Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Days are getting shorter and the equinox is coming up, but dang these dark, clouded mornings making it hard to actually get up out of bed. Blarrrrgle! And... I was in the middle of dreaming of a third live-action GI Joe movie (haven't even seen more than clips of the second). It was... weird. Snake Eyes was able to talk. The Joes were sort of renegade and cruising around doing questionable things, including hunting some lost gold. At least half a dozen characters on both sides were getting married. There was also an odd amount of PG-13 toplessness. The special effects were pretty bad. And yet there was this sense of humor that somehow put the movie in a so-bad-it's-actually-good category. Yeaaah, I'm not going to try to analyze that.

A couple weeks in and still entertaining. I still love a lot of the little things - level scaling in Legion zones, better (though not total) sharing of mob and resource node tags, and such. Shortly after level 110, you get a whistle that'll get you picked up and carried to the nearest flight master - convenience that works as a good compromise for the current lack of mounted flight. World quests fill the usefulness-slot of dailies, but by reusing leveling assault objectives and some quests. I could see some of them getting old, but the system works fairly well. Rewards even seem to scale to some degree, at least. I have some mixed feelings about professions. The quests they've put into those make things decidedly more interesting than buying a pattern and grinding it repeatedly to level up skill points. On the down side, they effectively gate some things past the point of really being useful. I think I've run four dungeons at level cap and I just picked up the patterns ...

The fight against the Legion continues! With an extended weekend, I didn't have too much trouble getting my paladin to the new level cap of 110 and get into Suramar (though I haven't finished out Stormheim yet). Suramar quests start dropping artifact power like candy. Just like candy, however, it's not very fulfilling to get 100-300 power when your next artifact trait is 7000 points away. Pretty much all my quest chains at this point (class hall, professions, etc.) involve delving into dungeons for various things. That's a little bit of a roadblock to me until guildmates are ready, though I might try to dust off my Retribution skills and PUG as DPS. We'll see there. Technically, this has been a pretty darn smooth expansion launch. I had some disconnection issues one evening, but no queue times logging in. There have been crowds in a few places, but I never felt overwhelmed and rarely have had to wait for target spawns. That's all good. Also, though Blizzard ...

I feel... a little less frantically hurried to reach level cap that I think I have previously. I'll still admit to skipping some quest text, but I don't feel quite as driven. Maybe I don't feel pressured to get ready for guild dungeons/raiding ASAP? Maybe I'm just getting old. ;) So far, the little things are bringing pleasure. I don't have to fight over mining nodes with other people, because we can finally share them. There seems to be more shared tagging/credit for kills as well - I think XP may be limited in some fashion, but anything I hit (first or otherwise) seems to have given credit quest-wise. There are still some interact-with objects that require individual attention, but kills are much better. The zones where level scaling is implemented seem to function transparently. Even finding the shortcut portal to/from my class hall (rather than dropping into a huge crater every time) felt like a victory. Quality of life in the game feels pretty much as good as...

So far, so smooth? I got in about an hour of play before work today. There were no login queues, and only a moderate amount of PC-bunching at quest givers. A fair bit of that latter parts is because the first real quest chain urges players toward picking up their artifact weapons and establishing their order hall, which divides players out by spec/class for the first 30-60 minutes of the expansion, including a solo scenario for part of that time. That feels bizarrely ingenius. And with a choice of four zones to start in on the main continental questing, players should remain not-totally-concentrated. Previous expansions usually funneled players into one of two zones to start. With level-scaling technology, a lot more doors are opened. I'm not exactly thrilled that my artifact weapon as a protection paladin is a Titan Watcher's sword-and-shield combo, but there weren't any real legendary shields in the lore, so... what can ya do? It's not bad or anything. The scenario...

Arguably, I made a very critical error when designing my character in our Sunday-evening airship-based D&D game. I had a fighter type in mind, but I was faced with either leaning on Strength or Dexterity. Both seemed pretty equally viable. Strength might have an edge in melee, Dex in ranged. I opted to make a half-orc Strength fighter - pretty archtypal. The problem with that is there's basically no synergy with anything. On an airship, Strength is not directly useful in much of anything. Weapons are ranged, therefor Dex-based. Navigation and engineering can lean on mental stats. Negotiations fall on Charisma. So, stat-wise, Harrick excels at nothing aboard the ship. Last night, however, I was so proud of him. With the party in an ice-swamp searching for a missing clergyman, the group came under attack. Four PCs and 3 NPCs in a trio of canoes were traversing murky waterways to be assaulted by a swarm of javelins from the reeds. I took a look at the ambush and came to the ...

While it's technically true that you can't really effectively review something without having experienced it, there's a point at which that sort of doesn't matter . We have a finite amount of time and money for entertainment. It may not be fair to say "that's bad" from afar, but I think it's perfectly fair to say "that doesn't look worth my time/money/concern" even if the opinion might be appended with "yet" . No Man's Sky has been drawing attention for quite some time. The color palette turned me off a bit, but the thought of a massive universe of exploration is pretty cool. Coming up on, and passing, the release date, though... reviews have failed to convey any sense of purpose to it. One review I listened to described the game as a survival game without the best parts . So based on what I've heard, it's a game of functionally-infinite breadth, with procedurally-generated worlds farther than the eye can see i...