A Glimpse of MY Timorous Deep

Here's a few screenies of the work in progress..enjoy.

Spooky happens (NotD)

The ‘outside’ area in my Gorowyn home is coming along rather nicely thank you. I am finding it a bit of a problem that the area I have to decorate is now soooo huge that it may take me an eternity to complete to my satisfaction. Yes, I can be a bit of a perfectionist! So far I have ‘Easter Island’ statue type things, dotted around the extremities of the island keeping watch. I have placed my graveyard now on a hill overlooking the bay. Round the far back side of the island I have placed a forward camp/lookout spot and created a makeshift ring of sorts. I have started on the grotto area and have had some ideas what I want to do with the docks. I’ve also managed to plug most of the ‘holes’ in the scenery where entrances to other zones are supposed to be, such as the top entrance to Gorowyn which I blocked with a piece of hedge from the recent Nights of the Dead quests. I have the screenies of my decorating efforts, although the outside area is far from complete. I’ll pop those on here tonight before raiding if I get time.

On the subject of the Nights of the Dead (NotD) festival, I have been running through all of the quests on Voltaan. All of these quests scale to your level and they give pretty good AA but also they are a lot of fun. This year you get sent a strange coin in the post and if you examine it after retrieving it from your mail, you’ll get a quest to be a Devotee of the festival. Basically, every update you need for that quest is in a zone you will need to visit doing the other NotD instances and quests. If you are going to do them though it’s probably best to do them in order as there are some items that you can only get if you have completed the home city questline in the Haunted House (in Freeport it’s the dude in the bank to start) and then gone on to complete the other quests like the Haunted Mansion in Loping Plains and the ones in Nek forest and the Hollow Hedge. Make sure you do the two haunted places (House in home city then Mansion in Somborn) before doing the Hollow Hedge quests. Hollow Hedge is the same instance as Cauldron Hollow, but make sure you speak to Altius on the Docks first (to get the quest)and then the lass who is at the end of the beach (turn left off docks to far end of beach) before you can gain access to Hollow Hedge. Once inside Hollow Hedge you can either follow the quest guide or try and work it all out for yourself. I’d recommend the try it yourself attitude. It’s not that tough and is a lot of fun if you read through it all.

All I would say is on your second run through Hollow Hedge (yes it’s well worth doing twice as you get another new quest when you zone in when you are doing it the second time through, something about reliving the tale again..there’s no lockout by the way) make sure that when you kill the final mob in the zone, that you loot his body, not just his treasure chest. If you loot the lockpicks he drops on the second time through the zone, a ‘Gleaming Chest’ appears at a predetermined spot. Once you loot that chest you get a ‘Lost Necklace’. As a rather nifty trick if you have that ‘lost necklace’ in your inventory, then head to Somborn Village and go to Havras Skutter, there will be (on a 5 minute respawn timer) a small red cube just behind him on the floor. Click this and if you have that necklace in your inventory, you will get three free prizes for your home. A box that screams when you are in your house (I put this on the broker and not in my house, as Frank Martin said, “I like the quiet”). You also get a ‘Blanket of Fog’ which is exactly that and a machine to turn on or off fog effects in your house. The very cool thing is, that there is no limit to how many times you click on the red cube. It’s worth doing as the Blanket of Fog goes for 7platinum a piece on the broker and in half an hour you can stack up about 5 or 6 of them ready for sale. Of course, I didn’t sell mine, they were used in the building of my graveyard in my house, but if ye need plats, it’s quite a nice earner at the moment.

On to other news and it looks like we may be getting an old face back in EQ2 again soon who is from my tribe. I’ll say no more in case they play it for five minutes and dislike it, but I’m sure somewhere in blogdom you’ll be updated as to their progress soon :) Welcome back!

In MotoGP racing Rossi gained a third spot on the podium at the Australian Grand Prix after just about ousting Nicky Hayden who he fought alongside for the whole race, so congratulations to him. However, I must say I am starting to notice a rather worrying trend here with my all time racing hero. The last few races, his moves to overtake at critical junctures of the race seem to have been rather daring and just on the edge of racing etiquette. Now I know he has done nothing wrong, but on both recent ‘critical’ overtakes (one in Malasia on Lorenzo and the one on Nicky in Aus), he simply pushed the other racer out the way or parked his bike so they had nowhere to go but slow right down. Now I know that’s racing, but I’m used to seeing more clean passes from Rossi that display his skill and talent and not simply parking his bike so that if the other racer wants to push the overtake, they would crash. Perhaps it is a sign that the competition is finally catching up to his talent. If I was racing against Rossi I guess I’d be pleased he is having to resort to less gentlemanly tricks to win as it shows the start of a possible weakness and the fact he is now struggling to keep up with his natural talent alone as the rest of the field start to gain their confidence and the talent gap shrinks. He is still producing amazing results though, can’t fault him for that.

Be well.

Zurich wanderer returns..

That was an unexpected time away from Blog. Well, not totally unexpected. I did know I was heading to Switzerland on business but kinda forgot about it until the last minute and didn’t consider the time away from bloggage it would mean. Have I missed you guys? Erm, probably about as much as you have missed me, hehe.

Before I progress any further, I’d just like to wish my fellow Hometownian and Comedian, and TV star of ‘Genius’ fame, Dave Gorman and his new Bride many congratulations indeed on your marriage. If your marriage ends up anything like mine, then you’re doomed. Err, no, that’s not right..If your marriage ends up anything like mine you will be spending the rest of your life with your best mate and giggle partner. Things will be rosey in the garden of Gorman I am sure. Congratulations!!

Switzerland (Zurich) was fine. First time I had ever been there and I must say it’s a very nice city indeed, especially at night when everything is lit up. It’s one of those places that’s extremely orderly. I would imagine crime is very low also. Whilst I was there I noticed every single car was spotlessly clean. I didn’t see one dirty vehicle the whole three days is was there, not one. I asked a colleague who is based there why it is and he told me that if you don’t keep your car clean you become the villain of the neighbourhood. All very organised and orderly like I said. It kinda created a very community minded and safe atmosphere. Quite pleasant really. Anyhow, thanks to the staff at Hotel Glockenhof and the residents of Zurich, you have a lovely city.

Right-o, I’m back now, so what have I got to rattle on about today? First things first. Within a couple of minutes of clearing the new entrance to my brand new terrace in my Gorowyn six room house I was outside and decorating. I hadn’t hardly started really before I had to log off but before I did, I made a fun discovery. Yes, just like with Antonica or Greater Fay you can ‘slide’ a teleporter out off the terrace and once having teleported to it , pick it up, hop down the mountainside and before you know it, Bob’s ye Mothers brother, you have a teleporter on Gorowyn docks. I haven’t started exploring fully yet, but it looks like you get to head all over Timorous Deep. That’s on my ‘to do’ list tonight. It’s great finding stuff like that and establishing that I can walk on the surface and not fall through the world and indeed even place items there, but then there’s the realisation that if I really wish to enjoy those areas (like the docks) then I’ll have to decorate them. I know the house limit went up with the last expansion but I haven’t checked out how much stuff I can yet place. I guess I’ll find out tonight. The other thing is the cost. I need to tap in to some of the decorating resources we have in our guild I think so it doesn’t end up costing me too much.

One thing I thought of that would be fun, especially in the area ‘outside’ your home would be to let free a few pets that like to wander. Leave them for a few days, then try to track where they went. It is probably a fun game actually and could be done in guild too. I know in AoVs guild hall we have a port to the empty Antonica zone. I think I may run that as a guild event sometime, hunt the pig or summat. Hey, you know what they say, “Small things please small minds”, perhaps that’s why I get a kick out of that kinda stuff, who knows?

Had some raid fun last night on Voltaan. Nothing earth shattering as to content but it’s still nice to hang out with the crew and bash some raid mobs on the noggin. I know quite a few of our raid force are getting itchy feet where the type of content we are doing is concerned. I know for sure a few think we should be doing hard mode stuff a lot more often. I’m not saying they are wrong, or indeed right but I trust our raid leaders judgement and if he feels we need to do some more of the old stuff before we progress to that, then so be it. There are some raid mobs at hard I honestly think we could down. Toxxulia for example. We hit that Dragon a few weeks ago for a couple of raid nights and aside from the time it takes to learn a fight, things were going pretty swimmingly really. We were just missing a healer or two perhaps and Toxxulia would have been dead. It’s that rock and a hard place situation. Do we keep doing the old content to ensure everyone is as well kitted as they possibly can be with the additional possibility that we get a few more healers on board in the mean time? When the bad payoff is that constantly doing the old stuff seems to promote a bit of , well, shall we say less concentration/lethargy which can result in sloppy raiding. Against the argument that we simply do not have the right setup at the moment for hard mode stuff and what if we try and simply keep failing? Would that lower commitment levels of our raid force? Too many knockbacks and lack of progression also brings the occasional shedding of raiders who need raid sustenance quicker than that. I know it’s a fine line to walk and I do not envy our raid leader having to steer the raid in the right direction especially when there is so many differing views on the subject. My own personal opinion, I’m up for anything (within game and within reason ;) )so let’s give it a go. I actually enjoy the endless deaths that comes with learning a new raid mob from scratch. The satisfaction when working in concert, twenty four people achieve something special. It’s a good feeling. If we do hard mode stuff more regularly, I’m sure it will be Toxx that goes down first.

I’ll post some more piccies of my decorating ‘outside’ my Gorowyn home soon.

Be well.

One sought after dude...

A certain friend of mine should get a kick from this. This is the top three most recent search terms typed in to any search engine that ended up redirecting those searching to my blog.

1. jahf eq2 (49 searches)

2. adurj le bard (7 searches)
3. jahf eq2 a bard (7 searches)

Now what I want to know is what sort of fans have you been rallying Jahf to get that much interest? Never mind that the blog operator is a shady 42 searches behind Jahf, but you’re in third spot too. My, we are a popular boy! I guess we shouldn’t tell Ema she is only ...

6. eq2 emarald (1 search)

We can’t take too much from that as most visitors to my blog are revisiting or are from referrals and only about 10% of the traffic comes from search engines. Interesting all the same.

On other matters, it seems the team at Trion have been busy beavers. The content on the RIFT website appears to be growing daily at the moment. It’s worth a look even if you only check out the screenies. Also for those who did not realise, Beta sign up is also available on the webby. There is a lot more about classes and races now and some of the lore makes a good read. Although, am I the only one who sees a resemblance between the idea of RIFT and the EQ2 expansion The Shadow Odyssey? There are certainly similarities.

MotoGP hits Sepang in Malaysia this weekend which I am very much looking forward to. Valentino Rossi has won here no less than five times. I’m predicting another last few laps battle between Rossi and Lorenzo. I wonder if Rossi will ride less aggressively now he’s been told off by Yamaha bosses about last weeks race? I would certainly hope not. That’s his riding style and there is nothing illegal about it where MotoGPs governing body is concerned, so I don’t see what they have to moan about. I know it happens in other sports, where one team mate will help the other to succeed, but there are two points to consider here. One, Lorenzo doesn’t need any help. He is aggressive enough himself and more than talented enough to fight those sort of battles and let’s face it, he’s going to be World Champion most likely anyhow, even if he fails to finish another race this year. Two, it’s always been part of the attraction of MotoGP that the teams do not impose anything resembling team orders, aside from historically, maybe Honda who are a little different in their ethos towards racing than the other teams.

I honestly think Yamaha are trying to cause Rossi problems. I know he fell out with Yamahas big boss and words were said, but if they get off their high corporate chairs just for a second to realise without Rossi (and his crew chief Jeremy Burgess) they would not be the powerhouse in MotoGp that they are today. Yamaha are in danger of becoming like the British Government in the way they treat their heroes and legend makers, and that’s not good in any ones book.

Ok, back to normal business. EQ2. Raid tonight. I’m not sure where we are going, but I hope we go and finish off our half done Palace instance. I am in desperate need to get my helm and one of the nameds drops the tier 2 version. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed because the red helm adornment is probably one of the best for a Bruiser. It’s mega helpful anyhow and gives quite a few bonuses to the three different stances they get. I guess we’ll just have to see what drops. I’d also like another go at Toxx hard mode. We really were working hard at that and it would be a shame to leave it too long before we try again. If we had tried with the raid force we had the other night then there would be no question at all, we would have got him down. I’m also feverishly hoping to get more raid seals. As you will know from yesterdays post, my hoard of Seals of Arad has been reduced rather dramatically since my red adorn buying frenzy and I still very much want to get my hands on my sublime weapon (costs 100 seals). Patience is required. Anyhow, I’ll let you know how I get on.

Until then,

Be well.

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.

EQ2: 7 Year Veteran Reward

It looks like I may have moved house a little too soon and spent many many hours of decorating this last few weeks...for nothing! Because as soon as I get my 7 years Vet reward, I'm moving home! This is the free veteran award for accounts 7 years old. It is called Mistmoore Crag Estate and is based in Loping Plains. Not too near the local shop or pub, but hey, look at those views!

Be well.

Like a knife through butter..

That’s what last nights raid force was like. You know when you play any game, any sport, carry out any activity really and sometimes you get in the ‘zone’? Well last night there must have been 24 people in the ‘zone’ [Of course there were 24 people in the zone..muppet! – Ed] because we seemed to plough through the raid instances with ease. Not one mob failed to drop on first pull. We got the creepy Crab down in Labs which was pretty sweet and over all Voltaan seemed to clear up on accessories that dropped and then to top it all off he grabbed his tier 2 forearms.

Voltaan got to do a little bit of tanking also, although I am still learning the raid force from a tanks point of view. When you are a raid tank it seems takes a bit of time to learn the raid from a tanks perspective. If you can learn how your raidforce responds to certain fights, or how they monitor their aggro, how they administer their buffs so you can use yours to the best of benefit also, then you’re off to a good start. There were a fair few rippers last night when I was tanking but mostly I managed to grab aggro back within a few seconds, although sometimes when all my ‘snap’ tools were down it was painfully longer than that.

After about thirty minutes of tanking I was swapped out of the role for melee dps. I’m more than aware there are battles that require several tanky types or more than one tank but as a tank it’s always a bit disconcerting when you are swapped out of your role. You can’t help but think, ‘what did I do wrong?’. I’m more than aware I am still learning the zones from a tank point of view, which is a whole lot different from the just stand there and hit it philosophy, from positioning to mem wipes. But still it’s a bit of a pin in your ego. Hey, I’m not perfect! I know there are very valid reasons but I still can’t help wondering if I did anything wrong or what issues I have. For two reasons really. Firstly so I can improve. If I know what I am doing that is adversely affecting the other raid members and their ability to play their toons to their full ability then I can help to improve the raid performance by being better myself. If you have a tank that does their job properly it makes all the difference in allowing you to do yours as a, well, as whatever role you play. Secondly I HATE to let people down. If I am given a job to do, I will hammer that job out time and time again until I have it perfect. That takes a little bit of time though I guess.

Luckily a couple in my group were helpful and gave me some tips, such as on Haarkat I was pulling to two different pillars and was informed that maybe one pillar may make it easier for the healers. Of course that is totally correct and I’m glad peeps feel they can speak up to offer advice. It’s a good way to learn. I am more than aware that issue was actually a lack of common sense on my behalf, of course it would make it easier for the healers. That’s the other thing about tanking, like healing you have to think about what everyone else is doing and how you doing your job affects that. Anyhow, I hope I did an OK job and that I wasn’t switched out for bringing ‘teh suck’.

Although raiding was pretty amazing last night in the speed and efficiency with which we worked, it actually wasn’t the best bit of the night for me. As we were setting up for the raid, one of our Troubadours, Mynna sent me a /tell. It seems she had started to read my blog (that’s why I pop the link on my forum signature..it’s a lure..beware!) and was a little shocked when she saw the linked blog of my Bro’s and some of the discussion within the two blogs and the name of ‘Merecraft’. It seems Mynna’s first EQ2 guild was a certain guild on Runnyeye server called ‘The Watchers’. Yup, you guessed it Mynna, six years later we have been raiding alongside each other for months and we didn’t know we knew each other, let alone that she was a member of mine and me Bros guild way back when!!. Although to be fair I think she knew my Bro better (as Merecraft) as she moved to AB when he did from Runnyeye and joined the newly formed guild he and his compadres started. Small world indeed huh! So to one of the original Watchers, Mynna ‘Hi’ and thanks for stopping by for a read.

I have work to do, so I’ll wrap things up, but I can’t go without mentioning the Japanese MotoGP at Motegi. I’m not going to bore you with the specifics, but if you get the chance and can find somewhere to watch it (motogp.com charges for viewing :( ) then it’s a must. The rivalry and battle between Jorge and Rossi was quite simply stunning. The last lap was breathtaking. There were bashing of fairing, elbows, neck and neck, nail biting stuff. It was very interesting to see the comments after the race. Rossi got a telling off by Yamaha (his team) for racing so aggressively against his team mate and Jorge stated he thought it was too far past ‘the line’. Wherever that is. Now I have very much respect for Lorenzo, he’s a biking God and a great personality but of course my soft spot is for Rossi. With all the negative comments flying around about Rossi and the way he rode (which I think was awesome by the way) Rossis comments after the race were golden and got across the message the fans wanted to hear I think;

"What a great race!” said Rossi......... I wanted the podium so much. Jorge came back at me and we had a great battle, proper racing - I think everyone watching enjoyed it.”

Two very different opinions huh? Very different. I get the feeling Lorenzo was livid. Anyhow as I see it, Rossi is right. It was damn exciting to watch. Like I said, a breathtaking display of unparalleled talent, from both riders. Congratulations to both Vale and Lorenzo for such an amazing show.

Be well.