City of Heroes added a referral program to invite your friends back, so I thought I would mention it. If you have been gone for 90 days or more, a current player can invite you back; when you pay for a month, you each get 15 days. The existing program, to send a free trial code (and the sender gets a month if you eventually buy and subscribe) continues. Since I am a current player, if you were thinking of coming back or trying it out, let me know, and I will send you a code for a couple of free weeks (and exploit you mercilessly for my own free play time). I can see the otherwise-invisible e-mail field if you leave a comment.
: Zubon
If all this modern technology is getting you down, why not try an old school laptop? Wood, brass, all the things that make your older co-workers comfortable. Also, it looks cool.
: Zubon
Hat tip: Steve Jackson Games
… women are from 19th. century Britain. Or so I’ve found out. Allow me to relate to you a conversation I recently had with my amazing spousal unit. It will be summarized and paraphrased, of course, but I’m sure you’ll get the idea. Even if the names have been removed to protect the innocent.
Developers, designers and psychology students take good note, because this is how deep the rabbit hole goes sometimes.
Continue reading ‘Men are from sometime in the future…’
The, ah, the title pretty much says it all. Weapon customization, two new powersets, flashback system, new and rare IOs are the main highlights.
I’m a lore junky. For those who knew me back in my EQ days, they would attest to that. I used to run trivia contests using my intimate knowledge of the game’s lore to entertain. I even had devs of the game ask me lore-based questions, which, for me, was a highlight of playing that game. However, as EQ progressed, the lore changed. Now, when a game lasts as long as EQ has, you have to have growth to the lore, and no one would look askew at you if you occasionally revamped some lore based on, perhaps, some “old hidden scrolls that have just recently come to light” or something. That’s good storytelling. Because that was one of the reasons EQ had such immersion - it told a fantastic story. Around about the third time Kerra Island’s back-story was completely written, I came to understand that the story had been left on the cutting room floor. One of the most interesting complaints I see from WoW lore junkies is the way a major element of the lore is being completely re-written for Wrath of the Lich King.
Continue reading ‘For the Lore!’
Some quick thoughts before the jump…
- The Blood Elf noob zones are amazingly well designed. They have continuity, great quest synergy and are beautiful and full of unique flavor.
- Starting over from scratch is tough to get used to. I ran out of cash because I trained all of the weapon skills at L10, forgetting that I still have to pinch pennies. Compared to my Twink alliance alt that I started for the 10-19 battlegrounds, who had 2000 gold sitting in her mailbox when she got to the very first mailbox in Goldshire.
- Warcraft, with all of its many flaws is still an amazing game, and nothing can compare to the incredible population levels available in every zone. Many games have whole swaths of territory vacant after the first leveling rush passes, but no matter your level, you can always find others in WoW, no matter where you are or what you are working on.
Continue reading ‘WoW Update I’
There seems to be less activity on the villain side, which surprises me given that I usually characterize City of Villains as what City of Heroes would have been if they had had another year to work on it. The classes have better solo-ability, the zones have more of a story to them, the story arcs tell flavorful stories that do not drag on unnecessarily, and the content is spread over fewer zones.
But now I am back in Grandville. Grandville is in many ways a triumph of story over gameplay, like the Shadow Shard in CoH’s endgame. It is built as a fortress, complete with high walls, guards on patrol, and gun turrets. It is a vertical zone, taking advantage of CoX’s 3-D nature, so the zone works upwards as well as outwards. These are positive, until you need to navigate. Imagine having an instance door several hundred yards above you, with enemies seven levels higher than you on patrol in front of it; some of those enemies can see through stealth; most of them have some form of crowd control and/or anti-jump/fly ability. They will still be there when you exit the mission door, and because my latest character is a Mastermind, I always exit missions defenseless and needing a few minutes to resummon and upgrade. Being two-shot for the crime of leaving a mission is unfortunate.
The more interesting content requires more dangerous paths. Anyone can get endless newspaper missions: those doors are usually easy to get to, and you can swim to the mayhem missions safely. You may have more difficulty getting to contacts who give story arcs when they are standing on ledges or under structures where higher-level enemies roam. The new Rikti War Zone is the only alternative to Grandville, and you are again on repetitive missions once you run the half-dozen arcs there. In CoH, you never need to go to the Shard, and Peregrine Island is about as linear and 2-D as it gets. The only problem is the occasional newspaper mission door that is at the feet of the 200′ tall rock monsters.
I don’t recall if my first level 50 villain had problems with Grandville. My second was an invisible teleporter with status protection, which is about as safe as it gets. Maybe I just need to re-learn how to run in panic through a zone where I am no longer the big dog. I need more panic buttons on my Mastermind.
: Zubon
Hitting the wayback machine, I was reminded of a bug from the early days of City of Heroes. Damage resistance debuffs also debuffed resistance to damage resistance debuffs. That is, if I hit you with a 30% damage resistance debuff, not only would your resistances drop, but you would have a 30% larger effect from the next damage resistance debuff to hit you. Take Enervating Field, a damage resistance toggle, and have two characters drop it on the same enemy. Tick tick, tick tick, and it is stacking by multiples, not by adding. Some people still have screenshots of doing >10,000 damage in one hit after letting the enemy sit there with several debuffs toggles going for a while.
: Zubon