LOTRO: Fairly hard

 

Having missed out on the amazing dress of last festival, I was determined not to make the same mistake twice and check out Farmer's Faire in time. So there I was, heading out for the small town of Bywater in the Shire. I always love to visit this region, as the weather is always good. Besides, it's always nice not to get battered by some evil Dunlendings for a change.

There were an awful lot of hobbits about in Bywater, the place was crowded with them. A kind hobbit lady offered me to give me goods if I would collect festival tokens for her. I wasn't very impressed by the gardener's outfits she had in stock, but oh dear, she had a flower circlet I had never seen before. I had to get that thing! She also had a mushroom table which made me curious, as I have many mushroom decorations in my house (I always thought the flower pots were a bit underwhelming). It became apparent that I should collect these tokens for her. This turned out to be harder than I thought.

First of all, I didn't read any festival guides, since I rather just go there and find out myself what's there. So I tried to help out another hobbit lady with the huge amount of customers she got. The customer I addressed gave me a shopping list of what he needed and I eagerly went looking for these ingredients. Ah, there I saw the apples he requested! No, that wasn't correct, he wanted to get them in the right order as well. Spoiled little brat, I tell you! So alright, I had to find him some meat first then. Although there was a table were food was magically spawning and disappearing, it didn't have any meat, and even though I turned the whole faire upside down, I couldn't find any there either. I'm terrible at finding things. Of course the timer expired and I was so ashamed that I didn't dare to show my face to the market lady again. The debacle made me feel as depicted to the right.

The bounders were happy to give me another job. I had to address drunken hobbits and tell them to take a break. "That's good," I thought, "I'm always good at tracking down drunken elves, so how hard can it be?" Very hard, I found out. I had forgotten that hobbits don't get drunk. Well, most of them, that is. They drink so much that they pretty much built up an alcohol tolerance. And when they say things like "May the hair on your toes grow thick and curly" they're not drunk, but that's normal hobbit etiquette. After ten minutes of frantically monitoring feasting hobbits, none of them had said anything silly (and by silly, I mean above the average hobbit sillyness). I gave up on this faire of horrors and went to check out the nearby pond...

...where a lot of people where testing their luck with the fishing rod. It boiled down to "fish 10-50 times and be lucky". One quest required you to keep on fishing increasingly hard fish without catching the "bad fish". There was a deed for catching all tiers, and I think that meant 50 times not catching the bad fish. Not really my idea of fun, as you could still catch the wrong fish after spending half an hour pressing the fishing button 49 times (or actually 98 times, one for throwing the bait out, one more for pulling the fish in). It turned out you could barter each pile of fish for festival tokens, which cheered me up a bit. 

I got loads of tokens, enough to get myself the flower circlet I longer for. My grinding tolerance is very low, so I don't think I'll visit the fishermen any time soon again. I visited Bywater again, failed some more quests and had enough for today. I still have to try out Sandson's Farm and stealing mushrooms, so I'll do that another time. A kinnie with a *much* higher grinding tolerance than I returned from Sandson's Farm with 400 tokens "left over" (he was trying to get some deed done), so that does sounds promising. The best thing was that he bought me the mushroom table (so nice of him!), so now I've accomplished everything I wanted from the faire already. I'm now ready to construct and wear my new summer outfit, as the one I was wearing today is a bit warm in the pleasant environment of the Shire. Still, I will present it to you before I put it off:

       Raven's outfit       

• Hat of Deep Lore
• Cloak of the Raven's Claw
• Mantle of the Beneficent
• Lore-keeper's Robe - evendim blue
• Fingerless Gloves - evendim blue
• Shoes of the Stone-student - evendim blue

I recently won the shoulder parts in a raid skirmish and I love their fancy look. They even cover the ugly cloak thingies on your shoulders (see second picture from above). This outfit is one of my favorites as it's colourful yet classy and it is raven-themed (the raven is my favorite pet). I think it's a fitting set for a lore-master and I always use my raven when wearing it!

Skyrim: Rav goes Skyrim

The Steam summersale is over, and one thing I can conclude is that it's bad for your purse. I'm specifically talking about my boyfriend's purse, as he can hardly resist to buy everything. The positive side of this all is that I can 'steal' his games as well, so I now got many games on my menu! One of these games is the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim...

...wherein I immediately got stuck in the all too familiar trap of all such games: the character creation. I've already spoken before about my talent to take hours to pick a character, so please help me a bit. I created three characters I like, but I really can't choose which of the three I should continue with. As usual, I tried to give each their own characteristics and story. I've completed the introduction with each, but like them all in their own way. Which of the following characters should I stick to?

Who of the three?

1. Ravereth

Elf (Wood Elf)

Favorite weapon: Longbow and daggers (for the occasional sneaking)

Character: The hunter-type that has great knowledge of nature and wildlife around her. I hope I can fight with animals on my side.

The hunter playstyle usually doesn't appeal to me, but what I've seen so far in Skyrim actually looks like much fun. I started this character because I'd like to play something else than a human, and I can't set myself to play a cat or lizard (they just look so weird!). A wood elf of the hunter-type made sense to me.

2. Tessel

Human (Imperial)

Favorite weapon: Two-handed Sword

Character: This probably is the most 'normal' character of the three. Even though she herself is an Imperial, she fled with the rebellion after she was caught and almost beheaded for seemingly no reason by Imperial guards. She doesn't know which side to pick and is probably a lonely survivor type.

Funnily enough, this character looks the most like I do in real life (both in fighting style as in looks), but feels the hardest for me to play. Even though I have a lot of experience with medieval sword fighting as a sport, I usually don't play melee classes in games. That has a reason: I generally suck more at it.

3. Ravanel

Human (Nord)

Favorite weapon: Magic

Character: Ravanel is a fiery, talented girl, who loves to put things on fire and brawl potions. Eager to learn new scrolls and zapping left and right, you don't want to be on the wrong side of her.

I usually play mage-like classes in games and generally love them. In fact, I play them so often that I wouldn't mind playing something else now. Still, I enjoyed my mage elf in Oblivion (magic was great in that game) and think I will in Skyrim as well.

First impression

I love what I'm seeing in Skyrim. So far, it looks like Oblivion, but... better. The landscape is well done and the light is nice... somehow it all looks very realistic and medieval. The start of the story was also very exciting, with nearly being beheaded and having to run through a very realistic burning village from a dragon and all. In Oblivion, I got a bit bored by the repeating storyline (close this hell gate, close that hell gate, close this hell gate... etc), but there doesn't seem to be anything like that in Skyrim, as far as I've seen. I can't wait to get starting, at least, as soon as I know which character I should continue with.

So have you also played Skyrim? And do you know any tricks / do you have a a favorite of the three characters above? Let me know!

SWTOR: Pursuing the matrix

Hunt for the datacrons

I should stop writing about datacrons. Really, it starts to sound like some sort of fetish of mine. Truth to be told, datacrons are just very addictive, even though I'm extremely bad at finding them. Right after my first Star Wars raid ("operation"), I and my guildmates took the art of datacron hunting to the next level by roaming the galaxy to find a dozen of them. On Corellia, we passed through a hologram of a door that I doubtlessly had passed without noticing a thousand times... and found a datacron. On Nar Shadaa, we jumped up some crates and then some tubes... and found a matrix cube. Aargh! You know those crates I talked about when I was so determined to find at least one datacron on Nar Shadaa? I had jumped those exact same crates back then, saw the tubes and thought "Nah, that's too high, there's no way I get up there and there's nothing there". Turns out there was. Gah, so close!

Matrix cube or datacron?

So that evening, we hunted both matrix cubes and datacrons: two things that look almost the same, but have a different effect. Datacrons (from "data holocron") are easy to explain: they give you a permanent bonus to an attribute (willpower, strength, presence... etc, you know the drill). Matrix cubes are another story. I had vaguely heard about them before, but didn't really know how they worked. So, just in case you're a noob like me, here's a short explanation.

Some datacrons will not give you an attribute, but will give you a colour shard instead. A combination of three of these shards can be used to make an item (also called a "matrix cube") that fits in a relic slot. There is one matrix cube for each class/role and it will have the best stats of all relics you will encounter in the game, so it's definitely worth getting one. The level 50 matrix cubes (there are also lower level ones) require three shards of the same colour. This is what you do:

1. Find out which shard colours you need for the (level 50) matrix cube of your choice:

* Note how force users and non-force users may pick cubes with the same name, but with different stats. 

** The stats of these cubes are from various websites, I haven't checked them all myself.

2. Find out where to get shards of the colours you need:

For instance, I found a very easy red shard in a hut on the roof of a base on Illum. There might be easier and harder places depending on what colours you need. It's probably best to just look it up in this post from Gallitin on Starwarzone.net.

3. Go to the Jedi temple on Coruscant and combine your shards into a relic. (Or, if you are evil, the Sith temple on Dromund Kaas.)
Republictrooper.com has a guide in case you don't manage to do it by yourself.

Tadaa! You got a relic!

Athletic tricks

While looking for datacrons on your own can be quite frustrating, it was major fun with my guild. Some places where so horribly hard to get to! Some would no doubt have taken hours to do without mistakes, but luckily we used to some tricks:

• Rescue (Jedi sage skill): pulls the target towards you
• This was great for pulling other people up to some hard-to-reach buildings. We were with two sages, so we could pull each other up if something went wrong. Ideal!
• Guardian leap (Jedi guardian skill): jumps towards the target
• Handy for guards who accidentally jump down at the wrong spot. As presented by my boyfriend on the picture below.

My favorite place was a crawler on Tatooine, where you could only get up if one person stood in front of it and pulled you, and you jumped when you were just above that person. Once one sage was up, we used Rescue to pull the others up (this apparently was the alternative to the buggy balloon ride). A bit complicated, but so much fun.

Own discovery

While "datacron hunting" was great, finding a datacron all by yourself still is the best experience. Yesterday I was doing the Tatooine bonus quest series on my sentinel, when I noticed a pink datacron on a rock wall. It was out of reach (too high), but it looked like there was a cave leading to it. In the evening, I returned to look for the cave entrance together with my boyfriend. It was well hidden, but we did find it, hurray! It even turned out to increase my will, which is always a good thing for a sage. To the right you see the location details, just for personal future reference (spoiler). You can see the datacron from the road, but you'll have to jump down on some rocks in the gorge west of it to get to the cave entrance.

Valuable?

I don't know how much it's worth to really go find all those datacrons. Finding that will datacron yesterday gave me +3 willpower, and on the 1500+ I already got, that really isn't so much. I wonder how much of a stats boost you would get by finding all the datacrons.  Would it be something like +50 to all stats? In that case it would be a good thing to do, but finding a single one doesn't immediately make a noticable difference. Nevertheless, I'd like to get them all eventually, for completionist and fun reasons.  

Okay, that was the last time I talked (at length) about datacrons, I promise!

Back from the mud, living on a tree

Catching steam

So I'm back from my holiday, which turned out to contain a lot of wet feet, dirt, rain and mosquitoes (why did nobody tell me it was going to be a Neeker-breeker marshes kind of re-enactment?), but it was a lot of fun nonetheless. The first game-related thing I did when I got home was something I had been planning for a long time: I installed Steam on my computer. For those who don't know the program: Steam is a platform wherein you can buy games, and connect with friends. Remember back when we used to be online on MSN all the time? Well, much like that, but then it's even more awesome, because you can talk to each other while being in-game, even if you're playing different games. It has an overlay that's very neatly done. Anyway, I should stop advertising for Steam, I'll just conclude with saying I wish I'd started using it a long time ago.

To be able to add friends in Steam yourself, you need to own at least one game (protection against spammers etc, I think). It so happens there's a summer sale going on (some games are 80% off, really, ridiculous prices), and I suddenly found two games gifted to me by my boyfriend: Myst V and Botanicula. Such a great surprise! And it was the latter game that I tried out first - it immediately stole my heart.

Botanicula

Botanicula is a game about... yeah, what is it about, really? It is a game without spoken words, a game of images and sounds only, and I love it. You need to explore and discover yourself what's going on and what you need to do through these images and sounds only. Everything feels very intuitive, though (apart from the weird shit that happens after you've solved something). Base story? You live on a tree and need to save the beautiful and special treelife from some sort of evil black spider creatures. I think. To be honest, playing this game for the most part creates the impression of being on a magic mushroom trip and there's no end to it.

Like:

• Awesome animations, with all sorts of funny and, above all, super cute creatures.
• Fun music and great sounds, of which almost all are made by voice.
• There are many 'easter eggs', funny animations of species to discover that have no use to the main story but are just, well, fun.
• Overall: playing this game feels like looking at art, not just like playing a game.

Dislike:

• Getting 'stuck' and spending time running around, clicking everything left and right in frustration before you find out how to proceed. It's a game rated for 7 years and older, so I guess that explains a lot about me...! Luckily this doesn't happen too often.

Overall, I think this is a great game to play in between other games. It keeps surprising you. You shouldn't play it for too long, though, as you'll start to feel a bit dizzy (at least I did). It's typically a game that you'll either love or hate.

Bestiary

One of the most fun things in Botanicula are the many different creatures you encounter on your tree, of which many are not really interesting for the level continuation, but do add a lot of fluff. Their only use is a spot as a card in your collection book, which I'd like to get as complete as possible. Here are some examples from screenshots I took:

Top left: Soukac

Third from the left, second row: Dzin

Bottom left: Zio A

As you can see, the names of many of these creatures are unknown, but the ones that do have a name have an alien one that sounds a bit Czech (the nationality of the game developers). I thought it would give some sort of impression of what weird stuff you'll encounter.

Curious?

Check:

• More screenshots at my Botanicula gallery 
• Free demo with the first level playable online at Botanicula.net
• "WTF is Botanicula" - a hilarious video review:

There and back again

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with weary feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

I'll be on a trip until the third week of July. Let's say it's a sort of Middle-earth re-enact thing, as we're going to be camping, cooking on fire and living without electricity and shower etc. Instead of horses we'll have bicycles. You might already see this one coming: I won't be able to blog anything either. Be sure to check in after a while, though: I'll be back and kicking around July 20th. See you then!

SWTOR: Orokeets in the desert

Look at me, I found a bird to match with my new Columni robe! Don't we look great together? I promise I won't ditch it if I find a differently tinted robe in the future, honest!

So after the successful Operation I wrote about yesterday, we went hunting some holocrons and matrix cubes with those that stayed. On Tatooine, someone miraculously pulled five eggs out his bag, and asked if we would like one. Of course we did!

So now our journey began. We searched for a water tower in Archorhead to get refreshed by some water (a buff called "Refreshed and Sustained") that would protect us from the strong desert sun. Then we traveled to the furthest reach of the known desert, in the far west of the planet. You had to take your egg with you under a construction of solar cells to make it hatch, and then quickly run away from it so you wouldn't burn yourself. And then we all had our sweet little green orokeets!

Want an orokeet as well?

I'm really a hypocritical girl in the sense that I don't enjoy looking up cheats and locations on the internet myself if I haven't done something before, but I'm fine with it if others do so for me, as long as it gives me the feeling I've discovered it in-game with friends. The best feeling is of course if you literally walk around and discover something by accident, but it's near impossible to get all achievements of Star Wars done without spending a lot of time being bored and running around in vain. For me, that would take a lifetime.

I can't tell you myself where to get the egg since it was a gift, but if you're not such a hypocrite as I: here's a good Orokeet pet guide at STWOR Spy.

You can also watch a video tour here:

Good luck!

SWTOR: A new home

We've done it, we've found a guild! And it seems to be a damn nice one, too. We dismissed the thought of a raiding kin because we're also raiding in Lord of the Rings Online and don't want to commit to four days a week, and then we talked to an old friend and he just invited us to his, that included some other old acquaintances of us as well. They raid a bit, but also are a social guild, so it seemed perfect for us. What happened then, was not really what I anticipated...

Guild chat, along the lines of:

Member 1: Hmm, only 7 on for the raid tonight.

Member 2: I rather go watch the football finale, to be honest.

Member 1: Tiger and Rav, would you like to come?

Me: Erm, are you serious? You do realize that we kinda dinged level 50 yesterday, right? Like, literally.

Member 1: We've never serious.

Me: Just saying, inviting us will result in certain death.

Member 1: Sounds good, you're in.

So there we went, with our amazingly crap gear (I was wearing level 41 homemade implants and other horrors), to our first Operation ever. And apparently that was...

Eternity vault 

in Story mode, and I was supposed the heal the buggers. Which was actually good, because I've never DPS'ed before and my gear, though crap, is totally focused on alacrity (= diminished inductions). It was sort of scary, though, to be responsible of keeping people alive right away.

This Balrog-like fiery boss ("Gharj") could've known it wasn't going to end well when he saw himself confronted with this wood of lightsabers. This was pretty fun, jumping around a bit, healing everyone back up when we were together. He didn't live long.

This was Storymode, but I must admit that I'm not really sure why we had to fight this giant Rakata ("Soa"). Either way, we did. Note how I'm still wearing the boring brown Corellia sage robe here.

This one was actually a bit tricky and luckily the other healer knew where to jump and when to take a short pause and heal everyone up with Salvation. I was trying to be a good healing bot and follow the orders, and luckily we made this one too.

But this was not all, no, apparently they thought we didn't die enough, so we had to try harder at a place called:

Karagga's Palace  

Also known as the place of the "Hutt with the Hat". Apparently you can win that ridiculous hat that the fat brown Hutt on the picture below is wearing.

Did you notice my awesome, rose-ring parakeet coloured new robe? I was trying to pass at stuff that dropped in Eternity Vault, but it didn't really work (it probably all was crap to them and the other healer already got everything) and they gave me two pieces of the Columni set, which gave me a set bonus and was like hundred times better than what I was wearing. These guys are far too nice for me.

I love the picture above, showing the first boss of Karagga's Palace. I can't recall exactly what he did, but we apparently beat him, because we ended up...

...dead here, at the third boss ("Something Crusher"), where you can see the tragic happening. We were eaten alive! Only once, though, after that we made it.

Experience

This night was... So. Much. Fun. It was incredibly nice of my guildmates to take two rookies like us with them and we had so many laughs on Mumble (the voice program they use, it's much like Ventrilo). It was all very overwhelming to me. I hadn't expected that the Operations would feel all that new to me. In Lord of the Rings Online I always have a good sense of what's going on, even if I have never done the fight before. Now I realize that five years of playing Lord of the Rings Online has just made me very accustomed to recognizing mechanics in that game, and I'll have to develop the same reflexes in Star Wars. Still, it would have been a totally different story if I would never ever have raided at all.

For healing I'll need some more experience to get the hang of it. For many fights it seems to boil down to if you need to save your big AoE heal ("Salvation") for a certain spot or not, and that wasn't always very clear. I might have been a bit too hesitant with it because of that at certain times. However, the few wipes we had were more due to tanking at the wrong spot and that sort of thing than due to lack of healing, I think (hope). Of course, now I've said this, the other healer of the group is probably going to come to me and will say he had a terrible workload because of me sucking, hehe. Nah, I think there is hope here.

Now I just feel really humbled at all the kindness offered to me tonight and want to stick around and do something nice to them back in the future. We stopped the raid because it was getting late, but we went on with a small group doing other things, of which I will tell in later posts. I ended up going to bed at 3 am with a very happy feeling.