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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Holiday Upgrades

Well, there was finally a hard drive on sale right after Christmas that was within my budget so I should be getting sometime next week a 32GB SSD for the Mac whose hard drive has been dead for awhile. Depending on how it performs, my wife may claim it as her primary computer again, letting me have her Toshiba Satellite. The Mac has better specs, but having to run Wine and an underclocked video chip hampers it severely in the gaming department, so the swap may be a good thing.

In the meanwhile, I've been playing DDO on the netbook, which is aggravating at times, but the frame rate can usually stay around 20 to 25 in a quest, so it's not bad.

If hard drive prices come down I may be able to build a desktop sooner, but it's looking like maybe sometime around April that I'll be able to do that.