SWTOR Lvl 50.. now what

In the last days, I've been mostly playing SWTOR, I've been leveling my Bounty Hunter, and I'm proud to say, I've reached the cap level.

WoWwise, I've restarted playing my old hunter, moving him to the Portuguese Aggra server. He's now Bimbo, a very nice dwarf captain. I'm gearing him up to try and go Dragon Soul. But it's been hard, gearing up from lvl 333 is very hard, 346 heroics take long because of noobs and until I get 353 to get to the 358 instances... justice+valor takes a loooong time to farm. Oh well.

LOTRO, Update 6 is here and... I haven't touched it yet.

AION, started playing a bit with a RL friend but going slow, 1-2 lvls per week.

Endless Destroyer

I got a few achievements I longed to get.

Veteran of the Molten front was one, after a nice ally parked his horde with Mankrik add in Hyjal for us poor allies to /wave him.



Another was the Glory of the Icecrown Raider, I finally got my skeletal mount. We had to do "Been Waiting A long time for this" in normal, as in heroic, as usual, half the raid was blasted away after the first ground debuff (forgot the name).

Talking about skeletons, I also completed all the Archaeology profession achievements, and in the process I got myself a skeletal reaper and of course, the Professor title.

Herr Prof. Netcownt

I missed obtaining the two archaeology trophies I wanted to get, but they are so rare that.. well.. may be it's not worth farming. I'm talking about the marine AQ-40 silithid mount and the Vial-In-The-Sands twin rider drake mount.

Last but not least, I went with the guild alts to Dragon Soul 10, and killed Deathwing, achieving Destroyer's End. Made a few stupid mistakes. The most accpetable was failing to run away from Blackhorn, it's a bit hard to step away in phase 2 when he damages the ground floor.

Nearing the 12K achievement mark, 11930, I think I'll stop for Cata there.

This weekend, I'll get Insane in the Membrane, after the Darkmoon Faire ends and I get a few decks. Oh, and the 125-pets one is coming today. Damn, they came up with a 150 pet achievement :)

Ah, and most fun, I entered a relaxation guild called Que Inc with Moonprince, and in two days, I was able to tank and learn how to play retradin in cataclysm (quite differen from WOTLK, when it rocked for being so easy), and was able to go for Dragon Soul LFR. DPS is still miserable, as I have half gear tank, half gear dps. Ah, and I had to get Power Auras to be able to keep up with retradin buffs.


In the SWTOR front, lvl 44. Indoor stuff is tremendously repetitive, they made the same mistake as LOTRO. The class quest campaign is very good. Battlegrounds are pretty nice too, I'm getting good in Huttball.

AION went F2P, tried it for a few nights with RL friend. My old sorcerer Varinha is still there, parked at lvl 17.

LOTRO.. waiting for update 6. Went for a 3-man instance once , but my companions are slacking in the showing up part, so I'll have to wait.

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.