Thursday, December 20, 2012

Don't Panic

Lots of changes are in store for the new year, and I think it's important to keep one thing in perspective:


Thursday, December 6, 2012

3rd Life and other thoughts.

I know winter festival type stuff is approach soon, actually coins are dropping now, but grinding them out isn't much of a draw for me right now.

Losing my superior glaciation that i had ground out winter motes has given me a once bitten twice shy mentality about the whole thing. Submitting a ticket is supposed to get help, but with response times being so poor and having to be online at the time to get it resolved is annoying.

I did get mabar handwraps though, adding to my repertoire that I've been building up. I think my third life might be a favored soul/monk type character, but I'm looking for a build that can do both melee and 10k stars if possible, but if not, I'm leaning toward handwraps.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Mabar

I know some people don't like Mabar but I find it kind of fun!

But the pressure is on this time around. I have robes, cloaks, wands, potions of various sorts, but I most keenly feel the lack of a docent since I TR'd my drow wizard into a warforged wizard. I don't have many high level robes, but what would have once been an easy upgrade from the level 16 to the level 20 robe is now a from nothing to level 20 docent. It would also be nice to upgrade my cloaks and robes for other characters so they can have longer lasting clickies and nicer effects.

I'm hoping segmenting out the instance levels and such will make drop rates better for motes, but that will remain to be seen.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Kingmaker, reaper, DDO, and other games.

Haven't blogged lately, here's an update:

Kingmaker continues slowly but surely. Kingdom size still less than 10, but in looking the rules, it seems easier to have one large citystate type kingdom than to have multiple cities. But there is a loss of potential by not using the landmarks to discount buildings. A larger kingdom allows building to be built faster, and farms can help pay for large consumption due to edicts, so there are some benefits.

The Reaper kickstarter was an awesome opportunity to get some minis which I could not pass up. I see much painting in my future.

I continue to play DDO almost exclusively. The Menace of the Underdark expansion is awesome, so i bounce between my 2nd life wizard and recently level 22 bard. Got a t-shirt and swag from DDOCast, too!

I did get portal 2 and that game is awesome. Civ 5 also sees some play.

Monday, October 1, 2012

BTCoE vs BTC

Not too long ago, I was running my Bard 20 /Epic 1 / Fatesinger 3 in Eveningstar quests with a guildmate on her Barbarian 20 / Epic 1 / Fury 3, with the aim to get some loot, xp, and commendations, especially since the random encounters in the King’s Forest are still a bit buggy. I was tossing all my commendations her way, since I already have what I need for this character.

Fast forward to the Battle for Eveningstar, and either the wiki is wrong or I am misremembering, but I know I got the Drow smoke goggles, and I’ll swear it was the granary chest and not the end chest but oh well. I gave them to my guildmate because I already had the epic ring of the slayer and she still had my bloodstone I had loaned her, and she equipped them and went to town.

And then it happened…yep you guessed it. Drow Smoke goggles were on her chain completion end reward list, proving that the loot gods hate me, and reinforcing how awesome BTCoE is, and how lame BTC is.
Another plus in her column was enough commendations for Purple Dragon Knight armor. I know, heavy armor for a barbarian is less than optimal but for a casual player the free LR (which went off without a hitch) to restat/refeat and get heavy armor prof and overwhelming critical wasn’t awful and a stacking +3 to hit/damage for the set wasn’t going to be coming from something else anytime soon.

In other bad loot news, I still don’t have a complete sigil but I’m going to cut my losses and come back and get it later, so I can run litany unimpeded on my third life. Currently rank 90 and looking forward to running vale quests for xp. Not certain I can keep up my bravery bonus solo on those but I’ll see what I can do.

I did get a Turbulent Epee last night though, which I may have to test out, but compared to a dedicated DR breaker I don’t think this passes muster but as a generic DR breaker ‘just-in-case’ it may be okay.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Fatesinger

Been running FR realms content on my Bard 20/Fatesinger. A few things I need to work on...

Get a perform +15 item. Stormsinger cloak won't cut it anymore.
Upgrade my silver flame pendant to a silver flame talisman. Protection from evil items are bugged though so that makes me sad. Greater command is not my friend.
Get more spell pen in my enhancements, and also look at shifting away from melee focus to cc focus and get spell pen feats too. Crafted an epic scimitar of cursespewing/improved shattermantle to help with OID at least, along with a spell pen buckler.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Terror Greatsword and how I didn't know what I was missing

Back before Epic Destinies, and I was trying to get a light and darkness for my paladin with my capped wizard, I got a few nice end rewards from dreaming dark, some from the chest the old fashioned way with discs (even messing up once and having to get another disc because I left one disc in the bank...), and some from end rewards like normal.

So I have a lucid dreams waiting for an artificer, or at least an artificer 2 splash (any comments on artificer splashes for rune arm use?)

I almost got a regalia of the phoenix, but already had the epic cloak of flames so it was no longer the only item to boost meteor swarm, but decided to get Terror instead. It was kind of a hard decision, based on the review here .

I wasn't looking for specific weapons, I was looking for loot comparisons, so never did see all the other 'please fix terror' threads, the 'terror is worth it now' threads, or the 'Terror is the best!!!1111one!' threads.

But I had a wizard at 20, a stagnant paladin at 16 and a somewhat slowly leveling bard. I thought, oh well, at least I can beat down the mindsunder with it, as well as quori.

Just a few days ago, my 1st life bard got to the level 19 cap at level 17. I just haven't gotten around to leveling him up to 18 yet and getting my min level 18 gear out, including terror.

If I had known Terror was that good, I could have been running vale quests without a second thought (incidentally, level 16 ring of the stalker isn't bad). But now it is too late...

So alas, I will only know Terror post nerf, based on a review pre-nerf.

Friday, June 8, 2012

The Blood Stone

[caption id="attachment_120" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="The Blood Stone"]The Blood Stone[/caption]
Well, Desert Runs aren't a complete waste, now are they?

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Challenges, New Computer, and TR

So I've been grinding out challenge ingredients with daily tokens for a small bit now (seems like forever but I took level 20 on my wizard March 29th so it can't have been that long.) But it wasn't until crystal cove came around and I was able to get an epic ornamented dagger and epic spyglass that I was able to get things into high gear.

But, one thing that made a huge difference was my new computer. I had been playing between a 2006 MacBook Pro using Wine, a Toshiba Satellite Pro A210 and a Dell Mini 9, none of which were really up to the task of running DDO. I built my desktop, with the little APU that could, the AMD A6-3500. It meets my needs for now, as my only monitor is a 17" CRT, which works for now.

With new computer and epic level items in hand, the disruptor became pretty trivial for my wizard and now I have enough epic challenge ingredients to TR. I'll probably just wait for the expansion to check out the new quests, epic destinies and levels, and then TR into druid.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Challenges

Lately I've been running the vaults of the artificers challenges, partly for favor and partly to get used to them and running them at 'epic' levels. I figure I'll want to TR my wizard soon, but I've never done a raid, and I don't even know if epic quests are soloable (like P Carnival), so the challenges are probably the easiest way for me to get epic tokens.

But until I get minimum level 20 stuff, I don't see the a good reason to go from level 18 to level 20. The wizard capstone is nice, but isn't necessary at this point for challenge resource gathering.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Almost to xp cap on this character, and any character. The big boost that really got me going were crystal cove last year, the new quests and 10% xp weekend, and gianthold slaying.

Not certain what I'm going to do for the last bit of xp. I'd do the gianthold flagging quests but those are hard to solo. I might try the vale.

Even if I cap xp, I might not level up right away, so I can help out others on lower level quests more. Mostly because I don't think epic quests are my cup of tea.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Establishing a kingdom

Last night we played Kingmaker, and the kingdom was founded, positions on the council were filled, the capitol city was established, and lots of xp was handed out.

 Actually, it wasn't a ton of xp, but enough to make it feel worthwhile for an evening without much combat or roleplaying.

So there was xp for:
  • Establish a kingdom
  • Build a capitol city
  • Grow kingdom to size 5
  • fill a city block with 4 buildings
  • completing a quest (no spoilers)
  • killing some things (no spoilers)
Buildings include: Castle, dump, house and shop.

Right now building points are at a premium but it is currently hard to fail an economy check so they should be getting build points every turn, enough to continue growing their kingdom.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

SSD is nice, but...

Surprisingly, after putting an SSD in my 2006 MacBook Pro, most things sped up considerably. Boot times, application load times, even DDO, it was quite speedy.

But the bug about changing zones or characters several times is exacerbated in wine. So for short amounts of time it works great.

I would boot camp into xp if it had good SSD support, and I would boot camp into vista or 7 if it supported 'overclocking' the underclocked ATI X1600 in my particular model of Mac (way to go Apple, first put on a metric ton of thermal paste and then underclock the video chip, and then make fans run too slowly for gaming)

In DDO news, haven't really been playing, just running around with my wizard in slaying areas. Currently in Gianthold.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Catching up on a few things

1 - Played Kingmaker last night. Finished up the first module, and started planning the kingdom for book 2.

2 - Finally got around to uploading this picture of the mini I was working on. The hair is a separate pieces that I glued on. I ended up not using a join, but I did have to use my hand drill to make the connection stick. Also cut off the base and glued her feet directly to the provided base.

3 - No number 3 for now.