Epic Indecision

July 12, 2010

My biggest problem in any game where you have a choice of classes at the start is deciding which one to play. Looking at MMO’s I have tried pretty much every class available and in some cases taken them all the way to the cap. Where I’m floundering at the moment is in Dragon Age: Origins. I got the game at release but don’t feel like I have really done much with it because I keep farting about with different class/race/spec combinations. I think it’s actually holding me back from enjoying the game as I’m re-running the same content over and over but with different classes. I enjoy the warrior, I love the rogue and playing the caster is a breeze (if a little too easy). I can’t promise that I’m going to be able to make my mind up but today I’m quite determined to take the warrior forward, just as soon as I make it past the ambush where you pick up the assassin companion. Ripped through that as a mage but for some reason I keep getting my ass handed to me on the Warrior, silly meat sacks. Half tempted to go out of my way to pick up the Golem companion as well, I had that content in my retail box, not sure I need a low maintenance warrior as I’m trying to run with a tank, rogue and two mages and I think I would prefer to keep the tank I already have. Think of the peas I guess.

16.07.10 Update

Rather than do a complete post I will just update this one. I did indeed carry on with the Warrior but not without some farting about first. I was hunting around for information on how to respec when I discovered a whole range of mods available that suit my needs. Lock bash, so I don’t have to worry about taking rogues or playing rogues and a Respec mod so I could stop feeling like I had spent the last few levels with wasted points holding me back. To be fair it was only a few points here and there that I needed to move around after I invested some into Dual Wield talents when I really don’t feel like playing that on this warrior.

I’m a bit happier now and I have adjusted my base stats so I can wear the DLC Blood Dragon Armor (which isn’t that attractive but it beats the hell out of wearing Templar armor in the absence of anything better) and I have finally made it out of the fucking Fade. I did see a mod that lets you skip that whole section but I thought I owed it to myself to plow through. Once I realised what the hell I was doing wrong it was simple enough but it’s always been my natural instinct to go around any wheel of choice counter-clockwise and as I had no idea what you actually gained from each section, I was running around in mouse holes for hours. It was a learning experience I suppose, I’m still going counter-clockwise the next time something like that comes up though, fuck em.

Gaming, RPG | No comment

A fun week for hardware

July 10, 2010

I have a secondary drive for work related nonsense but with my main drive nearing capacity I have been installing stuff on the other drive, games mostly, it’s how I roll. The one thing I hadn’t really noticed was that the drive was still FAT32, generally not a huge problem except that I was reinstalling Guild Wars and the last expansion Eye of the North has a file that hits the FAT32 file size limit and then gives you the finger. Largest problem was that I didn’t really want to back the data up as there was already 100gb on there, I just wanted to convert the file system. Convert.exe does that but just because I didn’t really want to lose anything important I did back the data up to an external USB drive, that took about four hours. The conversion took less than 60 minutes… go figure.
All the data seems fine and I guess I now have backups for when the shit hits the fan (plus I have moved off some shit that was just taking up space).
I hadn’t logged in to Guild Wars for around three years, it was nice to see that my account hadn’t been stolen and all of my toons had birthday presents in their bag, even got a couple of legendary ones which was a treat. I still have to get my head around builds, I’m three years behind the curve but I do want to play through “Eye” as it’s something I never did. Back then I was still pretty heavily playing Guild Wars but got sucked over to WoW and never quite recovered from that. I have fired the WoW account up a couple of times this week, not to do anything too exciting, some gathering for Tig and selling off some excess crafting stock as (a) I’m not likely to do anything with it before the expansion and (b) my bags are full of the shit. I suppose I could hold out as prices for old stuff can go up a little during a new expansion but what the hell.

Gaming, General, Guild Wars, Hardware, World of Warcraft | No comment

Release set for FFXIV

July 1, 2010

I’m proper excited about FFXIV, I played XI on and off for a couple of years but it was far less casual friendly than the WoW of today. To be fair that was one of it’s strengths and something which kept the spaz happy tweens away and kept me playing. XIV is supposed to be a little easier to solo in with job switching on the fly. Compare that to WoW dual spec if you need something to get your head around but then say to yourself that your tank can switch to a healing spec, squeeze into a nice flowery dress and be ready for action. With seemingly no level advancement the focus is on job advancement through usage. You spend all morning twatting Wamoura with your trusty sword and presumably your sword skill will increase (and this in turn should be linked to your active job). Precious little is really known about the advancement even this close to release but it certainly sounds intriguing.
There is a nice bunch of shots over at scrawlfx that should whet your appetite for the time being and if you are planning on picking this up for the PC, it wouldn’t hurt to check out the benchmark app from the official site. I’m in two minds, my shitty PC would probably be ok but I’m also quite tempted of the prospect of playing this on a PS3 (although would obviously need a keyboard). Will see how things pan out. Kupo.

FFXIV, Gaming | No comment

Aww you broke it.

July 1, 2010

Well, maybe not broke exactly.

It’s 1.30am and I can’t sleep, it’s too hot. Fired up WoW for the second time in 5 weeks as I’m now all patched up. This latest offering brings us the Ruby Sanctum where we get to see BWL models dragged out for some whoring whilst Blizzard furiously dangle their carrot to draw us toward Cataclysm. The patch also brought the addition of Real ID. Their cross-game battle.net friend system. Most of the changes to the game are fairly simple, changes to chat indicators, some changes to the chat box and that’s about it. CT Core have already updated to tinker with the available options although on a basic level you can do the same thing using in-game options. The other funky thing I saw was the ability to turn on class colours in chat windows. They also added an option to increase the width of the quest notification window, again Blizzard just playing catchup with the addon authors.

My one issue is that the chat input box seems to be there all the time now, it used to vanish upon send. Maybe I’m missing something but it’s quite annoying. Will have to dick about with it next time I’m on.

Battle.net, Gaming, World of Warcraft | No comment

This is not a review

June 25, 2010

Not had a great deal of time to play Puzzle Quest 2 but initial impressions are a bit “meh”. Considering that I have been frothing for this since it was announced, the execution seems a little underwhelming. The gameplay can stand on it’s own as well as the original but at the moment the niggles are really standing out. Like the game forcing a save each time you even look at the DS funny, coming out of menus, coming out of conversations, coming out of your fucking inventory. It’s a few seconds out of my life when I just want to be furiously tapping on something to move the game forward.

I will probably sit and fart about with the different classes over the weekend and see which one I like the look of to play through the story with. I started out on the Assassin but I don’t really like the combo-style spell mechanics. Some of his effects match what I loved in the original, turning gems on the board different colours to make tons of 4′s and ultimately get another turn but the initial costs for the spells seem a little high.

I will pop something else up here after I have spent some more time with it. It’s not a terrible game but it just seems to play a little slower than the original.

Gaming, General, Nintendo | No comment

Things are afoot

June 24, 2010

Rolled out the theme I have been working on, it’s nothing to tell your friends about but it’s pleasant enough. I still have some farting around to do but never content to get things right in the test environment, I’m all for ROLLING THAT SHIT OUT LIVE. Not sure I’m happy with the font, I like Raptr but their choice of widgets are terrible, will have to rectify that. Also lost my google reader widget along the way but hey ho, I’m going for a smoke, a piss and then I might try and get some more sleep. I’m starting to dislike summer, wasn’t it so much more fun when it was dark all the time?

Design, Web | No comment

Pimp my webshite.

June 19, 2010

I have switched back to one of the old themes for the time being as rather than quickly fix the styles to my liking on the TwentyTen theme I decided that I’m going to build one from scratch. I have the design done and I even have the basic html/css/jquery working to my liking. There are a few things I need to sort out, one is dropping all the WordPress chaff into the layout and the other is a bit of a fiddly mod to make the blog do what I want it to do. I have seen some solutions, I just need to find some free time to play around on my local install and see if I can get them to work with the design. I have a fallback position if it all goes to hell but where’s the fun in that?

Just got back from the Warwickshire fete, there was a man with a digger and someone had painted a few white lines on the grass so kids could run along them. It’s reassuring to know that fete’s never change. The Knights were there but seriously, that was the only reason to ever go near the thing. Willy had a cake.

Design, Web | 1 comment

Upgrades

June 17, 2010

Just updated to WordPress 3.0. Had the RC’s on here for a little bit but only now have I made the switch over to their shiny “TwentyTen” theme. I will head on in and pimp it up at some point but at the moment you are left with UglyFont ™ and BogStandardHeaderImage ™.. Enjoy.

General | No comment

On faction transfers

February 17, 2010

I enjoyed being a troll, I may even roll another one but as the majority of my toons and my guildmates are alliance, I faction switched my DK. Everything went fairly smoothly but I spotted something unusual today.
There are a chain of quests in Icecrown to unlock the shadow vault as a base of operations and open up a load of Ebon Blade daily quests. I had already done this on the horde to the point where I was wearing the Ebon Blade tabard and gaining rep in instances. After the faction transfer I didn’t give it much thought and carried on gaining rep right up to Exalted. So I figured I would head over and see if there was anything of value at the quartermaster (there wasn’t, not now enchants are BoA) but the shadow vault had reset back to it’s hostile version.
I headed over to the airship and found I could pick up the starter quest again, got everything unlocked again and now have two of what should be a one shot quest reward item. It’s not going to break the game mind you but it’s a curious turn of events. Free gold for me I guess in doing the quest chain twice but somewhat of an annoyance, even if it was mildly amusing.

World of Warcraft | No comment

Oh right..

February 10, 2010

This thing is still on then?
Will probably sort out a decent post at some point but today I have been mostly farting about with Google Buzz, follow me ran93r[at]gmail.com unless you are selling cheap viagra or are in need of help releasing your prince’s funds, in which case you can feel free to die in a fire.

General | No comment

Home Alone!

December 1, 2009

I’m making the Culkin face as a mark of respect.
Missus has gone out, nipper conked out after running riot. I watched Stargate, smoked fags, shot a few things in the face (Borderlands) and now I’m going to hit the sack.

I’m kinda back playing World of Warcraft, mostly a little PvP here and there along with leveling the lock and DK. The DK I have managed to get his mining and smithing ready for Northrend after already mastering Inscription and Herbs. The state of the horde AH is fucking shocking though, I admit it, I’m an alli whore and I’m just taking a vacation on the ugly side but my god does their economy suck. It really wouldn’t take much for a goblin to go over there and clean up. I just wanted to buy some starter plate to be going on with and there wasn’t a damn thing, hell, the entire AH was devoid of anything interesting. So I took the plunge, dumped inscription and went about starting from scratch on mining/smithing so I could at least gear myself in the basics.
Tempted to roll a horde mage, great class and I love the gneum but trolls are just so fucking cool. Glad I already got the DK his venomhide Raving Sore!

World of Warcraft | No comment

State of the nation

October 30, 2009

Not been playing all that much WoW of late, you can see my last real post was a couple of months ago. After gearing the mage in PvP stuffs, I managed to get some gear for the huntard and some offspec kitty pewpews but that’s about it.
Fell in love with Fallout 3 all over again and dumped a bit of spare time into that but this week I have picked up Borderlands and the dirt cheap Torchlight.
Reason for coming to waste some time posting on here though is that Steam is b0rked, the forums are alight with tears and after four hours of trying I have only just managed to get to my games list, now to see if I can load something up.

Gaming | No comment

Another respec

July 25, 2009

Mrs Gnome and I have been PvP’ing on our mages this week, geared as fresh 80’s with a smattering of spellweave so the honor rewards are fairly nice upgrades. I didn’t realise how good the gear available from Wintergrasp was, never really looked before as I have been gearing up my other toons through PvE.

Anyway, I had it in my head that my mage spec was pretty decent, slightly PvE but otherwise ok and I was sure I had picked up TtW in arcane. I hadn’t as it turns out, which was a bit of a head scratcher so I had to go and rectify that. 15g just to switch a few talents around but I’m happier for it I think, dumped a +hit talent and the replenish to grab TtW and also dumped some extra points in Imp Blizzard. Situational you might think but you can generally find me at the back of the pack fucking up everyone else’s day with Blizzard so I will see how that works out for me.

Also tightened up my glyph selection, not something I had cared about on the mage as there wasn’t a single glyph that really made a huge difference to the dicking around I usually got up to but I sorted myself out with the two minor warding glyphs and picked up the ice barrier major. My free major slot was a tough choice, an extra mirror image would have been fun but 30% extra protection on ice barrier isn’t to be sniffed at.

Gaming, World of Warcraft | No comment

Windows Live ate my saves

June 24, 2009

I decided to spend my BillPoints on Broken Steel, probably the most interesting of the Fallout 3 DLC so far, not least because they have raised the level cap to 30. I had already hit the old cap but was nowhere close to completing the main quest line. What a fiasco it was just getting the content, the day I decided to grab it was the day Live was down for 24 hours and when it did come back up the marketplace was screwed, so 48 hours later and I finally grabbed it.

Dropped back into the game but nothing came up and I did give it ample time to realise it had new content, decided to do a Live update in-game. This was a mistake, the update looked like it worked but crashed at the arse end. The game runs but all my saves have gone, the new content is being discovered but the game hangs on exit.

All in all, quite an exercise in FAIL.
On the bright side, I get to play through it all again and play with some different perks but having to kill the game from the task manager every fucking time I want to exit is a giant ball ache.

Gaming | No comment

June 23, 2009

General | No comment

To the skies!

June 5, 2009

When dailies first got added I had a quick look at Skettis to see what the Skyguard grind was like, there were only really a handful of quests that amounted to something like 1350 rep/day. Needless to say I couldn’t be bothered with that at the time.
Have been out on the Warrior though, after three days of dailies, mob killing, dust handing in and summoning the bone pile bosses I’m exalted. That was a surprise, neutral to exalted in three days work (and only really a few hours a day). Good job we get full rep for grey mobs.
I wasn’t really planning on getting the warrior an epic flying mount but how could I turn down a riding ray? 5k later and I have a nice flappy mount, go me!

World of Warcraft | No comment

The end of WAR

April 3, 2009

Firstly the lesson for the day.

It would seem that Recount is the only addon I’m running that provides the “Armory” texture. I quite like this texture and as most Ace based mods can happily chat to each other and pinch their resources, that texture is made available to them. For me this is my primary UI bars (AGUF) and my cast bar (Quartz). After a spakattack in Naxx last night I started turning mods off willy nilly in an attempt to settle down my shitty performance. Doing so really pissed off AGUF, without a texture to use it went nuts, threw errors, reset my profile and went back to looking like some fucking circus tent.
The lesson, um.. just leave recount on m’kay (I should have just settled for turning off the sync which is spammy)

Anyway, on to the post.
My month back in WAR is over, I haven’t played that much but I certainly enjoyed it more this time around. Despite really wanting to like Destruction, the Greenskin classes left a lot to be desired, the Witch Elf was fun though. The game itself is still very clunky and unresponsive. It’s, you know, ok, but it’s failings are pretty huge ones as far as playability goes.

The RvR is a lot of fun but the unresponsive nature of the game makes it a very spammy affair where pushing buttons is more important than outskilling your opponent but even as a Witch Hunter, quite a frail class, I went up against a horde of new choppas and managed quite well.

The problem is that when you press a key to activate a skill, there is a delay between that action and what your character does. In some cases this is reflected in the cast bar but not always. I’m used to a little cast bar lag, in WoW for example I can happily predict that a spell will be going off after the cast time, cast bar display notwithstanding. I have been playing that solid for five years mind you so I should know damn well the cast times of everything. WAR operates a little differently, at least as far as I could tell, with the castbar ruling over when your action took place. It wasn’t so much a case of client>server lag as it was just shitty mechanics.

It’s a nice setting, the classes are fun, the RvR is fun, the music is great, greenskins are just hilarious but Herders and Shaman are pretty poor to play, the crafting is awful and there are server merges every five minutes but as I said, I did enjoy playing it again.

I might go back there at some point but I’m starting to consider having another look at LotRO as my next diversion. In the meantime, back to chuffing Walrus dailies.

Gaming, World of Warcraft | No comment

Window cleaning

March 20, 2009

Today I have been mostly pacing around waiting for things to finish installing, so I can install something else.
I’m sure it’s been close to five years since I originally installed XP on this box and it’s been wearing me down lately, having done everything I could to smarten it up, it was just tired. So first thing this morning I backed up my funderbird mail, firefox settings, ftp settings and deleted the entire partition. Huzzah!
I have pretty much everything else on a separate drive anyway so it’s only the OS cruft that needed nuking from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure?).

I have managed to get my list of installed apps down to a bare minimum, over the last few years my development routine has been whittled down to a couple of Adobe apps and a copy of Notepad++. My start menu used to span three columns (and this is at 1856×1392), now it’s a third of the screen height and I have everything I need on here. I was thoroughly pleased to discover that WAR didn’t need the registry to survive, I didn’t fancy having to repatch that beast. At the moment I’m waiting for The Witcher to finish patching itself back up to the enhanced edition, and this time I swear I’m going to get past chapter two before being distracted by something shiny.

I didn’t bother to back up all my Steam apps, I haven’t played HL2 or its episodes for a good while, audiosurf was a passing fancy and SiN Episodes was nowhere near as charming as it’s Q2 engine powered parent. I’m probably going to regrab TF2 tonight though, I be on dat kryptonite, straight up on dat kryptonite!

Testing out this site theme until I can pull my finger out and create one of my very own, don’t hold your breath though, I have stuff to kill.

General | No comment

The inevitable return of Captain Awesome

February 20, 2009

I don’t know quite where the database went and of course I should have had a backup but sometimes it’s nice to drag everything outside and set fire to it. I half wonder if it was the itemstats plugin I was tinkering with that ate everything but I guess I will have to set up a local install to test that theory (like I should have done in the first place).
Still need to work on the theme, using the latest K2 nightly and whilst K2 is great, it’s a little plain at the moment.
Have added my twitter feed, feel free to follow me.

General | No comment