Sand & Ice

Sooo. Back at work now and all the holiday season stuff is over for me and mine now. The kids are back at school and UK Christmas, New Year and Spanish Christmas are all finished and done with. I managed to get some fairly decent online fun during my time off. Mostly I have spent it grouping with my guildies, playing older tier stuff on Udrath and mentoring down trying to get Voltaans alternative advancement up to 250 before the next expansion. I’m aware that the new Bruiser AA stuff is likely to be pretty cool indeed, so I want to try and get those up as much as I can before release date. I wonder if pre-orders are out yet? I’ll have to check.

Also over the holiday period I missed two Beta events on RIFT that I had received invites to. Not because I wanted to miss them but my family is mega busy of the holiday period. Over the space of 2 months I have 2 childrens birthdays and three public holidays. It all amounts to a pretty busy schedule. So aside from anything else, Trion Worlds (for me) planned their Beta events badly over a busy family time of year. I can’t say anymore about the game than I did previously as I simply haven’t had the time to play it. To be honest I’m not too bothered. The game didn’t blow me away. It was OK, but certainly not different or good enough to lose sleep over. In addition to that I’m started to get a bit excited about the Velious release.

I’ll be totally honest and say that I really haven’t done any research in to Velious and rely only upon what I’ve been told by other folks. But here is my small wish list for the new expansion.

• More shared dungeon zones like SoS, Sebilis, Chardok

• NOT another new currency system. I do not want to have to start building up something other than Marks of Manaar and seals of Arad. I know they will do the opposite though. Well, not for sure but I reckon they will.

• A new independent city a la Maj Dul. I like having lots of overland stuff, but big rambling cities are fun to explore too and add to the flavour of the game.

• Less running around in the quest lines. OR if there is the same running around, not just to kill 10...or harvest a.... or , well you get the picture. I don’t mind doing the work and the running around if the quest story is good and deserves the jaunts.

• Being able to unattune/adorn items. This is a big one and I’ll talk about it below.

• More large outdoor zones

One thing I mentioned above was the ability to un-adorn or un-attune items that you have collected on your toons. The reason I say this is that the way I see it, is that I have worked hard to get most of that kit and a lot of it has been replaced by better stuff. So I quite literally have a few boxes full of old items that are attuned. I worked for them, why can I not use them on my up and coming alts? Some of the pieces took me hours and hours of work to get. It’s not as if I was given them. Seeing as I worked for them, why can I not use them again? I personally would like to see attuning gone forever. The heirloom system is enough to ensure the items are not transferred between accounts or sold. The other big bugbear I am having at the moment is adorning. I have now had to replace 7 red adorn slot items with the same adornment, simply because I have obtained the next tier of raid gear. I personally begrudge having to spend another 5 seals and 10plat and then the cost of the player made ones too. Over al I think I must have wasted about 160plat and 35 seals on doing this. I know that’s not a lot to some, but when you have limited play time and don’t have time to ‘do it all again’ those amount of raid seals and plats do have quite an impact on my toon and bank balance.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the idea of getting stuff for free, but this is stuff I have already worked for and made sacrifices to obtain. In an age when you can buy most of your raid gear (tier 1 at least) over the auction channel, why can I not un-attune stuff I actually worked to get? It seems MMO life is emulating real life, where the rich become richer (crafters making adornments!) and the poor remain stung at every turn for their cash/alternative currency. Oh well.

One of the things I have been enjoying recently has been my quest to get Voltaan to max AA. I’ve been doing this through a couple of avenues. One when power levelling the missus’s toons through the lower tiers and through mentoring down using the chronomancer and completing some of the old questlines. The most recent one I have been doing is the Cloak of Flames timeline. It’s an item I always wanted but never actually got to complete the questlines at a level appropriate to using the item. A shame, but I’ve always wanted one so I thought I’d crack on with it. So far I’m really enjoying it. The story is ok, a little patchy at times, but generally the quests are interesting enough to keep me hooked and actually seem to have a purpose for once. I’m only about half way through, but I reckon I may be finished by next week.

I won’t get much of a chance to do that this week though as I am going to be concentrating on getting Uddy a couple of more levels to bring him in line with Merecraft who’s been sitting at 50, level locked for some time waiting for me. It’s been a nice move for my Bro as his AAs have shot up and he will really feel the benefit of that later on. Massively so. Anyhow, as soon as I get Uddy up to scratch, then I guess it’s delving in to the Desert of Flames content. I love that area. Can’t wait to have a hack at it again. Quite a few folks think it is one of the worst expansions. I think it’s fantastic. Love Desert of Flames. I think the atmosphere it creates with the city of Maj Dul and the adjoining zones really works well. I really do feel like an extra in Arabian Nights when I’m adventuring there and you’ll know if you read this blog one of the most important things for me when playing an MMO is immersion. That’s why I love that first expansion. It really does draw me in. I can almost smell the spices in the Maj Dul market places, feel the grit of blown sand in my eyes from traversing the desert. Great stuff.

Be well.