Adventures of Taas

Here is my first weekly update – a look at how I spent my week gaming!

By the numbers:

• Everquest 2 – 11 Hours
• Warhammer Online – 3 Hours
• Team Fortress 2 – 2 Hours
• World of Warcraft – 2 Hours
• NHL09

This week was supposed to be all about World of Warcraft but I found Everquest 2′s expansion and the temptation to join back up with my EQ2 guild (League of the Ignoble Liver) was too great to avoid. The Shadow Odyssey is EQ2′s 5th expansion and is focused primarily on the high end. Those who played EQ1 will be familiar with one of the primary features – doing dungeons for points that can be spent on a wide range of gear – known in EQ1 as LDONs.

These instance based missions are awesome. The expansion added just over 20 new such mission instances and the three I’ve done so far have all been a blast. My personal highlight was in Deepforge (one of the instances based out of Lavastorm) having to fight the instance boss on the run because he drops AOE pools that will erase your health bar in minutes and you have to run away from them.

In a few days I’ll have a full TSO review up… but for now I’m having a tonne of fun with the missions and the expansion as a whole.

As for the Saturday night raid, my first since May, it went extremely well. We raided a Tier 2 RoK dungeon (my first Tier 2 RoK run – we were stuck farming T1 when I left in the spring) named The Temple of Kor Sha. We cleared several of the nameds pulling in quite a bit of loot (mostly healer stuff) and eventually had to call it after wiping several times on one of the final mobs (the name now escapes me). For my first run back in EQ2 it was a huge success, I had a blast.

Warhammer Online got more attention than I expected it to get this week. The Live Event stuff for Heavy Metal is currently going on (Heavy Metal is the upcoming patch where they are introducing two of the cut tanks – they are doing daily events to get people to unlock them early) and I’ve been logging in every day to complete the daily tasks. Every time I log on my Rune Priest I’m reminded why I don’t want to level him anymore – he’s just such a bitch to level.

I have started a new chracter, a Shadow Warrior, and he has been a great improvement. I’m really evaluating what future I have with WAR and the fun I have with my Shadow Warrior over the next few weeks will be crucial in deciding if I stay or go.

As for World of Warcraft – My Warlock is now level 16 he really should be higher but the distractions above have made it hard to find time to log on. I really hope to spend more time on him this week (20 by mid week would be nice). The time I’ve spent in WoW so far has really been enjoyable it just has to compete for my time with everything else I have going on (both gaming and other wise).

I rounded the week off with quite a bit of NHL09. I’ve gotta say – the boys at EA Sports did a great job with this iteration. The game is actually quite challenging. I’ve been whooping the AI in the NHL franchise for years but this year I’m really getting a challenge out of it. Hell – my Detroit Red Wings are in 6th place in the Western – since when does that happen?

That was the week – I have a test this week at school so the early part of the week is going to be a write off but I should get some gaming in later on in the week1