Butcherblock Mountains…

Butcherblock Mountains.  Or rather, the docks and the surrounding areas.  On Monday night I finished up with the Darklight Woods area and then made the trip to BBM.  I got started doing the starter quests being offered and hit 23 last night.

One thing I realized upon getting to BBM, was that I’ve been here and done this before.  I don’t remember how far I got, but I don’t think it was too far… I seem to remember doing some quests above on the cliffs surrounding the bay but that’s about it.  That was back with my Troll SK in ’07 or so.

I really wasn’t in the mood to play last night,  but I got on anyway and knocked out a few of the quests leftover from Monday night before logging out and watching the rest of the Godfather Part II (my favorite of the three) on Blu-Ray.

To be honest, it was rather uninspiring.  The quests were ho-hum and after awhile actually started to annoy me a little bit.  I did end up dying twice during my half hearted adventures last night though.  My third time overall.  Three equal conning Aqua Goblins did me in.  For some reason they kept breaking my mezzes.  Bad JuJu for a Chanter.  Anyway, after the second time I called it a night and  logged out, abandoning my somewhat ambitious (more like ridiculous) quest to hit 25 last night.  I’ll give it another shot tonight though.  I might even try to find a Crushbone group or something.  Soloing is alright and all, but sometimes seeking out company is the way to go.

OR… I COULD give in to my nature and look at starting an alt.  I know.. I know.. I just said I *could*.  If I do start an alt though, I’d have to decide on what to roll.  I’m thinking Ranger (scout class again) or possibly an Assassin or Paladin.  I kind of miss my plate class.  Back when I quit though, and part of my reason for leaving the game, was that my 50th level Paladin was not a very good tanking option at the time.  I wonder if things have gotten any better since then (Desert of Flames days).  I guess I’ll have to see how I feel when I settle in for tonight.

~ Mojeaux

 

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Back to Norrath…

Well, after a couple of months of no MMO’s, I finally lost it and I went ahead and downloaded EQII.  All 12.5 GB of it.  It didn’t help that my wife is going to Germany for a few weeks to visit family and friends.  I mean, what am I supposed to do with that much unsupervised time? 🙂

I haven’t played the game in quite a long time ~ in fact, if my payment history is correct, I think 2007 was the last time I set foot back in EQII.  One thing that caught me by surprise was that I had a level 37 Troll Shadow Knight on the Guk (medium pop) server just sitting there waiting for me.  He looked pretty spiffy and inviting too, just sitting there in all his shiny plate armor…  “Play me! Play me!” he seemed to say.  Sadly, I have absolutely no clue how to play him.

So… instead of sitting there for an hour or more trying to figure out my SK, after already having to endure the 12.5 GB download, I just decided to go ahead and re-roll a new character (Ranger) on the Antonia Bayle server.  It was one of two servers that showed “HIGH” populations among the 10 or so that were listed.  The other high pop server is a PvP server, so I’ll probably end up there once I get my bearings, but for now I think I want to just take it easy and “stop to smell the roses” so to speak.  Hopefully, choosing a High Pop server will provide me with plenty of folks to group with without having to join a guild.

I don’t mind guilds for the most part but I find that as I get older, I have less and less tolerance for the drama and the demands of a raiding guild or any other type of guild for that matter.  We’ll see.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and find a good casual semi-serious guild that likes to raid occasionally.

So anyway, as mentioned, I’ve rolled a Ranger on the AB server named Moejeaux.  Drop by and say “Hi” if you’re so inclined!

~Mojeaux

RIFT Warfronts (and Bard soul)… I Think I Love You!

Wow!  No pun intended, but I had an absolute freaking blast playing RIFT this weekend and it was all because of the War Fronts and a kick-ass little soul known as the Bard…

I didn’t find this little gem of a soul until late last night, but once I did, I took what had already been a fun filled weekend of mostly doing War Fronts in RIFT to a whole other level of AWESOME!

I started out casually enough on Friday night by completing a few quests and participating in whatever rifts came my way.  I actually did enough Rifting this time around to earn enough planar currency to buy myself a nice blue-tiered planar chest piece.  I was pretty happy about it until I saw that in my haste I had overlooked a very nice blue-tiered bow that I would’ve liked instead.  Ah well, win some, lose some.  It actually worked out pretty good in the end.

It was about this time that I picked up a quest that unlocked the Bard soul.  I’ve never played a bard before so I wasn’t all that terribly interested and I let it sit as I went about my business completing some other quests and doing a little leveling.

It wasn’t until Saturday night that I got around to participating in some War Fronts and from then on out, I was completely hooked.

At first I went in with my Rogue specc’ed out strictly for damage dealing ~ a Marksman/Ranger/Riftstalker build.  This is actually a pretty good and fun build with most of the points going to the Ranger and Marksman trees.  The Riftstalker’s ability to plane shift 15 meters serves as a  nice “get out of jail free” card when things get hairy and it saved my butt quite a few times during some up close in your face situations, but for the most part, that was the only real benefit for me.

As for the action in the War Fronts, it was great fun and I typically found myself amongst the top 5 damage dealers at level 15, but I also found out that I was not very durable, despite my “get out of jail free” card.  For the most part I think we lost more matches than we won, but not by very lopsided ratio or anything.  I think that aside from a lack of general coordination, we also lacked in the healing department.

In just about every group that I was in, if we had any healers in the group, they weren’t very generous with their goods as the heals were far and few in-between.  To be fair though, there were a few healers that actually took their primary role seriously and as a result we often ended up winning those matches.  I ended up picking up a nice new blue tiered bow (as a result of winning 5 matches) to make up for the one I had overlooked earlier and it turned out to be a much nicer bow anyhow.  So win win!  I went to bed around 2 a.m.  that night, a happy gamer and a little more excited for RIFT than I had been.

So Sunday night rolls around and I’m back at it doing the Ranger thing in the War Fronts.  The ratio of wins to losses wasn’t going our way again and this time it was so lopsided that it was embarrassing.  We just couldn’t seem to beat the other guys… it was pretty demoralizing and I was about to go back to PvE when we happened to pick up a Bard for what was supposed to be my last group of the night.

What a difference!  With the bard along we were pretty much unstoppable!  He jumped on the War Front chat channel right from the get go and basically told us he was setting up near the middle and that if we wanted heals and buffs to stay close.  We rushed the center, got the Fang and set up shop and defended.  We had a run of about 5 or 6 matches with the same Bard in our group and we just steamrolled the other side each and every time.  Good times again!  We were winning!  That is… until the Bard left or got paired with another group.  Then it was back to getting owned…

So, right about then, around 11 pm last night, I had an epiphany.  Since hoping for a bard to show up is an iffy proposition at best, I decided to ditch my Riftstalker soul and swap it out for the Bard. So off I went to complete that Bard quest I had ignored and I shifted my points around and hurried back to War Front.

OMG!  What…. a…. freaking…. difference!  I was having such a blast that it was 2 am before I decided, that in the interest of making it to work on time, to retire for the night.  I hated doing it too because I had absolutely started getting into the Bard and would have loved more time to play around with it before the head start… not that I need to be convinced or anything ~ the Bard will definitely be one of my starting souls at launch.. but still, it would have been a blast!

One of the cool side-effects of being a Bard was that all of a sudden people were talking to me throwing me a few “good jobs” etc.  Apparently, I was making a noticeable impact because my name was being hailed in open chat as soon as I joined a War Front.  It happened enough times that I felt like Norm on Cheers, lol.  That’s right, I went from being just another DPS’ing Ranger-nobody-type to a mini-celebrity of sorts.  It was actually a pretty good feeling being able to make such a noticeable difference.

Oh, and our ratio of wins vs. losses?  That quickly turned around in our favor and we were consistently winning more than we lost.  If we managed to get a cleric or another Bard, victory was pretty much guaranteed.  Life is good as Bard.

The only thing that worries me about the Bard though, is that once I started playing him, I found myself almost completely ignoring my Ranger/Marksman skills ~ preferring to keep my buffs up almost indefinitely.  I have put enough points in the Bard tree to make my Motifs last 30 seconds, so really there’s no excuse, it’s just a matter of resisting the urge to spam my buffs and instead trying to focus on doing damage between buffs.

So yeah, I had a great time this weekend with RIFT.  I’m now (thanks to the Bard) anxiously looking forward to Thursday!

~ Mojeaux