April 2008 Archives

I've done it again.

My main characters - My druid, warlock and warrior are all about as well-geared as I can get them without raiding, which I can't always do.  My hunter is well-geared enough to farm and I don't have much interest in getting her beyond that.  So, now I could be running dailys and getting epic flyers for all my toons.

Am I doing that?  Am I heck.  I rolled up another alt.  I'm so weak!

And I LOVE ghost wolf.  Can you say overpowered?  40% run speed increase?!  What the heck was I doing messing around with travel form?  Pshaw!  Wolf is where it's at. 

I'm currently running around with a big two-handed mace, using flametongue until I get windfury.  I'm enhancement, and I think I'll be sticking to that because I already have a healer (druid) and ranged caster (warlock). 

Will I get her to 70?  I don't know yet.  I should be starting a new job soon so my playtime will go right down, and I may lose interest partway through.  My rogue is still languishing in the late 40s and has been for about two years now.  We'll see! 

I think I have the basics of the class down.  Another reason for playing a shaman is that it's one class I had no idea about and I wanted to get to know at least a little.  I love having the range of knowledge that having alts brings.

I'll probably come up with an RP background for her soon.

So, I went to the Isle of Quel'Danas to do my dailys on Emelyn today and noted that the harbor was 99% towards opening.  I did all my quests and decided to stick around for a little while to see if I could be one of the people there when it opened.

Stood around for 15 minutes or so with a guildie, and it popped!

I'm liking phase four.  The harbor building functions as an inn, with a mailbox, stablemaster, poison vendor and innkeeper.  Once we finish unlocking it, I'm also very much looking forward to the new jewelcrafting vendor to see what she has.

The new dailys are pretty fun, too.  The first one I did was Disrupt the Greengill Coast, where you loot orbs off the female naga and use them to free the murlocs.  Seems to be a 100% drop rate off the naga, and you can hit multiple murlocs with the orbs, so it was pretty fast.  It's also very amusing to see them attack the naga.  Buahaha.  This finally gives me a reason to kill the female naga instead of dodging and cursing them trying to get to the male ones for the key quest.

The other quest opened up is Discovering Your Roots, where you go to the new area in Terrokar, Razorthorn Ridge.  There you have to loot a gland off a flayer and use it to control a ravager.  Then you look for dirt piles on the ground and get the ravager to dig up the root therein.  The glands seem to be another 100% drop, and you can get all 5 roots with one ravager, so it's another easy quest.  Plus, it gives an SSO satchel!  Yay!

I felt kind of mean controlling the ravager and then abandoning it, though.  Well ... I kinda ran mine off a cliff, because I got on my flying mount and it followed me.  Sorry, ravager!

There's also the donation quests.  Before you get exalted you hand over 10g towards getting the statue.  At exalted, it's a one-time donation of 1000g and you get a title.  Nice fluff thing, but I doubt I'll get the title for my characters until they all have epic flyers.

All in all, a pretty fun phase.  And more money from dailys is always a good thing.

What do you get when you combine some footage from the Stockades, an over-active imagination, and a video-editing program? 

Something like this...

Yesterday I travelled to the top of a lava-strewn mountain, where I spoke to a dragon that attempted to strike a deal with me.  I refused to deal and after an epic battle, my party and I were triumphant.  A few days before that, I talked down a hostage situation and resolved it with no deaths, convinced an evil warlock to join my band of adventurers, and became a Knight.

Was this RPing in an MMO?  Nope.  Neverwinter Nights 2 has claimed a lot of my current play-time.  And I realised what it is that I'm missing in World of Warcraft, and in all MMORPGs.

That sense of immersion that comes from the NPCs reacting to your conversation choices.  To being able to complete a quest in a number of different ways, depending on your class and alignment.  Actually having an alignment, and it being changed by the way you play (Currently I'm a maxed out Lawful Good paladin/fighter/divine champion) and even dictating how you play. 

It would be nice to see a little of this.  Granted in an MMO the rules are different, because it's not just you playing through a single-player campaign, but it would be nice if we saw some quests where we can choose how to complete them, or some NPCs in the world would greet us based on things we've done - Not just on a reputation bar.  The big difference is of course that in a single-played game, you only do things once.  This dungeon or cave is gone once you've gone through it, this NPC is dead "forever".  It would take some work and imagination to weave more seamlessly into an MMO but I think it could be done. 

I'm pretty excited to see what BioWare are coming up with, given that I'm such a big fan of Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights.  I could see either of them being adapted into an MMO, and they both feature heavily an alignment system.

And just for fun:

What alignment is your character?

Emelyn is chaotic evil ... no surprise there!

I know this is a little late, but I've been busy with the new dailys and with RL stuff. 

So I was out in Nagrand and noticed an air cloud, which I promptly swooped down and sucked up.  To my surprise, I no longer looked like a wannabe shadow priest.  Seems they've put in a new animation for it, and it's pretty dang cool! 

Part of doing non-heroic Black Morass with an over-geared group has to be seeing how fast we can clear the trash.

Consecrate + Seed of Corruption = Fun.

They make an almost fractal pattern, as one group member commented.  All I saw on my screen was a LOT of numbers, and "Killing Blow!" a bunch of times.