Redwolf's Journal (continued)

If my count is correct, I went through 39 novels in 2011. I've wanted to get back to reading more, and I consider that a success. Last night's Witchcraft-turned-Dresden Files tabletop game was... remarkable. Why? Because we went on a stealth mission that actually worked . Usually one failed roll means all hell breaks lose. Instead, we managed to fight a couple harpies outside in a storm. One survivor of the pair did claw its way inside and sound an alarm, but we managed to evade from there, find the prisoner we were after (and one we weren't) and get back to where we boarded the ferry without otherwise being seen. We even finished out the session by distracting the gunmen redcaps on deck with summoned tigers and leaping off to land (roughly but safely, via wind spell) on our own boat to make our getaway. Woo! I did a lot of "unsafe" casting in the session. Previously, I'd been looking at shift levels in my Conviction/Discipline range, but veiling a group to

I've rambled on about it before, but I find myself once again considering the connection between interest/investment in something and the enjoyment gotten out. And right now, both seem pretty low as far as group gaming prospects online... The last few weeks have definitely been "down" on WoW. That's highly complicated because my main focus on play there is based on group/guild activities. That means other people's involvement impacts my enjoyment. I've always tried to maintain myself at the forefront, keeping my tank gear set up in the top few of the guild as far as gearing and brushed up on tactics as best I can so if the guild is pushing forward in raiding, I'm as ready as I can be. But when I perceive less interest on the part of others in the group, I start asking myself why I should be trying so hard. Right now, we might be seeing the extreme manifestation of that with our lack of healers. A fairly recent join who had healed some through our Fir

Spent most of the weekend with my parents, which has become our tradition. And that's what Christmas itself feels like to me these days - celebration of family tradition, not religion. Good food was had. A basset hound was wrangled into position for photos. A long walk was had. And while there was no snow there, I still have some at home (shade and low temperatures, yay?). I was also able to expose them to Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, which was enjoyed. They're both Whedon fans anyway. It was nice. Along with some clothing and miscellaneous stuff, I received Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and Uncharted 3. Couple that with the recent release of SWTOR and the ever-expansive Skyrim and I feel a little bit "buried" under games, but better too many entertainment options than not enough, right? Actually, after some play on Christmas day and yesterday, I was able to finish the story mode of Arkham Asylum. I guess there's a lot more gameplay in the challenge modes

It's taken a few examples and some forum research, but I've come to understand (I think) the intricacies of orange-quality items in SWTOR, and they're... interesting. There's already the standard hierarchy. Gray items are most sellable, white items are basic no-frills stuff with no stat enhancements beyond armor/damage, green items start to have stat modifiers on them, blue items have a few more points than their green counterparts at the same level, and purple ones even more (and perhaps a slot for an sugmentation). All of them can be found, though white-quality armor/weapons pretty much disappear after the first half dozen levels. Crafting patterns you buy are for green quality, but you have a chance to learn blue versions of the patterns by reverse engineering green items (and purple from blue as I understand). Then there's orange items. Orange items have modification slots and the stat benefits of orange-quality items are entirely based on those mods. If y

Another book read, perhaps the last of the year as my pile seems empty and the one novel I have in mind to read isn't at the local bookstore for immediate availability. It finishes up the trilogy previously connected on here and here . I find the ending less than satisfying. There are some good and neat world details. I like how the usual archtypes are pieced in, with the bronze-using native elves are supplanted by iron-wielding humans and the secrets of steel are held by dwarves. I like the magic blades being forged to fight against sorcerer-summoned demons, though the powers of the Ancient Blades seem unusually varied. The religions are interesting, though there's a hint of a thread in the second book that never was elaborated on. On the down side, I found some of the character development to be very uneven. That's especially true of Sir Croy in the second two books - if he's going to be a naive and idealistic knight, I'm okay with that, but he takes some tur

Christmas is Sunday? Really? Sheesh. That seems strange to me, even if I do have a Christmas song stuck in my head and have for the last 36 hours or so... I actually dumped some free time into creating a World of Darkness character, ending up with a wealthy, immortal weaponsmith with ties to the Shadow Realm. Shades of Tony Stark or Batman (though not as extreme as either) turned in a more supernatural vein. And... that's about it. With a little bit of XP unspent and apparently no connection information for the MUCK, I couldn't dive into play even if I were highly motivated to do so. Heh. A few SWTOR observations: - I still love the Agent's ship and the space combat missions, limited as they are. Reminds me a touch of the old X-Wing arcade game (or Star Fox, or...). A few ship upgrades can make the starting missions way easier. - It's all too easy to dump credits into crew skills (doing Armstech/Scavenging/Research). I keep realizing I'm back down to 10k credi

The holiday doldrums set in a week early (or so it feels to me). In WoW, we knew our guild leader would be gone Saturday, but he was the only one I was aware of. He tried to get a group together Friday night. That almost worked, but with our primary healers unresponsive or absent, current raid content was out of the question and we just knocked out Blackwing Lair, the old 40-man raid with about six people (easily) before I headed off. Saturday was disappointing as I think there were only three other raiders online at the usual start time (ironically, including said guild leader). I had hoped he'd be the only one missing at, at the worst, we could struggle through something or even take a partial team into LFR or take on the easy Alizabel and Morchok quick-like. Then when Guild Wars time rolled around Sunday night, I was the only person online . No progress. I expect Christmas night to be as bad or worst and New Years just as bad. So... it feels like we'll be rebuilding our g

Attack of the acronyms! So I received my message regarding "early access" to SWTOR today and can make characters for real, tonight. It seems a little odd to me, but I knew a couple people who are going to play, and I'm sure there are others I don't know as well... but I've seen no discussion among any of them as far as guilds and very little as far as servers (as the game is split into servers like many - but not all - major MMOs and the possibility of switching characters between servers is unclear at this stage). It appears I'll be making my Imperial Agent on the Canderous Ordo server (Edit: Of course, this one is 'full' and has a queue already) since a friend of a friend got said friend to make his Bounty Hunter there. Then again, there's so much potential for solo play that I'm not sure if I should even try very hard to group up. I've further considered the possibility of a WOD MUCK character. I read through a lot of the Werewolf b

I may catch a little flak for it from certain quarters, but it's currently looking like I'm planning a road trip to Disneyland in March through a combination of fortuitous timing and a price point that, while not cheap, is less daunting than international plane tickets. I've wanted to go back there, and maybe even see if a place I used to live is still there. If luck holds, I'll even be able to go with Gabefinder , who's never been.

Having capped out my vacation time, I took Friday off. The weekend was still too short. Ah well... I am frequently amazed at how things can change just week to week in our raiding group. Mostly, I feel that's due to limited personnel as we've rarely had more than ten, and sometimes less, regulars. So one person coming or going can throw things all out of whack. This week, we had a solid group to start with. We hit Alizabel, the new boss in Baradin Hold. Easy - especially since she sort of enforces her mechanics even more than the others there. She signifies the moment to taunt trade not just with a debuff on one tank, but by fully incapacitating them for several seconds - the Skewered tank is pretty much unable to accumulate more threat that might make the trade touchy. During her Blade Dance, you're supposed to avoid her and, in fact, she deflects attacks so there's no point in trying to do otherwise during that phase. We downed Morchok again easily enough and t

I've been waiting for this book for a while, and I'm not disappointed. Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy remains one of my favorites in recent years. I remember hearing he intended to do two more trilogies in the same world, one in a modern setting and one in the future, all with the same "magic" system. When I heard about The Alloy of Law, I was a bit confused. It turns out this is the result of pondering the development of the world - a Western-era novel. I enjoyed it like the first trilogy. It's got a good mix of action, plot, and fun/interesting characters. I'm left a little bit confused by it, though, because there are dangling plot threads left that... seem to beg for continuance in the short term. Certain elements could stretch off into the modern-era series, but there's implication that there is more to the story of at least the protagonist Waxillium. So I wonder if there will be direct follow-up... While the original trilogy focused on Mistbor

Guild Wars progresses apace, though we were down to three active people. Another two or three encounters done, taking us to about 18/26 current ones. Much faster after the afflicted mess. At this rate, we will be caught up in three weeks or so, and may actually end up waiting for the next part of Winds of Change. Raid night on WoW was sort of a mixed bag. On the one hand, we had some overly dramatic griping and confrontation before we started, which I may get back to later. On the other hand, we downed 6/7 Firelands bosses, the two in Baradin Hold, and the first in Dragon Soul. We saw, I believe, three trash drops (though still no patterns), one from DS. Our paladin healer (who was writing off the earlier Firelands bosses for anything useful) even got the caster shield off Beth'Tilac. That's actually a pretty good run, all told, though it wasn't without difficulty. Without our main death knight, we had to change things up a bit. Someone else got to chase Alysrazor through

A Den of Thieves continues the Ancient Blades trilogy started a little while back . And having read it, I'll get part three, due to come out soon. It's good enough for that. That said, I have two main gripes about the book. First, there's some character development that I don't like (in the sense that I feel there were better directions to go without compromising continuity). Second, the author has a habit of using in-character dialogue to explain this. In itself, that isn't bad, but there are several passages that made me feel a particular character was being exceedingly dense by prompting for more details that struck me as unnecessary or already apparent. Magic Bleeds and Magic Slays continue the "Kate Daniels" urban fantasy series, and it's really only grown on me. It shares several traits with the Dresden Files that, to me, set it above most of the genre. Most notably, the cast of characters seems to evolve based on notable events in the books

... suuuuucks this week. Dragging myself in a bit early to have things set up for demos at 8 is bad enough, but it feels like I can't catch a break. DHCP server errors. Laptop hard drive failures. Mac setup. So draining. So frustrating. Ugh.

Transmogrification is a neat touch, and I've always changed the look of my ugly face shield and shoulders to something that appeals more to me. Void storage is a minor nicety that's freed up a little bank space. The Darkmoon Faire stuff will be a diversion accessible one week a month. But my absolute favorite part of WoW patch 4.3? Being able to queue for a relevant random dungeon without blocking out two hours. It looks like most of this boils down to either spending valor points or getting a token for tier armor that only drops from raid bosses now (again?). There aren't a whole lot of other options, and that... seems strange to me somehow. I mean, a good bit of my current outfit now is non-tier raid drops, and there just don't seem to be that many of them this time around. And the tier pieces come in three varieties. I can pretty much rule out the heroic level. I don't expect to use the raid finder much, but there's slightly weaker-than-normal variants t