Dopey

Posted on April 3, 2012 by

I’m oftentimes not the brightest bulb in the lot. I’ll be proving this on a daily or weekly basis as I play SWTOR, but here are some real /facepalmers I’ve caught myself doing lately.

Gearing up Companions

I… don’t do this. With the two characters I’ve spent a lot of time on (the Sage and the Vanguard), I have geared up my pocket healer fairly well. But only fairly well. I’m pretty sure that neither Tharan nor Elara are really decked out. Implants are a major point of failure. As are relics and earpieces. This habit of vendoring gear rather than trying to pass it on becomes particularly distressing when viewed in the light of my trooper. I mean, they all wear heavy armor so they should inherit my castoffs for those class quests when I am forced to use a certain companion. But, uh, I’m a dope. So they don’t.

Under-utilizing resources

This is something I do all the time. I’m not proud of it and I’m trying to change, but change is slow in coming. I have three or four things that should always be on cooldown when I’m raiding and they pretty much get used maybe once a boss fight. Sometimes twice if I am on the ball or it’s a long fight. wtb macros like yesterday so I can tie them to other buttons I am pressing all the time anyway.

Since we do lack macros, I splurged and got myself a new gaming keyboard. This was two weeks ago. Want to know how many keys I’ve remapped since then? Three. Then I had to remap them back to their original locations because I found the changes to be more unnatural than intuitive. I have yet to really sit down and make another stab at getting my abilities in places that will work for me. I should do that and put in some practice on it before this week’s raid.

Who am I? What am I doing?

I can’t seem to keep crew skills straight at all. I mean, I’ve managed to keep in mind that certain things go together and I can even recall which three skills my main has. After that? I’m totally lost all the time. So when I get a mission discovery for Cybertech, I have to default to my second screen and pull up a spreadsheet I made that lists all my characters and what the hell they do. This also comes in handy for all the times I forget whether my Smuggler is named A’lexxia or Alexxia… or was it maybe Alexxira? This must be why I never did a naming convention before.

Christmas Shopping

Then there’s my other spreadsheet that only lists all the possible companions and what sort of presents they like. I would be lost without this. In fact, I was lost without it all the time and it took me something like two and a half months of grumbling about having to go look up what it is that Qyzen actually likes (pretty much nothing, for those of you playing along at home) before I finally just made the google document. It lives on the second screen along with my crew skills list. Pretty soon, all my tabs will be little guides to help me keep my shit straight.

Maybe I should make a rotation list? It would read: 6, 7, 8, 0 (keypad), 1 (keypad), 3, 3, 3, 0 (number bar, if up)….

Yeah. I really need to remap my abilities.

That’s going to be priority numero uno.

Right after I make a new header for this blog. I just had a great idea for another tagline.

Posted in Being Dumb, Companions, Sage, SW:ToR | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Under the wire

Posted on March 28, 2012 by

My guildmate, Kris, recently wrote about SWTOR in review, covering the events that have occurred over the past three months. She invited everyone to contribute their own recap of their first three months in game and since I’m usually scrounging for anything that looks remotely like a blog topic, I thought I would get on board.

My story starts with the fact that as few as seven months ago, I was not at all intending to even try SWTOR. I mean, I enjoyed the original trilogy of movies, but other than those movies being a fondly remembered part of my youth, I never had much to do with the whole franchise.

Despite standing invitations to join a guild in SWTOR when it launched, I couldn’t see walking away from WoW.

But then shit happened in WoW. For all that the changes announced for MoP didn’t excite me, it was really guild-related stress that drove me into wanting the escape of a whole other game. A place where I could be someone else and have a blank slate. A place where I could hide1 from the several people who made WoW something to be dreaded rather than enjoyed.

So ending up in a beta weekend for a game I had no intention of playing was pretty strange, but I am glad I got the exposure. I wrote about how I enjoyed the Sage and how it felt natural to me. I said I had found my main and was pleased that she would be my main from the get-go, and have the right name and everything.

And despite some taunting from Njessi, I was right. Alexx is 50 and my raiding main. The issue of my Trooper being leveled at nearly the same pace was resolved when I made the decision to ditch Dion and level at my pace, rather than wait around endlessly for him to get done with space battles or whatever had caught his wandering attention.

Although I am a notorious altoholic, I have only the Sage at level cap and, though I do have more than a handful of alts, I don’t spend a whole lot of time in game outside of my main. At least, not compared to prior MMO experience. Part of it is thanks to Biochem and the fact that for a little while there I was the only person in the guild who was working on Biochem on my main.

In fact, these days I mostly work on my alts when I want to have immediate access to a crew skill that I have a need for…

Though, when I had the brief disconnect from the game upon hitting 50 and finishing my class quests on the Sage, I do admit I hit the alts a little harder then.

Since then, I am happy to have finally started in on raiding and am enjoying that immensely, usually despite the bugs. Oddly enough, bugs could cause us to wipe all night on Soa and I wouldn’t be too fussed about it, but I do hate the travel time involved in running back after a wipe. Especially when the speeders bug out and drop you off about two stops too early.

All in all, I am enjoying myself in SWTOR and my guild is a wonderful place to be. The drive for progression in raiding makes up for the sudden drop-off of story elements and I’ve learned that it’s easy enough to scratch that particular itch even with a second run-through of the same class when one plays to the opposite side of the light/dark side spectrum.

I feel as though Alexx has come a long way and I am eager to see her go farther. I really believe we’ll be hitting up hard modes in raiding soon, not to mention there’s a patch right around the corner.

In three months, I guess you could say I’ve fallen in love with a new MMO. Not to the exclusion of being able to see the flaws and I certainly can’t help but compare it to WoW in some ways…. But none of that even matters so long as I have the Snark Side around me.

My takeaway after three months? The game and its mechanics are great but, as always, it’s the people I play with that make it home.

  1. I am obviously hiding less now. I never thought this persona change could be a sustainable secret or was ever a well-kept one to begin with. On the plus side, the guild was secretive long enough to get a solid application process brought on-line so we can all be more discerning about who we let in. ↩
Posted in Guild Leadership, Operations, Sage, SW:ToR | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Anti-Skirt Sentiment

Posted on March 22, 2012 by

I put on my robe and wizard hat.

Dear BioWare,

Hello there. Do you know what’s difficult to do? Pretty much anything if you’re wearing a dress. I suppose they may be well suited for sitting around and chatting or perhaps swooning onto a chaise lounge, but otherwise, they’re pretty much a giant pain in the ass.

No, seriously. Walking can be difficult if the conditions are wrong. I have a full-circle skirt I sometimes forget how much I hate and will wear to work. There’s a lot of material to that skirt but, as I don’t intend to wear a hoop skirt underneath, nor yet massive amounts of petticoats to give it that bell shape, the combination of walking and even a slight breeze can cause a lot of that material to either sail away behind me – the better for other people to step on – or to bunch up between my legs.

Imagine trying to gracefully pluck a few yards of fabric out of your crotch region in the midst of a busy street and let me know how much fun you think that is.

Have you even tried to do anything more athletic in a skirt? If you want to run, you have to gather that thing up and hold it above your knees or it won’t work. I’ve gone dancing and had the hem of a skirt completely torn out because some clumsy farm boy stepped on it while I was moving in the opposite direction as the dance called for me to do.

In short, long skirts just aren’t practical. At all.

But the fantasy trope dictates that anyone wizard-like must wear a robe, which is pretty much a dress in disguise. I suppose it works for the wizard who is hard at work in his secret lair, mixing “eye of newt and toe of frog,” but when you’re out in the real world (and I do use that term loosely) and fighting – or running – for your life, it makes not one lick of sense.

So, c’mon BioWare, give us some more options in clothing that look like pants and some sort of tunic (and that aren’t hooded and/or are skimpy as hell). This whole running around in a dress thing is killing me.

Sincerely,

Alexx, Jedi Sage and hater of long skirts (also oven-mitt/banana hand gloves)

 

Posted in General, Sage, SW:ToR | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Snark isn’t dead weight

Posted on March 19, 2012 by

In my several years of gaming and raiding, I have often tried to find myself in a raid team that isn’t carrying any dead weight. But it never quite seemed to happen. That team had a tank who didn’t use some of their best threat-generating tools. This team had a healer that was only adequate. Most teams had at least one or two dps who spent most of their time standing in the bad but figuring that they were doing very well because they never stayed alive long enough to see just how bad their sustained dps was.

In all of these scenarios, I have also been with people who more than made up for the dead weight we were hauling around, whether it was a great healer who made up for the slack of the only-okay healer. Or skilled dps who could not only make up for having a dead fellow, but who could also juggle their threat well enough to put out superior numbers while managing not to pull off the derpy tank. Or the tank who had his cooldown rotations so well in hand that he could manage to stay alive through insane odds.

And then there’s operations in SWTOR. We’ve only been at it for a few weeks and this last week was my second time seeing both Eternity Vault and Karraga’s Palace. My first time in EV, we fought a number of bugs but still managed to make decent progress, ending the night with a look at Soa just to see it. The first time in KP, we ended up stuck on Foreman Crusher, though we had a few close attempts.

The second time seeing these places was nothing like the first. We sailed through EV and only wiped twice, both times due to bugs. The next night, in our first hour of raiding, we had thoroughly trounced everything up to and including Foreman Crusher with nary a wipe in sight.

I think we’re seeing better success due to a blend of familiarity and fewer bugs working against us. But the familiarity coming into play so soon is, I think, telling. None of the mechanics we’ve seen from the bosses have been too different from the sort of things we’re used to seeing from raiding. We know to stay out of the bad, avoid cleaves and interrupt anything that can be interrupted.

The difference, I think, is that everyone who is raiding in The Snark Side doesn’t see the same old mechanic rehashed in a different way and immediately treat it like it’s a new mechanic. It’s just getting out of a different colored bad. It’s just interrupting a different cast. It’s knowing that Internet Dragons aren’t the only things that cleave.

I’m feeling very positive about raiding in the group I am in. I just can’t see any dead weight to have to haul around. And I wouldn’t be too surprised to find ourselves working on hard modes in the near future, which is something I never once did in WoW.

And that, more than anything, is what is going to keep me engaged in end-game for a long time to come, no matter if we have lost the story elements that came with leveling up. I’m really starting to think SWTOR is the best of both worlds, where leveling is fun and end-game is accessible but with room for challenges.

Posted in Leveling or Questing, Operations, SW:ToR | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Portrait of a small guild

Posted on March 13, 2012 by

The Snark Side is a pretty small guild. We have, at my last count, 11 members who play SWTOR as their primary MMO. That number is not heavily subsidized by those playing it as a secondary game – in fact, I believe we have one social member and almost got a second, but not quite.

A guild that small tends to be fairly quiet in many ways. It’s not always possible to get a guild group together to go run a hard mode flashpoint and guild chat can be dead for great swaths of time, but so far it’s been a decent trade-off for a general lack of even minor guild drama.

Structure

Our leadership structure is fairly straightforward. We have two Co-GM’s (Co-Tyrants, we call it), of which I am one. Between myself and Njessi, we handle the administrative junk and tend to be the ones to get any of our policies set down in written form and posted to the appropriate place on our forums. There was quite a lot of this going on early on, but a few months into the game and being a guild full of reasonable adults, we haven’t had to do more than lay the groundwork and perhaps tweak one or two things in a minor way since.

The beast that is raid management and leadership has been split up among three volunteers, and it’s a thing of beauty. One person – Iyeri – graciously took on the task of managing the roster, while Lonomonkey has largely shouldered the burden of being the raid leader, with assistance from Wolfsong on that end. Wolfsong has also been going out and finding information on strategies for operations and posting lovely recaps to the forums for those who are more pressed for time.

And then there are the generally helpful sorts, which tends to be pretty much everyone. Crafted goods and crafting materials flow easily from hand to hand, depending on who needs what, when. Half our guild chat may very well be along the lines of, “Oh, did you still need more red goo? I have a stack for you.” Or, “Who has Cybertech? I have this schematic for you.”

The honeymoon or the marriage?

I know it’s easy to be in a sort of honeymoon phase with a new guild, only to have the cracks in the foundation start to show as soon as something drops that everyone wants or someone says something careless in guild chat. I’ve been through the honeymoon phase in prior guilds, where everything seemed wonderful until one or two of the wrong people got handed an invitation and the stress came crashing down so quickly, I had to wonder if it was there in hiding all along.

Where The Snark Side is concerned, however, I’ve been gaming with most of the people in the guild for anywhere from 1-5 years, and I know for a certainty that many of these people have seen me at my worst and I have seen them at their worst. But we all still like each other and get along and tend to have similar enough viewpoints that we can always work out a decent compromise with enough time and conversation and patience.

Along with having mostly known and played together for some time, we’ve also been very choosy about who to let in and under which circumstances. Social members have to be sponsored by a raiding member, for example. And raiding members have a whole set of criteria to meet to even be considered.

We’ve had one applicant so far and it was nice to see him make it from trial to full raiding member and then to continue fit in seamlessly, as though he had always been a part of the fabric of our guild. All the more so, since I took on recruitment duties as a part of my job description as Co-Tyrant, largely because I thought it was an important aspect of managing the guild, but also because I had never been very active in a formal recruitment process before and wanted to gain the experience.

All in all, though there may be some small drawbacks to being in a smaller guild and though the recruitment process may take up a really large chunk of time when it occurs, I’m glad to be exactly where I am and to have the guild be exactly the way it is. Here’s hoping we all remain diligent enough to make sure we’re all so happy a year from now. (I mean, I’m just assuming that if I’m happy, so is everyone else. I’m notoriously pessimistic in most cases.)

Posted in Guild Leadership | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Weak Link

Posted on February 29, 2012 by

I pretty much fail at posting, don’t I?

I do, but that’s not the weak link I’m here to talk about today. Last week, I started dipping my toes into hard modes. It’s been covered pretty well elsewhere that hard modes are a mixed bag. You have trash that is harder than bosses in some places, bosses that you don’t realize are bosses because they pretty much fall over in others and way too many bugs and too-tight enrage timers in others.

And yet, I came away from two different incomplete hard mode instances feeling as though the failure was likely pretty much mostly my fault. I can’t be blamed for AoE attacks from bosses doing damage well outside of what their ranges should be, but I can cop to the fact that my attention to my gear had been pretty spotty. I guess I am too used to the WoW model of normals, then heroics and then raiding and, as long as you have even some of the weaker item modifications in place by the time you start raiding, you’ll probably be good to go.

This is not the case in SWTOR. It’s impossible to say just how much I might have been lagging behind in terms of DPS compared to my guildmate (wtb some sort of log or meter already), but I knew that other people in my guild had completed hard modes when I wasn’t part of the equation.

So I sucked it up and apologized and went to work.

I’m a dope

I can’t say exactly why, but I’ve been having a strangely difficult time wrapping my head around modifications and stat priorities and how orange gear works. People in my guild would talk about stripping the mods from one piece and popping them into another and I was derping in my corner like the dope I am, all: …you can do that?

I guess I tend to get overwhelmed when there’s a lot of change. Changing a whole MMO and having similar mechanics that work different has been tripping me up left and right. So I hit Google pretty hard, recalling this time to also search for information on Sith Inquisitors because there’s a lot more information out there for them than there is for a Jedi Sage, but same difference.

Because I require lists and organization, once I had figured out my stat priorities, I hit up Excel and started making lists. To do this, I mostly looked at the GTN to see what was available for purchase and listed anything that might be good for me before arranging it all in order of most desirable to least desirable. I still need to get some things added to that list, such as items that are available for purchase using commendations (and I’m sure there’s a lot that could be crafted that just wasn’t on the GTN when I looked), but I’d like to eventually share that here as a quick reference guide.

Then I made a list of all the gear I had that could take modifications and what was currently in it. I marked everything that could easily be improved in red and things that were decent in green.

The bad and the ugly

 

Yikes. Other than the lightsaber – which I had just replaced a non-moddable green with the first orange one I could get with commendations (and so which came with those old, crappy mods), I realized I had done a pretty bad job of upgrading my gear as I leveled and in several cases had chosen the completely wrong mod with wasted stats, such as Accuracy.

Fortunately, a guild mate had already sent me five enhancements to replace anything I might have had, but I was on my own for the rest of it. Some of it came from the GTN, my alt with slicing provided the augment and I had a ton of commendations to throw around. And the after shot looks a lot better:

The good

 

I know I could still improve on a lot of it and I’ll certainly be better about working on it, especially now that I’ve begun to figure out what words to look for in the names of the various modifications.

But for now, I can say that the third time I tried a hard mode, having put all the effort into it that I did, we sailed through it fairly easily and even managed to kill the last boss. Of course, I still have yet to get credit for completing a hard mode because I released on the last boss and was kicked out and denied loot and basically given the finger by the game. BioWare says this is working as intended, which I think is a load of bullshit. But hey, at least I’m not the weakest link anymore.

Or if I am, it’s not that noticeable.

Posted in Being Dumb, Sage, SW:ToR | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

Feeling lost

Posted on February 13, 2012 by

Hitting level cap for the first time in a game is apparently always a bittersweet moment for me. I had thought that since I plan on raiding (going with Shintar here on “running operations” being too much to type every time I want to talk about my end game experience) and have a familiar roadmap ahead of me for the whole gear up and get ready process that I would just roll right into it without missing a step.

Instead, I find myself avoiding my main and avoiding the grind. Flashpoints have been the only exception to this, since I am finally getting to do flashpoints with a properly balanced guild team and not having to pinch heal every time with mixed success.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m looking forward to raiding and I have every intention of being prepared for it. I’m enjoying being a Sage and I feel like I’m performing well in a group setting. But after being overwhelmed with story all the way up to level 50, the endgame feels a little empty, somehow.

I miss my class quests. And while it’s been fun to read the missives from Iresso, to whom I am now engaged to be married, I miss having the interactions in game with a companion who is more interesting than Lizard Face or Nadia or Zenith are. Even Tharan with his questionable womanizing ways was better than trying to grind (heh) affection with the other three.

So I’m back to hitting my alts with a vengeance. The trooper has just started out on Tatooine and managed to pick up the bonus series before leaving Anchorhead. That was odd. I’ve also started up my Jedi Shadow and am trying to put aside my innate distaste for dark side choices long enough to run around being an asshole to everyone I encounter.

It’s surprised me how much I am enjoying playing through the same class again so soon. The first 10 levels are mostly pure agony since I’m so sick of Tython I could puke, but once I made it to Coruscant and started putting points into the different AC, it’s felt like a whole new experience. One that reminds me a great deal of being a feral Druid in WoW. A feral Druid with a pet lizard and a penchant for dresses.

Anyhow, no real point to this post I’m afraid. I’m hoping that as more and more of my guild mates reach the level cap and join us on Ilum that there will be more group shenanigans and more liveliness in Mumble to break up the tedium of farming commendation badgers. As soon as I can get over this little dip in my enjoyment of the game, I hope to have to have more to say.

Posted in Companions, SW:ToR | Tagged , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Bugs

Posted on January 31, 2012 by

Seemed like I ran into a bunch of random bugs over the weekend. Many were the usual crazy eyes and characters being blacked out sorts of things, but then there were some that were a bit more amusing.

Reminiscent of a famous cat, I give you the invisible speeder.

Invisible speeder is invisible

 

And then there was this thing that happened. I hope it was a bug, like the naked bug that sometimes manifested in WoW. Because otherwise there was some sort of weird bet or deal going on between my companions.

Checking in, Sir. Nevermind the underpants.

 

And, you know, if Zenith wants to run around the ship in his skivvies, I have no problems with it. But it seems to me that when we’re raiding an Imperial ship he might want to wear, I dunno, armor.

It's nothing you haven't seen before.

 

Then Iresso got in on it and while I was very impressed with his guns, it looks like that’s about all he is packing in terms of, err, weaponry.

No wonder the BSOCK is always followed by a stilted and fully clad conversation on the bridge of my ship. No one likes to cuddle when they’ve been disappointed.

What interesting bugs have you seen lately?

Posted in Being Dumb, Companions, SW:ToR | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Conversations

Posted on January 26, 2012 by

Late night conversation with Dion.

Me: Man, it must suck to play a male Jedi Consular.

Dion: Why is that?

Me: Because all your companions are dudes until the end of the leveling game! I’m 45 and still have yet to get a female companion.*

Dion: (Disinterested) Wow. That is kind of a long wait.

Me: I know. My ship is a total sausage fest, except for me.

Dion: ….

Me: That’s it. I’m gonna name my ship the RSS Sausagefest!

*I did, however, just get Nadia while still at level 45, so it’s not like you have to wait all the way to level 50!

Posted in Being Dumb, Companions | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Illicit romance

Posted on January 24, 2012 by

So I’m a Jedi Sage, right? And apparently, emotion is bad and loving someone is a definite no-no. Because my priorities will become skewed? And the world will implode or I’ll have babies and then try to kill and maybe eat them?Something like that.

Well, whatever. I’m a total rebel. When I picked up companion number 4, aka Lt. Iresso, I noticed with exceeding joy that his favorite gifts are the ones no one else in my motley crew wanted. They’d been piling up in the bank cargo hold for ages, so I took several minutes to wander around with Iresso and give him something shiny every time he’d stopped being overwhelmed by my last gift. (I assume that’s the purpose of the debuff. They’re all excited and need a moment to collect themselves. Right?)

Apparently, he took this to mean I wanted into his pants.

That hadn’t been the plan. I favor the technologically savvy in real life, so I had planned on maybe letting Tharan have another shot at me. He hasn’t tried again in all the time since I shot him down. So clearly he’s afraid of rejection and can’t handle a little challenge. So I’ve been trying to encourage him, but his stupid little hollowhore keeps getting in the way and he’s so terribly whipped by something he can reprogram that I threw caution to the wind and shared a kiss with Iresso.

Iresso then came to me this morning with some concerns. After all, I’m a Jedi and it’s not allowed. Won’t the Jedi Concil get all mad?

If they find out, I said.

He chuckled warmly and said we could keep it on the down-low.

Then my computer gave me a Blue Screen of Death.

…I think the Jedi Council knows and is punishing me.

Posted in Being Dumb, Companions, SW:ToR | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments