LOTRO: A captain, a hunter and a champion enter a deserted bar

Somewhere mid December, I managed to login to LotRO.

I had been procrastinating logging into the game ever since Helm's Deep has been released because of the prospect of having to:

• realize how few skills my characters have left;
• check out how the new skill trees work and what everything does;
• actually spend points in a skill tree;
• check if any game mechanics/stats have changed;
• figuring out what legacies are available and how useful they are in the new system;
• actually spend my points on my legendary items;
• move my skills to useful places;
• set new keybinds to my skills;
• get rid of the junk in my bags;
• try out some new content;
• realize it sucks.

(If you skipped reading the above list because it looked boring, that's okay. Its content feels very boring to me too, so it's only fitting.)

So when I logged into LotRO, it was the first day for me in the new era of Helm's Deep.

I logged my level 84 captain (I could not bring myself to level that last bit to 85 before the expansion) and tried very much not to stare at the half empty skill bar that was hers. It looked a bit like a mouth with half the teeth rotten and fallen out. (Tiger compares it to gatenkaas, cheese with holes, but I'll go for the horror option.) While she was completing deeds all by herself over a course of five minutes (apparently the deeds were new but got completed retroactively), I discovered the presence of two others online in my kinship, both Star Wars players as well. I'll refer to them here as the Hunter and the Champion. Our characters were level 84, 85 and 86 respectively - not very impressive considering Helm's Deep has been out for several weeks by now. I tore my eyes from the emptiness of that what was supposed to be my skill bar and concentrated on the kinchat instead.

The Champion: "Are we all just here because SWTOR has maintainance?"

I indeed had tried to log into Star Wars earlier, but decided to give LotRO a try since the servers were down.

Me: "Errrr, maybe."

The Hunter (who happened to be on his warden, to make things more confusing): "Haha, perhaps."

We laughed because we had caught each other red-handed. (I'm writing "we" here, because it almost felt as if we were physically in the same space - although I may just as well have been the only one who was smiling.)

The Hunter: "I logged in earlier this morning to see if there was anyone on, but nobody came."

I explained how I had procrastinated logging in for such a long time because of the prospect of all the chores: spending points on my legendary items (LI's), skill trees, trying to find a space for all the items in my inventory... It was met with general agreement.

The Hunter revealed: "I haven't spent my LI points either."

Me: "But you just told me your hunter has reached the dazzling heights of level 89!"

The Hunter: "I mostly leveled by handing in quests that I'd completed before Helm's Deep... I did do some quests of the epic storyline, but couldn't be bothered to do anything with my LI's."

I took a last desperate glance at my half empty skill bar and logged off again. And even though I had not done a single thing in-game, I somehow was smiling like a maniac.

LOTRO: Belated wishes

This is the Christmas card I sent in December to friends and family while I was too absorbed with studying to spare some time to read and write blogs. On real photo paper, yes, I am that old fashioned.

What, you don't read Elvish? No worries, the text is plain English, merely written with Tengwar signs. You can find some help here. 

The best reaction was from a male friend: "You always say K. and I are such nerds (NB their favorite topic in my vicinity seems to be the Ubuntu operating system), but at least we don't send our friends Christmas cards with our in-game characters!"

Jokes aside, I'm having a bit more fun in games again and I have even felt the urge to make some posts, so you can expect some to follow this month. I'm hoping for a better year to come (from a personal viewpoint it's hard to beat the depths of 2013, but let's not tempt fate), with lots of games, discoveries, creative posts, comments and new friends. All the best for 2014!

SWTOR: Dun dun dun

Is has been a while since the last post. I didn't even make my golden one-post-a-week goal, oh my! The worst part is that I even can't seem to feel guilty about it.

The last couple of weeks I've had to digest some bad news. In fact, I'm still digesting it. No, don't worry, I won't fall over and die (yet). I usually keep my personal stuff out of the way of this blog, but I guess in this case it's relevant in the sense that I've spent little time in games lately - simply because I just do not care so much about games right now. I want to spend the time I have on things that I consider meaningful: my studies and the people I care about (uhm, maybe not necessarily in that order!). I guess my life is just a bit more off-line than in games right now and it is hard to find enthusiasm to write here as a result.

School time: priorities in life, anyone?

Oh, I do know games are meaningful. After all, how could they not be when I met my Tiger in an online game? The whole gaming blog network itself is prove that they have meaning. However, for me at this moment other things provide more meaning.

For the record: this does not mean I'm quitting this blog. My posts just might be a bit less numerous right now, because there is enough stress in the world without having to worry about posting schedules. And this is just so that you know.

Enough!

Okay, Rav, enough of this emo-shit already. If you're not providing me with happy stories on your in-game experiences, where should I go else? Besides, why are you taunting me with these sexy vanguard pictures?

I have to admit that I did play *some* Star Wars in the past weeks, although not as actively as usual. I've attended the progression team runs of Obviously on Imp side, and I've played some lowbie PvP on my vanguard Xialin with Tiger and friends. I finally finished chapter 2 of the class story on her, which meant I received my last legacy-wide buff. I now have all four class buffs on every character, so that's worth a little hurray.

Unfortunately, my XO Elara got injured during the chapter, and much to my dismay I found that she is now greyed out from my companion panel! As she is still recovering, I'm forced to play with other companions in her stead. The whole operation had already been quite the challenge because the story forced me to play with Yunn and then Vik as my companions, and they walk around in the green gear I got them with (so they basically just fell over and died in each fight). Normally, I only play with Elara, as I like both her healing and her character. As a result, she is the only one properly geared for my level.

In a rush to get Elara back, I completed the next part of the story and freed some diplomats. However, this still turned out not to be enough: her character is still greyed out on the companion panel. In the meanwhile, Elara's companion bribes gifts keep piling up in my inventory.

Seriously though, I got super scared when I saw Elara lying down like that, I thought she was dead! Even though my virtual crew assured me that her injuries were bad but she was going to be okay, I'm still worried. I guess even in games as much as in life, all I want is just a happy end.

LOTRO: The Balewood

Help, I'm surrounded by Ents!

I wasn't disappointed when Tiger and I ventured into the Balewood: it was full of Ents. In fact, we seemed to be surrounded by them!

A good wood

Har har, that rhymes! I really love the look of this wood. It has a pastel green-blueish teint that is very pretty, and the trees are done in a manner which makes you really feel like you are walking through a wood. I don't know if you remember the first large wood that the developers made, the Old Forest? It is still my favourite wood up until this day, and it created the illusion of being one big maze very well (I always got lost in there, but I did not mind), but Balewood is in all ways its superior. Here there are no impenetrable "walls of trees", a cheap way of filling the forest up, but every single tree is there. It truly feels like walking through a real forest, with dense and less dense parts, although it's sometimes a bit heavy on the computer and trees may appear right in front of you at the last moment. 

My heart broke at the Ent's tale of the bringing down of one of the oldest trees of the Balewood by orcs. The tree fought back and many orcs died because of it, but eventually it was brought down. It was such a terrible thing to have to look at.

This conflicted and helpless feeling only became worse when I had to do a Nurzum session play and actually had to play the monster, having to kill Ents left and right. But but... I don't want to kill Ents! Yet I had to, to continue the story. I also felt a bit sorry for Nurzum, because he had only three skills in total. It must be such a boring existence, you're bound to get frustrated and violent like that, right? I guess it's all to mentally prepare us for our 'challenging' skill trees with Helm's Deep. /sarcasm

We finished all the quests in Balewood, and I must say that I found this the most awesome part of Wildermore. The quests were fun and the wood itself with all the Ent tales felt very immersive. A good ending of the long and very elaborate Wildermore region.

SWTOR: I have saved the galaxy

To jump or not to jump - can the voices in my head please shut up?

It's been over a month or so since the new raids on Oricon have been launched, and yet I haven't spoken a word about it. What is happening? Have I grown fat and have I retired from raids? I can comfort you and tell you that this is not the case. In fact, I have been meaning to write something about our raid progression, but I always end up feeling that my writing about raids is so utterly boring. Somehow it seems more fun to write about trivial things such as a funny billboard or in-game fashion, and thus you all believe I'm frisking about, looking at flowers while sometimes participating in a raid, while it is actually more the other way around.

As my Republic guild has ceased to do progression raids for now, my actual 'main' in terms of who I play the most and accumulates the best gear has switched from sage Ravanel to my sorcerer Fárah. It is a nice feeling to play with great players and discover the new raids with them. The Dread Fortress was easily overcome (I'm not counting getting terribly lost in the crystal-maze here!) on hardmode, with the exception of the last boss, the one with those arms and fingers randomly emerging from the ground.

It took us a couple of tries to conclude that our unintentional handicap of having four melee DPS was really holding us back in this case. Somehow our best DPSers tend to play marauders (3x) and operative (1x). Not a conscious choice, but something that just came to be as a result of personal preference of the players. At the end there is a phase in which everyone needs to be physically close to a finger (each has one) and everyone takes a lot of damage. Once we let our operative spec heals and our healing merc DPS we could focus these fingers a little bit better, and apparently having one ranged DPS saved us just enough damage taken to clear the fight in one go. Our merc had never played DPS in raids before and both switched players did not have gear for their role, and yet it made all the difference. Funny how these things work sometimes.

Then there was the Dread Palace. We were amazed at how easy the first boss was: we did it on our first try without knowing of any tactics. The second boss was trickier, but worked out fine when we had figured the right way of dealing with the tiles. The third boss with present and past took some time to work out, but was very much fun. I really like the fight's design. After that there's the arena-in-space boss (picture above) which wasn't that complicated, but struck us with movement, range and boss mechanics bugs that I, simple healer, too obsessed with looking at health bars, didn't all get but were holding as back. So we need a couple of tries here each week, depending on our luck factor with the bugs - sometimes it's done in one go, sometimes not.

Uhm yeah. Sorry about the "arena-in-space boss" terminology, but there are so many dread masters and they keep on returning from death during the various raids that I can't hold them apart anymore. I'll just have to hope you understand.

The last fight of the Dread Palace took us weeks to figure out, though. I experienced the fight as very healing intensive and the fact that I got much better gear throughout the weeks didn't make a noticeable difference. I came in that state caused by repetition, I don't know if you know the feeling: I knew exactly when to use which heal on who at the first part of the fight. It's like your hands take over the keyboard, working together with your brain in a sync at a pace that your own thoughts cannot follow anymore. It is this rarely occurring flow that I really like about end game raiding.

This Sunday the time was there: we finally took down the last boss of the Dread Palace on hardmode and it was great. Bye bye, dread masters!

Dread master Tyrans having a bad day: defeated by Rav and her team

There is no nightmare mode of the Oricron raids (yet), so we have beaten the new content. What now? Luckily Bioware has provided us with many ways of saving the galaxy over and over again. After our final victory the night was still young, so we cleared the first boss of Scum & Villany on nightmare mode. We haven't looked further inside there yet, so working on that will be our next goal.

NBI: It's almost over

The last day of October, and thus the last day of the Newbie Blogger Initiative 2013 today! Also, confession day: I was planning to write several more advice pieces than the single one I have done, and I also had planned to feature three new blogs that I liked each week, but this real life thing came in the way and... ah well, I think the NBI was fun either way, with many new enthusiastic blogs and lots of discussion. I hope it was as much fun for our newbies as it was for me over a year ago, when I was a newbie myself!

Three final blogs for you to check out:

Thinking Play: Pasduil writes clever and thorough posts about gaming in general, but also about his passion, the too little represented (among newbie bloggers) LotRO. I'm hoping for more of these treats soon.

Away from game: Even though this blog is about different games than I play, Lonegun is a passionate writer that knows where to find those spots that interests any gamer. A pleasure to read.

JVT workshop: The blog of the one and only Joseph Skyrim (whom's name was totally stolen by the Elder Scrolls), prolific blogger ánd commenter. The place to be for in-depth posts about game design and you-name-it.

Last-minute advice

I know, I know, I should've been a good blogger and just posted these as articles themselves (bad Rav!). But late is better than never, no?

Layout: Contrary to what others may have written about this during this NBI event, I firmly believe in that you should make your blog look like how you like it yourself. Don't make it a simple blank page with black letters (read: boring) just because some readers might want to appear reading work stuff at their work. Those one or two readers aren't worth the effort - not to talk about the fact that almost everyone uses readers anyway. It is useful to think about some sort of format of your blog, as a consistent look makes people recognize it. For instance, as you may have noticed, my posts always start with a banner picture - and if I don't have an screenshot available, I torture my readers with homedrawn ones.

Name your games: People like to read blogs about games they play themselves, so there's no better way to catch the attention of a visitor than by making clear what games you write about, especially if you have a multi-game blog. If it's not clear already from your blog's title or layout, a short list of games can do wonders. Otherwise you risk people with short attention spans to just skip over your blog if they don't see anything that interests them right away. Here are some inspirational newbie blogs that did it right: Gamer by design, Part Time Core Gaming, Vagabond Worlds.

Comments: If you want to be part of the community and like interaction with readers, allow these. Make it as easy possible for people to comment and avoid Captcha like the plague. It's super annoying to regular visitors of your blog and I know of commenters that will just not comment at all when confronted with it. If you're afraid of spam, first try how much spam your blog actually receives and base your decision on that. A holding-comments-back-for-approval system is not advisable either if you want a fluid conversation between visitors. I know how frustrated I am when checking a blog I commented on several times a day to see if there are reactions and the owner hasn't seen or approved any yet. I myself use a hybrid system of no-Captcha but approve-comments for posts older than 14 days, because I found that I got spam on my older posts. I have no spam now, and I hope it's not too bothersome for people to select a profile they can comment with.

Blogroll: Again, if you want to be part of the community, take one. A blogroll is a good way of being part of the community and at the same time shows your visitors what sort of blogs you like. Don't be afraid of people leaving your blog faster because you have a blogroll: if they are bored with what they read, they will leave anyway, blogroll or no blogroll. People are usually quite conscious about what they are reading and don't just accidentally click away (that's something for your grandma who never touched a computer, not your average reader). Also, linking to others might mean they'll link you back. If you've just started a new and unknown blog, think about it like this: if you don't have a blogroll yourself, why would people add you on theirs? I prefer blogrolls on the front page myself, but you can always consider having one in a tab page if you think that clutters your page too much. 

Oh, and don't write walls of texts. Like the one above (facepalm).

Keep in mind that this is just advice and no more, so you're welcome to disagree, politely shout at me, ignore me and do whatever you want instead. I know you will, anyway.

Okay, this is enough for today. See you at the next NBI event! Or hopefully earlier.

SWTOR: Smuggling plan

One of my more cryptic pictures today, inspired by Rowan's blog post notes. A griffon if you can explain all the numbers!*

For a long time past there's the option to 'smuggle' gear between characters of the same account using legacy gear and mail.** When my second character, sorcerer Fárah, reached level cap, I sent her leftover gear from sage Ravanel. Nowadays it's usually the other way around: Fárah does progression raiding with my Imperial guild and sends the leftover bits over to Ravanel. I always forget what gear my characters exactly have, though, so there's always some papers lying around with notes - also for other gaming stuff that involves any numbers or calculations.

Some people say I should just use one set of legacy gear and send the entire thing over each time I'm going to play the other character, but I refuse to do that, for the reasons of 1) bothersome and 2) cosmetics. Surely it's just utterly boring if both my characters look the same. Fashion above everything!

Not sure if I dare to categorize this one under "Drawings". Ah well, whatever.

---

* Cookies are so 2012.
** Credit for this interpretation of the word 'smuggling' goes to Njessi, I think I heard her use it like this first and it's awesome.