Whirly: good to go

I had my most enjoyable evening in Guild Wars. Mark and I did The Honorable General primary quest which took us to Fahranur, The First City. We had to place books on pedestals that open gates and kill a boss. All while avoiding fire-spewing-pillars and things dropping from the sky. We had no idea what we were doing. It was great.

Mark noticed we could add more Heroes to our groups so we added my Melonni - Dervish, and Dunkoro - Healer along with Mark’s Koss - Warrior and Melonni - Dervish. With my Koss and Marks Dunkoro that makes eight plus my Koss has a pet warthog, making nine.

We took the whole crew to Laktenda Bog, which somehow became unlocked, and kicked some butt. We also finished two more quests while there. We went from level 10 to 12. Many of the Heros dinged along the way, but there are too many of them now to keep track.

Mark is going to be surprised next time we play. I made the secondary skill of my two new Heroes to be Ranger and got them each a warthog pet. We now have three warthogs in the group. That makes eleven of us in all. I don’t know why. I find that funny.

I spent the day imaging 30 eMacs. It should have been easy. I planed on multi-cating the image using a 16 port switch I brought along for the job. Of course, it’s never as easy as planned and 15 of the eMacs couldn’t boot from CD because the kids had removed the drive belt from the CD-ROM drive /sigh. The good 15 I was able to multicast, but I had to slow it down to 4 meg because at 6 meg I was getting over 50% failure rate. When it fails you start over from scratch.

I used an HP switch, not my favorite. Maybe it’s a good switch, but I don’t like jet powered equipment. I know it’s jet powered because you can hear the two jets when you plug it in.

With the bad 15 I had to use the old firewire / target-mode / diskutilities / restore method. It’s tried and true, but painfully ‘me’ intensive. I got everything done in 5 ½ hours, which I’m happy about. I wasn’t looking forward to working Saturday on new years weekend.

I know that’s more eMac info than anybody could ever want to know. Lugging those danged eMacs around gets my back to aching, I missed lunch, no breakfast either, and I’m in a pissy mood. Ah, not pissy I guess. Just tuckered. I’m glad it’s done.

The World of Warcraft expansion is coming. The new races, content and levels mean little to me. I can’t imagine starting new toons, we’ve done that too many times already. We play Instances exclusively. Unless there are new mid level instances we won’t be seeing any of the new content, or levels, with our level 27 toons for a long time. With our play schedule, it could be a year before we reach 60 again and see any of the new instances. Blizzard has taken too long for this expansion. For us anyway.

Vanguard is out soon as well. I’ve got high hopes for this game, but the word on the street isn’t all that great. I’ve yet to read one glowing statement from anybody playing beta. Sure, they are constrained by an NDA. That hasn’t stopped the grumblings of, “no fun” coming out. I’m afraid they are trying to resurrect the most unpleasant parts of EQ such as corpse runs and shared dungeons. Not that there aren’t many who enjoy such torture. WoW’s success shows that most don’t.

Mike has been waiting for Pirates of the Burning Sea. I’m more than willing to give it a try, assuming it ever comes out. I don’t see how they are going to handle sea travel in a less than boring way. EVE is a beautiful, sophisticated game, but travel is a curse.

We’ll play WoW, that’s almost guaranteed. It’s still one hell of a game. We’ve committed to trying Vanguard for a couple of months. Mike and I will try Pirates if it comes out this year. I’m not excited.

Mark and I paid another visit to Guild Wars. We’ve only been away a week, but that was plenty of time to get rusty. Not that we were un-rusty to start with.

The fights seemed to go on forever. I’m not that good of a puller so we often had multiple groups as well. One quest guy was 25 to our level 7s. That fight actually did go on forever. I think we are fighting it still. We kept at it until the server got tired. I had to tell Mark all my bad jokes to keep him awake. He hates that.

All and all, we did well. Mark died a couple of times along with my hero’s warthog pet. We never wiped or had to go to town to refresh. Maybe we are getting a handle on this thing.

For our last quest of the evening we picked up an additional two NPC guys making seven in all, counting warty. That’s a big group. Hard to know what’s going on. They didn’t like my jokes either.

“Guy with a monkey go into a bar, and orders a beer …”

My Illusionist continues to make progress albeit slowly. I’m not in the mood to power level so I’m just poking along. My problem is finding the quest locations. Spiders? I saw some of those around here somewhere - I had to check the whole zone. Turn in the spider legs to some guy? I checked the whole tree city and two outposts to find him. I’m not searching online for spoiler sites, trying instead to experience the game as it comes. The running around is getting me familiar with the zone. That’s a good thing.

Another problem is periodic enhancement options. You get a list of enhancements to choose from. I don’t know, maybe an Illusionist needs more intelligence. When you make your choice it asks, “Are you sure you want X?” Well, no, I’m not sure. If we wait till I’m sure I’ll be level 50 and still not picked anything. It should ask, “You’ve chosen X. With your limited experience and lack of knowledge is X what you are willing to live with for the rest of this characters life?” Or, “Of all the stupid mistakes you could have made, is X the one you want?”

I was unable to find EQII - Echos of Fadwer at the store last night, so I decided to try the digital download method of purchase. Giving money to Sony Online was easy enough, except for a small email address error on my account. My receipt went to the wrong address, my bad, easily corrected. Nowhere on the site or receipt did they mention how I was to download the expansion I’d just purchased, hmm. Starting EQII did the trick. The download began automatically. Four hours later, 12:30 am, I was creating a Fae Illusionist.

My highest character in the original EQ was an Enchanter. My job was to make everything better, I loved that power. The Illusionist sounds a little like that – worth a try. Plus, you get a copy of yourself that follows you around. How cool is that?

I didn’t play long, last night, but I’ve reached level 8 this morning. The Fay starting area is newbie friendly. I’ve gotten lost a few times, died once, but I’m poking along happily. Did I mention that the Fay can fly? More like hover, but they can jump off high stuff and float down.

I didn’t think I’d ever be enjoying EQII again, here I am.

Our great Guild Wars adventure is on hiatus. Mike is back and we’ll be returning to WoW Monday. I’ve not played WoW this week other than to install the patch and re-spec my Mage. It will be good to get back in the saddle. The expansion is coming, we aren’t ready. Our mains are only 26 so we’re stuck playing the same-o same-o content.

Guild Wars has been fun even with the ‘what do we do now’ factor. I may be starting to work that out anyway. At least when solo. It’s easier playing solo than grouped. I think the Heroes and Henchmen are better than us.

For no good reason, I downloaded and installed Skype (online voice chat). It seemed to work right out of the box, so I asked Mark to try it. We like it. The delay is around ½ second compared with 2ish with TeamSpeak2. It makes for a more immediate conversation, we liked that. The quality was good as well. I sent Mike a quick message to get the download, and we talked earlier today via Skype. We’ll see how it works Monday in conference. I expect good things. The limitation is four connections in conference, not a problem for us.

I’ve been playing a little EQ2. I switched from my Warrior to a Conjuror. Everybody says they solo well. Like any caster, Conjuror is a little on the soft side when it comes to taking damage. So far, it’s been manageable. My only complaint is my pet, the bug. Having a bug following you around isn’t very impressive. I purchased the upgrade hoping for something better, Nope, just a bug of higher level.

Day 2 of our Guild Wars adventure. We kind of hit the ‘what should we do now’ wall. We did a few quests, but they weren’t very exciting. Eventually, we just went for a walk which worked out ok.

Nothing mobs and you’re-dead mobs can be right next to each other. We ran into you’re-dead mobs a few too many times which caused our stats to go to hell. I’m not sure exactly what that does, but mobs we could previously whip started whipping us back. We finally dinged level 5, the hard, slow, painful way.

We headed to town to choose our secondary professions; an honor reserved for level 5s. We are talking two don’t know anything guys here. We had absolutely no idea what to choose. Mark decided on Mesmer as his second profession. I poked around on the net till I found a page saying Monk was the way to go for a Warrior so I chose that. It’s just the dumbest thing. The first page I ran into could have said anything. Anything. At least somebody took the time to write it down I guess. I was going to take a crap shoot anyway. Choosing from some random comment on a web page is the same as a random choice.

I wish the quests showed some kind of level range so we’d know which to do next, which to wait, dump. We play again tomorrow. I hope we can get a little better structure in our progress. Perhaps I’m asking for too much. We are rank newbies after all. We’ve got to expect to suffer.

I’m off to play EQ2.

Mark and I played our first Guild Wars – Nightfall. I’m running a Warrior and Mark a Monk (healer). It went well, we died two or three times, but let’s not blame the newbie Monk. I played the original Guild Wars a little, this is Marks first.

I tried to make sure Mark had a good time. When Mike and I played GW he hated it. I’m the one who talks them into spending money on these things. I like almost all the MMOs I’ve tried. The boys? Not so much. GW is just enough different from standard MMOs that it’s a little annoying. The keyboard controls, UI, play-style take some getting used to. I don’t know if it will ever feel comfortable.

I can’t say we did anything wondrous. We poked around in the first instance area trying to do quests and get experience. We improved our armor and weapons some. We survived a few fights we shouldn’t have. I thought it went well and Mark seems to enjoyed it enough, though he hates his Hero for some reason. I think the Hero said something, while Mark was doing the initial newbie stuff, that ticked him off. He’s been trying to get rid of his Hero since.

I dinged level 4. Mark did the same later, playing solo. We are on for another run Tomorrow. Hope it works out.

Completely unrelated: I’ve been playing EQ2 solo a little. I dinged level 14 last night and I’m enjoying it enough that I’m considering purchasing the latest expansion. Wonder if I could talk the boys into playing EQ2 again?

We haven’t visited Blackfathom Depths in a while, never with these toons, so it was a true adventure. We didn’t have the flight path so our first business was making the long, uneventful, run from Cross Roads. It would have been sweet if another group was ahead of us clearing the entrance. Maybe it was sweet for somebody coming in after us cause we had to do our own clearing.

We had a few good fights in the instance, but no close calls. We took the side trip to kill Gelihast. We had to pause to research the action-item shrine he guards. Mark thought it might port us out. It turns out to give a nice buff. All three of us dinged 26, Mike and I on the same kill.

As always, time was our biggest enemy. We made it to the entrance of the Moonshrine Ruines, but no further. With the flight path, and minus the side trips, we should make better progress next time. Unfortunatly, it won’t be for a little while. Mike is off to Boston for the week and Mark and I will be playing Guild Wars – Nightfall while he’s away. I’ve been poking around in Nightfall a little. I think it will be fun.