Atland

If you’re a fan of epic fantasy, humor, and well proportioned women, then you owe it to yourself to read Nate Piekos’ Realm of Atland. The current story arc starts at number 269 and is the best place to start for a new reader who wants to catch up quickly, but I’d say start at number 1. Nate updates every other week right now, so it won’t take someone too long to catch up, and you’ll avoid spoiling the plot when you get hooked and want to read from the begining.

This is one of a handful of webcomics that I’ve actually purchased the books for, and that’s as high a recommendation as I can give it.

That’s Much Better

I complained earlier about the poor level of communication on the part of Cryptic’s Champions team, especially as compared the the level of communication that the Star Trek team maintains. There was apparently enough community feedback that they did an Ask Cryptic, Part 2. This one is much better.

First, the post is explicit that the questions are being answered by Producer Rob Overmeyer, so that whole vague anonymous feeling from the original post is gone. Second, the answers are informative and detailed without losing the humor from the original post. Not to mention there’s just more of them.

Besides the second Ask Cryptic, there’s also a State of the Game for April. Also done by Rob, it does has some crossover with the Ask Cryptic, enough so that Rob is planning to start doing alternating months for the posts.

I’m feeling lukewarm about the upcoming Resistance Adventure Pack. I had issues with Serpent Lantern and I haven’t even attempted Demon Flame. My hope when Adventure Packs were originally announced was that they were nice multi-mission story arcs, but they ended up being mini-dungeons complete with boss fights. It just occurred to my that STO’s Featured Episodes were actually what I’d had in mind for AP’s.

The two things I’m really looking forward to are the Golden Age and Pulp Comics costume sets. Even though they’re C-store items, I’ve got enough Atari Points from my stipend to get at least one for free.

Besides more costume options, I am curious about the Hideouts coming in July although I can’t imagine getting a lot of use out of it once the initial novelty wears off. I’m also interested in seeing what the team does with their AP replacement, Comic Series. It sounds much more like the FE’s that they were inspired by, and even though a lot of challenge focused players probably won’t like it, I hope they drop the boss fights. I’m just interested in experiencing more stories, not snapping my keyboard in half in frustration.

 

Vistas of Telara: Stillmoor

As I do sometimes in real life, in MMOs I like to climb mountains to see the view from the top. This is a view from a peak just north of the Iron Pine Peak pass that leads into Stillmoor. To the left is the Icewatch Outpost that leads into Iron Pine Peak and in the distance at the far right is Greenscale’s Blight.

(click on the image for the full-size version)

Massive Patch

I am as excited today about Rift as I was disappointed on Saturday, and it has nothing to do with the mea culpa event gift that showed up in my in-game mailbox. Although some lucky people did better than a 20-slot bag like what I got (on all four of my characters).

Nope, it’s the absolutely massive 1.2 patch that’s on the test server now. There’s a ton of changes but here’s the ones that’ve gotten me the most fired up (delivered Anjin-style):

  • Wardrobe! Wardrobe! Wardobe! A cosmetic appearance system is coming, so I can actually use all of the equipment pieces I’ve been saving in my bank that I’ve out leveled but still look cool.
  • New clothier NPCs have appeared in Meridian and Sanctum following the rise in numbers of fashionable Ascended.
  • Slivers – a new type of rift content, I have no idea what it’ll be like but it’s new content which is always a good thing.
  • Stillmoor has a new zone event.
  • Crafting rifts – anything that helps in my search for Pristine Sap, so I can get that last skill I need for my Apothecarying (is that a word?).
  • Improved raid display for callings/roles, this is sorely needed. I could never tell what the colors meant so having colors for callings plus icons for roles will be nice.
  • Crafting recipe window has a search function. This is sorely needed and an odd omission considering that player inventory has a search function (which I always forget to use).
  • Respawn rates for resources nodes have been tweaked (I hope that means quickened) for Shimmersand, Iron Pine Peak, and Stillmore (among others). In my experience, it’s really difficult to find Twillight Blooms which I’ve been focused on finding hoping to get a Pristine Sap.
  • Auction UI now allows for more searching and sorting options.

Patch 1.2 has some new content and a lot of quality-of-life improvements, my only complaint right now is that it’s on PTS and not the live server.

Update: Just in case you don’t usually read Massively, be sure to go check out Justin’s interview with Scott Hartsman. Lots of good information about Trion’s plans and some of the new content like the Slivers.

Foundry Fixes

Cryptic’s been starting to address some of the grinding missions in the Foundry by un-publishing some and in some cases revoking some players’ Foundry access, see Wishtone’s post for an excellent summary. I like that they’re policing the published missions, and I originally though revoking player access is a bit heavy handed until I saw Wishstone’s post which implies that only players who were republishing removed missions were affected. She doesn’t say, but I assume that it’s a temporary measure until fixes are applied to Tribble and Holodeck.

Speaking of which the first patches to remove the exploitive mechanics that are now on Tribble:

Ship explosions will now only effect a maximum of 5 targets.

Apparently some of the missions that allowed players to level quickly relied on spawning a ton of ships on top of you and then blowing up as a result of the warp core breach from your own ship dieing.  Someone further down in the thread asks if this is related to Foundry exploit missions and Salami_Inferno, the associate producer, confirms that it is.

I’m very please to see them addressing these issues. I hope that some of the suggestions regarding adding categories and tags to missions to help with searching will get implemented quickly as well.

New Kind of Tutorial

Don’t be put off by the name, achievements are now in Minecraft but they are just as much a tutorial as they are achievements. When you first login to Minecraft now as a new player, you’re prompted to open your inventory. This unlocks the Taking Inventory achievement and starts you on a path of learning the basics of the game. They’re still pretty basic for the moment, you can check out the full list on the Minecraft Wiki, but I can see this developing into a nice way to introduce players to the game and provide some initial goals.

Finished with a Fizzle

Trion committed their first real misstep this weekend. The big River of Souls world event started with a big two week ramp up  and ended with a single event that lasted less than an hour on Saturday afternoon. Phase two was a single instance of multiple bosses spawning in each zone followed by phase three which was in-game cutscene introducing the new raid instance.

I am completely disappointed.

I spent quite a bit of time with the dailies and looking into the lore behind Alsbeth, the River of Souls, and the Plane of Death. I was also at the level cap early, which never happens. So I was really looking forward into experiencing the event. Unfortunately I was out of town doing family stuff this weekend, so I wasn’t even one of the people stuck in an eight hour queue. Originally, I wasn’t to worried about missing anything. I figured that the event would a least last the weekend and I’d be able to login on Sunday evening and catch up with a little work. It never occurred to me that the event would only run once, since the entire build up phase was repeating rift invasions.

This event was especially frustrating because of Trion’s history of good decisions until now. They did a great job of running their betas. They had a smooth launch, if not perfect, and they impressed me with how well they handled their account security problems a few weeks ago. So given all of that, why did they think it was a good idea to follow up a huge two weeks long (even if it was only planned to be one) build up with a short one hour (or less on some servers) one time only event? It just doesn’t make sense.

By Saturday night, Scott Hartsman has a follow up post where he tries to do some damage control. Like Trion’s done before with other issues, they’re giving out from free items and awarding the event achievements to everyone who’s a subscriber. That’s a nice way of saying sorry. For me though it wasn’t about the loot, it was about getting to be online and experience the content, and that’s gone. To put it another way, getting a t-shirt from Disney World is nice but I’d much rather ride Space Mountain.

Reading through Scott’s post, he talks about how their ambition got the better of them, but I don’t agree with that. The event itself sounds like it was fine, the problem was that it only happened once. The queues and the lag were all a consequence of motivating the entire population of every server to login at the same time, which was exacerbated by bringing the servers down shortly before the event and compressing the login rush even further.  Had the even been scheduled to happen every two to three hours during the course of the weekend, I don’t think they would’ve had nearly the same problems. There still would’ve been the issue with Phase Three only taking place in Stillmoor which locks out any players under level 45 or so, but at least two-thirds of the event would’ve been accessible.

I still logged in Sunday evening and had some fun. I’m not upset or planning to quit over this, but I don’t see myself investing quite as much time or interest in the next event. They’re saying the right things now, but I need to see if they can follow that with actions.

STO News

Even though Rift has been dominating my playing time lately, I still follow the STO news pretty closely and there’s been lots of interesting news recently about Star Trek Online.

The April Engineering Report came out today. A lot of what Stahl talks about in the report we already knew a bit about from the Ask Cryptic earlier this month. Still there’s tons of interesting information, although I’m a little disappointed that there’s no mention of the warp and nacelle animation issues on the Vice Admiral science ship refits. Such a small thing, but so very very irritating.

Besides the Engineering Report, Dan was also on Episode 77 of Stoked. If you have any interest in the Foundry, I highly recommend giving it a listen. Dan gives some stats on how many missions have been started, published, and completed. He also does a shoutout for the top three rated authors.

There was also a detailed dev post regarding the Duty Roster system that’s being added with Season Four. The short version is we’re getting a Duty Officers (Doffs) which we’ll be able to send on assignments to do offline things for us like crafting or missions for rewards. Some of the Doffs will also provide special passive abilities (similar to how some Accolades give passive bonuses, I think). This is just the initial feature, it’s going to be expanded later with the ability to assign Department Heads and a First Officer.

It’s not all sunshine and roses though, I saw this via Longasc on Twitter:

oh cool, people start playing the #STO Foundry… Vice Admiral in 11h was not enough, now it’s possible in 2h!

I suppose it was only a matter of time for someone to figure out how to tweak a Foundry mission to help level characters faster. I’d thought based on what I saw on Tribble that Cryptic had managed to correct for some of the problems that COH’s Mission Architect ran into, but never underestimate the ability or inclination for some players to optimize the fun out of any game. Of course, the real test of the Foundry now is how the player community reacts to these missions and what, if anything, Cryptic does to the Foundry to keep these kinds of missions from being created. Interesting times ahead.

Back to the Drawing Board

My current goal in Rift is to finish all of the epic story quests for the Saga of the Endless. While I was leveling, I got stuck on one in Moonshade Highlands which needed me to take on three level 40 elites and I never quite found the time to put a group together. It’s unfortunate because I spoiled the story a bit for myself by accidentally finishing some related quests in other zones.

After getting some help from guildmates earlier this week to finish the quest (thanks Faraii and Gaar!), I was able to do the next part solo but then the follow up quest wanted me to go into the Runic Descent, which is the Highlands dungeon. So last night I popped on and was able to get a guild group together (special thanks to Battlemage for tanking andMMO Gamerchick for helping with the healing) to head into the Descent. Since most of us were over level, it seemed like a good chance to practice being a healer. I’d been using my Chloromancer healing role quite a bit in rifts, but I found out that the free-for-all aspect of rift play is very different from running a dungeon instance.

I did okay, but anytime a fight started to go sideways I found it very difficult to pull of a save. Poor Battlemage suffered quite a few deaths as we made our way through the instance, and while not all of them were my fault I still feel like I should have been able to do better. I’m not sure if it’s my build, the rotation I was using, or just being rusty. I haven’t played a healer in a long long time, my last healing character was my beloved Troll Shaman, Nallas, in Dark Age of Camelot.

About half to three quarters of the way through the instance, GeeCee and I switched roles. She took over with her Cleric’s healing build and I switched to my Stormcaller/Elementalist build. Things went a lot smoother after that.

The challenge for me playing a Chloromance was it has few oh-shit abilities. Most of the healing comes from damage done via life spells, and the majority of them have casting times. So there’s very little time in order to react when the tank’s health starts to plummet. It always seemed like Battlemages health took a nosedive when Bloom was still halfway through its cool down.

Adjusting to using the interface differently was as big a challenge as using the Chloromancer soul. As a DPSer, I’m focused on the tank’s target or my pet’s target primarily. I’ll occasionally pick up an add if it is attacking the healer, but for the most part it’s: target a mob, burn him down, and target the next. I use tab targeting usually and select party members using the mouse (since I do it so rarely I’ve never picked up using the F-keys). The casting time on Chloromancer heals really required me to start using the F-keys in order to respond quickly enough to swap targets, and it’s going to take me some time to get that habit ingrained. I haven’t setup and of the smart targeting options either, but I plan to tonight, so that I can stay focused on the tank a bit more and have damage spells forward to their target (I think that’s how it works in Rift).

So I’m not giving up on the Chloromancer yet, but I do have a lot more to learn and practice. I also don’t think rifting is working to get me the role experience I need. Bad news for my guild’s tanks.