What makes the game enjoyable?

This post has been sat in my head for a couple of days but I think I have finally gotten the right thoughts on the matter to be able to make them into some form of coherent post.
What makes the MMO you play fun? What changes within the game cause it to not be fun?
There are a few factors which can enhance or reduce the “fun” ill list some of which are springing to mind now:

1. Are you playing a character that you enjoy playing? You may think this is a funny point but many people play in a guild where a certain class is required and although not the first choice, you play it anyway to help the guild. Would you be having more fun on the class you want to play? Some would argue yes you would, I used to be in this boat until I changed to play the class I wanted.

2. Are you playing with people you enjoy playing with? This is another fairly big point, are the people you play with fun and enjoyable to game with? This kind of ties in with point number 1 and ill explain below:

I raided for years with The Harpers of Norrath on a class I didn’t really want to be playing. I tried and tried to main change but got turned away every time. But the people in the guild were fun and ive played with them for years, in fact we were in previous guilds together so it was still a laugh.

I got the opportunity to raid on the character I wanted to be playing. So I upped sticks, away from my friends and into a new guild. Do you know what id prefer?
Being with those friends. The class I play now is everything I want it to be and I love it, but the loss of the camaraderie and fun has hit me hard.
The case of the grass is greener? It might be because im now having to integrate myself into a new social group rather than be in my old one or it may have something more.

Ive seen more content now with the new guild than with my old but still unsure as to what id prefer…. Part of me wants to go and be a social in Harpers but I really want to see the raid content come next expansion, I love the lore of Velious and want to see everything I can.
The other part of me knows that in the long run I wont be happy with non raider status in Harpers.

Just one of those situations where you need to figure out whats going on!

Id be interested in points of view of what makes the game enjoyable for others?

Im So Slack I know!

I cant believe its been so long since I wrote a post here. That’s my bad and I aim to improve this blog as much as I can and give it some more attention.

For now you will have to be content with another update post:

WoW: Cataclysm is rolling closer, I bought the regular edition of the game so im ready when it comes out. I also transferred my Warrior back to Twisting Nether in order to raid with a mates guild. After my first ICC10 run with them where I was pulling 15k dps I haven’t been back.

LOTRO: With this game now free to play ive been levelling my Champion a lot, also doing the new skirmishes which are a lot of fun.

Black Ops: I bought a PS3 and Black Ops, im level 34 at the moment and I know I wont prestige, it’s a good game but not one I will give a TON of time to.

Borderlands: I found my Steam details so ive been playing this with my dad, it rocks. Well worth a buy!

New Vegas: Also been playing this, not much to report.

EQ2: I left Harpers…… Joined Fusion to TANK! Its good fun, still striving to improve my personal dps and tanking ability. Unsure as to whom from those two guilds reads this blog so I wont comment further.

That’s about it for now, ill attempt to get some decent content on here soon.

I suppose this makes me hardcore?

Its been a long time since I considered myself even CLOSE to a Hardcore raider.  Maybe back in my WoW heyday I would have tarred myself with that brush, but not for a good couple of years.

Ive been raiding with Harpers for the past year or maybe more for only 3 nights a week.  Hardly hardcore but not uber casual.  Well this last week I decided I didn’t like my class that much that I quit the raid team and joined a raid alliance on my Assassin…

However I saw the light and decided that if I really wanted to help the team I should gut it out, even if the new dps recruit we got doesn’t deserve to shovel my shit…..  So now im actually raiding with Harpers AND the raid alliance.

This means im now raiding 5 nights a week…….

Sunday saw Harpers having a hard time of it on Hard Mode twins, with the kill eventually coming after a pull which lasted 50 minutes…

Monday saw Harpers smashing a go at Hard mode Malus.. and do you know what, we got this, he didn’t die but we got him to 27% fairly easily and we reckon we know what to do now.

Last night was my second raid with the raid alliance which was scheduled for an AA run, now I don’t need AA on my Assassin but went along to help anyway, it got off to a rough start when the zone in wouldn’t work but we soon flew through it and were headed for the second zone of the night when my participation was cut short.

The raid alliance is nice and will probably help keep my interest in the game but I really wish they didn’t do AA raids on one of the nights I can make it.  My only hope is still that Harpers will eventually need me on DPS.  I play DPS so well, when I brought my Assassin to a Harpers raid I topped DPS.  Granted our Ranger was away, but I still beat out all of the mains there with my ALT.

I suppose in the mean time I will just need to keep raiding with Harpers and maybe keep my eyes open for opportunities elsewhere.  If say, Ascend, or Mythic Legion, or dare I say it Fusion need an Assassin, I may need to rethink my game playing.

Its not that I want to leave Harpers, I love the guild and the people ive “grown” up with, but I cant ignore the pull of being able to do what I love.

EQ2 Bonus Exp Weekend!

Ive been waiting for another bonus exp weekend on EQ2 for a while now, ever since the last one in fact.

I was a bit of a dunce last round, I didn’t even play EQ2 that much which gutted me since people were saying how good the AA grind was so I made a decision, the next exp weekend I was going to hit it… hardcore.

And god did I ever!

I made a little plan of action to grind AAs out since I think they are the hardest thing to get (Levelling is EZ!) and made a little routemap of what I was going to do.

I started with my Assassin on the Friday night, but woe is me, I screwed myself over for 18 hours.  Ill explain here how I did what I did.

There is a little zone inside Splitpaw called the “Crawler Nest”  this zone is full of spiders and one, or very rarely two, named mobs.  The idea with this place is to mentor down to level 45 and blitz every trash mob in there whilst leaving the nameds alone.  Once you finish with the trash evac and go again.

However the first time we had the rare named pop we killed it….. BOOM 18 hour lockout.  Therefore on the first night my Assassin went from 186 – 191 AA however Mrs B did go from 248 – 250

I woke up on the Saturday and thought I would work on the Berserker, Mrs B brought her Wizard along for some AA too.  Id love to say how much AA the Wizard got but I didn’t pay any attention.  But late ish on Saturday (about 4pm) Borgeo the Berserker hit 250AAs!

He started at around 0830 with 236 and ended with 250!  It was about this time that the Assassin was unlocked again.

Since the Assassin was much less of an AOE class than my Zerk I decided to show my Dad the spot, and he brought his SK.  Therefore for the rest of the night (Up till about 11pm) it was him and me smashing AAs out.  He soon hit 250 himself and I went from 191-222.

Sunday was THE day, I hadn’t planned on getting lots of AA on the Assassin but whilst the opportunity was there I may as well abuse it.  The plan was to stay awake all of Saturday night but tbh I was dead on my feet and full of Caffeine… I knew I would crash.

And I did….

Sunday I eventually woke up at 1130…..

I dived in game and got hold of Dad, and in we went again. Dinging 250AAs at about 3pm.

So my weekend grand total was:

Zerk 250AA

Assassin 250AA

Mrs B 250AA

Dad 250AA

Couple of Alts got some AA too.

The bonus is still on till Tuesday but tbh I think im ground out.  I wouldn’t mind getting some easy Exp on the Pally but with tonight being a raid night it wont happen.

Ill also add that I got to raid on the Assassin last night, and once I found my feet I started topping the parse.  WOOT.

I did something weird…

I dont know what is happening to me lately but I did something really weird last night….  I logged into EQ2 on a NON RAID NIGHT!

Readers of the blog will be aware that I am really not happy or comfortable playing my Inquisitor on raids, so much so that I have attempted to re-roll in house 3 times (turned down all 3 times) and pretty much only logging in to raid.
So what made me log in last night and play for 5 hours?

Well the chance of playing something else of course.  Ive rolled another new character.  I started to think that the more characters I have then the more chance I will get to raid on something else.

I see guilds out there shouting for classes I dont have, but I could play and it keeps me wondering why I am still chugging along on my Inquisitor when I could be on something that I am much more suited to.

Now Harpers are looking for a specific class which I dont have (well till last night) but I would love to play.  Swashbuckler.  Ive played my Assassin to 90 and love him to bits but I cant get a break on him in Harpers with the current GM being a little adverse to them.  So I rolled a Swashy last night.

The usual powerlevel fest ensued and in the 5 hours I played I hit level 60.  60 – 70 is very rapid in the spots I use so I should be hitting that tomorrow (Im out tonight) with 90 following by the weekend.

Then starts the wonderful grind….. AAs and gear…..  AA grind isnt so bad since again, I have some good spots for it to get around 180 no problem, with the last few to 200 coming slower but still coming.

After that I will need to get gear and my Myth buff.  Gear will start out with the player made level 82 stuff and whatever weapons I can get my mits on, but the Myth is a different kettle of fish, im hoping that I can do most of it myself (Using tank on account 1, box the swash, and box a healer) which then leaves the mythy buff.

I really do think though that the order of things will be:

1. Ding 90
2. Get some MC Gear
3. Grind AA to ~180-200
4. Myth

All the while im doing this I decided I will carry on raiding with Harpers but start to buy the Scout gear nobody wants for the alt.  I HAVE been buying for the Assassin but with that idea shot down by the guildleader and no other guilds recruiting one currently ill try again with the swash.

I really do hope this is the time for me to re-roll as im not a happy bunny that another tank has been recruited while I was away again.  Im very close to just saying fuck it and giving up.

This weekend I have been mostly playing… World of Warcraft – Cataclysm beta

That’s right folks, ive got a closed beta invite to the Cataclysm beta!

So how did this all roll around then?  Well back when Starcraft 2 was in beta I logged into my account manager on battle.net and enrolled in betas.  I wanted to try SC2 having been a massive SC1 fan and spent many summers playing that over the LAN (Yeah… LAN Blizzard!) with my friends.  I didn’t get into the SC2 beta though, but now its released yay!

So anyway, I was thinking of transferring my priest (old OLD main from back in Vanilla) over to Wildhammer so I could send it some heirloom gear so went onto my account management to do it….  Lo and behold there is a new option under wow:

CATACLYSM BETA!

I checked my emails quickly, and I can tell you this for a fact, I could not find one from blizzard telling me I was in.  I did however have a lot of email from Blizzerd, Bliazzrd, Blizerd and the like all telling me to click their bogus links.

So anyway, this was Friday night, I sent the download off and went to bed. 

I have now spent all weekend playing and digesting the beta including the following:

Full Worgen starting area

Full Goblin starting area

Both dungeons currently in game

Some of Hyjal quest lines

Some of Vashjir (didn’t spend much time there so cant honestly remember the name!)

Ill give you the rundown of what I have found.

To start, I transferred over my Draenei Warrior and my Gnome Warlock to see what the gear reset and relative strength of the mobs is like at this point in the beta.  Ill start with the warrior.

My Warrior isn’t the best geared, he runs approx 4k gearscore in normal WoW.  Well in Cataclysm with the changes to stats, he really feels weak again.  It’s the normal Warrior reset.  I specced my main spec Fury and then the offspec Protection. Heres what I find.

Fury:  Currently little different in the Fury spec of Cata to the Fury spec of Live sure the talents are condensed but the feel of fury is still there.  My damage was low against mobs but the most amazing thing is I CANT DIE!  Fury has had a HUUUUUUGE survivability buff.  Blood Craze + Bloodthirst + Victory Rush = Lolwin

Victory Rush has been changed to heal you for like 10% of your hits when you land it, this makes AOE grinding a cinch. With mobs hitting for 200-300 and bloodthirst healing for 300-400 its so lolworthy.

Protection:  Tanking has supposedly changed in cata to be more crowd control based.  Well I haven’t managed to tank anything yet but the only major change worth mentioning at the moment is the thunderclap change.

You can spec in the prot tree to turn Thunderclap into a pseudo consecration, leaving this lightning ring on the floor which pulses damage.  Right now I don’t think its implemented fully as it hits for 10 damage at level 80, but it IS going to make AOE tanking easier. If we get to AOE tank that is.

I cant talk about Cataclysm without talking about the Worgen and Goblin.  I finished each of them this weekend from start to finish and heres how I found it.

First off both do a very good job of introducing you to the key fundamentals of the game, namely not standing in the fire!

Anyway on to the Worgen area.

You start off as human, years ago as the Worgen infestation is just beginning in Gilneas and it is your job to help try to stem it.  Well eventually you get bitten by a Worgen and end up turning.  The game is missing a few cutscenes at the moment but its pretty good.

The whole Worgen area was covered in rain when I was playing, and its got this really dirty, dark feeling to the whole thing.

There are some stand out quests though.  One quest has you taking on Heroic Abominations by throwing barrels of gunpowder on their heads.  As soon as you tag one, and NPC will shoot the barrel, blowing the abomination to smithereens! Its cool!

Another quest just AFTER the cataclysm has hit, has you rescuing survivors in the water where the buildings have just sunk, well this quest is bugged but completable.  There are maybe 50 npcs in the water who SHOULD be saveable but only 1 or 2 currently work.  Making this quest take me a grand total of 20 minutes to complete nearly put me off but I persevered.  This is the only real bug in the whole experience but you can see that more polish is needed.  

There are no female worgen at present, as well as no option to change your appearance. Hopefully this will change soon.

The Goblin Area:

I had a LOT of fun in this area making myself a little Female Mage. You start off on Kezan and are apparently a high ranking goblin on the island, having parties and running little quests in your CAR (Yes you get a car, and it rocks and I miss it!)

Until you manage to blow the island up by kicking a football bomb at it (don’t ask)  You then manage to buy passage off the island (which I miss, it rocked) but get shipwrecked when the alliance and horde have a tiff mid journey.
Your journey then is spent re-making a town (awesome concept) and trying to solve the problems on this rock.  Eventually again leading you to blow up THIS island (WTF is it with this goblin!) and rescue Thrall in the process.  This all ties up nicely into how the goblins join the horde and the whole area is terrifically well done.

The goblin racials are cool, I love the rocket belt jump!

So after playing those areas I fancied seeing the new Troll and Gnome starters as they are making a push for their old homes, except that due to the new starting area you cant make a troll or gnome without the game breaking, it took some jiggery pokery for me to even be able to log my Warlock in!

So you will need to wait till I can be bothered before I write about those.

I will give some props to the Hyjal area, seeing Deathwing and Ragnaros again brought back memories, as did seeing Baron Geddon. But the biggest memory hit from Vanilla came from my first foray into the Blackrock Caverns.  

This instance as many will have seen from Videos is in Blackrock Mountain, its got some AOE pulls and some cool throwback scenery.  Well my first wipe hammered home the old Vanilla feeling.

YOU REZ AT THORIUM POINT!!!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!

I didn’t go much further than the first boss in here due to people leaving but I did shove my head into the Vashjir instance.  All I can say is CROWD CONTROL IS BACK BABY!

The very first pull in the instance is like 2 tank mobs and 2 healers. The healing mobs heal so fast and for so much that its nearly IMPOSSIBLE without Crowd Control some move major description to stop one to kill.

Our group was something like 2 warriors, 1 hunter, priest and paladin.  Our crowd control consisted of tank interrupts, fury interrupt and interrupts over the board.  Sure a GOOD hunter would frost trap an add, but we had a huntard.

Pummeling one healer to silence the school led to the other healing like a madman and vice versa.

Once I realised that I was in a group of morons I left. Im sorry but as a tank I know what interrupts and stuns I get and how to use them.

I really am looking forward to doing this again. But I can see that unless you have a good Hunter, Mage or Warlock with seduce it will be tough going if the interrupts aren’t right.

So what am I planning on doing further? Well looking at the new Gnome and Troll starters and looking at some more quests in Hyjal.  More updates with some screenies maybe later on!

EQ2: Solo Healing Raids

Well if there is one way to stop me dpsing its to shove me in a group as the solo healer.  Oh sure for some easier stuff ill still shove my spade on and go to town with massive flurry crits but last night was a little different.

It all started when I got given the mage group to heal which isn’t surprising for me as an Inquisitor.  What was surprising was I was left to solo heal it all night…. Even when the “scout group” only had 4 members (2 being healers) I was still plugging away myself.

So how did it go then?  Well we started off on the mob in the hole who levels up when he kills someone.  We have been trying him for the last couple of weeks to get a feel for it.  We got him to 39% best try yesterday before he had levelled up too much.  We came to the conclusion that our dps was too low.

My findings from the fight are:  I cant dps this and keep the mages alive at the same time, with the amount of focus I need to give to curing curses and keeping reactives up.

It didn’t help that two of the mages in my group are either new or just returned to raiding and as such their gear lacked either resists, crit mit or HP which tended to make them explode when stood at max range unless I had single target reactives AND group reactives up at the same time on them.  This led me to just do zero dps (apart from some debuffs and maybe a quick burst on the pull) and just keep singles on everyone and group up whenever the charges hit under 5 (<3 13 Charge Malevolent Diatribe!)

In the end we realised we probably didn’t have the current dps in raid to pull this off, we were averaging 300k raid dps over the course of the fight.

We then went on to try the next fight which is 3 bosses by some pillars, we got some idea of what to do now but the execution was off.

We then went into our partially cleared Labs and finished off Perah Celsis before resetting the dungeon and going through it again.  I bought some Chain boots for my assassin which is awesome and stuck in the Fatal Followup red adorn.

We didn’t manage to drop Perah for the 2^nd time as for some reason we just could not stop the deaths, again the two mages in my group were esploding (as I called it) and in the end told one of them not to revive.  After a 19 min fight we wiped, perah had healed over 100 million damage and was top healer!  I came in 3^rd, WAAAAY above the MT templar. Yay for squishy groups.

My aim for tonight is probably to grind some AA on the Assassin, I still haven’t heard if im allowed to main change yet but any progress on him is good.  I need to get to 200 AA soon so I get most of the toys I want to raid with.  That’s the thing with the Assassin, every AA feels like an upgrade to damage.

However Mrs B will for a fact want to play WoW so may dabble on that for some time too.

Reroll Attempt 3!

Harpers are looking for certain classes again, one of which I have as a level 90 alt.  Therefore im attempting to reroll again.  Assassin is my choice this time, which is nice as it was the first ever char I rolled when I first started EQ2.

Its all in the hands of our GM, if he says no, then ill do what ive been planning for a while.  Grind AA like a mofo, buy gear then see where we go from there the thing to think about is that there are a few guilds out there recruiting Assassins at the moment, and with my latest healer burnout on my Inq maybe its time to jump ship?

EQ2: Contested down! Server 3rd!

Last night I logged on a little earlier to EQ2 as I wanted to get some AA on my Assassin (prior to enquiring about a main change you see) and headed off to Stonebrunt to grind some quests (as I didn’t have time to mass exp like normal).  I hear over our private voice chan that Oxdaxius is up, which generally means we are going to have a go.

Now a little history, we had one pull on this before where we didn’t know WHAT was going on and managed to get it to 85% through brute forcing it whilst the top guild on the server watched.

After we wiped they pulled it and killed it on easy just to stop us as was said by their members “Harpers will kill that if they get another pull”

Well a full half an hour before the raid was due to start, invites went out. We were going for it!

I logged over to my Inquis (BOO!) and got formed up, for some reason I got shafted with the scrub group (as I call it lol) which at the time consisted of myself and two dirges.  In the end the group filled out and we got to pulling.
In my haste to get online I didn’t run my parse so I couldn’t investigate the pull to see what happens and pick apart my own performance, but lets just say that we got him, and its not even hard….

So there we go then, serverwide 3^rd on a contested which is normally perma camped by Xanadu, go us!

The rest of the raid night was a mess of wipes inside the Hole.  I hope we gave a good impression to our new members…. Serverwide 1^st as a guild for deaths, hell yeah!

My First Mistake…….. hahahahahahaha

Ive been looking at upgrades for my warriors tank gear lately (as its easier to queue as tank and get insta pops than as DPS) and spotted the quest chain for the Occulus which gives a good ring as the first step, then some defence plate for the last step.

So I got the quest and queued myself.  Insta pops are great.  I was soon inside the instance with a group of all 80s, which I thought was good as the Occulus isn’t all that hard but with all 80s it should go fine.

Well the whelps at the start caused some issues as the healer died once when I could AE tank them all at once but I soon got into the groove.  I really don’t like that people don’t assist the tank in WoW, they need a targeting system like EQ2 where you fight THROUGH the tank, ah well.

We progressed through the instance and got to the final boss.  This is where it got weird.  First off, the boss went into his little portal plane thing and summoned the orbs…. Which was off, I didn’t remember him doing that before,  but remember reading about it.

Then he died…. And I got the achievement for Occulus and Heroic Occulus….. yes that’s right I did a Heroic!  I wasn’t even defence capped and nowhere near ready for it (in my eyes) but I did it! I apologised profusely to the group after I realised, they just laughed.  In my excitement I forgot to stay in the instance for the end of the loot roll and left after rolling need on some Defence Plate and didn’t get it as I had left.. doh!

Still im coming along nicely now, im about ready to hit heroics properly, there is still a piece of loot I want from regular Champions Colliseum, (Plate belt which I lost to a DPS DK last night fucksake) and then ill start with the easier heroics.

Tonight is a raid night on EQ2, we are starting to struggle with numbers at the moment, now requiring extra healers, chanters and even now dps.  Im considering asking to main change to my Assassin, for added punch.  Ive made it abundantly clear that im unhappy on the inquisitor so all I can do is ask and be told no.