MMO Updates
I slack in reporting/recording. Ah well.
In WoW we did get in some attempts at the beginning of Heart of Fear a couple weeks back. We were seeing improvement with each attempt. Though some people (I won't name names) seemed almost unable to avoid dying to attenuation, it was the third platform and the mind control that roadblocked us. Honestly, we might have gotten further, but the encounter bugged (heh) on us. Two of us stood there under mind control with everyone else dead and... the encounter did not reset as it should. Servants to the Empress forever! Muahaha! Well, until we dropped group and zoned out, but the encounter still didn't reset so we called it for the night.
This past weekend, we were short a person or two and finally decided to tromp back into Ulduar (25 man, no less) and see what achievements we could knock out. Flame Leviathan took a few attempts, just because vehicles limit level scaling. Razorscale's achievement took several attempts because it was difficult to get the dwarves to low health for the flame breath to kill them without killing them ourselves or having the "helpful" NPCs do so. Ignis and XT-002 were basically just a matter of DPS, so no sweat. The Assembly of Iron wasn't too difficult. We got to Kologarn and killed him, but we weren't able to coordinate quite well enough to get the achievement in the process. And being late and with some of us a little snippy, we wrapped up there rather than pressing on. We even picked up one fragment of the legendary mace. Heh. This is something we might plink away at when under-staffed for raid nights, which would be good, though I'm not sure if we want to continue on or go through a bunch again for another shot at Kologarn's achieve.
In GW2, I was encouraged to play through the latest "living story" developments, which... well, honestly the bread crumbs aren't very clear (as is typical in the game) and the achievement for helping refugees (which seems all there is at this point) is boring as hell. But whatever, it's a slow build up. Fine.
With the more active guild members, I've run the exploration mode of Ascalonian Catacombs three or four times now, seeing all three paths. They use the same map, though put different encounters in certain chambers. It's weird to fight gravelings so much when the story mode is all about ghosts. One path felt distinctly easier than the others - it still had one tough fight with a champion (?) graveling, but it lacked the graveling burrow rushes that were super-annoying in the other paths. The burrows also bugged me onto the other side of an inaccessible door a couple times. Whee. Another run or two and I could pick up a slight dagger upgrade, but the armor models don't particularly interest me.
I also ran the story mode with some guildies Sunday. I haven't done that in a couple months or more, and ArenaNet recently did some re-balancing of dungeons to go along with removing the ability to release to a waypoint while dead if combat is still going on (thus removing rez-zerg tactics). Some fights still feel moderately challenging, but it is sooooo much easier now than when I ran it before. It's not just that my character is much better now (level-scaling mitigates a lot of that anyway). No, those bosses were seriously nerfed from they way they were. Personally, I find that to be an improvement, and recent dungeon runs have not been as annoying as early ones were.
I'm still in an odd place in the game, hovering on the brink of embracing it more thoroughly. In part, though, I'm afraid if I do I might obsess and have less time for other things. With some of those I occasionally play with working on their legendary weapons, I'm tempted to do the same, but that's a daunting task. Capping a couple professions, running Citadel of Flame 7+ times over, doing full map completion, earning a bunch of points in PVP... all on top of the gathering and paying for materials and acquiring the base exotic somehow. It's not a small project, and I'm undecided on whether it's worth it.
And I still don't feel a great sense of community there, which may well be my own fault. I play with our guild leaders on Sunday nights, plus whoever we round up. And there's another little group that seems more into the game that I play with from time to time, but the guild as a whole feels sort of nebulous - a collection of people, many of whom I don't know and several of whom just seem to be invited in after filling a slot on a dungeon run or something.
In WoW we did get in some attempts at the beginning of Heart of Fear a couple weeks back. We were seeing improvement with each attempt. Though some people (I won't name names) seemed almost unable to avoid dying to attenuation, it was the third platform and the mind control that roadblocked us. Honestly, we might have gotten further, but the encounter bugged (heh) on us. Two of us stood there under mind control with everyone else dead and... the encounter did not reset as it should. Servants to the Empress forever! Muahaha! Well, until we dropped group and zoned out, but the encounter still didn't reset so we called it for the night.
This past weekend, we were short a person or two and finally decided to tromp back into Ulduar (25 man, no less) and see what achievements we could knock out. Flame Leviathan took a few attempts, just because vehicles limit level scaling. Razorscale's achievement took several attempts because it was difficult to get the dwarves to low health for the flame breath to kill them without killing them ourselves or having the "helpful" NPCs do so. Ignis and XT-002 were basically just a matter of DPS, so no sweat. The Assembly of Iron wasn't too difficult. We got to Kologarn and killed him, but we weren't able to coordinate quite well enough to get the achievement in the process. And being late and with some of us a little snippy, we wrapped up there rather than pressing on. We even picked up one fragment of the legendary mace. Heh. This is something we might plink away at when under-staffed for raid nights, which would be good, though I'm not sure if we want to continue on or go through a bunch again for another shot at Kologarn's achieve.
In GW2, I was encouraged to play through the latest "living story" developments, which... well, honestly the bread crumbs aren't very clear (as is typical in the game) and the achievement for helping refugees (which seems all there is at this point) is boring as hell. But whatever, it's a slow build up. Fine.
With the more active guild members, I've run the exploration mode of Ascalonian Catacombs three or four times now, seeing all three paths. They use the same map, though put different encounters in certain chambers. It's weird to fight gravelings so much when the story mode is all about ghosts. One path felt distinctly easier than the others - it still had one tough fight with a champion (?) graveling, but it lacked the graveling burrow rushes that were super-annoying in the other paths. The burrows also bugged me onto the other side of an inaccessible door a couple times. Whee. Another run or two and I could pick up a slight dagger upgrade, but the armor models don't particularly interest me.
I also ran the story mode with some guildies Sunday. I haven't done that in a couple months or more, and ArenaNet recently did some re-balancing of dungeons to go along with removing the ability to release to a waypoint while dead if combat is still going on (thus removing rez-zerg tactics). Some fights still feel moderately challenging, but it is sooooo much easier now than when I ran it before. It's not just that my character is much better now (level-scaling mitigates a lot of that anyway). No, those bosses were seriously nerfed from they way they were. Personally, I find that to be an improvement, and recent dungeon runs have not been as annoying as early ones were.
I'm still in an odd place in the game, hovering on the brink of embracing it more thoroughly. In part, though, I'm afraid if I do I might obsess and have less time for other things. With some of those I occasionally play with working on their legendary weapons, I'm tempted to do the same, but that's a daunting task. Capping a couple professions, running Citadel of Flame 7+ times over, doing full map completion, earning a bunch of points in PVP... all on top of the gathering and paying for materials and acquiring the base exotic somehow. It's not a small project, and I'm undecided on whether it's worth it.
And I still don't feel a great sense of community there, which may well be my own fault. I play with our guild leaders on Sunday nights, plus whoever we round up. And there's another little group that seems more into the game that I play with from time to time, but the guild as a whole feels sort of nebulous - a collection of people, many of whom I don't know and several of whom just seem to be invited in after filling a slot on a dungeon run or something.
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