Stargrace

Rift Announces Their Veteran Rewards #RiftGame

Honored veterans

Starting with update 1.5, being a veteran Ascended means honor, respect, and awesome rewards for subscribing to RIFT. Earn a full Guardian or Defiant guard uniform for your wardrobe, a personal vendor, an on-the-go mailbox, and more!

Your well-earned rewards

Every time you reach a reward milestone, you unlock another reward.

18 months includes Tricorne of the Drowned Thief / Endless Skull Helm – and a mobile mailbox to send and receive your important parcels anywhere. I find it a little odd that the rewards do NOT include any potions – but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s just not what I expected. On the plus side, I’m looking forward to the 6 month reward. Having a personal vendor to summon is always handy!

What are your thoughts on these veteran rewards?

Leaving Before The Wipe #WoW

Ah, Molten Core. I had never been to this raid zone before despite the fact that I’ve played WoW since release. I’ve never raided. It’s not that I’ve never WANTED to raid, but that I have never found a ‘home’ to belong to in game which makes raiding hard. Toargo and I decided to head to the zone ourselves (him playing warrior and me on the priest) to see if we couldn’t collect some appearance gear for 4.3. The zone was fun, and I had a good time figuring out how difficult it must have been back when the zone was still fresh to players.

My warlock is one of my favorite characters, but I don’t often play her because I’d rather be ‘useful’ (ie: healing). That changed slightly yesterday as I worked on gearing her up enough to finally be let into heroics. I was still sporting a few green pieces of gear, and needed 3 more points to my ilevel in order to queue. Two ‘regular’ dungeon queues later finally saw me with an upgrade, and I was able to get into heroics. Torago (trusty tank) set us going, and we ended up in Heroic: Blackrock Caverns which I had not been to even on regular mode for quite some time.

The group started out well enough, but we had a paladin dps that wasn’t quite ‘on the ball’. During the encounter that requires players to stand in front of three lasers until you get a stack of about 80 debuffs on you and then you move out, he didn’t move out, and thus we got an add, and then just as we were taking care of things in the middle of battle the priest left the group. Classy.

So another healer joined, this one a paladin, and I stood in the center beam instead of the paladin and we defeated it flawlessly. The rest of the zone went by without incident, and I picked up a new wand. I was a little discouraged by how few valor points you receive for completing a heroic, but I reminded myself that a lot of these players have done the zones hundreds of times, and probably had stores of justice and valor points just waiting to be used. Ah well. I’ll get there eventually.

My warlock is also my engineer, and I finally hit 540 (gnome racial bonus) in the skill. Now I’m saving up for recipes I don’t have, and my mining is 525, so I’m working on the smaller skills like cooking and archeology. I find them fun, if nothing more then busy work.

I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend, no matter where they found themselves. Happy gaming!

Warlock Adventures #WoW

As always I bounce between games, and my adventures have taken me over to World of Warcraft this time. Things are a little different then last time I played back in April with both developers and players preparing for the release of 4.3 (slated for November, I believe). My priest had been 85 for some time, but of course (as with all of the games I play) I have a handful of alts. The warlock was closest at level 84 and I decided I should probably try to reach 85 sooner or later. Preferably sooner. I queued for some dungeons and at 84 it took a bit to get in as dps, but as soon as I hit 85 the queues went much faster. Not only that but the dungeon runs themselves went MUCH smoother then I ever remember them going when I was doing them previously. Out of the 8 runs I did I only recall one wipe, and there were no rude comments from anyone. Weird!

The warlock doesn’t have enough of a score yet to do heroics, but the priest does. I noticed that justice point purchased boots and wrist pieces are now BoE instead of BoP, allowing players to purchase and sell them on the broker or AH. I also started the new chain of quests that introduces the Firelands, and received a very nice cloak that was a huge upgrade for the warlock. I don’t really know too much about this place, but the lore seemed pretty neat (and mushy, aw, Horde love).

My other alts include:

78 dwarf shaman
63 human paladin
10 gnome rogue

I had both a druid and a warrior around the 40s but I decided to delete them (no real reason, it’s just something I do to ‘clean up’ and will probably remake one day. You can find me on battle.net as morrow.stephane.l@gmail.com if you’d like to add me, I play alliance on the Argent Dawn server. I can’t say how long I’ll play (especially since I’m still playing Rift too) but for now the change is relaxing.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Anything But Dead #EverQuest #EQ

Any time I find myself in a video game, chances are I hear a discussion about how game X used to be good and popular, but then event Y took place and KILLED IT. I chuckle to myself, wondering how these people could possibly think a game is ‘dead’ if even a single player is enjoying it (as long as the game isn’t shutting down). Yesterday, that game was EQ1 – and if you take a look at the screen shot above, I think you’ll see it’s anything but dead. This is just one of many populated servers, happens to be Drinal, the server I play on. Of course the game isn’t at its prime any more and after so many years that’s completely understandable, but it’s certainly no where near dead.

What keeps people playing this ‘ancient’ game? Is it the amount of time they’ve already invested in it? The difficulty involved in mastering it? Friends? Fear of change? I suspect it’s a combination of all kinds of reasons, and I imagine that the type of player still playing EQ1 as opposed to those who play more recently released MMOs may be different.

I suppose I’m just tired of people making assumptions about games that they personally no longer play and haven’t for some time. A game may be dead to you – but there’s a lot of others who still enjoy it on a daily basis. One thing I’m worried about with the next EQ expansion adding guild halls is that this central gathering location which you see above as the guild lobby will become less populated – and I think it’s REALLY important to have a location like this – unlike EQ2 where everyone is constantly hiding away in their halls and homes and you can play the game without ever seeing a gathering of this size. I’m hoping since players gather like this to share buffs and timers don’t tick down that it will remain as it is. A focal point for social happenings. We will just have to see.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

Sign up for EverQuest: Veil of Alaris Beta #EverQuest

I’m really excited about the next everquest expansion, called Veil of Alaris. Above is a video for Argath, Bastion of illdaera, one of the new zones that come with it. There are a handful of wonderful changes also coming with the expansion including:

Guild halls with trophies
Resizeable hotbars
12 buttons per hotbar
The ability to link items and clickies directly to the hotbar, including from inside of bags
Customizable guild ranks
A new guild rank system
The ability to mail items in game

The level cap will also be increasing from 90 to 95, and that means new spells and aa. There are 12 new zones, and if you have an active EverQuest account and want to sign up for the beta, you can visit the sign up page here. You must log in to your active EverQuest account in order to sign up. I have to admit, I’m more excited about this then the EQ2 expansion. Fingers crossed that I’ll get into the beta and when the NDA drops I’ll have some interesting stuff to share with readers.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!