ang griffen's journal

I haven't watched all the videos yet, but Festivids are live.

( Vids I liked! )

( BELSAVIS IS THE WORST PLANET )

Today I decided to suck it up and re-make that Imperial alt after all. So I made a Sith Inquisitor. General chat on the Sith starting planet was full of people talking about how boring the storylines are Repub side, and I'm sitting there the whole time, like, actually, I'm kind of finding Imp side sort of ... lol edgy try-hard. I mean, I'm not sure what I expected from storylines aimed at people who want to play bad guys, but I'm just bored. With the exception of two, all the dark side choices felt like they were just for the ev0lz.

I'm also not sure why my character, who is established in-game as an ex-slave is going to choose any DS option that is pro-slavery, or for the Sith's creepy fixation with blood purity.

On the plus side, she's cute? (Fuck yeah body type 4.) And her first companion is a cranky monstrosity she found sealed in a can in some ruins, which is pretty pro.


And some screencaps I keep meaning to share but don't:
* Yes, the guy with the holographic girlfriend (yes, she's a program) is the romance option for female Jedi Consulars. He also has the whiniest voice. I'm kind of tempted to roll a second Jedi Consular just to play romance option chicken with myself. I'm not sure I could handle it.

* This is the best mob classification ever.

ø Slowly but surely moving what I can find of my old fic over to AO3. Slowly more than surely.

ø Re-reading The Midnighters series. (Well, the first book. Need to go get my hands on the other two.) I still love creepy, creepy Melissa/Rex.

ø In spite of not having watched the movie at all I've been reading a lot of XMFC Erik/Charles. Yep.

ø Up to level 38 on my Commando. Raz's Sentinel is 40. We're pretty much doing all our questing together at this point because when we solo quest, killing stuff takes me forever and things look at him funny and he dies. Balmorra was confusing but fun. Quesh was awesome. Hoth is like Tatooine with snow.

ø Every time I watch a Todd In the Shadows video, I keep wanting him to be an AU Todd Rice.

ø Hardmode Zon'ozz makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork repeatedly. Apparently the raid team poked at hardmode Yor'sahj on my night to get sat and thought it was okay... and then realized we'd have to drop a healer to beat the enrage timer. (Which btw, I'm so tired of "hardmode" being "Now you must make two healers crank out 20k+ HPS sustained because we put a stupid enrage timer on it.")

ø Feeling a compulsion to re-read reboot Legion of Superheroes, since I never actually did that when some_stars talked about it a few months ago.

ø Awkwardness is now pretty much only awkward in that we are both social failure shut-ins, not because actual interaction is awkward. Which is I guess a long and opaque way of saying :DDDDDDDDDDDDDD

So, here is a short summary of the planets you will quest on as a young Republic trooper:

Ord Mantell (1-10): Rocks and trees and stuff! Actually kind of pretty, in retrospect, although Tython (jedi start planet) is much much prettier.
Coruscant(10-16): City planet. Mostly gray in the questing bits.
Taris (16-20): Has trees, which is a plus. Has spacezombies, which is a minus.
Nar Shaddaa (20-24): space las vegas
Tatooine (24-28): desert

And then at 28 you get to go to Alderaan. ( Alderaan is really pretty. And it has trees! )

Sadly, Alderaan suffers even more from "everything is far away" than Tatooine did. (I think I've been spoiled by all the new Cataclysm flight paths in WoW where you can take a taxi basically down the street.) Mostly because of the fjords, so when your map's not explored, you head out to a place trying to get to a quest objective, and then you're like "oh, it's on the complete other side of this ledge and all the way down there." and you have to go ALL THE WAY BACK and around again on another path.

But it sure is pretty, so I don't mind so much!

Also, the taxis, which on most planets are speeders or hovercars or something, are ( flying dolphins. )

(So far Alderaan has had a lot of quests where you have to kill elites. I kind of love killing elites because I am a healer, so my companion does all the DPS and I sit there and heal him. It takes like 2 minutes to kill one, but I'm also never in danger of dying? :D? :D?)

( Extremely mild spoilers for companions you get as a Trooper )

Yes, that means I am already finished with Nar Shaddaa on my Trooper and have moved on to Tatooine. I haven't done much there though, because I decided to spend this evening playing around with my Jedi Consular.

( He is sometimes shiny and has no eyes )

The Consular questline is not as compelling as the Trooper questline, but the gameplay is pretty fun. I took Sage as my Advanced Class because I am pretty fond of healing, but I'm leveling him as Balance, which is a ranged DPS spec.

Originally I was going to have him go Dark Side, but I have a hard time being as huge of an asshole as that generally compels me to do, so he's currently Neutral-Leaning-Dark. He'll eventually hit Dark I, I'm sure. Eventually.

It's also kind of weird going through and redoing these questlines on a character of the opposite gender. This guy is presented with way more opportunities to flirt with people than my Trooper was. (And one of the people my Trooper wanted to flirt with she couldn't because she was a lady. Although the game totally made up for it by giving me that hot SIS agent guy on Nar Shaddaa.) I especially enjoyed getting to be like "Y HALO THAR SENATOR KAYL" on this guy.

( Unrelated to flirting, but related to conversations, this is the best conversation option of all time: )

That is all.

So I've gotten my Republic Trooper out of the start zone, and she's level 11. I've chosen Commando as her Advanced Class, but haven't decided if I'm speccing her into healing (Combat Medic) or damage (Gunnery, probably Actually assault specialist? Which sounds basically like being a fire mage, but with guns.) [note to self: possible healing spec? couple points i'm not sure enough of mechanics yet to be 100% on, but seems largely what i'll be going for]. I'll probably go healing though, because shooting people with healing bullets sounds awesome. (No, this is true! Apparently you put healing ammo in your weapon and then Hammer - the free filler shot - becomes HEALING BULLETS.)

I'm not sure I like the voice-overed/cutscened quest givers/quest turn-ins. (Although apparently I can skip most of the VA with spacebar, which I did not know until just now.) It's really awesome as far as immersion goes, but it makes questing much more time consuming. Partially because I have to sit and mull over my responses constantly. Being able to see direct Light Side/Dark Side effects has helped, but now that I have my first companion I'm always sitting around fretting about if he approves of me. Even though all that does is make crafting faster.

The Trooper story is interesting. It's very military-y, which is not normally my thing, but I'm actually pretty invested in the story hook that gets you off Ord Mantell. That said, I'm sort of sad that my Dark Side toon is probably going to be my Consular and my Light Side toon is probably going to be my Trooper, since I think they would probably be somewhat less depressing the other way around.

Also, spoilers, whatever, but the... penultimate(?) quest for Troopers on Ord Mantell (when you're sent to deactivate the bomb in the Separatist Stronghold) was pretty brutal. As far as I can tell it seems to be intended as "You are possibly a tanking capable class. We will now kill you repeatedly until you learn how to pull this room and how to assess which of these types of mobs you need to kill first to minimize your damage." Pulling was always my least favorite part of tanking, so this clearly went over super well. (Hint: it involves having a lot of medpacks to survive the strong mobs who hit like trucks, a lot of line of sight pulling, and the patience to wait for one normal class mob to pat around by himself so you don't pull him with the five pack and kill yourself.)

Crafting in this game seems to be largely divorced from earning credits. (The best way to make a ton of credits is with the Slicing gathering profession, apparently, which is basically the "print money" profession.) So I decided to go with professions I actually wanted to have for my characters. I picked bioanalysis/biochem/diplomacy, but I haven't really played around with the professions system much yet.

As far as gameplay goes, I'm a bit worried that I'm level 11 and feel like I have too many buttons. I know there are some I will just take off my bars eventually because I don't use them ever. FTR My "rotation" has largely been Explosive Round > High Impact Bolt or Sticky Grenade that random mob over to the side > Explosive Round > High Impact Bolt. On Strong mobs it's Explosive > Hammer > High Impact if Plasma's procced, repeat. If a buncha dudes get in melee range I use Pulse Cannon, which hits HARD. I've been using Hammer as filler because it's cell-free and gives me lots of chances to proc Plasma, but I don't know if that will stay true now that I've got a lot of my Commando special abilities. I have been having moderate trouble with the targeting system, though, so I'll have to play around with that.

Other minor troubles I've been having: Party chat suddenly became invisible to me today, so I made a complete ass of myself with the guy I was partied with by completely ignoring him. :( He eventually just dropped group, and I feel bad. Apparently this is a known bug that is fixed by relogging, but it is sad!

I'm not sure how long I will remain entertained by this game, as it is sort of fiddly in ways that don't appeal to me, but has some fun parts that do. Will report back once I've gotten my ship and maybe once I've actually done a Flashpoint or two with some people.

I'll also try to take screenshots more in the future. And by "more" I mean "at all".

So it's SW:ToR stress test weekend, and all my friends are doing that and reporting stuff back to me because I missed signups for it like a noob.

And basically I'm not sure it's the game I really want, which is because the game I really want is a tedious old-school grindfest with lots of places to explore and obnoxious things to do to access certain bosses, and tedious long-term class quests, etc. Do they even make MMOs like that anymore? It seems like they're all just built around killin bosses at max level now. If there are games still like that around with people playing them, are any of them F2P? Or should I just give up and play a proper single-player RPG that gives me the puzzle-solving and long-term planning things I apparently truly crave instead?

Videogames, why are you so hard.

(Also! My raid leader is trying to get me to play Skyrim, but APPARENTLY YOU CANNOT SET PUZZLES TO HARD MODE. If I'm going to set the combat to faceroll easy mode, I want to set the puzzles to hardmode. Silly games.)

So the next World of Warcraft patch is introducing some legendary quality daggers into the game for the rogue class. MMO-Champion shows us that these daggers apparently turn you into Batman. I am not sure how I feel about this, tbh.

All six of our farm bosses down in three hours last night! Yay! Which is gonna give us a full six hours on Ragnaros this week, so hopefully we'll at least push phase 3. Hopefully. (Raid leader wants a kill, but that's raid leader.) Thursday's my scheduled night to sit out, so watch them get the kill that night, though. Ha.

(And because our DPS is so pro, we switched from 4 DPS downstairs and 1 on top of the web on Beth'tilac to 3 downstairs and 2 up top, and it went super well, and I had no real problems healing the four of us on top of the web and basically it was totally awesome!)

Anyway! Apparently RealID dungeon groups are out of beta and a free thing in WoW now! And I know a ton of you play, and play Alliance (sorry, I have very few Horde toons, and none of them I'm comfortable grouping on), but not on my server! Characters I have I'm comfortable grouping with would be: 85 holy paladin (ret spec is PvP now, so she's not available for heroic dungeon DPS), 85 enh/resto shaman (can heroic as enhance, normals only as resto) 70 shadow priest, 64 resto/balance druid. So, you know, if that sounds interesting and you want to be realID friends so we can group, comment and we can totes get that sorted out!

I GOT THE RAID SPOT!!!!!!

(and i have 2pc t12 now and I can't wait to heal some stuff with that beautiful set bonus.)