Adventures of Taas

Sometime about a year ago I decided to take a serious shot at getting to level 80 in World of Warcraft.  I had been playing Warhammer Online and the lack of depth PvE in the game was killing me and I really wanted to sink my teeth in to something deeper.

For a time I stuck with my goal of getting up there in WoW – I made it to around level 35-40 but the new Everquest 2 expansion was calling with lots of new dungeon content to try out.  Group play, particularly in focused PvE situations (Dungeons and raiding in particular) are really what make me tick with MMOs and the EQ2 expansion was focused almost exclusively around that – so it was a bit of a dream come true so WoW lost out in the end and I went off to play EQ2.

For various reasons after about a month and a half I just couldn’t stomach playing EQ2 any longer (I think I’ve hit that.point with EQ2).  For a few months I drifted and even took a full break from MMOs at one point.  All of this until around June/July when I decided once and for all I was going to suck it up and get the Level 80 in WoW MMO-goal checked off of my list.

I’m happy to say I’ve finally done it – it took quite a bit of effort (I did the last 20 levels in a pretty hardcore amount of time – I was pure heads down focused on leveling) but in the end it was totally worth it.

I also have to give Blizzard a lot of credit – both the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions were huge evolutionary steps for the game.  Even after climbing this mountain I’m not convinced I would have enjoyed vanilla WoW if I would have done the drive to 60 back five years ago – I still think the game was too generic-MMO but with the two expansions, especially with Wrath you could tell Blizzard was finally figuring out how to tell a story and drive some really compelling content in an MMO.

I have a post that’ll be coming soon(TM) comparing raiding in EQ2 and WoW.  We’ll find out if the journey was worth it…

So Syp from Bio Break is back from his blogging break (resulting from his having a baby – Congrats Syp!) and decided to get started slowly – by introducing an internet meme (it’s good to be realistic in your goals kids)

So here goes – the MMO firsts MEMEMEMEMEME – pass it on

First MMO Played?

The Realm

First Character Class/Role Played?

Adventurer

First MMO Subscribed For More Than A Consecutive Year?

Ultima Online

First MMO You Fell In Love With?

Ultima Online

First Guild You Really Felt Attached To?

Order of the Gold Dragon on Great Lakes.  Some great memories creating one of the first player cities in UO.

First Character/Game You Leveled To End Cap?

Everquest 2 – My Troubador

First “Wow” Moment In A MMO?

Oh boy… probably the first time I hit the brit bank after UO’s retail release.  I saw the trade and the socialization going on and thought to myself – THIS is the future of entertainment & communication.

First MMO You Burned Out On?

Ho boy.  I think I’ll have to go with Everquest 2.  I think it is the first MMO I’ve truly burned out on.  UO I could go back to, EQ2 I load it up now days and I just feel so blah.

First MMO You Followed Avidly Prior To Launch?

Ultima Online.  I spent a good year kissing the right ass to get in to pre-beta

First Time You Felt Truly Noobish In A MMO?

I can’t say I can trace it back to any one moment.  Probably when I was being corpse camped in Deceit in UO

First MMO You Went Alt-Crazy In?

World of Warcraft.  I’m not much of an alt person but WoW really brings it out of me.  I have level 40+ characters on 4 servers in WoW.  I would have probably two raid ready characters in WoW if I would have focused

I’ve been back in World of Warcraft now for about two weeks and I’ve put around 20 hours in during that time.  At first I have to admit I was having a little trouble getting in to it but at some point between reading up on end game, talking to Chris about end game and genuinely having fun ploughing through some quests it started to click.

I’ve done level 28 to 35 (I think I might get 36 done tonight if I can avoid too much blogging/greader/twitter/interwebdistractions) and I feel the casual time I’ve put in to the game has given me entertainment in return.  One of the key indicators that I am starting to get back in to the game came today when I spent almost two hours just pursuing some meta game – got enchanting to 225, have made around 300-400 gold working the AH and mining as I level and at one point… wait for it… I even was chatting with some people at the Orgimmar Bank… IN WORLD OF WARCRAFT!  TALKING… TO PEOPLE…

Daggerspine (the server Jim is blamed for landing us on and Chris for keeping us on ) seems to be a little quiet (compared to my Alliance server Medivh) but Orgimmar is pretty hopping during prime time.  The community disappoints me a little (I don’t think there is a server community in WoW that would please me) sometimes when it degrades to pure fuck-tard-ery but all and all they seem to be a good bunch most of the time.

One of my biggest hesitations of playing WoW with the guys in the past was the fact that Daggerspine is a PvP server.  I’ve heard too many horror stories of being ganked and corpse camped for hours to be able to get too excited about a PvP server but I must admit I am starting to warm to the idea of a PvP server.  I don’t think I would go out of my way to play on one in any game but I’m starting to feel comfortable with Daggerspine as a PvP server as my home.

The biggest reason for this comes from an experience I had the other night.  I was in Stranglethorn Vale for the first time (anyone who has ever played on a PvP server go ahead and take a moment to grumble and moan – I’ll wait) and within 30 seconds I was ganked.  Fuck this.  I hate PvP. I’m quiting.  Another 30-60 seconds after that the calvary came running in and a handful of level 80s put the ganker out of his fuck-tard misery.  I grumble, piss and moan but eventually realize I need to realize this is the cost of playing with my friends so I headed off to the north end of SVT where you start questing.

I start doing the animal master quests and within a few minutes I’m seeing high levels of both factions running around in mounts.  I got the distinct impression I was about to be caught in the middle of a warzone and my only option for contributing to this war as a newb was to bend over and end up a corpse.  Luckily the tension between the 80s in the area never spilled over and we all sort of watch each other with a bit of unease.  It was once the dust had settled I realized the tension was very engaging from a gameplay point of view.

So I carried on and about five minutes later I ran in to a level 38 alliance hunter questing and I thought, shit here we go again.  I /bow’d in a lame attempt to not get two shotted and I don’t know if it was that or the guy just wasn’t up for a fight but we ended up questing side by side for quite a bit and aside from one of his multi shots going wild and hitting me (man we stared each other down for like 5 minutes after that I thought for sure he’d get a preemptive jump on me).

Another thing I noticed was that other people questing in the area tended to hang close together.  It felt like everyone was sort of watching each other’s back and it was a really neat sense of community I’ve rarely experienced outside of guilds in World of Warcraft.

So there we go – I still wouldn’t go out of my way to play PvP but I think I’m learning to live with it.

All and all this has been a successful return to WoW so far.  Onward to 40 and beyond!

These days I do most of my screenshot uploading via the auto uploader in XFire which ends up putting the screenshots on my xfire profile / screenshot area.  The problem with this of course is that the worst possible place to keep screenshots you want your friends to actually see is an xfire profile!

So periodically I’ll go through my xfire folder and upload some updated shots to Flickr so people actually see my screenies.  Today I added the following:

World of Warcraft – Mostly shots from my recent return.

Warhammer Online – Assortment of guild event shots.

Everquest 2 - Some old-ish raid shots from when I was playing 2-3 months ago.

Again – if you want to follow my screenshots the best place to do it is in my XFire screenshots page.

I’ve decided I’ve cleared my head enough and reprioritized to slowly introduce a little MMO action back in to the mix.  I’ve decided that because from here on out I plan on playing extremely casually (no event scheduling if I can avoid it – I run the MMO schedule not the MMO runs my schedule) that I would give World of Warcraft a go for my return.

If you are looking for casual it doesn’t get much more casual that World of Warcraft.  I’ve set a few ground rules for myself on this return to ensure I stay casual:

1. One MMO at a time – period. the end.
2. No scheduling / signing up for events.  If/when I hit end game this might change to one scheduled event a week kind of deal – but for now I come and go as I please.
3. No playing until the baby is in bed for the night including weekends.  Usually I’d play on the weekends while the baby napped – I found this was prime productive time for other tasks I was pissing away.

I have a few challenges going forward the primary of which is that WoW is not exactly my favorite MMO.  My friends play Horde (which I seriously dislike) on a PvP server (double gah) so from the get go there are a few things playing against WoW but we’ll see if I can get by them.

If World of Warcraft doesn’t work out for me I’m not sure what I’ll do.  But we shall see…  For now I’m a Blood Elf Paladin on Daggerspine.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog lately and its not just the hecticness of the Christmas season that is to blame.

No – I am in an MMO rut. One of those really bad MMO-depressions that hit everyone at one time or another. I’m feeling burn out in three different games and that is really making it hard to focus on any MMO or getting much of anything accomplished. I spend the time I have available to play games thinking about the three games that are haunting me and eventually I get frustrated, give up and fire up my Playstation 3.

The three games I am torn between at the moment are World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online and Everquest 2. I really want to enjoy at least one of them but splitting my energies between them is not working out for me. I’m also having specific issues with each of the games that is really preventing me from saying THIS IS THE ONE, THIS IS WHAT I AM GOING TO PLAY.

With World of Warcraft I can’t exactly place my finger on the issue. Its a lot of ‘been there done that’ (I’ve leveled so many characters from 1-50 I don’t even want to think about it) with a side of ‘everyone is bigger than me’. With WoW I have a sincere desire to hit 80. I.REALLY.WANT.TO.RAID.WOW. The journey is really killing me though. I’m an accomplishment driven gamer to a certain extent and there is very little sense of accomplishment in the early and mid game of WoW. I’m old school MMO – and WoW doesn’t offer much to my kind in the early levels. I haven’t given up on this yet but something has to give or I don’t see this happening for me.

In Warhammer Online there are a few issues. The first and foremost is that for the first two months (plus beta) of the game being out I was one of the primary people behind the 4th largest guild in Warhammer Online. And let me tell you – guild officers in guilds this large work their asses off for you – go kiss your guild leader now. It was a lot of work and I fell in to the trap of running events and attending to administration with 100% of my game time when I should have said “no, instead of leading a keep raid on Wednesday night I’m going to do something I want to do – Other Officer XYZ you run the Wednesday Keep Raid”. I genuinely love my role in Aureus Knights and I have no intention of stepping away from it to any extent but next game we start in I’ll be doing more to spread the work load around.

Warhammer Online itself is a game with flaws – that actually isn’t fair to say because what game isn’t with flaws? But with WAR there are a few things that stand out that make the game difficult to fully embrace as a main game. I find the PVE lacking. Now when most blog-commentators point out the PVE factor they say the game doesn’t have enough raiding or dungeons or whatever and I actually am not talking about that. I think the dungeons WAR does have now are great (public quests being integrated in to dungeons is truly game changing for MMOs and I expect to see it in many future titles). No when I talk about PVE in WAR I think that the questing is just damn boring. It is a fairly linear solo experience that just isn’t rewarding once you’ve done it to level 30. It just offers so little – and I’m a huge PVE gamer.

The second flaw that nags at me with WAR is that the best way to advance your character (in the widely accepted opinion of min/maxers and now the community has fully embraced it) is to scenario grind. One of WAR’s greatest strengths is that it allows you to experience several different facets to advance – this is the sphere system that Vanguard promised (but didn’t especially deliver on) on crack. In WAR you can advance your character through PVE Questing, PVE Public Questing, ORVR or Scenario RVR. Awesome, bang up job… good stuff. Right, until after the first month everyone realized you could get more XP and PVP XP (Renown) by doing nothing but scenarios and do nothing but scenarios they did. Even on some of the busier servers now the world is a ghost land as people sit in war camps queueing for scenarios.

So I don’t know – WAR is fun. There are some fun classes and the Open World RVR is amazing when the sides are balanced or are balancedish. But there really are some nagging flaws. It just won’t click with me.

That brings me to my gaming-love. Everquest 2. EQ2 is now 4 years old and I’ve been fairly dedicated to the game for around 3 of those years (having started in early beta and taking a break pretty early on and then coming back with a vengeance) and I think I’m finally hitting the end of the “primary game” cycle with EQ2. You know that point you reach after the peak of playing a game where you start to look back from the end game and think “how much longer can I beat up on the same tried and true content?”.

I can’t really point to any particular mechanic in EQ2 that is a causing my doubts about the game. Arguably The Shadow Odyssey, the expansion just released for EQ2 is a dream come true for me – it is primarily group based, it is based on the mechanics of my favorite Everquest 1 expansion (Lost Dungeons of Norrath) and it offers a tonne of highly replayable game play that is engaging and at times plain difficult. So I have no excuse here – I can only think of being at that point in the MMO life cycle where enough is enough, you just can’t do game XYZ as your primary game any more.

So I’m not sure where that leaves me. This blog post obviously didn’t help me answer any questions as I’ll be concluding here in a few lines feeling no better about where I am at. But I know many people have been here before – do you have any strategies for coping with burn out like this? I think my medium term future with gaming involves a whole lot of single player experiences on the consoles – maybe I’m just overdue for a bit of a genre break.

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

Earlier this month I threw out a call for help to help me narrow down a PvE game to play this November. The games in question were World of Warcraft and Everquest 2. Both games have expansions coming out this month (WoW’s is now out and EQ2’s comes out in a few days) and I wanted to get back in to one of them (with WAR on the go and working on managing one of the largest and most active guilds in WAR I can’t possibly do both PvE games).

I did get some feedback (thanks guys!) and I actually reactivated my account in both games and got my feet wet and I’ve come to a decision – I’ll be playing World of Warcraft.

Some of you will remember back in the late spring/early summer I was talking about getting a WoW character to 70 before the expansion came out. That never happened because in June I got in to the Warhammer Online beta. Even when I was at my peak enjoyment with WAR I couldn’t help but regret not getting my paladin to 70 in time for the expansion.

World of Warcraft’s end game really intrigues me. I know I know, those of you who’ve played the game to death will be sitting there in your chairs muttering how the game is an item progression and rep grind at the end game but what you ex-WoW fan boys won’t admit to yourself is that for a period of time, and it differs by person – some it was a short time some it was years – is that you really enjoyed that experience and likely pumped 1000+ hours in to it.

As I said in my previous post I’m looking for a big end game PvE MMO to compliment the PvP gameplay of WAR. I’ve raided quite extensively in Everquest 2 and I really LOVE the raiding concept. Talking to people who’ve raided quite a bit in WoW it really seems that the World of Warcraft raid game will really appeal to me and what I’m looking for. The game has a great loot and instance progression that I can’t wait to sink my teeth in to.

So heading back in to WoW I had a bit of a dilemma – I couldn’t stand my paladin any more. I have no problem with the class per say but there is something about Hybrids that drive me nuts. Am I a tank? A Healer? Weaksauce DPS? So I clearly needed a chance of scenery for this go at WoW.

That change of scenery came by way of Chris. About 2-3 years ago he stopped playing on our Alliance server (Medivh) and moved to play Horde on Daggerspine (f u Jim ). I didn’t follow because there was just something about Horde I couldn’t get in to (this was pre blood elves) and I also was playing EQ2 heavily at the time.

So I’ve decided to really change things up and for the first time I’ll be playing not only Horde but on Daggerspine which is a PvP server! PvP servers in PvE games seem entirely pointless to me. In WoW if you want PvP you go to the battlegrounds or arenas. PvP servers are just a breeding ground for ganking (in my opinion). But alas – I want to play with my friends so I’ll go where they go.

So there we go – WoW it is. I’ll be posting updates regularly on the status of my character. He’s now level 8. I decided to go with Warlock which is probably my favourite class in the game likely because of its broad array of utility and the different ways you can play them.

This should be fun… thanks for pushing Chris.

I’m a huge UI guy. When I recently returned to World of Warcraft (post incoming on that topic!) I spent a whole day not playing so I could get my UI just-right.

So I figured what the heck – I’ll put up a UI section here on the website. This weekend I’ll be adding some screenshots and links to the mods I have installed – for now you have a list of what I use.

Thanks to Will for the inspiration to get this down on paper! Check out My UI here.

This coming November one of the most important elections in modern history will occur in the United States. For Americans & others around the world who play MMOs November 4th isn’t the only big day of the month – November 18th marks one of the biggest release days in the genre’s history – I can’t think of a time when THREE MMOs launched expansions on the same day.

I of course am talking about the new expansions of World of Warcraft (Wrath of the Lich King), Everquest 2 (The Shadow Odyssey) and Lord of the Rings Online (Mines of Moria). Now I could go on about the feature sets and where I think these expansions will take the game OR I could question the sanity of Turbine and SOE for going up against Wrath BUT I have a much more selfish motive for this post.

Truth be told I’m having a blast in Warhammer Online but something is missing. There is a bit of a PvE gap in the game (its the best PvP game I’ve ever played – without a doubt) despite having some great dungeons, etc you just don’t get the epic dungeon raid feeling you get in other PvE focused MMOs. So WAR has my really keen on playing MMOs again but it was awoken a PvE itch within me.

So here is my dilemma and I ask for your help: I’m really torn between two games to scratch this itch; Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft. While LOTRO is enticing with its story driven gameplay the classes, etc have never really clicked with me (queue Jim telling me how wonderful the expansions classes are).

I see positives on both sides and they actually end up as good counter points to eachother.

Everquest 2 I have a level 80 character who I could pick up tomorrow and resume raiding with but in all honesty I’d likely want to get a new character to 80. In World of Warcraft I really have nothing going, a level 50 something pally who I have very little desire to play with – so I’d be starting new there as well.

With EQ2 I’d be entering familiar territory that I have trodden all over. I know what the game offers and I know I can expect fun for what I put in to it. With World of Warcraft I’ve done the early to mid game but I know it has a lot of PvE raid/dungeon depth especially with the expansion coming down the pipe introducing a very viable end game 10-man path of progression.

So here is what I see as the pros and cons:

Everquest 2:
+ Know I like the end/raiding game
+ Have a character at end game I could pick up and play the new expansion right away
+ I have a great guild to go to
- Itemization in EQ2 just isn’t as cool as WoW – You’ll never look like an insane badass also there isn’t as much tiering of the gear. As someone who is looking to raid with this whole shebang this is a minus for EQ2
- I’ve been there and done that

World of Warcraft:
+ The game has great looking gear and has great raiding progression
+ I’ve never done the end game before
+ WoW is probably the ultimate raiding game in the PvE-Raid-Centric sub genre
- I’ve done the early and mid game and while its fun I suspect getting from around 50 to 58 (where you can enter BC) is going to be a nose down challenge
- I have no guild in WoW. If I decide to play Horde (><) I do have Chris and his buddies which should work out fine – but when you contrast the potential vs the reality of my long running relationship with LOTIL in EQ2 its hard to not ding WoW a little bit here

So there – I thought putting that plus and minus list together would help me make a decision but alas I am no closer to an answer. So I throw it out to you guys. What are your thoughts. Any +’s or -’s you’d add to either game?

Either way – I’ll be doing SOMETHING come November 18th.