Wednesday, October 6, 2010

I'll never admit it..but..

Adornments. It’s a murky world. Full of profit centres, sweat houses with crafters feverishly creating these expensive items for sale to wealthy heroes, and harvesters and farmers working their fingers to the bone relentlessly to find manas and raw materials. It’s a multi thousand plat business that’s booming. But why?

Well last night I found out. Up until last night I had one adornment. Count them, one and that was a gift. That’s it, nothing extra, nothing more. I was quite happy with this arrangement. I had not planned on getting any more adorns until I had at least Tier2 raid armour. Why would that be? Well I’m not made of money and will probably only be able to afford the adorn bling once, maybe twice. Now if I have to replace items that I upgrade I want them to be of a high enough quality when I adorn them so I don’t have to fork out two lots of plat on them. In other words there is not much likelihood that I would replace that armour piece, so therefore I would then fork out on an adornment. This was my philosophy.

Now adornments can be bought with Seals of Arad also. For 5 seals and a few plat. For those who don’t know what they are, one, where have you been hiding and two, well, they are like the Marks but from raiding and raid bosses. I had 80 something seals from raiding and was really looking forward to getting those last few so I could invest in my Sublime Fabled weapon. Until I got home from work last night that was.

As usual I was in a pretty good mood when I returned home from work. For one, it was home time not work time and for two as ever I enjoyed the 25 mile ride home on my motorbike along the coast of the Mediterranean. I was nice and relaxed. It was, as ever great to see my family after a day at work. Emarald my lovely wifey had made me a cup of coffee and we sat down on the terrace to chat about our day. Except we didn’t.

Straight away Ema starts on about EQ2 and adorns. Now, we have quite a lot of EQ2 discussions obviously, we both play the game with some fervour, but I was suddenly bombarded with a tirade about adornments and how she doesn’t know how she ever played EQ2 without them. Not only this, but then comes the hard sell. I MUST adorn Voltaan and not buy my weapon apparently, “there’s no question about it”.

Now, being a man I dislike being told what to do. I may even see the merit in something, but if I have been told to do it, I generally don’t want to. It’s simple. The haze of my grumpiness descended and I managed to grunt a few acknowledging replies to Emas still ongoing promotion of adornments. The conversation pretty much ended up with me regressing to 8 years old to state “Fine, I’ll get some adornments. I guess I’ll just have to wait a few more weeks for my weapon that I’ve been SOOO looking forward to getting and I’ll be back on the breadline, they’re so damn expensive”...moan...moan..moan. Now when I get like that I always stop myself, remind myself that I am nearing 40 years of age and, more importantly that I dislike people who moan. So, I finished my coffee and despite me reminding myself of my seniority, I couldn’t help as I left to turn on my PC a small “S’pose I’ll go waste all my plat then!”.

So, with my wallet 200 plat lighter, my Seal of Arad pouch distinctly lighter, I surveyed Voltaans adornments , both white and red on pretty much 95% of his kit. I didn’t go 100% adorn as I still have a couple of legendary pieces to upgrade. I resisted the comment hovering on my lips to Ema of “Happy now?”..I’m nearly 40, I really should grow up.

Now comes the hard part. Admitting I was wrong. Another insurmountable wall for many males of the species to climb is that of “yes dear, you were right, I was wrong”. It is a rare phenomenon that probably only occurs once every waxing of Alpha Centuri, or something. So, to explain how I was proved to be wrong, I went to help out in an ERH group. Mainly guildies but a couple of pick ups too and my buddy Jahf came along. Sadly the group was plagued with LD issues (a lot of folks had LD issues after the update it seems) and no one available in channels or guilds to come heal when our healer lost his connection. BUT, what was important was the difference I noticed in my DPS. It had pretty much doubled. Yup, doubled. Now bearing in mind I had gone from being not adorned at all, to pretty much fully adorned with white and red adorns the difference was highly noticeable. If you have slowly built up your adorns you probably won’t notice such an immediate difference. But wow. Normally depending on group members and if it’s a solo, or group mob, I would normally have parsed from 6 to 12 k. With my new adorns on some of the larger AoE fights, I was parsing between 22k and 28k. Admittedly we did have a great Dirge along and I am sure that helped a huge amount. But the difference was palpable. I could almost taste it.

Next test is to see how they fare when raiding. Hopefully they will help a little with my hate gain but also with my dps when not tanking. Building up dps faster is important to me, because being a leather wearer, if I have to grab aggro quickly until the MT becomes unstunned, charmed or whatever, I only sometimes have time to swap out my off stance to my def stance, and yeah, sometimes I get killed pretty quick, but that’s usually enough time for the MT to grab aggro back so devastation to the raid squishies is not absolute. The problem is, when I am rezzed, I’m right back at the bottom of the hate meter and have to build the hate back up so I can grab again if need be. That is something I have been struggling with as our raidforce puts out so much dps, once I have been deaded climbing the hate meter is like climbing Everest. Maybe my extra dps and other fun adorn stuff will help with that. We’ll see I guess.

Oh, you’re probably wondering what Ema said when I admitted I was wrong. Hahah, sorry, I must have stepped off into a fantasy world there. Of course I didn’t admit I was wrong. At breakfast this morning Ema sneakily asked me through her grin how my adorns worked out for me last night (knowing full well already how they worked out). Being the honest, upstanding gentleman I am I graciously admitted defeat to the greater mind. No. I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. I changed the subject.

The message is clear to me. The eternal question, “To adorn or not to adorn” has firmly been answered, but shhhh, don't tell Ema she was right.

Be well.

1 comment:

  1. OMFG I told you so ~ Why on God's Green Earth do you NEVER ever listen to me nor admit I was right all along? Maybe now, Daniel-son, you will see the error of your ways.

    Love from
    Emarald Miaggi

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