Just because I don’t have enough to do in World of Warcraft, I’ve decided to start a new level 19 Horde twink. I’m kidding about not having enough to do, of course. I miss playing Battlegrounds and I figured it would be faster to get a character from 1-10 than play my Shaman, Warlock, or second Paladin to eighty. I’ve converted my banker, a Tauren Hunter, to my PvP twink and am currently level seven. As my banker is firmly planted in Thunder Bluff, she — yes, I said “she” — can easily queue up for Warsong Gulch and watch the auction house for twink gear that non-twink players put up for sale.

My shopping list currently includes all of the following: Sentry Cloak, Forest Leather Bracers, Gloves of the Fang, Scouting Trousers of the Monkey, and Twisted Chanter’s Staff. My Leatherworking Rogue will craft a Deviate Scale Belt, rounding out my bind-on-equip gear.

My current goal is to level her to ten and head to Trisfal Glades outside of Undercity. There, I will tame a Vicious Night Web Spider for their Web ability which “encases the target in sticky webs, preventing movement for 4 seconds.” I predict hijinks ensuing very soon!

Posted in 200 Words, Twinking, World of Warcraft 3 Comments »

BC seems to be having a good time with his well written and entertaining “200 Words” blog. It’s got me flashing back to our days with the OPK and how we used to post a write-up on the SoW/PAG/OPK forums the next day to much /loling. As anyone who got to participate can attest, we had a lot of fun even though we were chronic wipers (see what I did there BC?). Most of the wiping was my fault for sure, but what’s because I was afk a lot to refill my drink. Who plays WoW sober anyway?

While BC is off having new glory days running Naxx, me and the local boys on Ursin are having our own brand of fun. We started by /gkicking anybody who had a problem with failure. That left us with a 6 member guild and one ready alternate who refuses to have a guild tag but who is happy to run with us whenever. We have other local friends on Ursin, but they don’t much like chain wiping so we had to let them go.

When I started playing on Ursin again and noticed that we had just enough folks to start running instances, I talked everyone into trying some. Noone in our little group had yet to set foot in a single WoTLK instance so everyone was excited to have an opportunity to give it a shot. We started with regular UK since everyone (including our one level 80) had the quest for it, and off we went. We blew through it like 18 year old bullies picking fights with 3rd graders. I read up on the tricks of each boss fight and let everyone know what to do, but it didn’t matter. With 3 DK’s all pulling aggro off each other, me on heals and an enhancement shammy on “more dps”, we were an inelegant hammer crushing any content Blizzard could throw our way. Occassionally someone died, but that was because they didn’t realize they were standing in one of the many “circles o’ doom” Blizzard has implemented to keep people from going afk during boss fights.

We continued in this manner for three weeks (we just started last month), and saw almost all of WoTLK’s dungeons on regular mode, experiencing the same thing time again: 1) See boss; 2) Beat him down; 3) Loot! I think we felt pretty invincible.

Last night we stepped into our first heroic. We went back to were we started, UK, thinking we had better do something we are familiar with and low on the totem pole as a warm up to heroics. I told everyone what to look out for, to be careful with aggro now and watch positioning.

Nobody listened.

We blew through the first room as we always did, with everyone going willy-nilly and aggro jumping around between the DK’s. I was starting to notice that when our one blood DK got aggro, it was all I could do to keep him alive on trash. He would start at 28K health, but would drop to around 3k in a matter of 2-3 seconds if he pulled aggro. This wasn’t a problem on our MT who was wearing his tank gear. He had 24k health but 540 defense and he was a piece of cake to keep healed. I warned everyone to try not to pull aggro from the MT, and they said they would.

In the second room – the one with the protodragons, our blood DK grabbed aggro again and BAM! He was on his face kissing the floor. We recovered, I rezed him, and we moved on. On the last pull in the room it happened again and he went down, followed quickly by everyone else – our first wipe. Oh noes!

He died on a couple of more pulls as we worked on our pulling strategy (our “run in and kill stuff” strategy having failed so far). We ended up getting to the Prince with only one more near wipe which ended with our Unholy DK main tank being able to re-establish aggro after everyone else but me and he had died, and I just kept him up until he killed everything. We talked about what to do on the prince, and I reminded everyone to watch out for the frost tombs and the adds.

Now, on regular difficulty, we never paid attention to the frost tombs. I would just put a hot on the tombed person and he would get an 8 second break to get a new beer.

Here’s Steakum’s Tip O’ The Day: This does not work on heroics.

You have to (at least at our gear level) deal with the frost tombs as there is too much healing needed on the MT to also try and keep the entombed alive at the same time. Plus it hurts dps and add-management too much. We wiped twice before we got the hang of it, but it was a good lessoned learned. Everyone was much more on the ball after that.

We proceeded to own the instance after that. No fight was as difficult as the Prince fight and it was all free loot and badges afterwards, although we proceeded with much more caution and our dps-crazy blood DK did die on each boss fight in spite of my very best efforts to keep him up.

When it was over we were all happy and a little proud to have overcome our first heroic. We learned something very important: Don’t be suckered into thinking that owning the super-easy regular content means you’re any good. On heroics you have to use all the same tried and true skills we learned coming up in vanilla and BC. Our blood DK (who is a really great guy by the way and not a bad player at all – I hope I didn’t make him sound like one) said he would work on getting his defense up to help for the next time… and to keep from having a 20g repair bill – ouch!

Oh, and I did get a purple feral belt off the last boss, which is awesome considering I’m specced resto.

Next up: WTF is up with WG anyway?

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I was tasked with main-tanking the Loatheb fight in Naxxramas with our second tank – a feral Druid – watching the spores and contributing DPS. I put my recently-upgraded gear to the test, and fine-tuned my spell and attack rotation on the fight. Things got dicey towards the end of the fight when Loatheb’s casts of Inevitable Doom became more frequent. During one of the last Necrotic Aura phases, my health got dangerously low. Our aforementioned feral Druid taunted the boss off me. I panicked, thinking that a spore had struck me, or I somehow wasn’t holding threat. I popped Avenging Wrath and taunted Loatheb. I received two big heals returning me to full health, but half the raid was lost at this point. Those that were left burned all available cooldowns and finished him off.

We then ventured into the Military Quarter and worked our way down to Instructor Razuvious. The other tank and I spent about six attempts learning how to control the Death Knight Understudies. With some macros, a tweak to my Bartender settings, and communication over Ventrilo, we had the fight down pat. Our challenge for next week is to try and clear both quarters in one night.

Posted in 200 Words, World of Warcraft 2 Comments »

Great video games give you a sense of accomplishment. When you can accomplish something with a group of people, though, it’s even more satisfying. Our Naxxramas group started over with the Arachnid Quarter after the weekly reset. We cleared more in one night that we did in two nights last week! The group of people I play with are motivated, quick-learning individuals who like to have fun, but take what they’re doing seriously.

Before the raid began, I spent fifteen Emblems of Heroism on the Libram of Obstruction. This was an excellent upgrade for me since it increases my shield block value on every successful Judgment. I could definitely tell a difference working it in with my 96969 rotation.

We had a few issues starting out with Anub’Rekhan. I was silenced on two attempts because I was too close to him when he cast Plague Swarm. This ended up wiping the raid because I couldn’t control the Crypt Guard. Everything finally came together, though, and we got him down. We went on to one-shot the next four bosses and I picked up two new pieces of tanking gear: Gauntlets of the Master and Cloak of Armed Strife. Now for Loatheb!

Posted in 200 Words, World of Warcraft 2 Comments »

I was planning on getting my Warlock to sixty-eight and get him started in Borean Tundra. However, when you play as many alts as I do, things don’t always go as planned. Just as I started in Terokkar Forest, a friend of mine came online and was itching to play his level sixty Death Knight. My Death Knight is sixty-one, so I offered to come help him with some quests. We started off with the Ravager Egg Roundup and made quick work of the ravagers. I hadn’t played my Death Knight (specialized in Unholy) in quite some time, so I had forgotten about what rotation to use. I found a Death Knight site that listed a cast sequence macro for Unholy, and setup the buttons on my action bars to match. After that, I was quickly reminded of how much Death Knights are overpowered.

After slicing through ravagers like two hot knives through butter, we thought we could handle the group quest “Cruel’s Intentions” by ourselves. We got Arazzius down to under ten percent on our first attempt, and wiped quickly on the second try. After finishing our humble pie, I asked a nearby Paladin and Priest to help us.

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We ventured into Naxxramas for the second time, attempting to clear the Arachnid Quarter and explore the Plague Quarter. We had some troubles with Maexxna the night before, but we were able to one-shot her. I was concerned with rounding up her spiderlings and trying to tank them before they reached our ranged players. I posted a question on the Maintankadin forums and received some solid feedback. Users replied with their experiences of ignoring the spiderlings. I took this approach and focused on helping with the Web Wrap and healing.

The Plague Quarter was a nice change of pace after battling spiders for a night. I was tasked with handling the adds during the Noth the Plaguebringer encounter. I controlled them fairly easily, and our healers did an outstanding job of keeping me alive during phase two. It was another one-shot and on to Heigan the Unclean. After great progression on each attempt, we took him down. I assisted with cleansing and healing during the fight, and had fun running through the eruptions to the safe zones.

We’re going to try it all again next week in hopes that we’ll get through these two quarters even faster next time around.

Posted in 200 Words, World of Warcraft 1 Comment »

I ran Naxxramas with my protection Paladin for the first time. We started with the Arachnid Quarter, like most new raid groups do. I wasn’t sure how far we’d get, especially since my gear is not quite optimal for tanking Naxx. I studied a video created by Tankspot that showed how to tank the first boss, Anub’Rekhan. As it turns out, I was made the off-tank for the boss fight. After a few wipes, I finally had control of the Crypt Guards and avoided the Locust Swarm’s silence. He ended up dropping the Chivalric Chestguard and Gloves of Dark Gestures. I took the Chestguard since our Holy Paladin had something better.

Next was Grand Widow Faerlina. This fight was pretty easy for our group with me tanking the adds (in this case, the Worshipers). It was a bit difficult to round them up (as casters), but my Arcane Torrent ability helped keep them grouped together. We nearly wiped when I forgot to change my target icon when it was time to kill the third Worshiper. We recovered nicely and were rewarded with the Avenging Combat Leggings for our Restoration Shaman, and the Bracers of Lost Sentiments for our Fury Warrior.

Posted in 200 Words, World of Warcraft 4 Comments »

I received the whisper, “Want to tank heroic AN?” I replied, “sure,” and accepted the group invitation for heroic Azjul-Nerub. Our group consisted of a Warlock, Druid, Death Knight, Priest, and me (Paladin). The Druid is a tank, but will DPS for this instance. The Warlock is party leader and doesn’t want to mark. We pull the first group that initiates the boss fight, and the Priest — our healer — grabs aggro and dies almost immediately. I die next and we wipe.

On the second attempt, I ask that the mobs be marked or I be made leader. The Druid is made leader, but still doesn’t mark the targets. I ask for the adds that come with the mini bosses to be crowd controlled. I’m assured that one will be shackled, and one will be rooted. I then ask if everyone is ready and the Warlock replies, “y.” I pull, and, as you can imagine, the Priest does not shackle, and the root attempt is either resisted or the mob is immune. We wipe again. The Priest then states that the group does not have the “right consistency” and leaves. We disband at this point and I go back to questing.

Posted in 200 Words, PUG Tales 2 Comments »

As I delve deeper into the world of GTA IV, I find myself encountering a feeling of familiarity, even a sense of déjà vu, as I go about my business. There is a lot that is thematically in common with previous GTA games. On the other hand, the quality of the experience is so much greater, and many of the common themes have been expanded upon to the extent that, regardless of the familiarity, everything still has a patina of being different and fresh. This is really saying something, as I have become very jaded about my video gaming as of late.

The main character, Nico Bellic (NB for short), is remarkably compelling. The cut scenes and interactions with his friends and business associates make him a very likable character. So much so, in fact, that it is easy to forget that he has gunned down and/or maimed maybe 100 people so far, including the obligatory “beat up the prostitute and take back the cash” trick which is the cause of so much stir amongst the Jack-Thompsonites.

The way personal relationships are handled in-game is really extraordinary, and the fact that these NPC’s will contact you and express varying emotions depending on how much they like (or dislike) you, what you’ve done for them in the past, and whether you have bothered to contact them recently really adds to the depth of the in-game world. So far I have only dated Michelle, but I swear that I feel a real twinge of guilt when she calls to let me know that I’ve been ignoring her for awhile. Then she laid on the “Let’s make sure no one gets hurt.” line when inviting me up for some “hot coffee” action, which reminded me of a whole slew of failed relationships from my past. Doh!

But this is just more testimony to the greatness of the GTA IV experience. The action is good, but the immersion is excellent. I have spent a great deal of time doing almost nothing in-game, and loving every minute of it.

Okay, on to some game-play stuff!

The quickest way I have found so far to acquire some cash is to do the “procedural” missions, primarily the drug deliveries for Jacob, and the 10 Most Wanted from the police vehicles. Don’t bother with the taxi missions – the money is generally not good for the time it takes. Beating up people in dark allies is also not a good money maker… yet. I haven’t discovered yet if there is the equivalent of the corner drug dealer from San Andreas. That would probably make this game too easy though.

There are also armored vans that drive around town. You know, like the kinds that pick up cash from banks. I haven’t heisted one yet, but I’m betting that they have a good amount of cash in them. I’ll look into it and confirm ASAP.

Regardless, this doesn’t seem like the kind of game where you are destined to become a multi-millionaire like you could in the last two games. There is enough cash to be made to keep yourself well armed and well dressed, but that’s about it. Even in that sense you can burn through what you can make pretty quickly if you’re not careful.

Anyway, I doubled my money doing the Most Wanted missions. The only trick to these is to get a cop car, and that is hardly a trick at all. The guides talk about hitting up a police station parking lot or calling 911 to get one, but neither of those is really necessary. There is one a block away from your starting hideout. It’s always there (although it may not be from the beginning of the game, it certainly appears early on). During the day there will be a couple of cops nearby standing on the sidewalk and talking, and if you jack the car then you will get a wanted level. If you do it at night, however, they are not there and you can take it with impunity as long as there are no patrols nearby. It’s an easy jack regardless though, as all you have to do to dump your wanted level is typically go to the end of the street, turn the corner and within a few seconds you’re clear. These lone cop cars are scattered around town. No need to put yourself into harm’s way by stealing one from a police station!

Here’s something I discovered that sucks: Some of the missions are not repeatable if failed. So far, all the procedural missions have been “re-doable”, but I failed one story mission and it didn’t let me try again. It was the one where you have to chase the bike ganger who is dating the Russian mob boss’ daughter. I got a little squirrely on the bike (Hint: Focus on steering, not on shooting!) and lost the guy when I missed a turn. I failed the mission and when I called Faustin he told me what a nugget I am (he actually used language of a more colorful nature…). I was a pretty sure this was bad, so I rebooted my game, which cost me a few procedural missions which I had to play through again. So there you go.

Another warning: It is easy to feel pretty invincible in the early game. None of the fights are too tough – you can pretty much bully your way through with little/no skill. That changes some while you are still on the first island, and you end up really having to rely on the cover mechanic while on foot, and on being a darn good shooter while in a vehicle (no easy task while driving). As with all the previous GTA games, you will find yourself occasionally having to repeat missions, sometimes multiple times before being able to complete them.

Here’s something good to know about gun combat: When you score a hit with a firearm, the target reacts to it. This generally keeps him from firing back for a bit, often several seconds depending on how hard you hit him. Knowing this, you can cycle between targets to dramatically reduce the number of shots you are taking from the bad(der) guys. So far, it appears the most dramatic effect is gotten by the shotguns. Not only will they cause guys to flinch and duck for cover, they will often knock them off their feet for a quick, easy and free-from-reprisal follow-up shot. Good times!

As with all the GTA series, you are continually spoiled for choice of vehicle. I often find myself abandoning my current ride to jack a new vehicle I hadn’t seen spawn before. Last night I found the dump truck, and took it for a joy ride. As with previous iterations of the series, it’s pretty much good for plowing through any vehicle/bystander in your way.

The real trick in GTA is finding the best vehicles to get around with. Sure, the dump truck is fine, but it is super-slow, and it doesn’t corner well. Some of the faster, muscle-style cars have tons of acceleration, but require a real delicate touch when it comes to steering. The sports cars like the Infernus are a lot of fun, but are also very fragile. The bikes are handy for getting through traffic and into tight spots, but they can be hard to control and any collision typically results in you flying off the handlebars and flying through the air to take some damage. Word to the wise: If you get a flat on your bike, abandon that sucker right away. A bike without two inflated tires is begging for a trip to the hospital.

Regardless, there is something for everyone, vehicle-wise. Heck, even the Vespa-clone was fun to tool around on… only in GTA!

Posted in Gaming, Grand Theft Auto IV 2 Comments »

Part 1, 2, and 3

Part 4 (5/7/2008)

Part 5 (5/8/2008)

Posted in Gaming, Grand Theft Auto IV, Videos No Comments »