Suspicious activities !? Nah

This week I won 12K selling a mount, and got 2 other mounts. Somewhere along the line Blizzard automated system decided I was a chinese farmer or a bot or whatever and so blocked my accounts until I changed my password. No worries. I'm not a cybot AFAIK and I don't speak chinese, so no harm should come from this.

I also finished my PVP weapon farming, full 403 now, and nearly finished my PVE experience before Panda bears come to life somewhere during the fall.

That said, I cancelled one of my accounts, and the other will probably follow.

There's nothing to do besides achievements, and my guild isnt't keen on doing them.

The alternative is to use the free transfer to the Aggra Portuguese server for all my Silvermoon chars and start playing with portuguese-only.

I had a laugh looking at the names of chars and guilds on Aggra, using a lvl 1 spy toon.

I found out that Portucale, my mega ex-guild with 500+ ppl has moved there.

But... the server looks kind of empty, it certainly has way less players than Silvermoon. And then there's the question of portuguese way "My car is better than yours so I'm better than you". So, I'll probably pass.

How to farm the WoW Love Event mount for 2012

I created this to show my new 2500K machine up and running (kind of, the bloody damn Corsair 500W V2 PSU is giving me a hard time with a chirp noise, probably from a chinese set of coils, so it will have to go back to the box and back to the store, and probably back to China. Oh how I love my 11 years old taiwanese Enermax made with japanese condensers!)

Anyway.. Blizzard launched the 2012 Love Event. And although I thought I had nothing to do with it, I do. There's a new mount. An ugly mount. But still a mount.

Now... farming ? Argh. Not if I can help it.



Can't get any easier ;) and it's legal !

In Firelands, I also got my firehawker mount and most of the Cataclysm quest achievements, only a few remain, that will require RNG to play its part, but nearly 0 effort.

In Dragon Soul, I have been having a good luck with LFR drops, but a terrible luck with my free timing and guild raiding, so I still do not have the DS 10 Deathwing achievement. Hopefully it'll still be this month.


On the SWTOR front, I created a Sith Inquisitor alt, at lvl 11 atm, and will probably go towards the "warlock" way of things, ie, Sith Sorceror, as the other is a more of a melee/lightsaber kind of player, although it would be fun tanking with a "clothie".
My beloved Netgold mercenary is lvl24, so it's closing in on the speeder "mount", and collecting rest XP time for another level burst.

The Emperors Reborn

This weekend I had some real fun MMO'ing.

It started with me finally completing the achievement for killing Arthas in Heroic 25 mode. So many fools playing this game, made it a disgrace. Old Arthas made good fun of a lot of them for many weeks, watching them fly across the icy platform because of Shadow Traps, or wiping the raid because of defile. Finally, I had a lucky shot with a group where the idiots died soon and the remaining knew what to do, so down he came.
The funny part is that the run was exclusively to get a mount for the RL, that was paying 300K to the one highest roller. It didn't drop. May be I join next week LOL

It then proceeded with me going to Firelands and 1-shotting all the bosses, including Ragnaros. I was the only one in <390 gear (383i atm), so ofc it wasn't as hard as it was a few months ago, but for me it felt good. I was not dps racing, but I actually did some good numbers in the fights where destro is good. Other fights are a disgrace for this spec. We had gone on Tuesday, but only did 6/7.

Finally, we quickly went to BWD to kill Nefarian, and we 1-shotted it. The strategy feels really basic. Ofc it was easy because the boss was tuned for i359 gear, but still bot he and Onyxia kick ass.

Then I switched to LOTRO to help a friend with some quests in the Pit of Iron, and finished the day inside SWTOR.

SWTOR is growing bigger in my appreciation level. It's now approaching 4 out of 5, passed LOTRO :) . I entered in my 2nd month of subscription, and started leveling more seriously. Netgold, my Bounty Hunter, is lvl 20. Both my pals have reached 49-50 and are ready for heroics, so time to step up my game.

My 2500K machine will be ready this week, hopefully. Z68, SSD cache, 4GHz, 1600DDR3, all the new crap.

Ah, nearly forgot, I went dualboxing again..PVE raiding ! Yes, LFR allows it, and I can even trade items between my chars. Tarithel is shadow-specced, around 375i, so it's more than enough to be among the top 15 dps :)
Silly me, won the first two items for my kid's priest because I couldn't trade them (need to be in the same guild, I guess) for my lock. I would have 4pc by now.

Oh well... next week I'm going with the guild, hopefully it will be fun

WoW: Free week over.

Results ?

All new heroics done, epox looted, CHECK !

Dragon Soul done, Deathwing is dead , CHECK !

Transmogrified my PVE gear to Merciless/T5 (Merciless is so much better!), Used Void Storage, CHECK !

Played the new Darkmoon Faire, doing all the achievements I could. CHECK!

Passed 11K achiev points, back to 1st place in guild :) CHECK

Completed Glory of the Ulduar 25, got my beautiful proto-drake, CHECK !

NEARLY did Glory of the Icecrown Heroic 25 (always some idiot causes defile).

Had fun in PVP, healers rock so much, it's now a healer's war.

All in all, I had great fun.

Is WoW still worth playing ?

Dunno.

My new i2500K machine is nearly ready. SWTOR is waiting.

WOW: Free week and Dragon Soul .. AH AH AH

I went back to WoW to check whether 4.3 is worth playing.
From what I saw, it is NOT.
Except, of course, if you want to see all the content in one day and be done with it.

There are three new instances, one new raid, which can be entered, and conquered, by anyone, because Blizzard implemented a "look for raid", which gives loot and is (at least from a dps point of view) the easiest thing ever done.

Come on, downing a boss in DS25-LFR is as difficult as the first boss in old Deadmines.

I checked on the prerequisites, it was 370 iLvl or so. I went from 359 to 370 in 2-days by a bit of farming for Justice Points and the three new heroics.

Today I did the first 4 bosses. It was either nuke boss or "go where the other 24 are going and kill whatever they are killing". No strategy, no communication, no "I'll do this". Nothing.

I can't imagine how Deathwing is going to last more than 24 hours, because the next 4 and last bosses will probably be as easy as these first 4.

Oh dear...comparing with BWL and AQ40.. what a joke.

What else happened ?

I suspended RIFT, of course, since I'm now level 50.
My LOTRO minstrel Janariel completed all the questing, and now all that remains are a few deeds and some fun time with 3-instances with my RL pals.
SWTOR...my new PC is still under consideration. And part of it (PVP) is for me atm unplayable. Some PVE parts, the ones with lots of ppl around me, also not. I look at WoW and think that they did a very good job limiting CPU usage. Yes, in 25-raids my machine goes down, or in populated areas. But I can run everywhere on more empty servers (like Chrommaggus) and get 50 fps, continuously.
In SWTOR, I get 10-40 fps. And it oscillates a LOT, with the CPU usage always at 100% for both cores.

SWTOR: The Hunt for Gold

So... Star Wars The Old Republic has arrived. I missed launch week because of Xmas holidays, which was actually a good thing, as I skipped the initial bug/lag/queue fest.

My machine is holding up better than expected. Alone, it's quite playable with everything maxed up except shadows. RIFT was like that too. The problem comes when I enter a populated area, with NPC's and/or players. Then, it starts to get worse, below 20fps, ie, ugly.

I'm on target for a Core i5 2500K upgrade, but I'm still selecting components, PSU and stuff. Low noise is the culprit of my delay.

Back to gameplay. I joined forces with old Lords of Midnight guildies from Chromaggus server in WoW. They are going towards dps and tanking, so I'll go towards dps and healing, which is good.

After a long debate, I decided I won't be a bald man called Netcownt anymore. It was 5 years of looking at a bald head and neck, and it sucked. It's much nicer to watch a girl, so I went for a cyborg chick, human faced, called Netgold.

She rocks ! Well, she's a Bounty Hunter, so she better rock, and rock hard. Advantage ? I'm not a Sith at heart, and we started on the Sith side, so I couldn't see myself playing the "bad guy", although SWTOR allows Dark side and Light side decision making during quests. Bounty Hunters allow me to be mercenary, ie, do the good (or evil) because I'm paid for, not because of a Jedi or Sith mentality.

It makes a difference, LOL.

So, Netgold starts on Nal Hutta, and, as a Bounty Hunter, she quickly joins "The Big Hunt". Nesingwary keeps coming to my mind, I wonder why. If I could select a surname for my toon, she'd be Netgold Nesingwary, for sure.

Levels 1-10 are spent in Nal Hutta, preparing for the Hunt, doing shores here and there. Questing is fun, although a bit too easy, specially when I get a healing companion by level 8 or so.

There is a sense of "lots of new abilities for me to press keys, all seem to do about the same thing, ie, kill stuff".
But at the same time, some common things to other MMO show up, ie resource bar management (in my case it's called Heat, opposite to rage or.. whatever rogue had, I forgot, or hunter focus), AoE, crowd control, range abilities vs melee abilities, etc.

If I could match SWTOR with WoW, Bounty Hunter looks like a hunter. What else...

Tonight I'm leaving Nal Hutta and start exploring the outside world.

RIFT is dead, long live SWTOR

During this December , I subscribed RIFT and leveled a Mage (Warlock/Necromancer) up to level 50.

Why ? To be honest, I wanted to see the sights. Everyone kept telling me how it looked like another WoW, how irrelevant the game was, yadayada.

Well, as a lvl 50 (fresh one, for sure), I can tell it's not exactly true, RIFT is not WoW. It might be like WoW, yes, but a different WoW.

In WoW, you reach level 60,70,80,85, and all you can do is one thing: GEAR UP !

In RIFT, they understood their mistake, and changed things. Once you get to 50, you get a Planar development. Yes, it's more XP, you continue to get XP, but instead of leveling, you invest it in enhanced skills. Yes, there's also GEAR. Yes, there are dungeons, of different tiers and expertize required, there is PVP.

But there's also a thing that is dead with WoW. There's WORLD PVP. No you don't fly, you ride. You quest, you get ambushed, you get killed, ganked, all the funny stuff that makes you /yell "FILHO DA PUTA" from your grave.

So, I spent 7 free days, plus 30 (costing 5€!) plus 3 days of free game time (like SONY, Trion Worlds got hacked so they gave us complimentary game time). And in those 40 days, I reached 50, about 1 level/day, having fun.

I discovered nearly all the zones (only left a bit of Stillmoor), I participated in instant adventures ( a new RIFT feature, a bit like LOTRO skirmishes but in open world ), PVP battlegrounds (there are many), dungeons (many, too), I marvelled at some open air scenarios, and I took a lot of snapshots that I'll be sharing here. Most of all, I had fun, something I had not in WoW since my guild Arcadia split up.


So there you have it, December 2011, while waiting for SWTOR, I had a blast.

Now... talking about blasting things, SWTOR was released. So stay tuned, as I learn how to play a Bounty Hunter (currently level 10). Pictures coming right up.