Making Myself a ‘Better’ Player #WoW #WorldofWarcraft

When I play an MMO I typically take it upon my self to ‘be all that I can be’ when it comes to my character. I know this opens up a can of worms about the min/max that goes on in games, but it’s just one of my many generic ‘goals’. I like to be good at playing my character. I don’t like to be a liability for the group I’m in, and it’s fun to know that I play well. If I don’t play well at least it’s not from lack of effort. I don’t hold this over other players heads because personally it doesn’t matter to me how they play their own characters. I just take pride in the things that I do, and I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with that until you start projecting negative attitudes towards other players. If you harp on them for not being ‘as good’ as you and tease and make fun of people then I will very quickly have a problem.  That being said there are a few sites I use in order to learn more about my characters for World of Warcraft. You can play just fine without using any external resources, especially if you’re really good at figuring out the mathematics of the game yourself but I am not one of these people.

ElitistJerks (forums) – Now doesn’t this forum sort of go against everything I believe in as a gamer? Sort of. I only read the class sections and I stay away from every sort of comment that vaguely resembles someone trolling. Forums are notorious for flame wars and that’s really not something that I need to get involved with. If you can look past the ‘elite’ attitude of gamers you’ll find some fantastic information. You just need to develop a bit of a selective reading skill. It gets easier over the years. My issue with this forum is that as time goes on there are fewer and fewer updates by people who really know their class. I’m hoping when 4.3 goes live this may change a bit.

MaxDPS.com – a site I’ve only recently started using, this gives you a choice of stats to input and then find optimal gear for your character. It also includes things like spell rotations, and talents. There are some faults with the site, for example they only have one rogue spec listed (combat) and the gear is a bit behind. I couldn’t find some of my pieces listed. Still, it came in handy.

AskMrRobot.com – I was just told about this site yesterday, and I absolutely love it. You can input your character from the armory and then optimize to find gear that’s BiS (Best in Slot). It also tells you which gems, enchants, and reforges would suit your spec the most, and allows you to customize what tier of gear you’re aiming for. You can leave off certain BiS options like ‘Too lazy to get exalted rep’ – if you select this it won’t list gear for you that requires exalted reputation. Using this site I was able to narrow down what upgrades I should work towards, where they came from, and then what to do with them.

PLAYING a character well is still something that’s completely up to you. If you’re going to constantly stand where you shouldn’t stand, you’re going to die. If you run ahead of the tank, are impatient and pull on your own, constantly badmouth someone in your group, or any other number of ‘bad player’ things you’ll never be one of those ‘good players’. It doesn’t take high dps to be a good player. My warlock is a great example of this. She’s wearing pretty poor gear at the moment and only parses around 5-7k dps, but I know where to stand and what to do on specific fights. Staying alive and not being a dumbass dying to certain encounters is just as important as being able to parse high. When you’re able to do both, well now, that’s what I strive for. My priest is getting there, I have 0 raid gear and can hold a steady 11-12k dps on single targets, I’ve been able to parse as high as 42k on group encounters depending on how many adds there are. None of that matters if I don’t know enough to move out of the way when a flaming ball of lava is headed in my direction.

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

 

 

Working on Those Fireland Dailies #WoW

I finally earned enough Mark of the World Tree tokens to complete the first request for 150 of them. It takes 9 days of daily quests to unlock the second ‘hub’ and you have a choice of two of them. Once you’ve unlocked that one it will take another 5 days of daily quests to unlock the third ‘hub.’ In total it takes approximately one month of daily quests to complete the ‘event’. There’s a fantastic write up about it over on icy-veins that I suggest people check out if they’re interested in the specifics. Right now I’m doing daily quests from the Shadow Wardens, and once I’ve gathered another 150 Marks I’ll be doing the quests for the Druids of the Talon. There are numerous rewards for all of this including three vendors with some really nice items for sale, gear, patterns, and companion pets.

I’ve been doing these quests with my priest and I’m kicking myself for not having started them with the warlock. I’ve put so much time and effort into the priest that it’s finally focused me to playing a ‘main’ which is great, most of the time.

You’ll have to forgive my lack of posts this month (or lengthy posts in any case) as I’m participating in NaNoWriMo for the month (feel free to add me to your buddy list!) but I’ll try to keep the site updated with what I’m up to and any quests of interest. Honestly the majority of my time is spent working on these fireland dailies, and when I’ve completed those I head to Tol Bard and do the dailies there. It leaves me with two dailies free, and I have been working on the cooking and fishing quests in Ironforge so I can complete the achievement for them. I see a lot of people upset (and some not so upset) about the new companion pets that are being sold in the Blizzard store, but it doesn’t really bother me. I saw some trying to be sold for 10k yesterday (someone was looking for reserves) but I didn’t see very many people interested in it. I guess we’ll see where it goes.

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

 

What Are YOU Excited About? #EQ2 #WoW #Skyrim #SWTOR #MMORPG

It’s a pretty exciting time to be a gamer. There are a whole lot of games and expansions all releasing around the same time. I don’t keep as up to date as I should on the non-mmo gaming front, so my list is probably a bit more sparse then some others out there. What am I looking forward to? Well, there’s the EQ expansion, Veil of Alaris that releases in November. I’m really excited about this expansion, it’s just beautiful. EQ2 is also putting out their ‘expansion’ (I use the term loosely) Age of Discovery. I’m a lot less excited about this update then I am about the EQ expansion. There’s not a lot of actual content coming with it, although with mercenary and a new class I will say that casual players should be pretty happy. I’m holding off on any other comments until I can actually get my feet into it because until then it’s just speculation. I’d be much happier if this was coming as a free update rather then a paid expansion. World of Warcraft has their 4.3 patch coming out (supposedly) some time in November, which I am also pretty excited about. I’m looking forward to new dungeons, new gear sets, and I’m really looking forward to appearance gear for once. I’m even looking forward to the raid finder tool, which I think will be fantastic for casual players who don’t have the time to devote to finding a raid guild – or those of us who are in tiny little 3-people guilds who haven’t been able to raid yet.

I did decide to sign up for a year of WoW in order to get Diablo 3 for free, along with the mount that will be released in 4.3. The game has enough casual aspects to it that I find it quite relaxing along with my adventuring in EVE Online. SWTOR release date is just around the corner, but not being a fan of sci-fi I haven’t pr-ordered and I’m not really sure if I’ll play. I know my other half will be picking up the game and I’ll probably just live vicariously through him and his adventures. Until the peer pressure becomes too great, of course.

Skyrim is one of those non-mmo games that are certainly on my radar, and I do plan on picking up once it releases. The game just looks beautiful and it’s been a while since I’ve played a single player. I don’t really think the sims 3 counts. Speaking of, I’ve been having loads of fun with their latest ‘pets’ expansion that released this month. It’s a great game when I’m not in the mood for anything multi-player.

So what are you most excited about? Perhaps nothing coming out tickles your fancy at all? Let me know in comments below!

 

We All Love New Things #EVEOnline

It doesn’t matter what game I play, I love getting new things. Some times those new things are gear, weapons or even crafting supplies. In EVE one of those things is ships. Ever since I heard that there was a little war on ice miners I decided that I wanted an ice mining ship. Technically I could use my hulk (as I’ve already mentioned) but the Mackinaw receives a lot of bonuses for ice mining in specific. Today I decided to purchase one, and I’ve got three more days before I can finish fitting it, but it’s coming along nicely. I gave it the name ‘Cyrosphere’ which I think suits. I was a bit sad when I looked at the insurance value of the ship. The maximum you can get back is 26 million ISK, and the ship is going for roughly 115 million in Jita. That’s not including any money you spend fitting it. I took it out for a spin and was incredibly happy with my results, but I was also very paranoid that I’d get shot out of the skies, even if I was in .7 HighSec. After a few circles of the mining guns I decided to head back to the station and refine my goods, which is where the real money comes from.

Hopefully things will calm down for ice miners before too long, and I won’t have to be constantly looking around for people flying in all of the sudden. Of course it’s better to be safe than sorry, but after losing my hulk last week I really wasn’t in the mood to replace a 2nd ship quite so soon.

It’s almost time for me to upgrade my research agents again. I’ve been working on missions for Creo and my standing is almost high enough to warrant the change. I’ve been with my current agents for a long time, and even though I only visit them when I need a bunch of datacores you sort of get attached to them. Plus they’re in a nice location that’s easy for me to reach when I’m en-rout to my factory outpost.

Once I finish training the ice harvester, I’m going to complete fitting the Dominix (I sort of stopped half way through) and then work on my other crafting skills like mining different types of ore and refining them. Maybe I’ll do a little wurmhole exploration, and eventually I’ll finally get the hang of probing. In the mean time I’m still bugging corp mates to help me with that.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself! I hope all my friends down south stay safe with the storms that have been passing through. No sign of any snow up here in Ottawa.

o/

Relaxation via Mining #EveOnline

It feels really good to be back in EVE, and even better to be spending most of my time ‘crafting’. While the majority of people I know spend their time blowing up other ships (be they NPC or players) I spend a lot of mine crafting or preparing to craft. You may hear about how boring mining is, but I find it incredibly relaxing. It’s something I can do while doing other things (especially since I mine in high sec without using cans). I’m working on affording an ice mining ship, technically my hulk could ice mine, but it doesn’t have the bonuses that the new ship would have. It’s about 140 mill ISK to save up for one, so I won’t be getting it any time soon.

I’m thinking of starting up an alt on my main account, simply to be able to produce more in PI. It takes about a week to train the skills I would need and PI products are selling quite well. I have never really required another character on my account because you can only have one character training at a time and you can quite literally ‘do it all’ on one character. It just takes a lot of time.

My new corp and I didn’t work out so I moved back to the smaller one I’ve been a part of for the last year or so. I should have known better, it’s rare that I play well with others (there’s a reason I run my own guild in WoW and EQ2 after all). Long story short, I thought I was joining a friendly casual guild but when I joined and lost my hulk in their sector I received some not-too-kind emails stating that I was making their killboard look bad and even implying that our own members may shoot me down just to prevent this from happening in the future. I understand that everyone has their method of playing the game but as a member who had been there less then a day (and personally, I don’t give a hoot about killboards) I found this discouraging. I never pretended to be anything other then a carebear gamer (in EVE at least) who spends most of her time mining, inventing, and doing PI, whether or not I lose a ship shouldn’t be that big of a deal. It is EVE after all. It happens.

Anyhow. I can continue to spend my time in game doing what I do, which is supplying other players with POS bits, selling ships, drones and other crafted items. All from the comfort of the small but friendly corp that I started out in. I’m just not a blood thirsty player, and I don’t pretend to be.

Kasul managed to probe a nice mining site this morning which was a lot of fun. I’m still trying to get the hang of probing, even in my Helios I have some issues finding good sites. It takes a lot of practice. Thankfully he has no issues with probing for sites for me and I split the profit of anything I mine. He has a little hulk he takes out when he has the time, and I go to the site in the Orca as well as the Retriever (which will eventually be a hulk on my second account. In 18 days or so). The Orca takes care of any rats that wander into the system and it’s a nice hour or two of relaxation in the mornings.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful week! I apologize for the lack of posts lately, but I have been dealing with real life (it crops up from time to time) so I haven’t been posting as often as I’d like. Hopefully things will quiet down after next Friday and I should be back to my daily blogging schedule. Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!