Labyrinthine Shadows

by on April 21, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Posted In: MMO, News

Trying to catch up on a few things here…

Farmishi finally reached 64 last week, and immediately went on a Mana Tombs run to celebrate. It went very cleanly. However, there is a certain drop she’s looking for, and she didn’t get that. So, we went again. It turns out that Thermidor has been missing a fair number of instances, and hadn’t done Mana Tombs yet, so we gave him a guided tour. That run also went very well, until the end where our place started getting horrific latency and lag spikes. Doing an escort quest when it may take you a few seconds to do anything is not fun. Farmishi still didn’t get her drop, so we’ll be back for boss farming. ^_^

However, the real focus of the guild lately has been the fourth wing of Auchindoun, Shadow Labyrinth.

It’s meant for level 70s, so we’re going in slightly under level. The guild went in once earlier (without me), and apparently had a really rough time, not even managing to do the second boss.

Earlier this week, we did the first run with me in it. Three 70s, Blanc (69 – hit 70 about two fights before the second boss), and Dunain (67 – barely, Lance is still 66). It went fairly smooth all things considered. Most of the time, we were doing quite well. There’s some 6-monster groups before you take on the second boss. Those wiped us. However, we kept control part of the time at least, and and killed some of them, so it was an easier group on the second try.

The boss himself is an odd fight, as he’ll regularly force the entire party to fight each other. However, he wasn’t too big a problem.

The third boss, Grandmaster Vorpil, however…

Tough. Really tough. Really, really tough. Really.

He would not be so bad. He does periodically teleport himself and the entire party to one spot and do some frightening AoE damage. But that’s dealable. No, he opens portals, which start summoning voidwalkers that start slowly moving towards the boss. If they touch him, they go away… healing him in the process. We can get him about halfway down before that becomes a problem. But we can’t guide him or clean up the voidwalkers enough to keep the fight from getting out of hand as Mr. Boss gets healed and hands us a E-ticket ride on the Wipe Express.

We went in a second time the following day (or was it the day after that?), and things were much smoother, and progress was much cleaner. Naturally, all that ended when we hit the third boss again.

It’s frustrating. But the current diagnosis is that we need a bit more DPS, and we’ll probably get that just by Dunain getting closer to 70. The guild can put together an all-70 group as it is (Blanc, Blondiewood, Grumbly, Asclepius, Noxlux), and it might be interesting to hear how that would work out….

Oh, and Dunain seems to be skipping the Tier 1 look-alikes, and going straight to Tier 2.

Oh, while I’m on a semi-RPGish bent, and for those of you haven’t heard, Dragon Magazine is going to cease publication this September.

I haven’t paid attention to Dragon for years, somewhere around #150-ish it lost all interest for me. I still had interest in earlier issues, so it was at least partially something the magazine was doing, and not the mere fact that I was moving away from D&D to other RPGs.

Anyway, it is another childhood friend gone by the wayside, like AH and GDW before them. It will be missed less than the others, but it was the last of the grand old gaming magazines.

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Obligatory rant on rant

by on April 17, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Posted In: News

Current SFWA vice president Howard V. Hendrix has made himself the current tempest in a teapot by having a rant posted for him in the SFWA community on Live Journal. While most everyone (understandably) has leapt on the “Technopeasant Wretch” portion, reading the entire thing, there’s a few other bits I find… more telling:

“I think the ongoing and increasing sublimation of the private space of consciousness into public netspace is profoundly pernicious. For that reason I don’t much like to blog, wiki, chat, post, LiveJournal, or lounge in SFF.net. A problem with the whole wikicliki, sick-o-fancy, jerque-du-cercle of a networking and connection-based order is that, if you “go along to get along” for too long, there’s a danger you’ll no longer remember how to go it alone when the ethics of the situation demand it.”

He seems to be conflating the community-building that has become a staple of the internet with a herd-mentality. Or, maybe he’s just saying that diving into it would be violating his beliefs and “going with the flow”, which would erode his own mental defenses. But… it sounds to me like he’s saying it of everyone.

He seems to have missed the fact that the very places he names are wonderful places to espouse your own beliefs (as he has just done). The act of posting a manifesto is easy for individuals, you don’t have to get it by a committee, you don’t have to find a public forum that will allow you to preach it. Put it on the internet… and people will find it. Better yet, the communities allow you to find a target audience quite easily.

The point is, there is nothing inherent in the internet that keeps you from expressing your own opinion. In fact, it is easier here than any other place. Counterbalancing this fact is that you can fall into a crowd of like-minded people all too easily. This can lull one into a happy state of going along with a crowd that feels the same as you 95% of the time, and ignoring that other 5%. But frankly, if something rubs you the wrong way, it is very easy to speak up and be heard. Whether anyone supports your view is, as always, dependent on how ably you make your point.

Oh, and I will point up something from his most infamous paragraph:

“…the noble calling of Writer…”

The phrase and, more especially, the capitalization strikes me as indicating a brand of intellectual elitism that I consider as objectionable as the more conventional forms of social snobbery.

There is indeed something noble about the creative spirit, no matter what form it takes. And to my mind, there are few things worse than putting walls around it. Creativity is not something that needs to be put in a protected little garden to keep the yokels out, but something that should be explored and celebrated and encouraged wheresoever it should spring up.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit getting paid would sure be nice, but the real value is in the quality not the pay. The real nobility is in the effort (of invention and self-improvement), not the quality.

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Onward to May!

by on April 8, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had Patch and Mark over yesterday for another round of Onward Christian Soldiers. We definitely have a much better handle on the rules now. Got about as far through this time as last, but yesterday was a short day, since Mark had another engagement that called him away, we were really going much faster. Things are definitely looking interesting enough that we’ve written down where we are and will be continuing the same game next time.

For this game, I took the Muslims, while Patch and Mark split the Crusader factions. Their general plan was to march south with the North and South Franks, while the Germans and Normans stay behind to clean up the North. I’ve been benefiting from having a better understanding of how troop assignment works to gather my armies into forces that stand some sort of chance against a crusader army. Sadly, even my best leaders just aren’t very good, and most of them don’t have a chance against the better Crusader leaders.

An interesting dynamic of the First Crusade game, is that the Muslim leaders are generally cheap to activate, which means they get lots of activations in a compared to the Crusaders. On the other hand, they generally can’t do as much during an activation, and there’s only three leaders who can even possibly get a good formation in battle, which is about as bad against the incompetent Crusader leaders as against the good ones.

I have been abusing some good die rolls, and gotten myself into trouble. The North Franks sent Robert of Normandy down the coast past Tripoli, presumably to seize a base to take Jerusalem from (which is the only thing in the south that’s truly defended). I managed to surround him with a couple armies and cause some losses. Then, Adhemar (of the South Franks) trapped Duqaq (my better leader, who had moved against Robert from the north) between him and Robert. It’s going to be… interesting to see if I can get myself out of that. But while the size of my army is dwindling, I haven’t suffered any outright defeats(!), which is keeping me from having too big a disaster (yet).

Meanwhile, Both Antioch and Aleppo are under siege. Aleppo is a bit more worrisome, as one of my better leaders is trapped in there. Kerbogha, my best leader is set to arrive this turn with a large army. There’s a lot I’d like him to do…. Namely rescue Ridwan in Aleppo, break the siege of Antioch, and rescue Duqaq from the armies surrounding him, but he’ll probably only have a shot at one of them.

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I’m Burning with the Crusade Again!

by on March 19, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Posted In: MMO

Well, Burning Crusade‘s been out for about two months now, and there’s a lot to talk about, so this is likely to get very long. ^_^;

First off, our guild currently has four 70s in it. I am at the back of the pack with Dunain at 64 and Farmishi hitting 63 yesterday. (An interesting kind of ‘check-uary’ there, everyone’s so used to thinking of the final run up to 60, that it’s natural to say “54” when you mean “64”….) Admittedly, I am slowed down some by the fact I have other hobbies (like playing ASL with Patch).

Overall, I like Burning Crusade. Blizzard has done a wonderful job with all the new content. I do have some overall minor gripes. The hardware specs got pushed up with the expansion, and there’s no real acknowledgment of this anywhere in the promo material, leaving me to be surprised when my machine practically falls over dead the first time I go in Zangarmarsh (turning everything down to minimum has allowed it to be tolerable…). Beyond just the number of people who had marginal systems to begin with, I’m sure there’s a fair number who needed to adjust settings, and I think a little warning of this fact would have been prudent. Anyway, the other gripe is that I think they notched the item quality in Outland up too high. I understand that they want offer something to all those in their Tier 2/3 epics short of the new endgame content, but the random base world-drop/quest reward greens beating most of the blues our guild had seems a bit much to me.

I realized shortly after the release of BC, that I would probably prefer to switch to Farmishi as my main instead of Dunain. Along with this came the realization that the time to make the switch was a month before BC came out, so that I could position her properly. So, Dunain’s still my main… for now. The real obstacle is that they are both blacksmiths, and Dunain still has a good lead on her.

The guild as a whole is still getting the various crafting skills up, and we’re mostly entering the time when the recipes start actually wanting unusual items. Material du jour? Primals. Primal Earth, Primal Fire, Primal Life, Primal Mana… you name it and there’s something to collect of it. Last night was largely spent by the guild at large in collecting these types of materials to make Riding Crops for our high-levels. Dunain has just hit this type of thing himself, and the nice little store I’d built up isn’t nearly enough. But it looks like a little effort will keep Blanc in new armor nicely.

We’ve done a number of instance runs, though they’ve dropped off a bit lately. The highest one I’ve seen so far is the Mana Tombs in Auchindoun. Very nice, and we did pretty well, especially for a first run. Sadly, Dunain was too low level to get any quest for the place, so we need to do it again for him.

On the way to new endgame equipment, there’s a few options. There’s some small sets in the crafted items, a good number of very nice greens, and then there’s recolored versions of Dungeon 1 items. These last are generally nice socketed blue items from instance bosses geared towards the particular class who’s set it looks like. They start dropping in the first instances of BC, and are generally also the first socketed items you’re likely to see.

Anyway, I happened to get the breastplate for Farmishi’s set early, and thought it looked really nice. After finding out about the full set, I decided to get them all. So we ended up in our second round of Coilfang Reservoir runs about a week ago. Naturally, this is where the next pieces drop, and I figured Farmishi would be spending a fair amount of time in there getting all three pieces available. The runs went very well, and we did both of the low-level wings in one evening.

…And it turns out that it was Pally Night at Coilfang, as everything she wanted dropped, including some Warrior gear she can use for tanking (Smudge was on Shrimpette, so Farmishi was the only one present who could even use it). All told, Farmishi got five new pieces of equipment… only one of which she could immediately use. The other four all required level 63, and she was still part way through 62. Last night she finally made 63, and is looking quite snappy.

So now Farmishi wants to go to… the Mana Tombs. However, given the equipment and quests, she’s going to wait until she tips over into 54 64.

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Onward to Antioch!

by on March 4, 2007 at 11:38 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

I really need to catch up on WoW stuff now. But yesterday was another round of gaming at my place. As we had decided last time Patch, Mark and I tried out Onward Christian Soldiers in the multiplayer 1st Crusade scenario.

It comes with a “Quick Start” booklet that I handed copies of to everyone last time. They do help, some of our rules questions were answered by Patch looking them up in his copy, instead of my in the main rulebook. We only got four turns done, but were starting to get the hang of things, and some idea of what we’re doing. The current plan is to try it again next month, or back to Soldier Kings (which is much simpler) if we actually can snag someone else for the get-together.

While I don’t think there’s anything completely new in the game, the package is not one I’m used to. You can move as far as you want, but the further you go, the more attrition you suffer. Considering the Crusaders have no ability to get reinforcements, this is a big problem. Some attrition can be reduced by spending resources, but you need to have a city in the region to get those resources from. Figuring out what is a good way to take a city, and what is a poor way is something we’re still figuring out.

The two main Crusader factions (Northern and Southern Franks) were cursed with drawing low activation numbers all game, which meant they could barely move their armies around. Despite this, most of Mark’s Northern Franks ended the day under the walls of Antioch, trying to take the city. My Southern Franks had ended up at Edessa, not quite getting in the poorly-defended city before we ran out of time.

My other faction, the Germans, had been much more active, and skirmished their way to Aleppo. The untimely appearance of Patch’s large Mosul Turk army under Kerbogha may have been the end of them in another turn, but they had fought off several smaller attacks quite well. I hadn’t even looked at the charts before the game, but now I’m learning not to be scared of the less capable Muslim leaders, the combat system is pretty punishing on them.

Post-game notes; found a couple interesting things on BGG:

At the last second, they decided to cut down on the number of “Draw Event Card”s in the activation deck, and have each side draw one. Sadly, this isn’t in the rules or on the cards… -_-;;

I still can’t find the rule, but we should have each had an Event Card. Ah, there it is, at the end of the intro section on Event Cards, but not mentioned in the scenario setup.

And more:

Armenian bribery is during movement, there’s a couple passing mentions to the Diplomacy phase, because it was done there in early drafts.

Ravaging Finishes your activation, the Quick-start rules erroneously say you can Continue.

Independent factions can undertake their own actions against a city that’s already under siege. (Anyone can Assault, only one Siege can be on-going.)

I also need to re-examine Stops, Finishing and Continuing. I *think* you may need to roll to Continue when you arrive at a city before you do anything like start a Siege or Assault. That would tend to slow down the Crusaders even more… so I’m not sure there. Of course, with all those low-Campaign leaders, it might hurt the Moslems even more once you hit the middle game.

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