It seems I have less and less to say….

I’ve probably started writing different updates and comments at various times but I haven’t completed them or thought them worthy of posting.  I think for this I’ll just let people know what’s up.

I’ve stopped playing WoW, it’s been over a month and a half since I’ve had my accounts active, though I’ve been asked a number of times to help my wife using her second account.  I’ve been pretty adamant about not playing unless there’s a dire need on her part.  I had already planned on quitting when the Real-ID blowup happened and that just sealed the deal. 

I wasn’t too happy about Blizzard’s requirement that your login name be an email address, I felt it was a security risk.  I think my concern was valid and believe it has been proven, though only anecdotally.  I believe they have had more account hacks than ever before, at least I hear about them more from my wife, who had been hacked herself recently. I would bet that most people are rather lax about using their email address for everything else including random WoW forums and addon sites.  Leading to an easy way for hackers to acquire valid login names.

Add to that the idea of real names being posted in forums along with an automatic association of your WoW account with your facebook account by the company that you expected to protect your personal information and I was furious.  It was after these announcements that I decided that Blizzard had become something that I never thought they would, a money grubbing corporation that only worries about themselves and not their customers.  I have read some things that attribute this to the merger with Activision and I wouldn’t doubt it.

So what am I doing now that WoW is out of my life?

Well I was sent an email from Fallen Earth for returning customers to get free trial up until August 6th without any restrictions.  I took them up on the offer and became engrossed again in the exploration and crafting aspect of the game.  I decided to support this small MMO and bought a copy of the game and subscribed and I’m currently taking 3 characters through the first “sector” of the game.  I’ve played my crafter the most, he’s recently learned how to make all the components of a dune buggy and knows how to put the thing together.  I’ve just got to save up the resources to make it, it’s over 100 scrap steel as well as other hard to find parts.  I’ll probably start posting a little bit of information about my travels in the post-apocalyptic world.

Yet another new beginning

For those few who might wonder, yes I'm still here and alive. I just haven't had much to write about.

Our regular d&d group took a bit of a break as people's lives grew busy and we didn't have what I considered to be a quorum. At the same time, in WoW I was in a 10man raiding guild that was pushing towards 10man heroics and the familiar burnout was creeping in.

As for WoW, our 10man guild that both me and my wife were in was making the push every week and managing to down the new bosses in the week they were released. I believe there was one exception with Professor Putricide where we used all 10 tries and didn't get him down in the first week. Otherwise we were making terrific progress and competing with the 25man guilds for 10man firsts, considering the gear differences and less double-dipping on frost emblems from 10 and 25 man, I thought we were doing extremely well. The stumbling block came with Sindragosa, our first 15 tries out of the 20 allowed did not go well, though progress was made. One issue in my opinion was that we needed to do tank swapping in the third phase. This phase involved intense debuffs on the tank while members of the raid had to run away from the boss to avoid freezing the rest of the raid and other members had to use the ice blocks created to drop debuffs. Our raid/guild leader insisted on having me tank the whole fight without tank swapping, claiming our heals were great and this was doable. After our 15 tries on Wednesday and an extra session the following Sunday, I looked forward to trying our last 5 tries with tank swapping on Monday. But this was not to happen, my wife and I logged in on Monday to find that we had both been removed from the guild, the guild leader citing "poor" performance for my wife and avoidance of intraguild conflict as a reason to remove her and me. His comment was that she should be healing a lot more than his logs said she was and had poor "raid awareness", and if they were going to push into heroics they were going to have to get better healing.

It would have been nice if he had brought this up earlier to try and address this, which might have been why he was asking her to go discipline a couple of weeks earlier. In both of our opinions he was wrong, he obviously wasn't aware of what she brought to the table, as well as understanding that he had a strong paladin healer that was able to snipe heals from the priest and gained the benefit of her constant use of her guardian spirit (+40% healing) for 10 seconds every minute. The only problems she had with raid awareness was the same problems everyone was having with becoming familiar with the fight mechanics and required movements.

I think our opinion that he was wrong has been born out. Sindragosa was released February 2nd, the guild finally beat her 2 weeks later ( probably by tank switching ) and have made no more progress since then. Meanwhile 6 other guilds have started doing 10man heroic encounters while my old guild still languishes in regular.

After reading what happened and how it was presented you might think that we are bitter, but this is not the case. The guild removal came when I was burning out, but was dreading asking for a break because the guild had been made to have only 10 raiders so we had to raid when scheduled. It was a breath of fresh air for me and my wife liked to pug raids so was free to do that. We aren't pushing content anymore, but then neither is our old guild, while not bitter, it's nice to have some vindication.

Something about a boat and ToGC 10 again

Tuesday night we went and did a quick run through our weekly raids. We had OS as the raid of the week, we finished that quickly then moved on to ICC 10.

ICC10 we raced through, but slowed down to try and get the "I'm on a boat" achievment. After 2 wipes we had it down and completed it successfully, but didn't get the achievment for some reason, hopefully was just a glitched or someone double jumped on the enemy boat and didn't know it.

Last week we did ToGC10 with only five wipes, we set our sites on the zero wipes achievment. We had a couple of tense moments but timely battle rezzes and general OP got us through and we completed ToGC10 without any wipes.

Next week who knows what we'll try, maybe another attempt at the boat achievment maybe ToGC "dedicated insanity" where we can't be wearing anything over iLevel 232.

ToGC 10 - Progression

The 10 man guild I'm in, while we went into ICC 10 last week and should be back there tonight, we also have ToGC10 in our sights.

Last week we did ICC10 on Tuesday to get our guild name listed for progression. On Wednesday we went to ToGC10 and got our first Anub kill, I don't know if other guildies had done it, but this was my first try with my paladin. I think we had 39 attempts left when he died, not too bad and everyone was happy to have the achievement. Last night we went in again, with "A Tribute to Insanity" as our goal, we missed it by 5 wipes. This still meant a new achievement, we got "A Tribute to Mad Skill" for downing him with at least 45 attempts left.

Two of our wipes came on Northrend Beasts, we had some mistakes that I attribute to rustyness. One wipe on Jaraxus someone stood in fire. The next wipe was on Anub and it was my fault. I had forgotten to put up nameplates so I could see if either of the adds were casting. I missed a cast and the add ran out and one-shotted a shaman dps. We might have recovered from this since he was a shaman, but later in the fight, when I was thinking he was going for another submerge phase, I took the adds to an ice patch farther away from Anub because the previous submerge phase Anub first ran right into my ice patch. The problem with this was he wasn't going to submerge, he was going into leeching swarm and I needed to be closer to the MT to make the paladin healing work. The next attempt before the first submerge phase I took the adds to a patch that was a little distance from Anub, and the first kiter brought Anub straight to my patch where I died and the priest healer died immediately, wipe number five.

On attempt number six, with 45 tries remaining we put it all together again. I decided I would not try any fancy manuevering, I would put the adds next to Anub and count on everyone else to take Anub away. We got through it, with 45 attempts remaining. The tribute chest had 4 trophies, a crusader orb and Lothar's Edge that the deathknight was salivating over. Anub dropped the tank shield Bulwark of the Royal Guard, I gave that up to the warrior tank since I had won a tank neck item, Endurance of the Infernal , earlier from Jarraxus. I won a trophy and was able to get my second piece of T9.5 gear to get my two piece set bonus.

The fourth boss, Deathbringer Saurfang, was a bit of a pain

The main mechanic of the fight are his bloodpoints. He has a bar that gets filled up as certain things happen. If someone is hit by his blood nova, which is a range attack that explodes in a 12 yard range then he gains 2 blood points. He summons 2 blood beasts, or 5 in 25 man. Remember the shambling blob things after the chess event in Karazhan? When these hit someone he gains 3 blood points, so they get kited and killed when they spawn. Saurfang places boiling blood on people, he gains 1 blood point per tick of that. He puts a rune of blood on a tank, this is a debuff that falls off after 20 seconds, the other tank needs to taunt him when his partner gets the debuff or Saurfang gains 1 blood point per time he hits the tank while he has the debuff.

Hopefully now you understand where he gets his bloodpoints from, now the fun part. Each time he reaches 100 bloodpoints he puts a "Mark of the Fallen Champion" on a random raid member. This mark does about 3k damage to it's target every time a tank is hit, it is non-dispellable, persists through death and for each tick it give 1 blood point to Saurfang. Any time someone dies with the "Mark of the Fallen Champion" Saurfang regenerates 5% of his health. This make battle rezzing anyone questionable because chances are that person will die again shortly and give Saurfang another 5% health. What the marks do is essentially create a soft enrage, the speed at which Saurfang gains blood points increases each time he reaches 100 blood points because of the Mark.

During our early attempts we had problems with me pulling the beasts back to me due to AE threat, we had people battle rezzed and re-dying to the Marks of the Champion, we had some people die to the beasts when they were kiting. In the end we ended up having our third healer go in boomkin form and DPS especially at the beginning, I also worked hard to not generate any AE threat to keep from pulling the beasts to me when they spawned. He died to much whooping and hollering and dropped two tank pieces. I allowed the main tank to choose first as he had put the guild together and I had won the 10man tank trinket in TOC10 last week.

We fought four new raid bosses on Tuesday and an old boss made a return

The ten man guild that I recently joined made our first attempt on ICC10 on tuesday, we fought all four raid bosses and had to deal with the return of the lagmonster/instancedropper.

For the first three bosses, Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper and the Icecrown Gunship Battle, we had relatively little trouble. We wiped once each on Marrowgar and Deathwhisper before figuring out a decent strategy and getting the boss down. On the gunship I caused our first wipe by starting the event early, I need to learn to read the text I want to click before I click it. Deathbringer Saurfang was a challenge on an entirely different level, after quite a few tries we beat him.

Lord Marrowgar
Is a giant floating skeleton thing with a sharp spinning axe. Marrowgar is a fairly simple fight, most of the responsibility is on the DPSers shoulders. Both tanks have to be in front of him to divide saberlash and keep him pointed away from the rest of the raid. The DPS has to dps until he uses "Bone Spike Graveyard" on a random non-tank. When this happens everyone has to dps the spike that has impaled one of the raid members or that person will die. Additionally Marrogar does a Bone Storm, which is basically him spinning around with his axe out chasing random people, of course we all get out of the way and wait until he is done with that. After the first try we got all our DPS to realize the importance of the bone spike and the boss was killed.

Lady Deathwhisper
A winged female vampire, she starts out inside a magic bubble like some sort of museum exhibit, throwing frost bolts, shadow bolts, death and decay and using dominate mind in the 25man version. For the whole fight she stands in one place, she does not need a tank. Shortly after the fight starts she has adds come out of two possible sides of the room, 3 at a time in the 10man version. They usually make a bee-line for the healers who have been healing up the raid damage, it is up to the tanks to pick these adds up and then the DPS switches to kill them. Once she is out of mana you can actually hit her and do damage to her health. Once we got the add aggro figured out and had the raid move to have the boss between them and the adds we downed her. Pretty simple fight.

Icecrown Gunship Battle
I talked to the wrong person to get the rocket pack, instead I started the event prematurely. Before you knew it our ship was off and everything was in chaos and nobody remembered what we discussed about this fight earlier. Our second attempt of the event our main tank thought he had to stay on the enemy ship the whole time, but soon found that the enemy captain started to hit too hard. On our ship it was my job to tank the adds that ported in, while keeping out of incoming rockets. It was a bit hectic but manageable. For our third try our main tank just rocket jumped to the enemy ship when the frost mage made his appearance, killed him and rocket jumped back. Third "boss" down.

My report on the fourth boss will follow later today or within the next couple of days.

A new chapter in my raiding life is set to start this week

After being turned down by my old raiding guild, they went on to have a breakdown of sorts and "take a break" from raiding. Since that announcement was made many of the raiders there have moved on to guilds that were still accepting the challenge of raiding.

My wife and I made a point of finding pug raids, getting an idea of what was out there and what was available to us. We had one invitation to a guild, but I didn't think the fit was quite right. They were trying to do 25mans but still had to pug a majority of their raiders. It seemed like they weren't quite able to make that last step and take down Anub with any consistency.

We had also fallen in with another regular pug group, her with her other holy priest, me with my mage that lives in a casual guild. This raid was able to breeze through regular ToC25, and it seemed like there was more consistency with the raiders that showed up ( success breeding success ). I found out later that the pug raid lead had run a large guild on another server for a while, he liked raiding but had grown tired of the work of running the guild. He moved to the Garona server where he tells me, "There is a large alliance population to draw raiders from".

So anyway, I tried for a couple of weeks in a row to get my paladin tank into the "good" raid so that I could gear up my main in similar gear to my mage alt. About two weeks ago I accomplished this feat, it seems that one of the tanks had let the raid leader know that he was not going to make it, enter Frostbeard. I was informed that I was tanking that night with the raid leader, I let him know that I was looking forward to it. Jump forward to 30 minutes before raid time, I was on my alt doing some dailies or something so my wife gets a whisper. "Do you think that Frostbeard could bring his mage instead of his tank?" I was disappointed to say the least, and with a sad face I turned to my wife, "But I wanted to finally tank with a good group again." So my wife responded that she didn't think I was interested in bringing my mage and was really looking forward to tanking. She heard back that he thought the tank had a number of alts and he'd get him to take a dps.

Woot!!

So we went on to rip though ToC25, unfortunately for the raid leader the tank trinket dropped and I won the roll. Then the raid leader grabbed me, the top healers and DPS and tore through Toc10 as well.

After running the 10 man, he told me and the wife that he was starting up a 10man guild for ICC but he already had three healers. He knew we were a package deal and if he didn't already have three healers he'd invite us both to the little guild. My wife told me to just go anyway and I was considering it, but about 30 minutes later he said that he got one of the healers to switch to a DPS alt and would we like to join them.

So now Frostbeard is the second tank in a 10man guild that the guild leader is planning on taking through all of the heroic modes and achievements. I'm really looking forward to it, hopefully he'll pug a few 25man raids as well to reap some of the 25man rewards as well.

My old guild has responded and...

Well they turned me down, I wasn't given a reason but I can assume one of the following:
1) They already have enough Prot Pallies.
2) When I left the game before I just sorta dropped out, I honestly didn't give enough warning.
3) They don't want to be forced into taking me or my wife in order to get the other one.

I'm not sure why, and I'm honestly not too worried about it.

I've thrown myself into trying to raid with pugs, but it seems like there's an over-abundance of tanks lately. It's seemed easier to find a pug raid for my mage than it has for my tank, so he's been able to gear up better than my main.

Recently I've started playing my DPS warrior again, when I've finished what raids for the week. He had been leveled from 71 to 80 without going into instances. I'm sure you can imagine how poor his gear is as well as how poorly I can play him. I can usually maintain skill with 2 or 3 characters, but after that it falls off a little bit. My current talents lie in Prot Pally, Arcane Mage and Holy Priest. Anything else I play is just a button mash fest hoping to put out reasonable DPS.

I had a good night raiding two nights ago

I finally got a chance to see ToC 25, I had done ToC 10 last week. I really hate being a newb on an encounter when I'm one of the tanks. When I'm in this position I have a whole raid ( 9 or 24 other people ) depending on me to know what to do and how to handle it, without the benefit of failing a couple of times with the raid. Luckily both times (10 and 25) I ran into a nice pug of mostly guildies that were willing to suffer along with my questions and misunderstandings. In the 10 man we had some issues, I think I may have been the source of them, but then we went on to one-shot the rest of the raid. In the 25 man we had a few little things along the way but for the most part it was painless.

Luckily I have a pocket priest who is my social director as well as raid healer support. She is willing to go out there and find the pug raids or put together the heroic instance runs while I am a quiet little tank.

Between the two raids I managed to pull together a few pieces of higher level raid gear as well as emblems of triumph that I was able to use to upgrade. I am getting closer to being more properly geared for the current end game, now I'm just waiting to hear a yes or no from my old guild renamed.

A small update

It's gone dark here, mostly I think because I don't have much to say and partially because there aren't very many people listening here.

Well news for those who do listen here.

I have given in and have gone back to WoW.

It doesn't help that the love of my life never left and she has managed to pull me back in. First it was "I need a tank, can you play on my other account and tank for me?". It sort of grew from there. So I'm back in with both of my accounts, I've been busy trying to get my gear back in order and waiting for my application to be approved by the new guild that my old guild has become. It's been fun, and addictive and back to a grind. I don't like being guildless and playing russian roulette with pug raids, but it's all I have on the raiding scene at the moment. So that's what I've been doing at nights and weekends and work is work, which is good because if work wasn't work, then I'd probably be out of work.

Back to my other reason for this blog, D&D

WoTC ( Wizard's of the Coast ) for those of you not into p&p RPGs, has unveiled their new forum/blog/wiki/everything else website here http://community.wizards.com/. I linked from there to here, hoping to find some new readers and to keep my thoughts centralized.

What I have seen so far over there is:
They have kept the old forums together - Good thing
They have added blogs for every one of their users - Probably a good thing as once the newness dies down the serious bloggers will keep bubbling to the top.
They have added a wiki - Probably good, will depend on an active community which it seems they have.
They have added Groups - Seems like something useful, I think I will try and use it for my current gaming group.

It seems like a worthwhile though un-necessary change. Previously Wizards had a forum system and this will still be the core of their site. There will probably be some community stars that will rise to the top and provide insight, information and materials of worth in their blogs and groups, but the most important information will still be found in the forums.

Hopefully I'll have more to say once I've had a better chance to look around the new site.

Surviving in a new world...

The Fallen Earth NDA has been lifted, this means I can make some comments on the game I was beta testing.

Fallen earth is a standard quest/xp grind MMO with an interesting story to be discovered as you adventure. It is set in the Southwestern United States following the downfall of society.


Your attributes are raised by 1 point when you level and can be increased as you wish with attribute points. Your attributes are used to calculate the max lvl of your skills, in addition you can use APs to raised the max level. The only way you can raise the actual value of your skills is through use. So if you want to get good at cooking it's time to start putting together some of that grilled tainted goat and get your skill up. The crafting areas you get are: Armorcraft, Ballistics, Cooking, Geology, Medicine, Mutagenics, Nature, Science and Weaponry.

The equipment and abilities you can use are limited by the amount of skill you have in a particular area. For example, a light crossbow is not usable until your skill in rifle has exceeded 21, the mutation "patch 2" is not available until your alpha mutation skill is over 15, etc. If you have ever played Asheron's call you will get the idea, its a skill based system, and I expect that it will have issues with minmaxing just like Asheron's call. I did not get a character very far into the game, so I can't comment on how much of a problem it is with the game in it's current state.

What I did see was very interesting. You gain xp for completing missions, killing monsters, gathering resources and crafting items. The game is very crafter friendly, it seems like you could probably level up completely by gathering and crafting, though some defensive skills might be handy when that mutated chicken is guarding the old barrels you want to look through. Crafting takes time in the game, from 2 minutes for small things to 15 minutes for more complicated things like a gun. I believe some of the higher level items took even longer, I seem to recall someone saying that crafting an item took 6 hours. The nice thing is that your character can be crafting items while you are not logged in, as long as you have something in your crafting queue when you log out you can get something done while you're sleeping. Another nice thing about the crafting system is that nearly anything in the game is craftable, chances are the clothes you're wearing and the ammo you're using will all be made by you or your clanmate crafter. I saw some items drop from human mobs, but by that time I was already wearing something better that I crafted myself. I felt like I was a survivor taking what I could scrounge up and making use of it. I really liked what was done with the gathering/crafting system.

My highest level character was 9th lvl. I know it doesn't sound like much but that was a decent amount of play time, not the first 9 levels in 60 minutes or less you get from WoW. I think I probably took about 20 hours of play time to reach that level. Luckily there is quite a bit to do in that level range, the newbie town you start in can easily get you through the first 5 levels and after that you will be visiting many other scattered town and enclaves. You have a chance to "train" a horse by crafting it before you get to 5th level, with a horse the long distances that really help make this game immersive. Early on you are also started down a quest path to gather parts for an ATV to get you zipping around the post-apocolyptic waste.

I still haven't decided if I liked the game enough to buy it and subscribe, I can't decide if it's really ready for release yet.

I know I didn't cover everything about the game, it really is quite extensive. I will keep posting thoughts as I have them and I will answer any questions people might have.

How should I improve my descriptive vocabulary?

Ok, I'm trying to improve my DMing. I want to be able to come up with descriptive words at the right time that convey the right feelings for the areas my players are in. In an effort to add these words to my vocabulary I have spent some time searching for words, hopefully in list format so that I have many to choose from. I am not sure what words I will need though, I have started with a couple and have provided those below, but what other words should I find synonyms for? Where do other DMs find their words and inspiration?

For instance, I know there's a number of words for a mausoleum:

boneyard	charnel	charnel house
churchyard	city of the dead	crypt
marbleown	memorial park	mortuary
necropolis	ossuary	polyandrium
potter's field	resting place	sepulcher
tomb	vault	funerary grounds
God's Acre	boot hill	catacomb
cemetary

I have looked up words for castle but what else should I be looking for?

Anything New?

Haven't posted in a bit.

Reason 1 - We skipped a week of gaming, our host had something come up so we did not have a place to play and we would have been short of our 3/4 quorum.

Reason 2 - Other than not having a game session to talk about, I haven't had much else I wanted to talk about.

So I have decided to ramble a bit before I continue preparing for another session of D&D this week.

Regarding D&D
I have started using more and more a program called Masterplan. This is an application specifically designed for 4th edition, though with the extensibility that is supposed to be built into the app, I suppose it could be adapted for any game system.

Masterplan is designed around libraries, which are collections of objects. These include monsters, map tiles, templates, traps and skill challenges. Each object has its own editor, specifically designed to capture the information that is important for the object you are creating. The only object that doesn't have an editor is the map tiles, instead these are imported images of the WoTC Dungeon Tile products. You can find these images elsewhere on the net, or I suppose you could scan them yourself if you own the tiles like I do. The image in my previous post is a screen capture of a map I made using the tiles, though I planned the dungeon out with my tiles beforehand so that I knew I wasn't using duplicates.

The main work area of Masterplan is the Workspace. In here we can create plot points and join them together in decision tree format. I have used it to this point just to organize my thoughts and prepare for the near future, it would probably make more sense to break down each mini adventure into plot points and keep them seperate. I'm still trying to decide how this will work best for me. I'll try and give some more feedback regarding my experiences as time goes by, but in the meantime, go check it out for yourself at http://www.habitualindolence.net/masterplan/

A simple dungeon

This is the map of the last dungeon my players have run through. As I mentioned earlier this is the first time in 4th edition that I had to put together some encounters and map out some dungeons. In earlier editions of the game there was less need to make an encounter challenging via character mobility. In most cases you had a fighter type standing in front of the rest of the players, creating a "log jam" at a doorway allowing the less armored members to pew pew at the baddies while he held them off being healed by his cleric.

In 4th edition they have emphasized the mobility of the characters and their opponents. Most if not all player classes have abilities that allow them to move opposing monsters as do some of the monsters. The players could just turtle up in a hallway if they wished, though as I'm writing this I suppose a little discouragement by an "area effect" attack could have ended that, though their warlock tries to do this as well by bunching the monsters and dropping his one AE attack on them .

I referred to this dungeon in my previous post. The first area where the players grouped up in the entrance stairway and tried to reduce the amount of attacks they took at any one time is in the upper right hand side of the map. Then they went down the stairs and fought a demon and some gnolls in the lower tomb area. This was where the new player dumped the oil filled brazier. In the upper left side of that room you see a trap door that leads down into some natural caves.

The players decided to go down into the caves, the warlock being all pessimistic and assuming he was going to fall when attempting to climb down, suggested they go down prior to their short rest after combat so that he could recover from the fall. The players used a rope that was spiked into the tunnel wall, As fate would have it the warlock did fall as foretold with a roll of a 1, the other characters made it down successfully. Before the characters started their rest, which I would have interrupted with a gnoll attack, they found some of the gnolls around a corner and a fight ensued.

I had designed this fight as two encounter fight, shortly before they would finish off the first encounter I was going to have one of the monsters call out that they were being attacked. I also hoped the fight was going to be a bit more mobile, I had made the area fairly huge and I had put various ways for the combatants to move around and flank. I had also included some Shadar-Kai, these shadowy humanoids have short teleport movement power that added some chaos to the fight. In the end the characters prevailed ( as they should ) and we ended it there. I have yet to find out if they thought the encounter was interesting and if they felt challenged.

For any D&D 4th edition players that may wander by, here are the two encounters that they ran into in the last room:
6 - Gnoll Raiders ( a minion variety that I created )
1 - Evistro AKA "Carnage Demon"
2 - Gnoll Huntmasters


The second encounter in the caverns was:
1 - Shadar Kai Witch
1 - Shador Kai Gloomblade
6 - Gnoll Raiders ( a minion variety that I created )