Worgen

When Cataclysm was released, it added two new races, Goblins and Worgen, each with their own new starting area.

I was going to check these out much sooner, but since Christmas we’ve really not been playing WoW as we used to.. a lack of interest in dungeons thanks to too many randoms spoiling the instance, maybe a little bit of disappointment at the lack of things to do at 85 as well, without more friends to actually try out raids.

I finally got around to creating my Worgen character.. well, human and Worgen character, as you start off as a human.  She’s a warrior.. I’m going to attempt to learn to tank, if we play these for more than the initial levels anyway.

Leveling with Jaysoon instead of the usual suspect meant killing a lot of extra mobs..

Rampaging Worgen just off to the side of my route back to hand in?  Attack!  Maybe unnecessary for XP purposes, but this allowed more uses of fun quest items such as the Gilnean Mastiff, which just threw itself onto lurking enemies from whichever direction 🙂

As per the storyline we were eventually bitten, and a little later changed into our furry forms..

The female Worgen has a better walking animation than the male; being a little more hunched over, she looks more sneaky and animal-like.  I was rather amused by the ‘sniff’ emote, which has had the relevant sound added.  Worgen can also roar, unlike other races.

There were more amusing quests outside as the Forsaken arrived.. one in particular involved shoving gunpowder kegs on the heads of Abominations which were too stupid to do anything about it!  I would have liked more than four to blow up between us, though 😉

Shortly after this, the land starts to be flooded.. thanks Deathwing.. and we end up rescuing drowning people and trying to evacuate people such as a little old Grandma who turned out to be anything but feeble when a Forsaken tried to steal her cat..

Near the end of the area came the Battle for Gilneas City, which was great as we got to play with catapults, but less good when we managed to run into a glitch; a missing hand-in.  It seems that somebody else started the section just as we finished ours, resetting the location of the NPCs.  More catapult action, though, so it worked out fine 🙂

As our lovely area of the world was fast becoming an underwater area of the world, we had to go and seek refuge with the Night Elves, but not before jumping on the back of a Hippogryph and destroying a Horde ship.. after playing Horde side for so long, this felt a bit weird.

While completing missions for our new hosts, Jaysoon discovered that this huge whirlpool leads to a secret cave..with a hidden quest!

By completing the quest in here we got a secret achievement: Ghosts in the Dark.  I absolutely love the idea of little extras being hidden for those who explore 🙂

Kissing the Cockroach Man

Don’t worry.. achievement hunting!

During the ‘Love is in the Air’ event in WoW, an achievement is available called ‘Flirt with Disaster.  You get this for getting completely smashed, putting your best perfume on, throwing a handful of rose petals over Jeremiah Payson, and then kissing him..

Only thing is.. Jeremiah Payson is the Cockroach Vendor in Undercity.. definitely one to regret in the morning! 😉

I also managed to gather enough tokens to get the Truesilver Shafted Arrow.. which means the Perma-Peddle achievement and the flying pest: Peddlefeet!

I’m now up to 69 pets! 🙂

Rift

Rift is a new fantasy MMO from Trion Worlds, with all the usual PvE, PvP, quests and crafting, as well as some nice world events in the form of the rifts, which open to release elemental invaders into the world.  There are two playable factions: Guardians and Defiants, both trying to save the world, but opposed to each other as well.

There’s a brilliantly unique system in place in this game for character classes – rather than simply picking one of a few classes, you choose a calling: Warrior, Cleric, Rogue or Mage, and then specialise by attuning with a variety of Souls, the first of which you get for the first quest in the tutorial area.  This allows a vast array of customisation, and hopefully means a lot more variety amongst players than in WoW, where choice gives way to ‘optimal’ specs.

There’s a Riftwatch video here, which shows the Guardian’s starting zone.. there’s also a detailed explanation of Callings, Souls and the use of spells 🙂

A friend and I started off as Guardians, since he was determined to be a Dwarf, and they are only available to the Guardian faction.  I also picked a Dwarf Warrior, then a Beastmaster soul, which gave me a pet to help me in combat 🙂

After a few more quests.. enough time to try out the initial abilities.. I was asked to pick my second soul.  One of the suggested pairings for the Beastmaster was the Champion, a specialist in charging into battle with two-handed weapons..

This was where the confusion came in.
The second soul gave me a second set of abilities, which seemed very similar..  I just didn’t know which I should be using at first.

The abilities are similar in terms of the amount of damage dealt and amount of power they use, but the Fierce Strike increases pet attack ability as well as causing damage.. so it made sense to use that rather than the equivalent Champion ability.  I also took the Bull Rush ability as my opener.. having seen my friend charging in at mobs I wanted to be able to do that too.

From my third and final soul, Riftblade, I took the Storm Blade ability – a buff which could be applied to increase melee attack, and which I could apply and then forget about as it lasts an hour.  Less mess; less stress 😉

The quests seemed very easy, especially with friends.  By the time there were four of us, it felt too easy in places.. enemies don’t stand up very well to a mob attack 🙂

The rift events were more chaotic and a lot more fun.  Spawning at random, the rifts throw out elemental type enemies until players have killed enough of them, at which point the rifts close again.  Once a rift is open, a button appears at the top of the page for you to join a public group, should you want to.  The really cool thing is that everyone can get involved.. there are no level restrictions, although if you are much lower level than the invader, you might find you miss rather a lot 😉

While talking about the game with a friend, he said that his character didn’t feel powerful.. or as powerful as he should.  It hadn’t been something I’d considered to that point, but thinking back, I realised that my character hadn’t felt all that powerful once our group had split up..

I had been fighting goblins which were a few levels lower than my character, and therefore should have been going down fast, yet it was taking a while to kill them even with Cuddles biting and clawing at them too.  In WoW, when I charge in with my Warrior and take something on, it goes down fast.. and it feels powerful, especially considering he’s doing it alone rather than having help from a pet.  When I think about that, Orola doesn’t feel powerful at all, despite being a warrior hero type character.

Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to compare games.. maybe it’s just that generally, mobs are tougher in this game and you’re not meant to feel powerful until you’re a much higher level..

I decided to take a look at the Defiant side, creating a new character: Zaaliah, the Eth Mage.
New characters on this faction start off on the last day of Telara, with the tutorial area having you prepare for a trip back in time to try and stop the destruction of the planet.

My first soul was the Pyromancer.. woop, fire!   I’m loving my fire mage in WoW at the moment, so wanted to see how this works in Rift.

While the fireball spell had a great animation.. swirling the staff with the fireball being created and then flung at the end, it had a really long cast-time.  As soon as I got some points they went straight into Ignition, which decreases the cast time of all fire spells.

My second soul was the Elementalist, which gave me the ability to summon a Lesser Earth Elemental who I named Lumpy.. he’s a rather grumpy-looking guy 😀

The other ability from this soul was Crystalline Missiles: this time round, I was able to see it as comparable to my Fireball ability straight away and rather than be frustrated by it, I simply ignored it.

My third soul was Warlock, taken mainly because I liked the idea of healing myself by draining health from the enemy.. although I had considered the Necromancer, you can only have one pet at a time and I wanted to stick with Lumpy 🙂

The early quests included the usual tasks of talking to a person, killing so many of an enemy type, or collecting things.. but I quite enjoyed one particular travel mission when I found I was to be escorted by a Wraith Battle Construct.. a huge thing!

I enjoyed watching him punt the enemy mobs out of the way! 🙂

As per the story, I was to travel back into the past to I can help stop the world from being destroyed..  which brought me to what I think is the same time period as the Guardians end up in after they complete their starting zone and go forward in time.  Nice idea 🙂

Surprise Mechano-Hog

After the success I found in making money to get my Mechano-Hog, we came up with the idea of getting a Mechano-Hog for our other friend.

This meant a lot more herb farming, as my ridiculous stash of glyphs had run rather low, and as we wanted it to be a surprise, we had to avoid suggesting dungeons in case he came on and spotted my achievement via the guild page, or in case he caught me riding the bike.

There were a few close calls, but eventually we had all we needed.. we chased him down to hand it over in person, all wrapped up with a nice red bow.. for the Horde, of course 😉

I think it went down fairly well!
There was certainly a lot of jumping around, and a few moments of silence 😉

The Mechano-Hog also comes with a side-car, useable by any party-member.
When I asked for the bike I hadn’t realised it came with a side-car as standard, so this was actually a surprise for me too 🙂

Having seen how easy it is to get the money together, I might just be saving up for the Sandstone Drake next 🙂

Mechano-Hog

I’ve saved up all week, and finally got together the money for a friend to make me the Mechano-Hog.  Actually, when I say I saved up all week, that means that I farmed herbs and sold them for stupid prices on the Auction House, presumably to people who want to level without going to the effort of collecting ingredients.

My character does look a little odd, being unable to actually see over the top of the fairing, but never mind 😉

Personal World Destroyer

Engineering pet.. fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on your outlook – unable to actually destroy the world 😉

Fallen Earth

Sometimes I think I’d like to try more MMOs, but I’m not comfortable with the payments and subscriptions that would require, especially right at the beginning when I feel like I’ve spent enough buying the game, never mind paying again to actually use it..

I know that running servers costs money, but I can’t help but look at the sub money going out each month, imagine how much it adds up and think what else I could have spent it on.. and I also feel that once I’ve paid for my sub I really do have to play, otherwise that money is wasted.
So, I’d rather only subscribe to something I’m really going to put serious hours into..

Lucky that there are trials and betas, then 🙂

First up was Fallen Earth, which I tried out after hearing mixed comments about the game from friends.

Screenshot from the Fallen Earth website.

The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where a virus and nuclear war has wiped out much of the population; the location used for the game is the Grand Canyon.  Radioactive storms and mutated animals prevent any contact with the outside world, and so a variety of different factions are vying for control of this area.  You can join any faction, and switch later if you wish.  Thumbs up for player choice 😉

Rather than choosing a class to begin with, you develop your character by assigning points to various skills or attributes, with points being gained as you level up.  You can choose a role, such as Melee or Rifleman, and then the system will suggest where you should place your points, but the choice is left up to the player.  I like being given the freedom, though without knowing which skills and attributes to improve, it’s possible to waste points, and unfortunately there is no way of re-assigning points.. a big problem if you decide later on that you’d rather play a different way.

There’s also a decent amount of character customisation with facial features, choice of hairstyle, colours, tattoos and piercings.. but not quite enough to make up for the dodgy underwear..
All the options for pants on females left jagged, painted on thong lines visible above the waistband!  Personally, I think if you can’t make something like this look good you really should just leave it out..  I’m guessing they wanted to go for sexy, but this just looked rough.  I’d also have liked the option to not have my underwear on display too 😉

Once you’ve set up your character you start off in the tutorial area, with points being explained as you go along, although I found some explanations seemed to come after I’d actually figured them out for myself.  The last part of the tutorial area was fun, though, with some combat, a vehicle, an explosion, and subsequent revival by the Lifenet team.

While all the customisation is a huge positive, I noticed some fairly large let-downs too, the first of which was the animations.  In particular, the running animation made it look like I was gliding across the floor rather than actually running.  While the animations in something like WoW are fairly simple, they don’t seem out of place with the style of the game – but when I’m in a realistic-looking world, I do expect more realistic-looking animations.

Another annoyance was the combat mode, which you have to enable to shoot or hit your target.  This didnt seem so bad until I realised that I couldn’t do any other action, such as looting, without first coming out of combat mode.  Once out in the wilds and getting jumped on it got really annoying as the first instinctive attempt to hit the mob failed; being attacked doesn’t enable combat mode, instead you have to stop and press the combat button first.. urgh.

More player choice came in the sheer number of available quests which seemed capable of having you go off in any direction at all.  For getting around, I was given a horse.  The starter horse was slow, but definitely useful as there was a lot of ground to cover.  I ended up losing my horse around town a few times, but if you leave the horse behind somewhere, you can  have it summoned back for a small fee.

Vehicle mounts were available through crafting.. though I didn’t get far enough into the game to see for myself.
I grabbed this from the wallpapers section of the site.. if I’d seen this earlier I might have been tempted to push on with the game as this might have been fun..

While player choice is often lacking, Fallen Earth went a bit crazy and gave us loads..
However, too much choice can be a bad thing.. especially when it’s not clear what you’re choosing.

The professions were presented all at once and before I’d really seen anything beyond the tutorial area, so I didn’t have any idea what might be a good choice.  I’d much rather have had them introduced to me one or two at a time, once I’d been out in the world and seen what was going on.

Worse than this though: I was shown how to collect what seemed like every item which may ever have a use in the game.

For me, the ability to collect everything is bad as it means I do collect it, and this just resulted in my bags getting full very quickly.  As almost every item I’d collected or looted was marked as a “tradeskill components”, I couldn’t tell which were useful or valuable, and which I should just vendor.

Hmm, either break my immersion in the game by reading a webpage, carry a massive pile of useless ‘useful’ stuff around, or sell the lot and ignore the trades completely?  Instead of marking all the items as “tradeskill components” it would have been much more useful to leave something in the description to indicate what it might be for.. icons for the relevant professions maybe.. or just leave that particular note off and save the hassle.

I didn’t get too far into the game.. partly put off by this, and partly because I got my hands on the Beta for another game which I’ll post about soon.

Wind Rider Cub

Tim bought me a Wind Rider Cub plushie for Christmas.. only just arrived after New Year, but better late than never!

So something cute and fluffy for going on my desk, and something for in-game too..  I like how he flies along close to me on the bigger version 😉

Merry Christmas!

I’ ve been too ill to get anything written and posted up over this last two weeks, but in terms of games it’s gone something like this: squeee-cata, underwater, goblins, flying, beating on massive mobs, new dungeons, brilliant new quests, 85!

Great-father Winter wouldn’t let me sit on his knee, but there were presents around the tree this morning.. including the Tiny Snowman pet 😉

So, Happy Winter Veil, or Merry Christmas.. whichever you prefer.. and I’ll try to get back to proper posting soon.

Elementals and the last day

This is the last night before the patch that destroys WoW as I’ve known it since starting playing.
This is both good and bad.. good because it brings loads of awesome new stuff.. bad because it’s going to remove stuff I’ve not really played to death yet.

Over the last few days, we’ve been dealing with Elemental Invasions every few hours, where elementals attack the cities.

Eventwise, step one is preparing the area, or evacuating if you were a low-level player.
In Thunder Bluff, preparation involved placing enormous windbreaks around the city, while in Orgrimmar we had large spiky barricades.

Stage two involves freeing trapped villagers and fighting off the elementals.. killing enough allows the rifts to be closed and the invasion to end.. temporarily.  The elementals were harder to kill than I expected, and we turned out to not be quite so immune to being trapped ourselves.

As well as elementals, there were also a series of four bosses to deal with.

Grand Ambassador Flamelash was one of the harder bosses for me, as he kept spawning rather nasty fires which dealt a lot of damage.  Don’t stand in fire!

Representing Earth: Crown Princess Theredras.

I had a few line of sight issues at first, along with the fear of being thrown too far away from the group, but after a few repeats she wasn’t too difficult.. we hit her over and over tonight, until she dropped me some very nice gear: the Earth Bride’s Gown 🙂

I found Kai’ju Gahz’rilla the easiest boss to deal with although there was more damage being taken by the group.  Ice spikes were easily avoidable, and I could still heal on the move.

Fighting here reminded me of levelling a long while ago, when I was frustrated by the enemies polymorphing us into frogs.

Prince Sarusan was the last of the four bosses and well.. “ouch, cyclones” sums things up nicely!  Getting thrown into the air meant lots of damage on landing, and levitate made no difference.. it wasn’t always easy to avoid, either.

So.. the server just shut down, logging us out on the roof of Orgrimmar’s bank.  What will I see tomorrow.. and will I like it?