Oh, and Felmyst went down last night.  :/

I’ve collected all of the vanity pets possible without buying the really expensive whelplings and so on in the AH, but I’m stuck at 39 out of the 50 needed for the achievement and the skunk pet. /hiss

Kit, the new hairstyle, and her fireflys

Hanuman, the AOE Tank

]]> http://www.ravven.com/blog/2008/10/gorilladin-and-firefly-fandom/feed/ 0 http://www.ravven.com/blog/2008/10/hmmmn-2/ http://www.ravven.com/blog/2008/10/hmmmn-2/#comments Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:52:53 +0000 Ravven http://ravven.wordpress.com/?p=706 Well, we took Kalecgos down in just over three minutes, it was shocking. It felt like nothing, like doing a Kara run. Really, really disappointing.

And then we went on to Brutallus, who we’ve been struggling with for weeks. I mean, it would have been a somewhat empty victory to take him down after the patch, but hey…I’d be glad to just get that bastard down. :) So, we’re all set for our first kill…and then the server went down.

Blizz is laughing at us.

PS:  When the server came back up, we one-shot him. It felt a bit empty. And then we went on to Felmyst, who kicked our butts. I felt better.  :D

On a more serious note, I still have no real idea what spec I should take. I don’t think I’ll sacrifice the needed dps points in the MM tree just to have exotic pets (which really hurts me), so I’ll probably go with this. I don’t have anywhere near the agility to try survival, and mana issues which are bad now are expected to get worse, so I won’t go back to MM.

As for pets, I think I’ll get a quick Underbog heroic run together and tame a 70 wasp for raiding, and also try a moth. For fun, I’d like to try tanking with either a gorilla or a bear (probably a diseased black bear just to be all ick and nasty and everything).

And I’m going to play with Kit’s hair.  :)  I think it will stay white, because it suits her, but I’d like to try that dwarf braid down the back – that looks like a no-nonsense hairstyle for a hunter. Kitsune is a no-nonsense kind of girl.

We’re supposed to be raiding tonight, but given the problems in the States, I don’t see any way we’ll all be patched and ready by raid time. Addons are going to be interesting, although I’ve downloaded most of the updates for essentials: CT Mod, Bartender 4, Recount, BigWigs, FuBar. Fingers crossed that everything works. But I’ve patched and am hopefully ready for tonight…and am really excited.  :)

We didn’t get Brutallus down last night, which is a shame – it would have been very nice to do it before the patch. However, judging by the early reports, we should be able to get through a lot of Sunwell prior to the expansion, along with a lot of other guilds. Disappointing, but at least we’ll be able to see the content.

All in all, hats off to Blizzard pulling off one of the largest patches in MMO history.

Click here for dance awesomeness

When I first saw the undead female dance, I had to write my best friend from back in the States and tell her. “It’s us – it’s the goth hand dance!”  You know the one, if you’ve been to the right clubs – the swaying movement with sinuous hands and long red or black hair streaming over your face. It’s the hand dance. I’ve been there, and you’ve been there…admit it.  :D

]]> http://www.ravven.com/blog/2008/10/the-hand-dance/feed/ 0 http://www.ravven.com/blog/2008/10/random-2/ http://www.ravven.com/blog/2008/10/random-2/#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:06:56 +0000 Ravven http://ravven.wordpress.com/?p=660 Another night spent learning Brutallus last night, not focussing on dps so that the healers could work out a strategy for healing tanks and burn victims. Healing seems to be our main problem lately, which is a shame since we used to have awesome healers. I brought the Stupid Bird, a kaliri that I had levelled up for Screech only for Brutallus.

Pathing in Sunwell has quite a few issues. Pet pathing is awful in many places, which makes it difficult for hunters. In the anteroom just prior to Kalecgos, where you take down the last robot patrol, my pet spends the first part of the fight just running back and forth before he can finally hit the mob. You see patrols doing the same thing, a back-and-forth run for several seconds before they can finally take their assigned path. And on Brutallus, which is a fairly even groundspace, it is quite difficult to send a hunter pet in to attack. The best way that I found of doing is was to misdirect, do the pull, and almost immediately send him in before I get back to my area for the fight. If I wait, he’ll just flap by my side. I have no idea what is involved in pathing in a game, but judging by the problems with Sunwell and also the recent issues in Warhammer, it’s evidently quite complex.

I found an article this morning regarding a new steampunk MMO in the works from Mindfuse: The World of Gatheryn. It’s still very early days, obviously, but I’m a huge fan of steampunk aesthetic, and this may prove interesting. The game will be directed at the casual market, which is fine, depending on the subscription model used. I could see this working as a microtransaction model, but not as a subscription-based one. Nonetheless, one to follow for the future.

Since Vanguard is currently running a free trial, I decided to download and try it. The download was quick, which was good. I was able to play a little fox-person, which was cool (being able to play a rat-person was the only thing I thought was fun about my EQ2 experiment). The graphics were quite basic and dated-looking, and the UI didn’t have the polish that I would have expected from a fairly recent game. Granted this is all based on a few minutes spent running around the starting area after the raid last night, so it may all get much better later on. But at first glance? I’ve played free-to-play games with much more polish and visual richness than this. Meh.

First, here’s one way to find a new guild:

Second, a shot of the opening sequence when you first see Brutallus. It’s quite nicely done, with a bit of interplay between himself and the blue dragon Madrigosa, culminating in him smashing the glass that you are standing behind. A nice bit of theatre.

And some video, from YouTube:

Kit discovers the new “/fear” emote on the PTR.

Mouth open in an O, cowering back, jazz hands waving by her head, this whole “feets don’t fail me now” thing…I was laughing so hard I had tears running down my face, and my sides hurt. Miz’ draenei didn’t look so bad, but the nelf animation is hilarious.

Kalecgos Down!

After weeks and weeks of trying and wiping, of frustration and disappointment…our first Sunwell boss down. It feels so damn good.

First, what could be cuter than a box of baby ferrets?  They still don’t have their eyes open yet, but they are starting to move around a bit. They set up a terrific racket when mama ferret leaves them, which makes me nervous about our back garden with no lock on the gate…I’d hate the neighborhood kids to hear and investigate.

Secondly, I spent some time this morning listening to several of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speeches which had been archived. Although I was a little kid when he was alive, I’ve heard the most quoted ones many times. Listening to these, in their much longer versions, gives you an idea of how powerful and moving a speaker he was. (This was via BoingBoing, by the way. That post had quoted a very powerful section close to the end of the MP3:

“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

Many of the things that he talked about are still very relevant today, if you apply them to current events – even more so if you live in the States. The Edmund Burke quote “The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing” is something that none of us should ever forget.

Back to more trivial issues (our lives are frittered away on trivial things, while deeper issues pass us by, for the most part), raiding lately has been very much not fun. We suffer from the pre-expansion ennui and apathy, and Sunwell raids are impossible. Many people have stopped raiding, and many of those who are left are not the most serious or capable players…such as the bad pull last night which aggroed several packs of mobs, and while we were struggling to not wipe, one of the newer lootwhore healers (oops – did I really say that?  my bad) was heard to say “brb, I’m going to check on dinner”.  Excuse me?  Excuse me?  YOU’RE GOING TO DINNER?

grrrrrr….sometimes I think that I need to grow up and stop wasting time with imbeciles and children and do something worthwhile with my life. And then, as usual, I log in to do dailies. :(