Playtime on Ultrax

We went and had a play on Ultrax tonight and it will be interesting to see how the logs come out.  I am not impressed with my DPS as fire – although it can be quite good, the honest truth is that it sucks if the RNG gods are against you.  Tonight I was floating between 18 – 26k dps on attempts and that makes fights like Ultrax a real problem, especially since I seem incapable of getting those awesomely huge numbers that other mages seem to get…

Anyway, was really impressed, the first 5 attempts we had issues just learning the fight and figuring out the fading light debuff, but overall wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  We were getting him to about 50 % at the midway to enrage point, so we are almost there for DPS..another couple of upgrades for people and we will be very close.  I don’t really know what else we can do other than run FL for some attempted Rags kills, as most of us cannot actually upgrade any gear in FL now thanks to VP and LFR.  But I know I can upgrade a few more things with VP’s…so all in all I think we will have him very very soon and then we should be fine for the rest of it….Fingers crossed 🙂

I am not playing SWTOR as much…I did something stupid – I deleted my main toon…yes I know I used to mock those people as well, but seriously – in WoW your characters stay in the same order on the log in screen…in SWTOr – they move the most recently played to the top…since i had only been playing the one toon I didn’t even notice that until I went to select it to delete it….I selected the position where it has always been and typed away.  My toons looked exactly the same as well as I had created her to be a bank toon and so didn’t really care what she looked like.  Anyway they have not responded to my 3 in game tickets in a week and so i started re-levelling the same toon and basically I am sort of over the game….not that it is boring or anything but…it is just not holding my interest at the moment.

I am feeling a little wow deprived as well and so it has been nice to just be back in WoW doing my think and having some fun.

So hopefully tomorrow night we will have a better idea of the Ultrax fight.

More swtor and NYE

Spent a other day playing SWTOR and found some more cool things in the game that are enjoyable 🙂

One being the great big fucking ship that I get – and by ship I mean SHIP!!!! You get to fly to wherever you want and you just pay for fuel!

We ran another flashpoint with the hubby and our best mate, we actually ran it twice and the flashpoint changed the second time because different options won! the first time we killed people; the second time they lived and the outcome and events were still exactly the same however the path to get there was different!

That is a very cool concept; I would have hated to be the flashpoint designer though 🙂

So it is new years eve and so tonight we go round to our friends place, have drinkers and play wow to welcome in the new year 🙂 sounds dull and nerdy but there is much less playing and far more drinking that occurs 🙂 we have fun and that’s what is important !!!

I am looking forward to getting into wow, I have missed my Mage and Azeroth!

Happy new years everyone – be safe and don’t drink and drive!

SWTOR: My thoughts so far.

Yes, I know this is a WoW blog, however I thought it appropriate to post here 🙂

SWTOR does not get released in Australia until March, and there is rumour (perhaps fact) that they are actually going to be providing Oceanic servers in our area.  Which could be a slight winning factor.  However there is a lot of hype about it being a WoW killer and how they have 1 million subscribers etc etc.

After playing it for most of yesterday and some in a BETA weekend, I don’t think it is all that it has cracked up to be.  I can allow this game is awesome – it has a world that is pretty well known to a large portion of people already, and it has the sci-fi thing that a lot of people love, it has some fantastic game mechanics and is – on the surface – brilliant fun.

I am not level capped – or anywhere near it to be honest and I am certainly not even out of what is considered the starting areas…I am still working on getting my first ship…however I have already encountered a few things I am not liking and of course this might change once I have done a little more…

If you haven’t played yet, be prepared for a lot of talking…video talking the entire way through…perhaps it lessens after the first starting areas, I don’t know but the flash points (dungeons) have it every 2 seconds and questing it constant…You need to choose options, light/dark or neutral.  This feature is cool the first time round, but it quickly a pain in the backside when you are doing a few toons at the same time.  I have about 4 toons on the go, on different servers, factions and classes just to see which fits with me and what they are like.Yesterday was horrible with the constant interruption to my questing…I think the first time through it is awesome and there is a definite “wow factor”, but doing it a few times makes it highly annoying…at least in WoW I know I can just ignore the text but still be able to grab the quest.

My other major beef at the moment is there is only one class I really want to play that I enjoy the play style of, maybe 2.  This is because my heart is still set on magic and sorcery and fantasy – the Sith Inquistor does that so well.  I would prefer to play a ranged dps/healer class and really they only have the Inquisitor or the bounty hunter.  The BH played with weapons and guns and missiles – I tried that but really just don’t get the play style, I should play it to level 10 where I can choose to heal and see if that is any better, but that is a work in progress.  So basically I am going to stick with the Inquisitor.   I do have a Jedi Consular as well, which is effectively the same class but I wanted to be on both factions to see the difference. In WoW I have so many choices for what I want to play, I like having those options available to me, they can surely add more classes to this game down the track.

I ran my first flashpoint yesterday, which is a dungeon – apparently they have heroic mode as well.  However I will say the flashpoint was horrible.  The idea is cool, however it was hard to keep up or understand what the hell was going on.  I was in there for almost 50 minutes with a person who was leading us through – already has a level 50 toon and this was an alt, so they were zooming through and it took that long.  Part of that was the whole video talking thing.  We all had to make choices and waiting for 4 people to make choices and watch the video was painfully slow.  Even I started skipping the crap about halfway through.  For some reason as well, when doing the talking thing, there are numbers around the party frames which change depending on your choice, I have no idea what it is or how it works, there was no explanation for it, so I will be checking out the help function in game to see if it explains it better. I liked the actual running around, I just felt it was a little long – WoW also learnt from their long dungeons though. So perhaps these guys will.  The instance I was in could be done with 2 people, we went in with 4 and it took us 50 minutes, I would hate to see it with less people. I will do a few more and see if my opinion changes.

The last thing that is starting to annoy me a little, is the lack of variety, at first it is awesome that quests and drops are catered to your actual class, however when you get a companion and are trying to get them some gear you can’t unless you buy it – as far as I can tell.  All the gear I pick up is my armor class, but my companion wears a heavier class than me.  He is currently not wearing any upgrades because I am not going to spend anything unless I have to, I do want to get my ship when I can.  I think perhaps once you have a companion, the gear should be offered for them as well so you can upgrade them if I don’t need anything.  It isn’t a major issue yet, but once I have other companions and they all need gear that is of a different armor class, it will start to get expensive….

They have LFG system either, so it is back to spamming the general areas for groups – which from experience sucks balls.  the LFG tool, and now the LFR tool has made WoW so much easier to play, perhaps SWOR will implement something similar – I don’t know, but they may not have the same set up as WoW with groups of servers etc….So we shall see.

So onto the more positive things 🙂

The community seems ok, at the moment, a fair bit of stupid happening, but that can’t be helped.  I have noticed a fair few people saying on the forums this is their first MMO so they don’t really know all the “rules” for behaviour etc.  Which means the threat to WoW is possibly not as high as people think 🙂  However they could aid be bullshitting to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, who knows.

One of the built in options is fantastic –  “loot all in area” option, so if you kill 5 mobs and 3 of them light up with loot, it picks up all the loot for you in one click….FAST!  Would love that when running dungeons in WoW 😀

I do like the overall game play, it feels nice and they have some great effects, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what I like about it, perhaps the story has me hooked more than anything and I want to see more before I can say exactly why I do enjoy it.  It is different – and I think that’s the excitement, I think after a few months of people being addicted to this they will start to have the same issues that they had with WoW or any other MMO, but some of the hardcore Star wars followers will be ok with that because they are living the dream 🙂

It is definitely not a WoW stealer for me, I am so much more in love with WoW because of the world and the high fantasy aspects of the game, ANY MMO you play is going to have repetitive parts and be constantly battling for change, but that is not going to change any time soon.

Star Wars beta

I got my beta invite to Star wars during the week and dutifully downloaded it ready for this weekend beta test.

I took some video, so I will convert it at some point and upload it to the youtube page so I can share it with everyone, although I am sure you can find other videos now since they lifted the gag order on it 🙂

As a self denying Star wars nerd (hubby likes to remind me and EVERYONE that I used to read the novels), I do admit I enjoy the story and the universe, so I was really looking forward to adding a Star wars MMO to my game time.  I have only gotten to level 6, and they have just shut down the servers for maintenance, so will not likely get much further as we have plan tomorrow for lunch and for evening…..so it might be the limit i get to this weekend. Hubby can get further as he doesn’t have the same lunch plans as I do….he has no plans in fact 😀

TO get back on track from that massive tangent.  I have found quite a few nice things in game that have impressed me straight away, like being able to have the map up whilst running around – think Diablo, they have also put gear comparisons in without having to do anything for it, WoW you still need to push shift.  Currently it also appears as though the only gear I get is stuff that I can actually use….I haven’t had any other gear drop or rewarded that isn’t the right armor for me…stats I am not sure about but I seem to only be getting the same type. Hubby noticed that as well, so we are assuming that is by design – and I like that!

Not all mobs can be looted, however beams of coloured lights shine on the mobs that are lootable.  Blue beams for junk, green for green items, yellow for quest items…so far they are the only colours I have seen, perhaps there are more for higher level items etc…no idea though. I do like that as it just changes things up a little bit.  They also have an auto loot function for nearby corpses, but neither that or the actual auto loot seems to be working so I can’t really tell if that is cool or not…in theory though it sounds kick arse – kill 4 mobs and only loot once…yes please 😀

The maps can be slightly disorientating, however I am sure over time ; once I got the hang of it, they would be ok.  There is also a lot of video sections and voices, you can’t fast forward through all the speech sections to get to the options….not that I have found as yet anyway, to start with it is ok, but it currently seems like a fair chunk of quests are the type you have to have a chat with people about.  I think it will become tiresome.

It looks great, the graphics are very nice if you like the style and overall feels really good in combat (great animations for fighting) and seems pretty easy to pick up the basic controls and quest icons etc.

In the end, it is not likely to steal me from WoW – I still like the high magic feel of WoW with dragons and magic and wizards etc. SWTOR is about Sci-fi and is going to have a different feel because of that.  I can see myself playing SWTOR as more of a solo type thing – but I think WoW for me is still going to be my main MMO and my focus.  SWTOR is very cool – but it is not (at this early stage for me) the type of universe I am wanting to be in, of course I am not at level cap, I don’t know what the “raiding” scene is going to be like or what the dungeons will be, so hard to really make a solid call.

Definitely a shame we won’t be getting in Australia with the rest – I would be keen to play it straight away! Definitely worth a look for anyone wondering if they should!