So I did some rare thing on the past couple of months: I did more playing than writing, in fact all of the accumulated data i've been collected probably will be thrown away carelessly on this post, but i'll try to sort it out now, and at this time I'm posting, some of it probably got old
1. World of Warcraft, patch 4.3: Death to
Surprisingly patch 4.3 pulled off a refreshing change from the troll dungeon from 4.1, or even the hardcore aspect of Fireland Raid, The Zandalari and Amanis probably sulking in their den right now. The new dungeon and the new raid performed a continuous storyline where Deathwing is finally fallen by our hands and right now it's not just the 1% of the community who saw him fall, the new Raid Finder tool make sure everyone will get an equal chance to punch Deathwing's metal jaw.
The new 'trilogy' dungeons are nicely done, the fight is not so much as punishing as ZG/ZA (where on a very bad day Jindo will throw shadow explosion on you three consecutive times) but they still required some timely interruptions and move away from the fire thing, IMO the fight is surprisingly fun, interrupting and moving never been as fun as of right now, the fight had it's moment escpecially on Well of Eternity where you face Mannoroth The Defiler (pretty nostalgic since we didn't have chance to fight him head on at Warcraft 3 and Grom hogging all the hero title), most of the bosses required pretty decent amount of teamwork and when you're going the achievement run, things get more even challenging.
Raid Finder is a tool for even more possibility, the Raid on RF tool is tuned down into an acceptable mode of challenge from the normal mode, giving anyone with no fixed playing schedule (with an average team) could beat Deathwing in a mere 60 minutes, thus giving the chance for a tunnel visioner like me to adapt myself (and my comp) to the nature of 25 man raid. Unfortunately there's only one Raid on it right now: the Dragon soul (split into two separate raid) but as Blizz said they'll add more later as the tool evolves, after RF released there's a post praising it, and it's 142 pages long, Blizzard pulled this one off nicely and they deserves my (and most of the comuunity) a thanks.
There's also new Darkmoon Faire, I only visited them once at the beginning of this month, I stopped playing WOW on December to get my hand on City of Heroes (post is coming up) it's more festive than the old one, latest addition of Transmogrify spices things up a bit, it made me a sad panda and gives so much disappoinment though since my saved Field Marshall armor is untransmogrifiable, but well that's how Blizz want to play it, time to hunt armor on Darkmoon Faire again then...
And I sorta want to start tanking... again =))
2. Freedom at City of Heroes
Yes, CoH is now free to play, although the restriction kinda make the community split into subscribers and free players, but I'll talk about it later, I started as a free player and surprisingy many aspects are already cut off for me, thankfully NC made a sweet Black Friday VIP Deal with only $0.99 so I grabbed it.
after spent an hour designing my character and selecting an archetype (class) and selecting the Villain/Hero starting area I was launched into the fray, the general idea of City of Heroes gameplay is instance based where every mission had randomly generated dungeon everytime you enter it, the number of enemy also spawned based on your team size and difficulty setting (yes you CAN adjust the difficulty setting up to fighting mobs 7 level above you and they hits like a truck)
The delicious aspect of City Of Heroes is that your level is insignificant, as you team with another person that had more level you're automatically rises to their level or if you're the party leader they'll automatically follow your level, the restriction is the power they gain on above your level can't be used, this is called exemplar/sidekick system and can be used on almost every mission except some story arc or special mission. this system is beneficial to the casual player who just want to play together with another hi/low level (yep, it's me), tired of mission I can tinkered on crafting system and spend some hard earned cash on the unique auction house or maybe MAKE my own missions through the Mission Architect system and shared it to the community and earned credits from them.
A large chain of missions on CoH is called a Task Force (or Strike Force for Villains), usually had minimum level for the participant and a minimum team size, it's usually ended up on a major character of a story, whether we protect them or defeat them, or maybe a Giant Monster, most TFs are harder than ordinary missions and such missions often yield an achievement (called badges), another mission that requires more members are called trials, it didn't have much mission like TFs but often take place on a large instanced dungeon where thousands of enemies could be running at you at the same time =))
But unfortunately shiniest spot of City of Heroes comes with the paid expansion Going Rogue , although free for subscribers, this expansion contains most of the interesting story arc of CoH, this is where you can cross the line between good and evil (and if you want you can stay there between the lines), Heroes can be Vigilantes as they ripped their enemies new one in the name of justice, or even overdo it until they fall into the dark depth of Villainity, Villains can use their brains a bit and become Rogues and even go through with their heart until they become Heroes, the morally ambiguous Rogues and Vigilantes can stay that way and earn bonuses which can't be normally achieved by staying on one side and also some unique powers. Moreover you can start your character on an alternative Earth Praetoria where humanity lives on fascist utopia and Superpowered characters are not divided between good and evil but a more greyed area of Loyalists and Resistances, this is where choices matters for the sake of the stories, pretending to be Loyalist where you actually worked for Resistances? or an opened one where you gunned down loyalists in the street? It's all your choices, it become your own personal story but unfortunately it comes with a price for free players
.... my subscriptions ended a couple of days ago and I'm starting to miss my resistance-pretender-to-be-not-so-loyalist-but-overall-morally-good character
3. Lineage 2 without the grinding.... well not really
Yes yes, let's continue, I made some notes on the latest expansion of Lineage 2: God Of Destruction and their move to free to play thing, since it's my first serious MMO and stuffs, let's get started: first of all the leveling experience on 10-40 has been completely revamped, there's a single cohesive questline which sadly ended in 40, after that it's back to our favorite thing: Grinding millions of mobs....
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Okay I give up, first of all I hate the discontinued questline, the daily quests (yes there are those) aren't even close to closing the gaps between levels, Kamaloka and the Labyrinth gets old after a week, after doing dailies (about half an hour) I usually just push the exit button and pretending that I never knew Lineage 2. There's so much revamp on endgame and such (including new instances) and in order to get that I must smite one billions two hundred thousand and sixty one monster? why NC? I'm not interested in PVP and then you made this game 'casual' friendly but then you stopped abruptly on level 40 and it's old content all the way to 90, well at least us healer isn't broken anymore since you made our inquisitor skills accessable and yeah mana regen is still sucks, I was wondering abou Aeore Healer with their number of skills, WTB a legion of Kookabura
............... I'm out of words, Lineage 2 probably won't be for me anymore, I don't know, if someone who dedicatedly grinding for a year found themselves in a max level and wonder... why I can't paid 10 mils to an NPC to change my class? Yes in old time it's 15 millions to gain subclass but since it's optional it didn't matter, class changing should be a reward for gaining level on Lineage 2 and then again this statement can be expanded to: "Why the hell I'm unable to buy a standard DN set when I hit level 80?"
The community is probably better than my local server (or WOW) but I must admit the abundance of non-english speaker spamming shout channel is annoying, and the bots is still on the roll. I probably will touch this thing again in 5 or 6 months (if I have the time)
4. Star Wars The Old Republic Beta Impression
This one's a little aged, I was ecstatic when got into the last beta testing (well they invited all their long term forum troll... i mean... registered user) but immediately flunked down really hard because apparently I somehow reverting back to my old VGA driver (which caused the GPU to be so much overheated) and hindering my overall gameplay, I didn't have time to address this problem because I was kinda late to join the massive beta test, all I want to say is Bioware did a great job to make my character lifelike through all the dialogue and such but I really wonder about the replayability value of this MMO (i.e alting) I'm good with sitting with the same dialogue 100 times, but... other player could bang their keyboard due to the unskippable dialogue.
The graphic is beautiful, I started as a Jedi Consular and Tython's scenery is breathtaking, the story unfold dramatically, changing as I choose my own path (yeah it's the darker one because I choose to avenge my fallen comrades and didn't even try to be neutral on the Twilek's refugee situation), as I told before I don't have time to jiggle around the gameplay system but the combat system seems fluid enough, at least for a consular, the feeling of danger is there and you'll strive to get out of it before it's get worse with using ALMOST all your abilities (dancing finger again) =))
I need a bath...
