Frigate Fun

by on March 3, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Posted In: SFB

Well, due to job situation, Patch couldn’t make it online Wed night for a little SFB on our effort to finish off the Mantor battle.

I was going to continue introducing Mark to F&E with that time, but realized the save files are on a computer that isn’t plugged in at the moment. So we went back to SFB and started a little L-FF vs. Z-FF fight. Got through a turn and a half in 1:10. Not bad at all for online.

Anyway, it’s been different. A little bit of shield plinking. He’s eroded my #6 and #5, I’ve hit his #6 and #4. I’ve missed twice with my one disruptor, which is annoying.

He’s performed two HETs already. Thanks to a Breakdown of 6, he can get away with it, and it’s certainly playing havoc with where I think he’s going. I’d personally say they were not the best thing to do to pursue the battle.

But he’s actually doing them. Which I think is the point for him at the moment. Now I just need to get him to read the sign at the Academy that says “Use your tractors damnit.”

A decade ago, that was my problem. I can’t remember if I ever used my tractors back then (at least without prompting from Colin). Three attempted Kzinti anchors is a big improvement, even if I did throw away a FF on the successful one, though I should probably consider them for drone defense more.

Heh, I can teach an old fox new tricks. ^_^

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Razelikh the Defiler

by on February 27, 2006 at 1:30 pm
Posted In: MMO

Well, in the aftermath of An’Quiraj, we ended up pursuing the Fallen Hero of the Horde quest line, and having a grand time with it. We were slightly over-level for much of the chain, but it was obvious that it was ramping up fast to a climax that would want high levels and a full group. So that night, Blanc, Dunain and Blondiewood freed souls from being bound to this plane, killed a gigantic felhound, learned the true name of a demon, and gathered the materials for a demon-hunting weapon from… crystalized giant poo.

I now know much more about giant biology than I have any desire to.

Anyway, much of the rest of the week was spent on get getting Dejek and Gotesfaust up to speed on the chain, and finishing up such things as visiting Dunain’s teacher so he can forge the weapons. (Sigh, the game won’t trust Dunain to forge his own weapons….)

So, that left killing his three lieutenants before moving onto the big baddie. We got the group together, and set off. With a full group… lets just say there wasn’t much left of them and leave it at that.

So we set off to the Fallen Hero to get the final part of the chain. …And to celebrate Blondiewood’s 60th! The entire chain is fairly XP heavy, and the turn-in for this part put her over. So we now have two 60s for Muse and one for Moos.

So, then off to summon and kill Razelikh. Oh and the two other elites he summons. No problem!

Well, first problem: you summon him on top of a mountain. You get to the top of the mountain by stepping onto this giant rune in the ground (you get down much the same way). But my video card decided it didn’t like it, so I couldn’t see the rune. This was very confusing, as I teleported a couple times without any idea why. But we worked around it once I looked over at Smudge’s monitor and saw what was going on.

Second problem: We didn’t sort out what was going on properly. Blanc lost aggro, and well, we ended with a wipe with him about half down.

Things went much better the second try, until Blanc and Blondiewood got punted off the mountain despite our efforts to prevent that. They had a soft landing, and nearly got back in time, but it didn’t really work out. Mr. Annoying Boss (^_^) was down to maybe 1/6 health.

What we learned was that he really is immune to most everything. Including all of Blanc’s taunt abilities, which explains what happened the first time.

Anyway, a just a few tweaks to account for placement and all the darn immunities, and third time’s the charm!

In other news, Farmishi made 40 yesterday. I knew paladins get their mount for free, but I was all set to go adventuring for it… and when I arrive at the Cathedral of Light, they just hand it over to me! -sigh- I wouldn’t have minded some, you know, effort?

And, she’s now a weaponsmith. I pushed her to 40 because I was out of bank space to hold the materials I was collecting for that, and what I had on hand *barely* lasted through the skill-up process. (Anyone need Heavy Mithril Gloves?)

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All Frigates, All the Time

by on February 19, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Posted In: SFB

After three Kzinti FFs came waltzing up to a Fed CA and practically crippled it in one go, Mark and Patch expressed interest in learning more about how frigates operate. I had had thoughts towards that some time back, so working up a three-way frigate squadron battle wasn’t a problem.

We’ve been fiddling around with terrain lately, and at the last second decided to plop a black hole into the mix (not something I’d fight near in real life, but it makes for a fun game).

Y138

Patch James Mark
Klingon Kzinti Lyran
F5 71 FF 62 FF 62
E4 55 FF 62 FF 62
E4 55 FF 62 FF 62
Total 181 186 186

The game started with everyone opting to circle the black hole in the same direction. I wanted to hit the Klingons first, instead of last this time. He wanted to tangle with Mark instead of me for a change, and Mark was trying to engage me. We really had decided on the black hole at the last moment, that is to say after we had done the first turn’s energy allocation, so most of us weren’t going as fast as we’d like with the Great Attractor around, and we treated it with some respect. After that, we speeded up and the Klingons got a bit daring for turn 2, and I followed suit for the end of 2 and most of 3.

For turn 3, I ended up with a Close Encounter of the Exchange Weapons Fire Kind with the Lyrans. One of them had already been damaged and had split off, so I was quite willing to go 3 vs. 2 with them. As they had already fired off the disruptors at longer range, it ended with me doing good amounts of damage to both of them, and one of mine taking a decent set of internals, plus a few downed shields. I considered doing a Kzinti anchor during the range 0(!) pass (and should have), but held off the battery power.

A little later, Patch showed nice drone technique by passing above (relative to the black hole) the shot-up Lyrans and firing off drones that were accelerated in by the black hole. Mark was already cruising at the limit of the ‘safe zone’ (right outside the point of no return), had no weapons or power left, and had to eat both of them.

After that, Patch and I tangled at the beginning of 4. I got my wounded FF shot up some more, but it was still operational. At the same time my untouched FF went to range 1 of the F5, tractored and unloaded. It didn’t stay untouched for long, but there were more speed-8 drones in the area than available phasers. Getting them to hit took much of the turn, and crippled the F5. At this point the tractored pair were slowly headed for the black hole. I decided to see if I could get the F5 to go down the drain and release for my own escape.

Mistake #1: I rode it down too long. I should have realized I hadn’t kept us as far over to the side as I needed and given up (but maybe auctioned at the turn break for another round of drones). Mistake #2: when it was obvious that he’d get us both killed, I misread the situation and dropped the tractor before I realized that the increase in turn mode would still kill me (with no HET available in time to boot).

So I threw away a perfectly good frigate for no real purpose. I may be the guest of honor at the Patriarch’s next banquet again. T_T

We called it a day, well satisfied. By the points I figured out, me and Patch are about tied (I gave him full credit for my FF…). I realized later that everyone else was disengaging, so I should get points for that, but I don’t think I deserve a victory after that big a muff anyway.

The calendar now advances to Y140, and our next battle is going to be Patch and Mark together against a force of (sub-light!) Romulans. After fast Kzinti ships with slow drones, I figure sub-light Romulans with fast plasma torpedoes should be an interesting change of pace. They’re a bit worried by the excessively high crunch power, I’m worried about whether I’ll even get to hit….

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This is Not Blackrock Depths…

by on February 19, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Posted In: MMO

Well, we had scheduled to do a BRD run this Saturday. The bad news is that one guildie mis-read my notice of clearing my Sat for action as a move of the run to Sun, where I had cleared my SFB game to.

This… irked me some, as I’d really gotten stoked up for this run. But it isn’t really anyone’s fault.

So, we ended up with a Scarlet Monestary run with the second-tier characters instead. Since this was an emergency re-org thing, it wasn’t all that well organized. I did the main pre-req early Sat, and then forgot to grab the sequel that actually goes into SM. Shrimpette was along, but is still too low level to even do the pre-req, so at least Farmishi is in good company when we make another stab at that.

The bit of a run we did do (for Mythology of the Titans), went well. It was me (Farmishi: Pally), Shrimpette (Warlock), Brunev (Mage), and Thermidor (Mage). Everyone had something to do, the two mages had a mage quest, and the ‘low’ three had Mythology, and Brunev had everything. So, I was right at level (38) and playing Main Tank and Main Healer. I’m not exactly experienced at either in a real group situation. We had about four wipes, one right after the soulstone on me gave out… oops. And one against the final boss in the Cathedral. I managed to rezz all the corpses away from him, and the second try worked out pretty well.

The fun part was getting back through all the respawns to the entrance. It did not go well, and we just couldn’t stop getting real wild adds. There was one where we ended up with about 12 guys all told (not all at once thankfully!), and I actually kept us going on that one. The next time didn’t work out so well. So, we took our free trip to the graveyard, picked up our bodies at the beginning of the instance, and headed home.

Well, not quite home. Shrimpette was still needing to do Shadowfang Keep for part of a Warlock quest, so we headed out to there. We ended up picking up a Rogue by the name of Bliss. I’m still not sure what happened… because she zoomed through most everything, despite being about 5 levels under Shirmpette (the lowest Muse present), leaving us to try and keep up. Afterwards, the stats showed her and Thermi (20 levels above her!) as having done about the same amount of damage through the instance, with me at a nice 20% (out of 5 people). And I was healing. One death, Shrimpette (easily fixed ^_^).

I was quite happy to get out and do something more sedate, like run Thousand Needles in my ‘show’ armor (which puts me down by about a third of my armor value). She certainly knew her stuff, but is a bit too overachieving for me. ^_^;

And, in addition to the SM-run discussed under the cut, three of the same people are doing another SM run right now on their Moos characters. (Not me, Malzina still needs to do Wailing Cavern….)

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Wondercon 2006

by on February 15, 2006 at 10:14 am
Posted In: Conventions

I was kind of hoping that Smudge would say something about this one. She has a silly con quote and everything…. (Edit: So of course she posts while I’m posting…. X_X )

Anyway, Wondercon is a regional comic-book convention held in San Francisco, and owned by SDCCI.

I could say they’re turing it into a mini-ComicCon, but while that matches the surface, it doesn’t really describe what’s going on.

Similarities: It is growing fast. It was held in Moscone West this year, and the Fire Marshal closed off the dealer’s room for part of Saturday for overcrowding. Estimates handed out to the city businesses are woefully underrepresented. The Taxi driver on Friday said they were expecting ‘about 500 people’ this year. Um, Wondercon had something like 14,500 last year? Hello? Chamber of Commerce, Reality calling….

With it getting too big for Moscone West, there’s not much to do to expand the dealer’s (overcrowded) room without splitting it between two locations. There’s a few things they can take out, like the open gaming which was 90% deserted the entire time (the other 10% being SJG-sponsored demos).

Sales were poor. I don’t think we made back the relatively low table cost. We were stuck in a corner of Artist Alley that seemed to get less traffic than the rest. But even with the people who went by, it was hard to grab their attention at all. Wondercon seems to have been filled with people there to get their fix of whatever it is they’re already into, and have no interest in anything else.

All too often it feels like the comic industry as a whole is becoming more and more like this.

ComicCon itself seems to fight this trend, but for all I know it’s just so large that the minuscule percentage of people looking for something new turns into a noticeable number.

I did what I could to buck the trend, and went hunting for something new. I didn’t find much that caught my eye, but did come home with a couple new things:

Tales of the Moonlight Cutter is a pair (so far) of done-in-one stories about a ghost hunter in 12th-century China. He’s done his research on history, but they are (deliberately) Wu-Xia stories. The storytelling is okay (certainly nothing wrong with it), and the art is very strong.

A Monk’s Tale is also set in ancient/medieval China, but draws it’s inspiration from Chinese history, rather than hewing to any particular period. The story is a very warm adventure tale of three sheltered monks making their way across a China wracked by civil war and a corrupt military. Well recommended with engaging characters, a good story, and some very nice penciled art.

I’m not generally a big kung-fu fan, but that’s what the new stuff I happened to find was.

Not new, but I was happy to see the creator of Little Bat Koku, which I discovered last year, again.

Between the corner of the room given over to Playboy/porn or whatnot starlets, and various girl-attendees that seem to have installed springs under their shirts, the con needs a jiggle-counter…. -_-;

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