Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Poking around DDO actually got me thinking about groups in MMOs and how they handle it. So a little comparison of those I'm familiar with: WoW : You can group up to five. Few world quests require it, but most at-level dungeons expect it - usually including one healer and one tank. Up to eight groups can be joined into a raid of 40 people. Raid instances used to be calibrated that high, but now expect 10- or 25-man raids. Being in a raid makes you unable to complete most normal quests - so people don't just steamroll everything. Five is a pretty good number, really, though there are naturally awkward times when you have three or eight friends around. GW : Guild Wars is a little psychotic. It's theoretically geared toward a full group of eight. One the up side, there are NPC heroes (from expansions, giving limited control) and henchmen (fully AI controlled) available to round out a party even for a solo player. But then, earlier zones inexplicably have group limits of fo

... just have to be shared. Every now and then, you see fan-made trailers or short movies or music videos using game graphics. Some are good. Some are not so good. This Metal Gear Solid fan movie blows me away. I'm not sure I'd call the CGI "awesome," but it's better than a lot of SciFi (SyFy now) movies I've seen. It's live action, and the acting and voice acting is pretty good. The non-CGI props/scenes are amazing. Most of all, it has about the right feel or tone for MGS - even down to the exposition (thankfully more brief than the original) about genetics and growing up on the battlefield. If you're at all a fan of MGS, make the hour or so sometime and give it a watch. http://www.mgs-philanthropy.net/eng/

Hmm. Again, starting somewhere around an hour late. I wonder whether pushing the start time back an hour would work out better, of if we would just not have everyone until an hour later than THAT. So with Heigan down last week, we were on our way to smack down the last boss of the plague wing. Simple, right? Nope. The hallway after Heigan has a lot of respawning, slowing eyestalks and a ton of maggots. It must have taken four or five tries to get everyone through there. Even when only one person died, we had to go back because we couldn't rez them at the range and running through alone is even harder. Heh. I got through with just a priest on one attempt, then died because they were attacking the maggots instead of healing me through their attacks (mind you, I don't know if it actually would have made a difference and we probably would have had to go back anyway). We even had someone walk off a platform on the other side with no way back up. Not an auspicious beginning. Fin

Over the weekend, I wrote an email expressing my concerns about our property manager to the other HOA board members. None of them have replied, but it appears my email got passed along to the company in some manner. Today, those on the board, myself included, received an email from the owner of the property management company that seems a direct response to mine. Names removed/replaced: --- Please forward this to all the parties who are concerned about property manager contact 's license. Her license was pulled for the reasons stated. At the time her license was pulled, I bought out her company. My company came in, audited all the books, and made sure that the amounts shown on the books were what was in the bank. The problems, by the way, were in her rental accounts, not the homeowner associations. The real estate commission did not find any problems with them nor did I. I am a licensed broker in good standing in Colorado. When I bought the business, I took property manager

"You want X before tanking boss, you want Y before stepping into Naxx, you should be able to reach Z easy without gems..." There are guidelines like this all over for pretty much every class. The problem is, they're written by people who raid - usually with regularity and success. Sometimes, those numbers seem very, very far away. After a lucky drop (finally, Regal Aurous Shoulderplates!) and some emblems, my paladin's finally pushing a couple of numbers above the baseline. Of course, for non-druids, there's the threshold of 540 Defense. That is where you don't get critically hit by raid bosses. Technically, you only need 535 for bosses in heroic 5-man dungeons. I've been floating around here for a while, bouncing above and below 540 as gear has changed. For warriors and paladins, there's also the "block cap" (formerly uncrushable). This is where your total avoidance (base miss, dodge, parry - these all reduce a melee hit to nothing

See, this is why righteous fury is usually not helpful. I could have torn into our property manager, but I didn't have any proof. I still don't. I emailed a request over the weekend, and this afternoon got cash flow reports for 2007-present, as well as an updated list of owners and what they owe outstanding. Of course, these papers don't have audit-level detail. The numbers could be fabricated. But my request didn't get blown off. That doesn't put my mind at ease, but nor does it reach a "three strikes, you're out" level with me. So where does that leave me? Suspicious, but still lacking in any evidence of wrongdoing. Worried about the 11 thousand dollars and change of unpaid assessments/dues - which I fully believe are really unpaid because it's plausible and easily verifiable with the owners rather than her. There's only so much we can do to collect that money. I think I may next try to get in contact with the guy in charge of the repa

Back when we were doing Prophecies as a group, I was clearing Nightfall solo. Jerec, my paragon, tromped through missions and quests with naught but heroes and henchmen for support. I got to the last handful of missions off on other planes. So now that the guild has "officially" finished Prophecies and Factions, I'm returning to the campaign with a group of mostly real live people. And I'm not sure how I want to handle that. Last week was getting beginning characters up to speed. I, lacking any vision for a new character, pulled my ritualist over from the end of Factions. That bypassed several early quests, leaving me mostly waiting on people to finish with the 4-man-limited zones to get where we could all group up. This week, we actually did work on a primary quest line. It's not one I was on, though, and I'm not sure if that's because my character is a "foreigner" or because I missed doing some things in advance. Either way, Killian doesn&#

A ziggurat raised into a flying fortress by the Lich King, serving as base for his lich Kel'Thuzad in spreading the Scourge plague. It hovered above the Eastern Plaguelands for years, but moved to Dragonblight in Northrend, serving as the "beginning" raid for Wrath. And now I've finally seen some of it. We got started about an hour late, due to work in some cases - we just didn't have everyone who signed up on-time. Real life comes first, but it'd be nice if we could work on that. We buffed up (and with three paladins, I really should get that addon working to help manage those) and headed into the arachnid quarter. Trash was fairly simple - just a few pulls of large groups that didn't survive AOE long enough to really threaten anyone. And then we were at the first boss. Anub'rekhan The big nerubian beatle-type. I had serious tank-vision on this fight. I know the others dealt with the adds that spawn, but I only ever saw one. Mostly, I just saw t

I'd rather be thinking about playing Star Wars later. Or the potential Naxxramas raid Saturday. Or comparing GW and DDO. Something. Anything. Real life is giving me a headache. To put it simply, I no longer trust the property manager who is handling pretty much everything for the condos. The exterior repair project continues at a glacial pace. It's been over a year now. We've gone through one winter, and there's no real signs of things being done before the next. I have no good frame of reference for cost of such things, but I look around and can't imagine where $92,000 (plus insurance payout, minus the up to $16,000 in assessments that may not be paid yet). I accept that the project was bigger than initially assumed. I like the guy in charge of the work. But most days (or weeks even), there's no one out there doing anything. I don't know who to blame for this, or what to do about it. Yesterday, I was left a message by another owner in the complex.

So after 6 hour or so of continuous inventorying of computers (in addition to other things) last night, I get the sense that no progress has been made since then. My coworker said Monday he'd probably be in tonight to help finish things up (nothing like waiting 'til the last minute). In fact, most of what I didn't get last night is locked up in offices after five - he has a master key, and I don't. So now I've compiled what information I collected, but I'm stuck waiting on whenever he decides to come in tonight. I want to get things done , but I can't. Grrr. My own procrastination annoys me. That of others can piss me right off.

Possible widespread upgrade coming, so we're having to inventory computer hardware. Unfortunately, this isn't something we've kept very good track of since the last time (2002? 2003?) so there's a lot of scrambling. And, of course, it's hard to collect data visible on the system without disrupting anyone working there, so it needs to be done when people aren't working. And while I got most of the computers that are free in the morning last week, nothing was done on the others until *gasp-shock* this week, when I'm working nights. And, naturally, it needs to be done by Wednesday, because my co-tech is out for a week starting Thursday. So I'm trying to bust my tail tonight to get everything I can done on it now. That in addition to normal stuff. Whee.

I played a little Dungeons and Dragons Online over the weekend, making level two and doing some duo-play in addition to solo. Some other thoughts thusfar: - The narrator voice is both cheesy and cool. It's clear they were going for D&D atmosphere when you enter a room and get text as well as voice saying "You are drawn to the ledge on the far side of the murky waters" or somesuch. A video game should probably use the show, don't tell approach, but adding that in is a cute little throwback to tabletop games. - Overly instanced! That's personal opinion, mind you, some people will like it. There's something like half a dozen world servers. Additionally, towns can spawn different instances that you can manually switch between (as seen in Guild Wars) - I ended up leaving a shop before a party member and thus ended up in a different instance of the town until figuring that out and switching. Pretty much all "adventures" are instanced, where you

While WoW and scheduled GW play continues, and while others may be playing or looking at Champions Online, I've turned my eye toward Dungeons and Dragons Online. Having just instituted a free-to-play scheme, I can dabble at my leisure without feeling any need to make the most of my money or trial period. Of course, the free setup is a little limited. Starting out, you don't get access to a couple classes and races, and there are areas (and, in turn, quests) you can't access. I've read about limitations to chat and storages as well, but I'm going to have to get deeper into the game before I can say what that amounts to. You can buy some of these features in the store, or there seems to be a way to get them using 'favor' earned doing certain quests in-game. I have noticed the... interesting pricing, where a new class might cost 490-600 points, but you can only buy points in batches of 400, 900, 1500 and 3300. The download of the client took a while, probab

The great part about the emblem system is it gives you options. The bad part? It gives you options... I finished last night's couple runs (dang, we should really push through CoS sometime) with 57 Emblems of Conquest and 32 Emblems of Triumph. With EoC's, 58 is a "magic" number. That's the cost for a head or chest token for the tier 8(.5) armor. For anyone who doesn't raid Ulduar, that's upgrade material there. Now, if I focus on my most-used spec, Protection, I'd pick up my Conqueror's Aegis Faceguard . This is an upgrade over my Helm of the Crestfallen Challenger , though it sacrifices some parry and hit for everything else (stamina, strength, dodge, block, and a little armor and defense). It would also give the 2-piece set bonus, as I already have the chestpiece, which is a 10% increase in seal damge. That wouldn't be a huge output increase, but more damage is always better. But... I recently switched my secondary spec to Holy. For

With the Shadowrun game having ground to a halt, we've started up a World of Darkness game instead. Seems an obsession with filling that Tuesday-night time slot. It took some doing to cobble together a character in time that fit together in my head, but I managed. So far, I seem to be the only one with a solid idea what to do next, as the group is presented with mysterious disappearances to look into and little investigative skill. At least my character's dots in the Time arcana mean a possibility of glimpsing the abductions. Of course, if there's nothing to see, that's not going to lead anywhere. The only other idea that came up was talking to someone close to one of the missing people, but it seems like normal police/etc. would have done that already. We shall see. In online games: WoW : Holy paladin healing is odd. Having set up Grid and Clique, I now get a sense of the whack-a-mole game of healing where I'm looking at health levels rather than what's g

Recent thoughts have made me wonder if I went the wrong way when dual-speccing Sashayla as Retribution. Ret is a DPS build, and reasonably fun to be - killing things so much faster than I'm used to as Protection - but DPS classes are (no offense guys) common. In the guild, we primarily want for healers. And I find that healing as Reya, while that was sort of the intent, is not as satisfying for me because anything gained from a particular run is not going to my main character. Also, we seem to forget that while dual-specs exist, and make it easy to swap, there's really little reason we can't use the older re-spec feature to open up more than two specs for a character. So it seems time to take a look at the paladins' healer build. In some ways, it's the complete opposite of what I'm used to. Build My "own" class, but a talent tree I'm almost totally unfamiliar with... Something along the lines of this . It's possible to favor Divinity'

So, I dabbled in our first bit of vehicle-based combat in my Star Wars game last night. The end result involved a crash landing I really hadn't foreseen. Heh. Go figure. - The different "position" in Saga Edition help, though still don't necessarily make everyone feel equally contributing. It's not hard to have four or five characters making rolls in a combat turn, though some of them are going to be checks to "aid another" for someone else making a main roll. We had someone assisting the pilot, the pilot flying, someone assisting the gunner, the gunner shooting, and a couple people uninvolved. Technically, they probably could have been assisting, too. - Connected to that, some modifications that include a second gunner station would include another person or two. - The size modifier to Pilot checks hurts. I really didn't realize that before last night, but a Colossal ship (including small freighters) gets a -10 modifer. That makes it really h

I've given tankadin "homework" before, and I don't know if those articles were ever read. Here's another concise one that's fairly up-to-date: http://honorscode.blogspot.com/2009/08/tankadin-101.html I've been following Honorshammer's blog since before I was introduced to Ferarro, and I generally find his insights and advice sound. I don't follow it 100%, but that's usually a matter of situational customization - which is to say tweaks I've made to Sashayla are based on doing 5-man heroic runs, usually with specific groups of people, rather than main tanking raids. Before I get into long-windedness, are there any other requests for WoW "guides?" I've ramble-ranted before, I'll probably do it again. Disclaimer: Don't take any of this too personally/seriously. I'm not angry, I don't want to exclude people, I don't want to upset anyone. That said, I've been finding myself thinking again about the