Due to a heat pump failure, my normal schedule of writing scintillating posts (ha!) was totally borked. But lucky for you, I found some posts that I have previously rejected as being totally lame and irrelevant, pulled from the dregs of the barrel of mediocrity. My WoW Hunter has finally reached the level cap! Of Burning Crusade, that is. Which means he is now Level 70, a mere twenty levels and five years behind where everyone else is.

During the time I’ve been waiting in FFXIV endgame queues for my Bard, I’ve leveled all my other adventuring classes to 15 through a combination of FATEs, levemetes, and hunting log completion. (You’d think leveling to 15 would be easy, but in reality the time it takes to get from level 10 to level 15 seems endless.) My goal was to get all the classes to 15, then pick one to dive into and level the rest of the way to 50.

With such slow casting times, you’d think that the optimal way to play a Conjurer would be to spam Cures on the tank so he’s always full. That’s what I did in Rift, more-or-less, with the Purifier class. (Prior to Storm Legion, at least.) Welllllll, see, there’s this thing called ’threat.’ I may be completely wrong, but in my meager experience so far, I feel like healing generates a lot of threat in FFXIV.

On the issue of paying for Alpha access, I’m having a hard time getting worked up about it. On the surface it seems like an outrage, but the more I think about it, the more it sounds conceptually identical to pre-ordering. It’s long been a trend that if you pre-order an MMO, you get “early access.” I remember this was the case way back with Warhammer Online. It’s just that now, instead of 5 days of early access, you get 5 months of early access.

Don’t get me wrong, I am ecstatic to see Rift adding new “stuff” to the game, but unfortunately Dreamweaving-a crafting profession for enhancing Dimensions-is way far down on the list of things that interest me. Dreamweaving allegedly allows you to craft thingys and gizmos and whatsises for your Dimensions, but I have yet to do much of anything with my Dimensions, except dump in all the Dimension items that keep filling up my inventory.

Last Wednesday, SOE patched Landmark with a pretty significant list of bug fixes. The only part that mattered to me, of course, was the addition of an invert mouse option. Yay! I can play! I’m still not going to build anything complicated, though, because … well, it’s going to get wiped. Either accidentally or intentionally. So there’s no point in wasting the effort. So basically all I’ve done so far is run around and chop down trees or dig holes in the dirt.

In FFXIV, one of your endgame tasks is to follow the Relic Reborn quest line in order to build your “relic weapon,” which is one of the better weapons in the game (but not the best, of course, because that would be too easy). I’ve been pretty lazy about it because statistically the Artimes Bow doesn’t seem that much better than the Garuda Bow I’m currently using. But anyway the final step of the Relic Reborn quest (at least I think it’s the last one) involves retrieving some primal materials by defeating the three Hard Mode Trials.

Landmark continues to be a relaxing gathering experience. Remember when I said I couldn’t mine anything but Dirt, Stone, Tourmaline, and Agate? Well it turns out I had been running around all this time in a Tier 2 zone with a Tier 1 pickaxe. Doh! I have no idea how I got to Tier 2, but to get back I had to run to the central hub thingy-which probably has a cool name but I don’t know what it is-and click the big crystal hanging up in the air.

Zenimax is getting a lot of flak for their strict NDA, and I thought I would speculate on why they might think it’s a good idea to keep it in place, when other early games don’t. Which is not to imply that I think it’s a good idea, or a bad idea, or anything in between. I’m not a games journalist, so I couldn’t care less whether it has an NDA or not.

So apparently Zenimax lifted their NDA a day after I speculated why they hadn’t lifted their NDA. Neat. Anyway, now I can post what I wrote about ESO mainly after the second beta weekend I was in. Fair warning: The maximum level I have achieved is 7. That’s a couple of hours of gameplay. I have absolutely no idea what the endgame is like; I don’t even know what the maximum level is.

Yeah I pre-ordered the $79 Imperial Edition of ESO. Big whoop. Wanna fight about it? I didn’t do it for the Imperial race, which I don’t care about. I fully expect Zenimax to make that available for purchase later anyway. I didn’t do it because I’m an Elder Scrolls fan boy and I think ESO is awesome. (I tolerate TES and I merely think ESO is better than average.*) I mainly bought it for the horse.

When I was leveling the Archer/Bard, I often looked at Thaumaturges and Black Mages and wished I were them. They always seem to do more damage, and they just have cooler spells with their fire and ice and whatnot. And even more importantly, they actually have a useful Limit Break. (I would not wear the silly Gandalf hats, though.) Then I actually played a THM through level 15, and quickly changed my mind.

Still wanting to want to play GW2 more, but falling short. Here’s a summation of the new GW2 content: Same chaotic zerg fights, different location. I will give them credit for blowing up Lion’s Arch though. That’s cool. But the stuff you do in the blown up zone isn’t enough to pull me away from FFXIV. I still have no idea who Scarlet is. Or why Lion’s Arch got blown up.

I tried out a service called Pingzapper that might be useful if you’ve experienced weird lagging in MMOs or I guess really any game. The alleged problem is that your ISP might be “traffic shaping” your data in a way that interferes with games. They are almost certainly messing up your streaming videos as much as they can get away with, so it makes sense that they would extend that policy to other areas.

Amazingly, I completed Titan Hard Mode in a PUG! Finally. It took around three weeks of trying. I stubbornly refused to use the Party Finder because, since I had spent so much time attempting it in a PUG, I wanted to finish it in a PUG. I don’t know why. It doesn’t make much sense. :) He's gooooone!! Yay! So I finally got my Relic Weapon. And I upgraded it, too.

Hrm, well, this is the first day I haven’t had a workday post scheduled in advance in a long time, and I can’t find anything among my Drafts that is both finished and interesting. I can report the fascinating news that I reached White Mage level 50 in FFXIV last night. I had been buying Darklight Healing gear for a while, so I was able to quickly jump from around item level ~40 to item level ~60 in a span of moments.

I don’t have a problem with Blizzard’s $60 for a level 90 character. It’s within reach, but high enough to keep it from being an impulse buy (for me, at least). I think I would only pay to level a brand new character. It seems like a waste of money to take a mid-level or higher character up to 90. If you’re a person who can play all day and night, I could see where $60 seems high, because you can probably level a character to 90 within a month of subscription time, which is $15 I think.

This thought occurred to me one night while I was running around in a FATE group in FFXIV: Why am I enjoying this zerg but when I play in a GW2 zerg in Escape from Lion’s Arch I want to gouge my own eyes out? When I’m in a FFXIV zerg (or Rift, or most any other), I have a feeling of control. I’m filling a specific role, and when I execute my part of the plan, the whole group experience is better.

Here’s my feedback to SOE regarding Landmark’s proposed monetization plans: Hey can I just pay you and not get spammed with advertising for potions and costumes? That would be super. Oh, and by the way I already paid you. Maybe factor that into your plans, too. Also, are you ever planning to increase the percentage of your game that is finished? It’s been at 60% now for a month. (Okay, that probably wasn’t fair.

Just once I would like to play an MMO where it is easier to level a crafting profession than it is to level your character. Often it seems pointless to level a crafting profession because the equipment you make lags so far behind the level of your character. FFXIV is better than most games, but I’m experiencing it again. I wanted to meld my own materia for the level 50 Relic Reborn quest, but guess what?

I’m a little annoyed with the loot in GW2. Loot basically rains from the sky in that game, filling your bags in mere seconds. I never thought I would say anything like this in an MMO, but: For the love of god, stop giving me so much loot! You can’t take a step without getting some kind of trophy bag. And when you open that bag, out spills two or three or six or ten more pieces of loot!

I’m not sad to see End of Nations go. The “MMORTS” genre did not inspire me to want to play that game, and when we later learned it was to be reshaped into a “MOBA” my interest plummeted even farther. (I simply do not “get” MOBAs - so much clicking.) Instead, I’m ecstatic to see Trion devoting more resources to Rift, Trove, Defiance, and particularly ArcheAge, a game that I am still looking forward to seeing sometime within my lifetime.

Today I am pondering what it means when combat feels “floaty.” This is one of the most common criticisms I’ve seen about ESO: “The combat is too floaty.” I’ve seen this criticism leveled against a lot of games over the years, actually. But what does that mean? I don’t know about anyone else, but when I was swinging my dual daggers in the ESO beta, at no point did my Argonian begin to float away into the sky*.

In a burst of ambition, I installed and played the Russian version of ArcheAge for a little while. You have to sign up for a Mail.ru account (which I guess is the Russian version of Google Mail) and then you can download it. At least you could over the weekend, I don’t know if it still works. I used these handy instructions: http://www.mmocast.com/featured/archeage-ru-account-registration-guide-english-patch/ Not being able to read or speak Russian hampers the experience a bit, but not as much as you might think.

When last I was playing Rift a lot, somewhere around 2.3 I guess (just before and after the F2P transition), I was super excited to hear they were going to (evenutally) add new souls so that every class could play every role. The idea of a tanking mage was too awesome for words. Even from the very beginning of Rift 1.0, I thought it would be really cool if you could tank dungeons with an Elementalist pet.