[p]Wikipedia has a much more modern take on this very subject. You really ARE stuck in the stone age, Whysprr. =)[/p][p] [/p][p]Wikipedia Meta Link With Slightly Offensive But Altogether Appropriate Name[/p]
Sorschae@Najena wrote: [p]Yep, an' PROUD of it. (hefts her stone axe and goes back to whacking on saber-toothed-tigers)[/p][p]Whysp [/p]
What I want to know is how do you really like raiding Whysp? Got some relic, and some fabled weapons...Is it more appealing now over soloing?
Ainwen@Butcherblock wrote: [p]It's part of a balanced life, I guess. Some nights when we raid I'm all bright-eyed and ready to go, and others I'd rather be doing something else. I understand that raiding is hard -- I like hard -- but it's difficult to feel (as opposed to understanding intellectually) that one's choices really make a difference, and the downtime is rough on someone with my low tedium-tolerance. I might, someday, get to the point where I feel my knowledge base is sufficient to try being raid-leader, the cat-herding aspect of that holds some interest. [/p][p]What I like the absolute best is running with a group into an instance that's just a bit too hard for it; where you can see the tank's health dropping faster than the cleric can keep up with and you throw cheap shot, blades, then trigger OoS to let her catch up; where some pop one-shots the healer and you have to rez and do damage-attentuation until things stabilize; where you pull two groups of mobs instead of one and it's all emergencies and fear and everyone's doing all they can and the wizard goes down and bam you rez and then they're back up and the last one goes down and you all look at each other, grinning, and say 'whee!!'[/p][p]That's real adventuring. [/p][p]Whysp [/p]
[p]I could see that...Reminds me of taking down PHH it was chaos like that. [/p][p] At least raiding is something new...And seriously, take it from me Raid Leading can be a real pain. Especially when you have to start making choices like who sits out on nights when you have more then your 24...But otherwise, RLing can be fulfilling with a well oiled group...But sometimes the hand holding can be a bit too much. [/p]
Ainwen@Butcherblock wrote: [p]Yeah, it really can. It sucks when you come up with a plan that you know will work but people fail to pay attention and follow directions. Then they think it's the plan that is wrong and want to try different things that you know won't work or are less likely to work. Or if your leading a raid that you know will be very difficult just due to class make up. Back during my guild alliance days I'd be taking raid forces with literally 10 plate tanks into labs. It's really lame when the better geared tanks wouldn't want to... you know... actually tank. But when it comes down to it, your better off with a poorly geared tank that can follow directions then a well geared one that can't. And there are always those people who don't understand the loot rules no matter how simple they are and get all pissy when someone else wins something.[/p][p]Or you get the random drama you gotta deal with. Here's a fun little story. I was leading a raid and one of the guys on it was two boxing a guardian and inquisitor. Now his guardian is his main character. That's the one he wants to come with and focus on, but like I mentioned earlier we would always have a huge number of plate tanks show up on raids. But we were a little light on players online when we started so I let him bring both characters. After we killed the first two named a guild ranger logs on. I ask the guard/inq if he would drop out with the guardian and to just camp him in zone. I told him he could continue to roll for loot for the guardian and if he won something I would have another boxed character camp out so he could come back and loot it. I thought I was being pretty generous, but he freaks out and zones out with both his inquisitor and guardian. Not only that, but he has his son who's playing a dirge leave too. Sometimes there is just no winning.[/p][p]But there still are alot of fun times and there is a big sense of accomplishment when you lead a group of people through a tough encounter. [/p]
[p]The other thing is that I haven't been able to use two of the three raid items I've gotten. One is the relic boots -- the day after those dropped I finally got the Vhalen's boots from OoB, and that got me the 3/7 set bonus, so until I can get another piece of Vhalen's I'm not using the Sonorant. The Nightchord gloves, day after I got those the Darkened Gauntlets dropped for me in MM Castle, and the difference between that haste (25%) versus my mastercrafted cloak (10%) is immense, so until I can grind out the Cloak of Flames I'm not using the Nightchord either. [/p][p]Does anyone know where in Lesser Faydark there are group down-arrow mobs in big honkin' piles I can mow through with Banshee and Jarol's? It's very slow as a dirge soloing the shadowmen and nightbloods and such around OoB. [/p][p]Whysp[/p]
Find a low 60 person to mentor and do the Nybright family questline. Lots of AA, a title, and should get CoF page updates too.
Hello Whysprr, gratz from an Austrian Fellow Dirge based on the German Server Valor for your adventure blog here. I got one little Question, looked at your Charakterprofile and saw that you have Dark Linger in offhand Dragonfang in mainhand. I use the same weapons by now, only Dark Linger in mainhand ... Does the proc Shadowsap triggers in offhand too? I got Oblivions Edge the last night out of lab and wonder which weapon I want to replace, nice statupdate on oblivions instead of the Linger but I simply love the correct speed of the weapon together with this great proc. Housedog aka Tydus LVL 70 Dirge based on Valor
Weapons with procs will still proc in the off-hand. The difference I believe is that they won't proc off of combat arts like weapons in the mainhand do.
XHousedog wrote: Thanks for the kind words. I'd hadn't thought through the mainhand / offhand proccing thing, really, and being reminded by Lornick (thanks to you, too!) that the mainhand weapon procs off CAs and the offhand doesn't may make me rethink it. You caught me in solo mode, obviously -- the only other time I use that configuration is when I'm doing raid mobs with AOEs. Also when I forget to change, which is pretty often, but it's not intentional. I've usually put the fastest weapon I'm using in mainhand to get the most mileage out of Cacophony of Blades both in proc damage and in interrupts, and the Dragonfang is 1.6 sec versus 2 for Dark Linger. But given the number of CA attacks we get, I might have to rethink that. Of course, last night I was soloing green stuff for bloody Cloak of Fear and probably could've gone into my all-out-offensive group or raid configuration (Turadramin's Fang 1 sec, yum, in main, Dragonfang offhand) without losing anything meaningful. It's just sometimes more sensible for my particular rather woolgathery mental configuration to have standardized configurations than to think everything through from scratch for each run. Otherwise I could end up fighting Sothis wearing my crafting gear. And the tweezers have a terrible damage rating. Whysprr
Entry the Fifteenth - Hard-Won Lessons from a Casual Player I've no idea what the average playing time for an EQ2 player per day is, though I'd love to see it if the data's out there. I am, however, reasonably certain my roughly two hours a day is well below average. I base this on the rather shaky ground that when I was leveling up, every time I'd group with some nice, congenial people and put ‘em on my friends list, after two weeks they were ten levels above me, and after a month they were capped and in some sort of raid where my friendly /tell came at a critical time and caused them to wipe. It's nice to accomplish something in life. One of my fundamental life lessons (right up there with ‘Experts are Better than Amateurs' and ‘Idiots are More Common than Either Villains -- or Beetles') is ‘You're Not that Special'. That being the case, there's probably some poor middle-aged schmuck with a job and a family and a bad guitar habit out there right now who also has an EQ2 character they love and want to level up in less than a decade with the time they're taking out of what used to be an inadequate sleep schedule. This advice is for you, dear: ***** Electroshock therapy would be better. ***** You're still there, aren't you? I knew it, the gaming bug is worse than the Ebola virus, as documented by several well-conducted multicenter double-blind clinical trials using ability to handle activities of daily living and other measures of neurological outcome at 6 months as the endpoint. The p-value was infinitesimal. I'm sorry, those of you who missed that joke, trust me, it's pants-wettingly hilarious to a biomedical scientist. To a biomedical scientist-gamer anyway. Oh, never mind. Let's get on with it. Whysprr's Rules for Success as a Casual Player Limit non-productive activities. Note that I do NOT mean you should group-grind like a madwoman. This is a game. This is a game. Repeat until you understand this, breaking for food or potty is optional. By ‘productive' I mean ‘fun' and by ‘unproductive' I mean ‘not-fun' - like Cyclops after the first three times in that area, to pick an arbitrary example. And you'll note that I didn't say ‘eliminate non-productive activities' - there're dues to pay in everything, even gaming. My best example of this, and I'm ashamed it took me so long to figure out, was Calling home each night, which forced me to make a 5-20 minute zone / run / slog to the T7 adventuring areas when I hit my sixties. When you only play 2 hours, biting 20 minutes out of each session adds up fast. Of course, what's productive for one person may be unproductive for someone else. I enjoy crafting, as mindless in some ways as the system is, and I've always liked merchanting and doing a bit of wheeling-and-dealing. But if you hate crafting and you're a casual player but you really want the Wurmslayer, ask yourself if it's really worth it. I cut back my crafting as well; I used to try to keep my vendor boxes full, now I only replace sales once a week and handle custom orders as they come up, often out of Somborn. It makes a huge difference to my adventuring time. Use Your Time Well Multitask. Minimize trips. Instead of selling off status loot on a regular schedule, wait ‘till all your city writs are done, and then make one big circuit to sell off status loot and pick up new writs. Learn where mailboxes, merchants, menders, and crafting stations are in the wildlands, and use them instead of slogging back to town. Research quests that involve the same parts of the world or the same mobs and do ‘em at the same time. If you craft, learn to do it fast, using [shameless self-promotion alert!] Whysprr's Speedcrafting Guide. Pick Your Friends Carefully A guild is your friend. Sure, you can be a lonely wanderer, soloing through the levels, but the operative word there is lonely. Also, there aren't enough solo quests and you'll go mad in your early sixties. Plus, all the really cool loot these days is no-trade from instances and heritage quests. It's a huge help to be able to fling a tell out to your guild when you need a couple of folks to help you whack the final heroic in some endless bloody grind of an HQ. For the casual player, a big, sprawling, sloppy, friendly guild is waay better than the military uber-raiding guild which won't let you in anyway or the small ‘family' type guild, unless it's a small family-type guild of people you know and who keep the same schedule as you do. Otherwise, when it's time to whack Freddy, The Evil Keeper of the Cool Gizmo, you'll send out a call to your guildies and there'll be someone on who's leveling up a 4th level templar but who offers to log on with his main, a 29th level assassin, who's ‘really well geared', but probably not a lot of help in the Sanctum of the Scaleborn. If you do have a good, active guild, be a visible member. Help out when someone calls for it and you're not doing anything more useful than trying to kite the stupid ^^^werewolf off the Ahrouns for the fifth, messily unsuccessful time. (NOTE: resemblance of events cited in this blog to any person living or dead is purely coincidental, and very embarrassing) It's especially productive, if you've got a good guild, to keep your eyes open for compatible souls to recruit. People you recruit usually remember you, occasionally even positively, and you're doing your bit to keep your guild healthy against the inevitable attrition. Do Self-Promotion I'm a big believer in character development and role-playing in general, because I enjoy both. Sometimes I build so much character I can hardly get out of bed in the mornings, but ignore that. Being colorful has practical value to the casual player, though; it makes it easier to get pickup groups, to get help when you're hopelessly lost in Sol's Eye for the tenth time (see blog disclaimer above), and can generally smooth out a lot of life's little self-created bumps. If you're reasonably competent and interesting, people will remember you, and it'll give them that extra bit of incentive to run like mad when you put up the ol' LFG flag. Stay Flexible You'll have to solo a lot. You'll have to live with pickup groups a lot. Maintain quests you can go solo on, have something you need out of the major grouping areas, make contacts who'll call you to fill a gap in a raid on occasion so you can work on that Wurmslayer. For AAs, I'm speced to be acceptable in a raid or group, but to work as a soloist as well. I've got Bump, DKTM, Luck of the Dirge, and I'm a step away from Degredations. Then I'm going back up the Agility tree for parry and poison. My reasoning is that when I raid or group, there's more slack than when it's just me and the slavering beasts. If I totally spec AA for raiding, the uber-raiding guild I'm never going to join would like it fine, but that's never going to be my rice bowl, so I need to be able to solo well. Besides, since everything we discuss in the boards these days is AA choices, I thought it was obligatory to bring that up. Money Is Good It always makes me grind my teeth when someone tells me ‘oh, you can just camp Unrest for [insert name of cool item here]. Hello, folks, I've never even finished Unrest, and never will unless I schedule the run with my guild ahead of time on a non-work-non-church night when one of the kids doesn't suddenly decide she needs the computer to research a twelve-page paper that's due the following day. Camp the place? I'm as likely to camp the White House lawn protesting the proliferation of uncivil slime-coated lunatic ideologues in our public life. Which would be fun, but I'd rather get the Vhalen's hat, actually. So, if you, as a casual player, can come up with a source of funds to buy good equipment - a merchant or crafting niche, an older, established character who's just a very good friend, honest, no, all this silk lingerie is just comfortable to sleep in, or a sleazy plat-selling web site, (~whatever~), you've got a better chance of keeping up with your compatriots, or would've until they made every vaguely decent item no-trade. Yes, I'm testy about that. You can't do everything. EQ2 is a rich, complex game-world. Accept the fact that you're not going to be able to do it all. Sure, I'd love to be part of the raid that sweeps into the Freethinker's Hideout and sweeps all before it, wading through Fabled dirge armor and weapons to bring down the Big Boss at the end. It's so not happening. It's much like real life. We pays our money and we makes our choices. It's simply not possible to be an acceptable spouse, parent, hold down a demanding job, be a dedicated amateur musician, and play a complicated, immersive MMO. Not, at least, without becoming terminally sleep-deprived and having a psychotic break in which hello Mr Sprocket I'd like to order a side of E. coli in A minor with extra spinach please, heavy on the acylia clusters. The tank-tops, the horrible tank-tops, all on the floor!!! Best, Whysp
[p]**Chuckles** Another enjoyable read. Thank you.[/p][p]As a side note, I also just finished the 4 AA lines that you were mentioning. I noticed you said you were planning to put additional AAs into the Agility line. Maybe I'm confused, but I thought you could only put 50 in the bard lines and 50 in the Dirge ones. I do miss having bump, and would love to fall back and get it.[/p]
Tomlesh@Mistmoore wrote: [p]When I get Degredate, I'll have filled out two lines in the Dirge tree (Luck and Degredations) using, I think, 42 points overall there, I'll use the rest much, much later. And I currently filled only one line in the Bard tree -- Wisdom, with DKTM. Bump's the first power in the Agi line, and I'll work on filling that line out; I don't have anything anywhere else on the bard side. [/p][p]Whysp[/p]
Doh! So much for reading comprehension. I went down str, and wis lines, and got Luck of the Dirge and Degredate. I guess I just assumed everyone else would go down the strength line. Stupid of me. I may burn a respec for soon and drop the str line for a week or two. I'd like to try out that group stealth.
Whysprr@Kithicor wrote: lol, and if you were in a room with all those biomedical scientist-gamers you would probably be talking to yourself =p
[p]Not at all, dear. [/p][p]Millions of people play on-line games. [/p][p]Hundreds of thousands at least participate in biomedical research. [/p][p]And in both groups, they're practically all nerds! [/p][p]Now I think about it. it's a wonder everyone in medicine isn't a gamer. Ooh. [/p][p]I've got to go lie down now, I'm all weirded out. [/p][p]Whysp[/p]
Whysprr@Kithicor wrote: Hundreds of thousands?? as in 100,000 or more people? Dang, I didn't realize it was that big of a field. But I see your point about them all being nerds. So I take it back, you wouldn't be talking to yourself =p
