Complete Heal

Howdy strangers. So here I am roughly six months since my last post and it feels like it’s been even longer. Where have I been? Well, I’ve been gaming on and off over the last few months but mainly I’ve been focused on RL activities (work, family, picking up some new hobbies etc…) Life is great though so I can’t complain – things are calming down enough that I should be able to get back to updating the site more frequently.

What’s new in my online adventures? First of all, I spent a few weeks playing World of Warcraft with my priest but it just didn’t stick. I even bought tickets for Blizzcon but now I’m not sure that I’ll even fly out to Anaheim later this year. It’s probably too late to sell my tickets so I’m may be out $300. At the same time, I’d save a few thousand dollars by staying home so that might make more sense in the end. Who knows maybe I’ll end up going after all as attending a Blizzcon would be something to check off my gamer bucket list. I have to be honest with you guys though, World of Warcraft just isn’t my thing – no matter how much I try to force myself to get immersed in it. In the end, I think it’s all the instanced dungeons. EQ2 has the same problem. I just miss open world dungeon crawling and being somewhere with a group only to see another group of people run by on their own adventure. Don’t get me wrong WOW and EQ2 are great games they just lack the immersion factor for me these days and without that factor I’m just not that into it anymore.

I tried some Age of Conan with the Godslayer expansion. I even leveled up to max level with the “free level” feature that they put into the game recently where you are awarded a level or two a week just for keeping an active subscription. I didn’t enjoy leveling up in that game very much so my theory was that I could get to max level and have a fresh start but it just didn’t feel all that fresh. There is a whole new expansion worth of content to check out but I’m not motivated to play AOC at the moment. Age of Conan feels like a cramped fish bowl sitting on top of a mountain. You see so many interesting things but just can’t get to them. EQ2 held my attention for a few weeks as I got my Fury on Nagafen up to max level and then betrayed and made him a Warden. I did some entry level raids in the new expansion but it seemed like group content and overland pvp dried up due to the implementation of battlegrounds. Needless to say, battlegrounds got old quickly for me and playing a Druid just seemed way too common so I put EQ2 back on the shelf for a while.

As the list of titles that interested me dwindled, I found myself deciding between Vanguard and EQ. I really wanted to spend more time in Vanguard but it’s hard to justify a large time commitment to a game that is effectively down to a single server. Granted, the world of Telon is huge and having all the players in one realm probably makes a lot of sense but I don’t know how long a game on a single server (other than Eve) can survive. Last week SOE laid off 34 employees and early rumors had several of the remaining VG developers getting their walking papers. Fortunately, these rumors seem to be off base as it appears the developers in question remain at SOE. What would make me want to spend more time in Telon? Honestly, some direct communication to the players from the developers regarding their master plan for the game and reassurances that the game isn’t going anywhere. Those reassurances plus details on new content in the coming months would go a long way to calming my Vanguard jitters. Until then, my 40th level Bloodmage will remain on the fence – waiting to see what happens.

With all that out of the way, guess what was left? Everquest of course! As the title of this post indicates, absence makes the heart grow fonder. In the last month or so, I’ve leveled up an Enchanter on the recently combined Luclin / Stromm server. He’s now locked at level 65 with about 80 AA points and has joined a new casual paced progression raiding guild called Visceral. The guild is planning on going through all EQ content starting with the Planes of Power expansion with a two day a week raiding schedule. It’s exactly what I was looking for. Sometimes coming back to EQ can be difficult because players are two boxing or using mercenaries and groups at low levels can be hard to find. At the same time, high level veteran players have so many AA points that the gap seems monumental. However, in this guild I’ve had groups almost instantly upon logging in each day and everyone has a great attitude. At the moment anyway, people are playing because they love the game and everyone is helping each other out. It’s a guild full of EQ veterans, returning players and people looking to relive experiences they had years ago. I know it’s not a novel concept and many guilds of this nature don’t make it very long but I’m hoping this will be different. I could really see myself leveling up with a group of people over the coming months and experiencing a good bit of EQ content that I missed over the years as I went looking for the “next best thing.” Perhaps, sometimes we are staring it right in the face but we just don’t notice it.

The guild is currently recruiting all classes and all levels (below 65). We have about 115 members now and had our first little mini raids this afternoon – taking down the Dragon Xanamech Nezmirthafen in Plane of Innovaiton which gave us keys for the Factory. Inside the Factory, we killed the Manaetic Behemoth which was a fun fight. Our raid split into two groups and each group was charged with keeping a constant stream of adds at bay (go go Enchanter) long enough for other groups to down the boss. That’s it for now, back to Norrath.

What’s that you say? A World of Warcraft update? Yes, it’s true. I decided to make a few moves tonight with my World of Warcraft account in hopes of greener pastures with that game. For those that don’t know, I played World of Warcraft pretty hard core after it was released in 2004. I played a dwarf priest and raided 40 man zones such as Molten Core, Onyxia’s Lair, Blackwing Lair, ZG, and more. I really enjoyed the game back in those days as there was significant challenge to it and you felt like your efforts were rewarded with unique items and accomplishments. As the Burning Crusade expansion approached and the raiding game changed, I created a new Blood Elf Priest on a pvp server and leveled him up to 70 only to get disenchanted running Karazhan over and over in 10 man mode. After a while, I put my character on ice and went off to play other games.

When the Lich King expansion hit, I soldiered on to level 80 but really got into Vanguard and EQ2 so I left WOW once again. I tried coming back a few times over the last year or so but my old guild was so far ahead progression wise and I just needed a change of scenery. To be honest, I never really did get as attached to the Horde as I did to the Alliance. A few days ago, I was listening to a podcast and the guy was going on and on about how much fun he was having with a guild called Gamers with Jobs on the Blackhand server. I started kicking the idea around of doing a server transfer and faction change with my priest to join these guys. I have a lot in common with them and tonight the pieces fell into place. My priest moved over to the Blackhand server and then switched to the Alliance faction – becoming a Dwarf. No more sissy Blood Elfs for me!

After joining the guild, I decided to go kill the Headless Horseman in the Scarlet Monestary. The Horseman is a seasonal boss mob that drops a nice epic healer ring (among other things) and since I’m just starting to gear out this character I figured it would be a quick and easy place to start. Luckily, he dropped the ring and my “new” dwarf priest was on his way. It was a long night of talking to the new guild, deciding to make the move, getting all the moves processed, figuring out how to play my priest again and then going out and downing the Halloween boss mob. I was pretty impressed with how quick and easy it was to move servers and factions. All in all, I had a lot of fun and look forward to playing more WOW in the near future with these guys.

Two weeks ago on a Saturday, I woke up a bit groggy from the previous night of playing EQ2 only to discover three interesting e-mails in my inbox. They were e-mails from Blizzard and had all been sent within about 10 minutes of each other earlier that morning. They read as follows:

“This is a notice that the email address on your World of Warcraft account ******** has been changed. If you did not request this change please fill out our Account Security/Compromise webform at http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml. If this change was intended please disregard this notice. Thank you.”

Basically, someone hacked three of my WOW accounts by changing the e-mail address and then sending themselves new passwords. I tried to log in shortly after getting the e-mails, to no avail. I then tried to log into the Blizzard web site and that didn’t work either. The next step was to call Blizzard customer service but guess what? They are closed on Saturday – of course. That meant I had to wait until Monday to try to get my accounts back. On Monday, I was able to get my accounts back and set up a new battle net account. Unfortunately, my friends from China deleted my level 80 characters and created an armada of characters named “Bhskejlshdsd” or something to spam gold announcements on various servers. On the inactive accounts, they activated 10 day trials so they could spam to their hearts content. Once I had the accounts back, Blizzard told me to send an in-game petition listing the various compromised accounts and they would do a roll-back; resetting the accounts to what they were just prior to the compromise. A few days later, I got notices that two of my accounts were banned due to violating the terms of service. Surprise… Surprise… I’ll keep you posted. Hopefully, they can restore my gear, characters and accounts soon. This is the first time I’ve been attacked and it would be an understatement to say that I wasn’t amused.

I had a pretty solid gaming weekend. I managed to squeeze in about 18 hours of Blizzcon on DirecTV, hit 80 with my main in World of Warcraft, ran a few heroic instances and killed a few bosses in Naxxramas. Good times.

As I mentioned in my last few posts, I wanted to make a push to finally reach the level cap in World of Warcraft. I played WOW rather extensively back in the early days but my enthusiasm faltered a bit when Burning Crusade came out. I managed to roll a new Blood Elf character and made it up to level 70 during that expansion but my end game experience was limited to Karazhan. I stood in line at midnight at my local EB store for Lich King and was pretty pumped about it up until about 75 or so. At that point, my brother talked me into raiding with him in EQ2 and I also began to take a closer look at Vanguard. My World of Warcraft account was put on ice shortly thereafter, just like the stuff you find in Northrend.

Recently, I came back and powered up from 75 to 80 in about a week or two of casual play. I can’t emphasize enough how much fun I had doing the quests in Northrend. The quests have so much variety to them. Check out the screen shots above. In the first one I’m getting shot at in mid-air by rockets while flying some kind of airplane and then in the one directly above my vehicle has been destroyed and I’m parachuting down to a new land. Those screen shots capture the first quest you get as you move to a new zone called Sholazar Basin. It was a unique way to travel to a zone for the first time and it’s originality is very typical of Northrend questing. In adidtion to the fresh feel, the rate of progression is also a breath of fresh air. It’s nice to play for a few hours and feel like you made significant progress. Sometimes, I play games where the leveling just seems so slow and painful. I can see why WOW has 10+ million players.

The screenshot above captures another fun quest. In this quest, you get a bunch of mines and are supposed to mine the path of some scripting mobs to protect your local village. Check out my row of destruction just waiting until one of those angry mobs come charging by. Once they came by, the following happened. BOOM!

After playing MMOs for over 10 years, it’s easy to get burnt out on the grind. I have to tip my hat to Blizzard for making the grind fun once again. Within seconds of hitting 80 tonight, I got an invite for heroic Violet Hold. There are so many players playing this game that it makes finding groups for quests, dungeons, pvp or raids a piece of cake. You never sit around LFG for hours; everything happens very quickly. If Warhammer Online had been able to generate and maintain this critical mass of players they would have been in much better shape. It’s just more fun to play in a populated world where things are happening all the time.

In Northrend, all of the dungeons have normal and heroic modes. The heroic dungeons drop epic (purple) items and reward Badges of Conquest. The most recent patch to WOW made running these instances very rewarding as you can get two pieces of Tier 8.5 gear by gathering up 116 badges. I figure I should be able to do that in about a week of casual play. There are also a number of upgrades you can get from heroics and pick up Naxxramas raids that make gearing up a fresh 80 relatively painless. I think it’s pretty cool that they let you get caught up gear wise in short order so you can play with your friends – even if you are a freshly dinged level 80 character. Remember flagging in Planes of Power for EQ? We have come a long way.

Violet Hold is accessed through the main Northrend city of Dalaran. It’s got a number of portals inside it that summon various bosses to a central room. We fought the terror shown below in there as well as the first real dragon I’ve encountered in Northrend, shown above. Both fell rather easily but my guildies are very well geared so they made up for my noobishness.

After Violet Hold, we ran Heroic Tournament of Champions. TOC is the latest raid / group content in World of Warcraft and in this instance my lack of gear started to become evident. The first fight required us to jump on mounts and battle with jousting weapons. Our group, mounted on wolves of some sort, ran around an arena fighting off the mobs who were also mounted. It was a unique event, at least for me as a new 80, and it was lots of fun. After a few fights it got very tough and we eventually had to call in a second healer to win the instance.

To end the night, I joined a 25 man pickup raid for Naxxramas with about 5 guild mates. We downed some bosses and I got my first epic item from Northrend – a new neck piece. I’ve got a long way to go, but had a great time this weekend. I’m all geeked up on Blizzard and World of Warcraft after 18 hours of Blizzcon, hitting 80, and starting raiding once again. Let’s see how long these good vibes last as I’m still motivated to level up in Vanguard and Aion hits the shelves in a few weeks. College football season, cooler weather and the best fishing of the year are also all around the corner. I’ll post pictures of my Naxxramas run and my thoughts on Blizzcon in the next day or two. Who needs sleep anyways?

I spent some more time tonight leveling up my priest and am getting closer to 78. I came across a link to some reliable information regarding the next Warcraft expansion. There are plenty of potential spoilers enclosed so click HERE if you want to find out more about the new expansion. Of course, it’s all speculation at this point but Blizzcon is next weekend and by then we should know the official story. By the way, I’m not a big fan of harley davidson mounts in fantasy games. Oh well, I guess you have to take the bad with the good sometimes.

I haven’t posted much in the last two weeks primarily because I’ve been pretty busy in real life and was out of town last weekend. On the gaming front, I’m excited about spending more time in the final Aion closed beta; which starts tomorrow and runs through the end of the weekend. I have mixed feelings about investing a lot more time leveling up my Aion beta character since it will get wiped soon. If I’m going to grind, I’d like it to count – know what I mean? Be that as it may, I will try out some different classes and look around a bit more this weekend. I hear they are going to have some live events so that should be pretty cool.

What have I been up to in the virtual world recently? Well, I tried to give Warhammer and AOC another shot but couldn’t get into either game. I lasted a few hours in Warhammer over the course of about a week and about 15 minutes in Conan. Both games have their strong points but not enough of them to keep me playing. They just aren’t fresh – at least to me. Speaking of another game that isn’t particularly fresh, I did manage to gain a few levels in World of Warcraft since my last update. I took my blood elf priest up to 77 from 75. The best thing about hitting 77 is that you get cold weather flying which enables your character to fly in Northrend. A recent patch increased the regular (non epic flyer) mount speed to 150% so you can really haul ass if you know what I mean getting quests done. After running around for 6 levels, it’s nice to fly once again. It’s also nice to be able to fly without a timer (Aion) and without being 50+ (Vanguard.)

My priest also picked up the dual specialization option so he now has a healing spec and a shadow / dps spec. You can switch between specs for free in town and your spell bars update automatically between the two specs. There is no charge to switch. Very cool… Another thing I noticed while leveling up is that the game is incredibly smooth and polished. Everything just works and it feels right. The quests for example have great variety to them. So far I’ve gotten to unleash rats on npc corpses, unleash termites on a lumber mill to spawn a mini-boss, fight dragons while flying, rescue Undercity from siege, torture a few guys and a few more interesting things.

Another cool thing about World of Warcraft is that the seas are actually populated with interesting things. In other news, I read today that they are going to bring Onyxia back soon for the 5th year anniversary celebration and that might be just enough to get me motivated to grind out those last few levels to hit 80 before Aion releases in late September.

Vanguard had a double experience weekend last weekend and I missed it once again. That’s a bummer. The party I was running with a lot has continued to grind through the 40’s and last time I checked they are 45+ now. That sucks for me because they will be out of range soon and I’ll need to find some more random folks to try to hook up with. Personally, the solo content in Vanguard just seems a bit stale. I know it’s there and doable but it’s pretty difficult on my blood mage and just doesn’t have the fun factor to be honest. At least not compared to a few other games. Vanguard shines in the group environment so I’m going to need to find some new groups. My blood mage is still stuck at 40 but he should have quite a bit of rest experience by now. I’m still planning on leveling him up to max level but it may take me a while. The rate at which new content is released is rather slow, so I don’t really see any reason to rush it. In other Vanguard news, the spell animations have been fixed and they patched in a new overland raid mob this week. I’ll be back with another update in a few days.

Every now and then I log in to the first character that I ever created in World of Warcraft. The character is a dwarf priest (imagine that) on the Shadow Council server. I took him up to level 60 back in the day and joined a raiding guild called Luna. The guild was run by a tank/healer pair named Fallingstar and Risingmoon. I always thought those names were pretty cool. The guild was amazing and we were flourishing in the 40 man raid environment. We were raiding Molten Core, Black Wing Lair, AQ20 and were beginning AQ40 about the time that the guild broke up and I quit shortly thereafter.

When I came back to the game, I started fresh on the Horde side with a RL buddy and my original priest just sat idle. Logging back on this character feels like opening a time capsule. I haven’t really played him at all in 2-3 years. He’s still sitting in Ironforge toting his Benediction and wearing T2 raid gear from years ago. Without fail, I always get people gathering around me wondering where this gear came from and who is this guy that looks like he just stepped out of the pages of history.

I logged into this character tonight and within 5 minutes got a tell from an old guildie who remembered me. We ended up running two instances in Hellfire and I was able to ding 61. It’s amazing that you can leave a game for three years and then upon logging in again you get tells from people who remember you and within minutes you are rolling through content together once again. I really enjoyed WOW in the beginning. Raids were 40 man content and not everyone was walking around town with spiked shoulders and glowy weapons. There were no Harley Davidson mounts with PWN license plates and PVP took place in the open world. Epic quests like the Priest weapon Benediction really gave you a sense of accomplishment. I had a good time tonight and may start playing this dwarf again. It was a blast from the past – that’s for sure.

EA / Mythic recently announced 12/31/08 subscriber numbers for Warhammer Online. According to published reports, they have just over 300,000 paying customers. While that sounds like a healthy number, it’s far less than the 1,000,000+ copies sold and nowhere near the numbers they were talking about prior to launch. EA / Mythic basically just pulled a Funcom – a huge release of a AAA title followed my massive subscriber bleeding. The difference is that Funcom can successfully operate a game with lower subscriber numbers (see Anarchy Online) for the long haul and improve things and I’m not sure EA will put up with not meeting expectations. The Warhammer bleeding resulted in a round of support staff layoffs a few weeks ago followed by an even more severe cut yesterday.

With the news of the most recent layoffs, I got aggravated with EA / Mythic leadership and canceled my Warhammer account. The last round of firings cut deep into the development staff and involved people like the developer that implemented key systems such as the Tome of Knowledge. I’m going to vote with my wallet on this one. For now, I’m done with Warhammer. Good luck to those still working there. I hope you guys get the chance to make that product shine one day.

Since I freed up some cash, I decided to reactive World of Warcraft. I know I just caused several of you to shake your heads but I might get motivated to level my 74 Priest up to 80 and give Naxxramas a shot in the coming weeks. I’ve got several RL friends who are in my guild and are having lots of fun. It’s also easy to get a group in WOW and that’s one of the things that’s been bugging me recently in other games. I don’t know how much I’ll actually play it but you might see a few posts about it here and there in the coming weeks. In the meantime, let me introduce you to the WOW version of Lazaretto.