Pally in my cat travel form. The pally has some kind of invulnerability spell so we normally get away fine when we run soon enough. Those Gelkis like us a lot now. I don’t really care for them, but we were just working as mercenaries, sort of.
    

Well, no joy in Zul Farrak tonight. We were trying to do the next step in the carrot on a stick quest (makes your mount run faster), but it didn’t work out. We’ve got to bang a gong and fight a three headed monster of some sort. We made it to the right location but died while clearing the area around the gong in preparation for the big fight.

I miss-timed the re-pop of one of the walking groups that includes two guys and an alligator kind of thing. We were in the middle of a fight when they showed up and the boys didn’t hear my mental command to pull back. I don’t know what their problem was. I winked and everything. They just stood there like they had no idea what I was thinking. /shrug

We went back and tried to sneak by some of the complete re-pop we, happily, found when entering the instance again. It worked rather well and we didn’t have to kill everything on the way back in. The warrior (me) made a bad pull entering the gong court yard and when the same alligator group added, we went down again.

Third time is a charm and that’s why we died sneaking by a group, we could have easily taken, at the cross road fountain. Mike thought they wouldn’t notice a Gnome (mage). Turns out he was wrong and it got real sloppy and ugly soon after.  We called it a night after that.

It was frustrating that we didn’t get a chance at Gahz’rilla, boy he sounds super bad with a name like that, but we are practicing some new techniques and that’s good. All in all it was your standard instance run, fight your way in till you can’t go any further. I feel real confident we’ll pull it off Monday, our next fight night. Maybe confident is a little too strong. I’m hopeful. I think Gahz’rilla is the carrot on the end of our stick.