WoW fun, finally

Last night, yes.

Strings, my PVP pal, told me he has a holy pala ready to rock in 2v2.

And so we went to Arenas.
At first, it was a bit weird, as I had no dps because I was running aflliction.
But then, I switched to destro, and... oh boy.

The worst combos are for sure the same as ours, healer+dps, but we took our time understanding what healers require us to go for them instead me going for the dps. Druid seems one of them.

This was one of fights. Not a fast or a good one, but the only one I remembered to record.

Anyway, I had fun, for the first time in Cata...Mop...forgot the name of this expa.. ah yes, WoD.

This tells you how highly I regard this expansion.

On a sad note, I noticed one of my long time game pals the GM of RGC/Arcadia, unfriended me.
:( reminded me of South Park and Facebook.

Long Time No See

Life out of MMO's has been a tiny litte busy... but still I've been playing.

Getting my WoW warlock to level 100 and doing a bit of questing and such.

Getting my RIFT rogue to level 60 to experience the Nightmare Tide...and swimming my ass off.

I stupidly neglected GW2 and missed a chapter of the Living Season 2. Did you know that after releasing a new chapter, the bastards at ArenaNet disable the previous one, unless you pay gems aka gold aka EUROS ? Bastards. Well, I paid with gold, about 60 gold so I got through with it, but still...well, at least, a few days later, they released the last chapter, Point of No return and today they announced... GW2 HEART OF THORNS.

It looks yummy, a kind of Jungle !

Well, what does not look yummy is WoW. Poor dudes playing this oldie like it's the last heaven on earth, the game graphics and mechanics are so outdated it's laughable. The locations for this release are way way worse than Pandaria. 

So why am I still playing ? I don't think I'm playing, I'm... "vegetating" around like a zombie, doing the daily Pet quest, Garrison quests getting followers to lvl 655, going for some LFR, dungeons, I think I didn't even visit them all in heroic mode, and running some old raids solo. For legendaries, for mounts...I think I'll stop going for mounts, it's getting boring running an entire Ulduar 25 to get a chance of the Mirmiron mount of 1% or so.

I did some fun stuff, like going to an AllvsAll Arena in Nagrand, or playing RP on the 9th Anniversary of my Silvermoon guild, travelling drunk from Goldshire to Ironforge, only to end in some naked dancing in front of Great Father Winter. Disgraceful ? It's a paladin, ffs, it can't be all Light and Brightness !

I'm looking at Queen Jenna and Mike O'Brien presenting GW Heart of Thorns...and what a difference.  Yayayada, WoW is better. Now XXX is better. Just because...it is ? "Clubite" sucks.

Btw, started to play a bit of ArcheAge but not much into it after all. The mechanics look too much alike, a mix of Rift/WoW/Tera/Aion. All in all, the same crap.

A few shots of my WoW journey in the last two months.

A funny bug.

Hoverboard sliding, a needed feature for RL flights, unfortunately.

20 gladiators in an arena, that is fun. Got into the last 10 once.

Me doing the Legendary Firelands Staff quest, talking to Lady Tarecgosa.

Not an exploit, no. A silly bug.

Green Bananas

But the quality of the content does not excuse the subpar launch experience we delivered, and I apologize for that

" also hope you'll accept my apology and keep your faith in us"

J. Allen Brack 

Executive Producer, World of Warcraft

I believe this says it all. This is the 5th expansion of WoW, weeks after the 10th anniversary, and all they can say is "I'mmmm soooryyy". Well, not all, they also gave us 5 days grace period. Such a bad quality assurance with 100 million USD a month to spend on a game, it's simply unbelievable.

Yes. Shame On Me. I'm back to WoW. The idea was to raise a different class to 100, a hybrid, and have fun with it. Problem is...every time I want to log and do something, I get a "4000 queue position, ETA = 3 hours" , or "World Server Down", or "stuck at 90%". And then I log to play for 15 mins or so, then log out because of RL shores, which atm are way overwhelming and when I come back...yay, it's a 4000 queue again, etc.

.|. Blizzard.

On the LOTRO front, I did the whole West Gondor quest lines, and then started with Central Gondor. LOTRO seems to be entering into maintenance mode...most quests are the same over and over and over again.

As to RIFT, I'm now deep inside Storm Legion, level 57, nearing the new 3.0 zones. It is a beautiful game indeed, if somewhat repetitive in terms of quests.

On rifting a 50+ Rogue ... and Archeage in standby

I've been having fun with RIFT, mostly with my Rogue, since my Warlock abilities got so messed up since I started playing in 2011 or so... I can't understand how it works anymore.

No worries, I've reached 50+, going for 60 before RIFT 3.0 kicks in.

Here I am playing at night with my RL pals, going for the Elite Saga quest chains. Aelfwar in this case.

Meanwhile I found out that the makers of RIFT released Archeage, which I thought was in Beta still, but as it seems, it was released already.

I downloaded and started up just to see how it looked.

And it looks GOOD ! Smooth movement, very smooth, more than TERA or AION, more than RIFT, as smooth as SWTOR or GW2. Beautiful sceneries. I think I'll give it a go, just for fun.

Added my live gaming Stream on Twitch

Not a big fuss about it, I've been testing Ustream and Twitch.tv for audio and professional purposes.

But why not use it for gaming ? Well, let's give it a go.

When not gaming, I'll display a nice view from my window...better than my ugly face !

Helms Deep and Deep Inside ..: GW2

After my holidays, I decided to come back to MMO gaming, slowly and at my own pace. 

RIFT, I continue to level with my RL friend, and ... I'm still at 45.

With LOTRO, I decided to push it a bit to finish the Helm's Deep expansion, so I could play the battle in itself. It was kind of fun, although it took some time to do all the quests in all the Eastfold, Westfold, Edoras, etc. Now that I finished it, Helm's Deep was a good job well done by the Game Developers. However, a new mini-expansion was released, West Gondor, with a new cap level of 100. But guess what, I'm already lvl 100, even before I ever went to West Gondor. No worries, I'll play it some time later, probably during Christmas or so.

To more serious matters... Guild Wars 2 ! I've been having much fun with this Season 2, playing a bit more hardcore, though still solo.

I joined a lot of daily boss kills, courtesy of the following timer links:

http://dulfy.net/2014/04/23/event-timer/
http://guildwarstemple.com/dragontimer/events.php?serverKey=206&langKey=en
(For Gandara)
http://gw2.limitlessfx.com/

Feel free to use these to jump around doing bosses, getting an enormous amount of loot. I even finished the Tequatl meta achievement, I've now got the Sunbringer title !
I'm approaching the 5000 Respectul Achievement points, and my first 400 free GEMS ! Wohoo, that will go into..bag slot, of course.
Meanwhile, I've decided to go for some collecting (Staffs, for starters), and craft some amazing stuff. Just in time, because Collector achievements are up today, with the September 9th patch.
I leveled up Artificer to 450+, Huntsman to 400, and I already have Jeweller, Chef and Tailoring at 400, which will help me with crafting and $$$
My Legendary hunt is starting to get a bit better, since I can now make $$$...about 5-10g/day, so in a few months ... LOL ... I'll be able to buy myself a Precursor Weapon, if I don't get one first.
Ah, and I got two exotic named-weapon drops, a good value, which will do great for my alts, in a few.. years :)
One of them is a scythe that a lot of Necros cry for...time to level up Netcownt :)
Last but not least, I'm crafting Mawdrey, the exotic/ascended backpiece from the Season 2 Living story.
Takes a bit of trouble, a bit of gold and some persistence, but I'll get it !

Today, I crafted Hymenoptera, the AQ40-style exotic Staff from the Dry Top area vendors. It looks amazing. 

Here's a pic !

Back to LOTRO and GW2... and RIFT

It's been a long time since I played LOTRO. I finished the Riders of Rohan expansion, leveled to 85, did all quests, completed the epic chain quest and most of the solo deeds (except rebuilding Hytbold to 100% and Wildermore to Exalted...). As for reputations, I used my store coins (being a life-time VIP helps) for them. And last week, I noticed that LOTRO store coins can also be used to buy the Helms Deep expansion pack (around 4K, actually there was a 2K sale some months ago). So I spend 4K out of my 14K coins and got the expansion for free. This allowed me to ride into Edoras (beautifully crafted, congratulations to the grahpic developers) and start a new epic chain, interacting with Théoden, Grima, and the whole character lot. It seems that Janariel (my character) will stay behind with Éowyn to help guiding her people away from Erodas into safety, while Théoden, Éomer, and probably Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas and Gandalf will go with them (can't remember this part of the novel properly, tbh, shame SHAME on me !) Well, it'll be a fun Summer with LOTRO. As to Guild Wars 2, I missed (xuif xuif) most of the Crown Pavillion 2-month event, but I came just in time to do some arenas and kill all bosses (and earn a ton of gold doing it). Now, it seems Seasons 2 of the Living World with start on July 1st, so there's a lot to be discovered... hopefully. Last but not least, RIFT: I've restarted playing with some friends in May, from scratch, leveling a rogue, doing some quests (as guardian, not defiant again) and having fun. Currently at 39. I'm in doubt wether to go with the mage or rogue for Storm legion, but last time I tried the mage, it was strange to play, lots of skills I didn't know how to use. I guess rogue is way easier, so may be I stick to it. Stealth also helps a lot while soloing. And I can even tank (and heal with a paid soul tree). All in all, I'm not missing WoW at all. And with Blizzard stupidity of creating TBC II in the same exact place (fk, even Shadowmoon Valley and Black Temple are the same !!!) and with the same kind of graphics, I think I won't miss that expansion at all. Time will tell...