That felt nice

I’ve been done with NaNo for… I don’t even know how long any longer.  It seems like it has been forever, but I know it has only been a week and a half… two weeks at most.  It still feels longer.

In the time since, I have just relaxed.  I haven’t even opened or looked at the story that I wrote since saving it that last time.  I figure that I’ll eventually re-read it, maybe fix whatever errors I find, possibly re-write anything that needs to be re-written, and then put it away again.  I just didn’t want to look at it just now though, so I left it tucked away on my hard drive.

Yesterday was the first day available to upload your work for the official word count, so I again opened up the story and copied it out to be judged.  I can’t tell you how nice it felt when the page refreshed and I saw this:

So now, after listening to me babble about it since just before November 1, it is official… I am finished.  You don’t have to worry about hearing about NaNo again until next November.

Most of the people that I know all want to know the same thing… “What did you win?”  “Does this mean you are getting published?”  “Are they paying you for your work?”  The answers are, “Nothing other than a certificate that I can download and print out.”  “No.”  and “No.”

Flabbergasted, they then ask, “Nothing?  Why the hell would you do that?”  The best answer I can give is to quote that old saying, “Why do you climb a mountain?  Because it’s there.”

There really isn’t anything to report on the EQ front.  I logged on a bit late last night because a) I was busy uploading my story and reading posts on the NaNo forums and b) the servers weren’t playing nice for a bit last night.  As a result, I didn’t get to do anything before the raid.

The raid was fun if a bit disappointing.  It ended up being an optional raid due to the holiday and the fact that so many people were having a hard time getting online.  We ended up in the Shard of Hate… and the zone was stingy as hell.  We dropped the first named on the right side and he dropped his bow, but that was literally the only piece of loot for the entire night.

Still, it was fun to see how far we have progressed.  The first time we entered the Shard of Hate, we wiped countless times.  We got multiples at several points and we spent as much time reviving and rebuffing as we did anything else… and that was with our main raid force.

Last night, we were short on numbers, had a lot of 75-79’s there, and a lot of people played alts instead of their normal mains.  Other than on the named, we only had 1 death all night and even that was just an unfortunate “oops” from someone.

The named fight took a lot longer than normal, but mostly because we were way short on DPS.  Most people were out of power or nearly out of power before the guy even got to 50%, so the fight just stretched on and on, but he did eventually drop and with surprisingly few deaths from us.

Not long after that, we called it a night and I camped.  I was very tired.

Today is my last day of work for the week, so I’m sure I’ll be doing some decent gaming over the next four days… my version of Thanksgiving.  I’m not a fan of Thanksgiving or Thansgiving food, but I do like the fact that it lets me stay home from work. 

So much to do…

I find that it is a very good thing that, when I think of logging on, I find myself debating, “What am I going to do tonight?”  I haven’t been asking myself that question lately because I can’t think of anything to do.  I have been asking myself that question because I have so many things that I want to do and I’m trying to figure out what order to do them in.

I logged on last night fully intending to jump right into a tradeskill instance because I haven’t done one of those yet.  Before I had even fully appeared in the world, however, I had received a tell asking if I wanted to hit an instance.

I have not yet even looked at the TSO merchants to find out what is available and how much the stuff costs.  I figure there is simply no reason to do so yet as I know I am no where near where I can even buy 1 item.

Mindful of the fact that I do need shards if I am to eventually buy stuff and equally mindful that immediate group invites will probably fade as the newness of the expansion wears off, I jumped on the chance to group and decided to put the tradeskill instance on hold.  Afterall, I have a 4 day weekend coming up and I am sure that most people will be doing the family thing.  I should have plenty of time to exercise my anti-social tasks on those days.

We hit the Befallen: Cavern of the Afflicted instance.  It can be frustrating reading other write-ups for zones like this one where everyone is stating how easy this zone is and, if someone expresses that they had difficulty, the common response is, “Try sucking less.”  Still, this was our second time in this zone and, for the second time, we fell short.

We made it a lot further this time around than on our first attempt.  On the first attempt, we didn’t kill the Terror guy on the first floor, so every time we died, we had to fight back through the onslaught of mobs.  This time, we went for him first and took him down after one false start.  Afterwards, we went into the room next door and killed the named in there.

The jester at the bottom of the well gave us a lot of problems the first time we tried this zone, but we figured him out and eventually took him down.  Taking that knowledge with us, we downed him flawlessly last night.

From there, we went to the rumbler queen.  We have yet to figure this fight out.  We can get her down pretty good initially, but the power drain eventually gets the best of us and we simply run out of power before she runs out of health.  For the second time, we gave up after a couple of cracks at her.

The stairway of doom has been our undoing on both attempts.  The respawn of these groups is pretty much instant and we have been working several strats to make it to the bottom and get to the second terror to stop the respawn, but we haven’t managed to make it just yet.  We have a new strategy to try next time… one that should have been obvious to us but, for whatever reason, wasn’t.  The plan is to try to keep at least 1 mob from each group alive and pull him along with us or leave him behind and rooted to prevent the full group from respawning.

Tonight is raid night and will be our last raid until next Tuesday.  I’m not sure where we will be heading yet… just that it is happening.

My guess is that Wednesday night will be another instance or two… depending on who is online and who is traveling to be with family.

For the long weekend, I have several goals.  First is to run several tradeskill instances.  Along the way, I’m sure that I will ding to 80 armorsmith.  Once I hit 80, I want to do Rao’s tradeskill epic.  I want to get Ray out and get him through the tradeskill pre-req quest line and possibly Fuzz as well.  I want to get my carpenter, Strupus, over to Mara to get the new furniture recipes.  I’ll probably run the harvest quest on Ray somewhere in there as well.

Outside of that, I have an alt that I want to see about betraying citizenship.  He was my first toon that I created back when I received my character creation pre-order disk prior to launch.  It would have been easier to just delete him and start over rather than dragging him around with me for the last year, but there is some level of sentimentality attached to him and I just can’t delete him.  He was created as a high elf wizard however, and Fuzz is a wizard.  Why oh why do I need two wizards?  On the same account?  I’ve been meaning for some time to betray him so that I can turn him into a warlock, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.  This weekend might be a good time.

I also need to get back to a few quests in Kunark that I put on hold until after the expansion.  I never finished the jarsath hammer on Rao and I haven’t completed the band of thugga questline on either toon.  I need to finish knocking those out.

Somewhere in there, I think I want to do the brigand epic.  I wasn’t going to do it at first, but now I’m starting to think more seriously about doing it.

I love that I have so many things that I want to do.  It means that I am no longer burned out on the game.  I’m even enjoying the expansion much more than I originally was.

And that is a good thing.

Weekend chaos

This past weekend was such a mixed back of different things that ‘chaos’ is the only word to properly describe it.

I was too tired Friday night to do anything, so I pretty much just logged on, did my t4 harvest run for the harvest quest and called it a night.  I was in bed happily asleep by 9 PM… something I never do.

Saturday, I finished up the harvest quest in between various other things.  I ran one of the Befallen instances with some guildies and then later hit one in Lavastorm.  Before the Lavastorm run, I finished the harvest quest, equipped the cloak once so someone in the guild could see me turn into a rock, and then hid the ugly thing away deep, DEEP in my bank.  Ugly cloak.

Saturday was also alt day.  I missed it last Saturday, but I was able to make the run this week.  For the run, we hit Crushbone.  I was on my carpenter who was also a level 23 guardian and I got to see the changes in the experience gain first hand.

I have to admit that it was a kick seeing levels flow by so quickly, but for someone like me, once the novelty of flying levels wears off, I realize how thankful I am that you can actually toggle off the experience bonuses.  There is so much to do in EQ2 and that includes the low and mid-levels.  Flying through those levels at light speed can cause you to miss an awful lot.

Of course, there are many people who only want to be max level.  For them, the game is all about the end content, so the change is good for them.  For people like me, the toggle is a terrific addition.

In all, we were in Crushbone for 2 hours and I leveled from 23 to 29.  Everyone else had similar jumps.  Some were very happy with the rush of levels while others were like me and were left feeling a little let down by the rapid pace.

Late Saturday night, I realized that by going to sleep so early on Friday, I had made it so I wasn’t tired at all.  I set out to do the pre-quests for gaining access to the crafting instances.  I worked on those until about 2AM and then went to bed.

Yesterday started in Seb finishing up the templar epic for a guildie.  Afterwards, we hit one of the new instances in Everfrost.  Once finished there, I broke out my Frostfell tree and other Frostfell house items and set them up in Rao’s house before logging for a bit.

When I got back on, I finished up the pre-quests for the crafting instances and dinged armorer to 77 in the process.  About then, it was raid time so I didn’t have the chance to check out one of the crafting instances.

All in all, I would have to say that my overall impressions of TSO so far fall into the ‘indifferent’ category leaning slightly more towards ‘meh’ than ‘woot!’  All things being equal, I would rather quest in Kunark than run TSO instances.  The instances are fun enough the first time, but I haven’t seen anything yet in the few instances I have done that make me want to rush back and repeat it ever again.  The puzzles are nice and it is kind of fun to have to figure an encounter out, but that also hasn’t taken away from the frustration factor either.

For instance…

The Lavastorm instance we ran on Saturday went well enough.  We had little trouble with anything until the final boss.  When we reached the final boss, we pulled him and did well enough for a first attempt getting him down to about 30%.  We figured we had him, so we went back and tried again.

On the next 7 pulls, we got wiped immediately on the pull having never even engaged him.  Most attempts after that were some mixture in between, but we never did get him below 80% again. 

After having to pop 2 mender bots (and all deaths were on the final guy… we had none until then), we gave up and left.

For all the other zones I have done (and there haven’t been many), if you take all the chests that have dropped so far, I’ve seen roughly 20 chests.  Of those 20 chests, there has been 1 item that anyone could use.  The other drops were all for classes we didn’t even have present and, even if we had someone of that class present, the drop was junk anyway.  It all ended up being greeded for transmuting, vendoring, or diety gifts.

I personally don’t fixate on loot.  If I’m with someone and we are interested in the same item, I will almost always defer to them and pass.  Just about the only time I go in is if I’m the only one there that can use an item.  On greed rolls, I tend to just decline.

However, it is frustrating to go spend 2 or 3 hours working through an instance, dying repeatedly while you try to figure it out, and sometimes breaking your gear before the end and then having everyone walk away with only vendor trash because nothing worthwhile ever drops.

Four instances isn’t enough for me to write the whole thing off though.  I’ll keep plugging away for a while.  If nothing else, I’m hoping that a lot of the problem is a “1″ instead of a “0″ somewhere in the endless lines of gaming code and that, once discovered, a patch will fix things somewhat.

I’m planning on hitting one of the tradeskill instances tonight to try them out.  My only real focus for this week is to knock out my last couple of levels to get to 80 in armorsmith and then to start working on my first tradeskill epic.  If I manage to complete those 2 things, maybe I’ll go after the Hoo’lah hat. 

There will most likely be a few instances thrown into the mix as well… not to mention Tuesday’s raid, but level 80 AS, my first tradeskill epic, and the hoo’lah hat are what I am looking forward to doing.

This is also a short week for me.  I’m off Thursday and Friday, so if I don’t manage to get those things done before then, I’ll have plenty of time to work on them those two days.  I also get to finally upload my NaNo tomorrow for the official word count.  I’ve been done writing for over a week, but the project isn’t over until the official word count is done.  I’m looking forward to uploading it tomorrow so I can finally close the book (as it were) on that project and move on to something new.

“Have a Crow sammich, smart ass!”

I’ve mentioned several times in several places how I think it is a bit ridiculous that people are bellyaching so much about the collection quest to get the cloak.  Now, I readily admit that I am an obsessive harvester bordering on the clinically insane, but still.  From my slanted perspective from the little padded room, this is not a hard quest.  Sure, it can be time consuming, but hard?  Nah.

I was even feeling rather snarky about the concept of “time consuming” as well.  I kept hearing horror stories about how long it took even for the tier 1 harvesting part and I would just snort in defiance and proclaim, “BLASPHEMY!”

Yes, I had good luck with tier 1 and was able to knock it out in less than 15 minutes.  Yes, I had good luck with tier 2 and was able to knock it out in less than 15 minutes.

Last night, I began tier 3.  I started in Thundering Steppes… and things went downhill fast.  In Thundering Steppes, they went downhill because I’m a friggin’ idiot!

I took the bell in the guild hall to TS and began my run down the docks.  Out of sheer habit, I grabbed the collection quest from the halfling with the bottomless stomach and off I went.

I was happily harvesting along and snorting and giggling over how easy the going was when I suddenly realized the blindingly obvious… the two quests conflict.  You update the halfling quest first and the food nodes you harvest don’t count towards the Mara quest until you cap off the halfling quest.

That ended up adding about 30 minutes to my harvest time in Thundering Steppes, but it wasn’t too terribly bad.  One of the funny things about this quest is that it has thrown the nit-pick harvesters into a confused frenzy of identity crisis.  It must be maddening to be someone who hits a zone specifically for the ore nodes for the market value of rares only to suddenly be driven by obsession to complete the cloak… and by goodness, stopping for the ore just wastes TIME I tell you!!!

I am, of course, making assumptions here.  However, I have never seen so many ore nodes up in Thundering Steppes since the first day I stepped foot in the zone… and they were being completely ignored by everyone harvesting in the zone.  It was like Christmas.  Before I left TS, I had harvested 12 steel nodes and 9 rare loams.  Good stuff, that.

Anyway, I recovered from my bone-head move with the second quest and finished up in TS.  I headed over to Nek still feeling that people were overreacting somewhat with concerns to this quest.

Nektulos Forest.  First off, I never spent much time here.  I didn’t like the zone very much, so I avoided it.  Second, maybe because I never really hunted here, I never really figured out where the nodes spawn.  Third, with the added flora graphics, I started lagging like crazy the second I hit the zone.  Eventually I just turned flora off completely and immediately started wondering why I hadn’t done that long ago.

I was able to knock out most of the Nek leg in less than 10 minutes.  Then, I hit the wall.

I was missing 1 pig meat.  1.  Stinking.  Pig.  Meat.

It took over 2 hours to get.  It wasn’t that I was getting nothing but hides.  It wasn’t that at all.  It was the simple fact that I couldn’t find a creature den to save my life.  I was running around harvesting every node in sight, but no creature dens.

Finally, after a little more than an hour of looking, I found one.  I ran up to it and happily clicked.  BONG BONG BONG.  You are too far away from this node.

……………..

Son of a…

I go back to running around aimlessly and end up getting an invite to go back to the Obelisk that we had done the night before.  I join up and keep running around.  They weren’t quite ready yet, so I’m searching frantically.

I finally found a creature den and, sure enough, got my pig meat on the first harvest.  It just took me 2 freaking hours to find the damn den.

So I’m geared up to start the t4 leg tonight, but no more comments from me.  I still don’t find this quest a challenge, but I can now see the frustration factor.

The obelisk run was fun again.  The only complaint that I had was that the 3 bosses dropped the exact same loot as they did on Wednesday night.  Same exact 3 plate tank items… and again, we didn’t have a plate tank present.

I’m starting to get a little concerned that this is the only instance I have been on so far.  I’m having flashbacks of my attempts to get in on a RE2 group.  Other instances to other areas were forming earlier in the evening and I tried to get in on those, but was told that the groups really needed more DPS for the instance they were running than what I provided. 

The expansion, of course, is still young and people are still figuring things out.  As a support class, I just need to remember that I am a luxury to a group… not a necessity.  Once the newness wears off and the frantic drive to form the perfect group fades, things should get easier for finding groups.

And the verdict is…

My copies of TSO arrived yesterday.  I picked them up from the mailbox at lunch and dropped them on my desk.  When I got home from work last night, I ate dinner and then loaded them up and ran the patcher again.  I logged on, took two steps, and crashed to desktop.

I logged back on, took another step, and crashed to desktop.

I logged back on and got invited to do a group.  I told them I would come, but if I crashed again, I was done for the night.  The guy who invited me told me to turn off dual core support and relaunch the game.  I did that and never crashed again.

Hmm.

The instance we ran is either one that doesn’t offer shard rewards at all or is one that no one has found (or widely reported) where the quest giver is.  It was still an okay instance.

It was part of the void I think.  It was filled with all the little nasties that have been frothing forth from the storms for the last few months, some of the beasties from the dream sequence, and some new things.  The encounters were definately new and unusual.  For instance, there was one guy floating in the air that no one can reach.  You have to 100% range fight him.  However, he doesn’t fight back… really.

He has these little floaty balls that circle around.  When he gathers 3 to him, he launches a massive AE that will dump you down to about 10% health.  Other than that, he doesn’t attack at all.

Below him is a pit.  If you fall in, you die.  You can jump into the pit though and, if you hit it dead center, there is a blast of wind that will throw you way up into the air.

Essentially, you have anyone who doesn’t have strong ranged attacks ride the air trampoline and intercept the balls before they get to him.  Those who do have strong ranged just beat him down from a distance.  If your bouncers stay on target with the balls and don’t fall into the pit, he dies pretty easily.

The instance had a lot of trash to clear, but there was nothing overly difficult for the group we had.  We even started with just a 5 person group consisting of me (80 dirge), an 80 troub, an 80 templar, an 80 wizard and an 80 monk.  We later added an 80 swashie.

I’m not sure if smart loot was supposed to be present there or not.  I thought I had read somewhere that smart loot would really be stepped up in TSO.  If it was, the smart loot for this zone needs to go back to school.  There were 3 or 4 named mobs… I forget exactly how many.  Everything that dropped was for plate tanks… of which we had a grand total of zero present.

Once the instance was over, I went back to Mara and did the second collection quest which I was able to knock out in about 15 minutes in Antonica.  I turned it in and grabbed the next quest in the line, but I didn’t start it.  I’ll probably hit it tonight.

My overall impressions of the expansion so far are muddled.  I haven’t done enough to make a decision one way or the other, but I will say this… my guildies are jazzed about it and are obsessively cranking away at it.  By the time I logged on last night, there were 3 or 4 people talking about the expansion as if they had been playing it non-stop for months already.

I’m typically pretty easy to please.  I still really enjoy Kunark despite the fact that so many people are still complaining about it being so solo-centric.  I ran around last night after completing everything else turning in quests that I had completed but never turned in.  As I was roaming around, I found myself thinking about how I was kind of looking forward to this weekend so that I could go back to Kunark and resume some of the quest lines I put on hold after hitting max level/max AA.

Of course, the big question on everyone’s mind yesterday after I logged in and announced that I had received my expansion was, “How is the bear mount?”

My answer then, as now, is, “I haven’t claimed it on anyone yet and I’m not sure I will.”

Mostly, I don’t like mounts.  I hate trying to fight while on a mount, so I always cancel the mount before combat begins.  When it comes to just riding around?  I would much rather be on a horse anyway as I just like the way they look so much better.  As it is, I only own a horse on 2 characters anyway and I rarely use them.  Ugly-ass bear mounts?  I doubt anyone will ever see me on one.

For tonight, maybe I’ll jump in another instance group.  Maybe I’ll spend the evening harvesting instead.  Maybe I’ll dump both ideas and craft.  I play it by ear.

But, that is one of the things that keeps me in EQ2.  There are a lot of different things to do and I am not one of the people driven to the point of obsession to be the first at everything.  I just want to enjoy myself.