Okay I’m going to say it. Or write it. Whatever. Game of Thrones is getting a bit dull. In the books, it’s fine to have twenty different storylines, because it’s an epic fantasy after all and you get to stay with the characters for at least a chapter before moving on, and they are usually long chapters. In the television series, you get to spend roughly thirty seconds on each story in each episode, so it’s nearly impossible to form any kind of attachment with what’s going on.

From the unpublished archives: I tried out the Defiance beta. It was “kind of” fun but it’s not really my kind of game. MMO shooters never seem that great to me. Lag plays a significant factor in being able to hit anything. Also, maybe my expectations are wack, but I thought all TPS (Third Person Shooter) games were supposed to have cover mechanics. This one didn’t. One thing that drove me crazy was the complete inability to see enemies and players in the environment until you’re standing on top of them.

I got my Control Wizard to 60. It’s really easy to level in Neverwinter, by far the easiest game to level in I’ve seen (after WoW, of course). I think it literally took two weeks (maybe it was three). Admittedly I played a lot in that time, but still, pretty fast. Side note: What is the deal with the class names? Why is it “Control Wizard” instead of just “Wizard?” Why “Trickster Rogue” instead of “Rogue?

I’d been hearing a lot about how threat is “broken” in NW (Neverwinter) and that cleric healing generates too much aggro. I’d also been hearing that DCs (Devoted Clerics) need to be more versatile than simply healing. I’d also heard that DCs get into dungeons a lot faster, since nobody plays them (because of the first two items). Well, I wanted to see all of that for myself, so I started a Devoted Cleric.

When I read the Neverwinter forums, I get the feeling that the only people posting have either a) never played anything but PnP D&D, or b) never played any other MMO, or c) have never played in PUGs before. I can understand some people fitting those criteria, but *everyone*? It’s like nobody has ever seen a “need or greed” loot system before, and they think they are the first people to notice it’s not a very good system.

About those Neverwinter Feats. Is it just me, or is it really hard to get excited about spending points that only increase your damage/whatever by 1%/2%/3%? I mean, statistically speaking, there isn’t much difference between a 3% increase and a 0% increase, right? It seems very … anticlimatic. Two clerics side-by-side, one with 3% increase, and one without - you won’t be able to tell the difference. “Woohoo, I leveled up after all that work, now I get to increase my damage from 500 to 505 points!

I’ve read and heard a lot about how difficult the Lair of the Mad Dragon is (a level 34 5-man dungeon in Neverwinter). I’ve attempted MD five times in PUGs now, twice as a cleric and three times as a GWF (Great Weapon Fighter), so I have some thoughts of my own. For comparison, MD is the third dungeon as you’re leveling. The first is the level 16 Cloak Tower, which is simple enough that anyone can do anything and still get through it.

With apologies to Billy Joel. I had a minor revelation for my Airworld story last night. It occurred to me that things would work out much better if the location of the Council of Life is known when we start out. For some reason I had set it in stone that Naobi was leaving Motiva to search for the Council of Life. Now she is leaving to visit the Council of Life.

Failed again in Lair of the Mad Dragon with a PUG. (I think that was the 6th failure in total.) Group composition was a guardian, cleric, GWF (me), and 2 rogues. No control wizard, but it seemed like a balanced group that should have had the tools to tackle Chortlefax. Unfortunately we struggled through most of the dungeon. I’ve noticed that the only people who queue for Chortlefax are people who seem like they haven’t done it before.

I forgot to mention my theory for why Lair of the Mad Dragon is so difficult. I think it’s to get people to buy resurrection scrolls, plain and simple. When you’re sitting there dead on the floor, there’s a button that says “spend X zen to get life scrolls!” I expect that if everyone could rez after every death, the dragon would be a lot easier to defeat. That being said, I do expect them to nerf Chortlefax at some point.

My current favorite class in Neverwinter is the Great Weapon Fighter (GWF). This came as a huge surprise to me, because when I sampled the five classes, the GWF was absolutely godawful in the first four newbie levels, and for a supposedly DPS class, it had terrible, horrible damage output. Even the Guardian Fighter did better, and tank classes are traditionally pretty terrible at damage. Perhaps partially because of the challenge of it, I went back to the GWF to see what it could do.

I see a lot of people on Neverwinter forums complain about the “artificial difficulty” added to boss encounters. The argument they use is that bosses aren’t difficult to kill, but the adds that spawn make it difficult to focus on the boss, so this was a cheap and lazy way for Cryptic to “artificially” make boss encounters hard. This logic makes no sense to me. Most of my instance experience comes from Rift, but I’m led to believe it is typical of what you might find in other raids and dungeons like from, say, WoW.

My GWF dinged 36, so I can’t queue for Lair of the Mad Dragon anymore with him. Instead, I queued for the Throne of Idris, which I think is a level 38 dungeon. Idris is a bit easier than MD, in that it is actually finishable. I’ve done it twice, and finished both times (though it took two tries on the last boss both times, too). And it’s very short, which is awesome.

Word has come down that Neverwinter’s “launch day” (June 20) will bring major balance and gameplay changes. This coincides with the 1-month-after-launch massive patch that every MMO always does to address issues that arise after launch. To me, this also seems to be the time when the developer actually implements a lot of the feedback they got from their beta period. They hardly ever change anything but major breaking bugs between beta and launch.

I just love how every single MMO forum thread goes something like this: A. I don’t like this aspect of the game. B. No, I think you’re complaining about nothing. A. What are you retarded? Learn to read! I didn’t say I was complaining! You’re a total moron! You’re a scrub loser with a pathetic gear score, and you’re stupid! Can’t you even read? Rage rage rage. B. Did you even bother to read my post?

I have to say that the dungeons are my favorite part of Neverwinter. Everyone on the forums whines constantly about how poorly designed the bosses are but I find them rather fun. You don’t have to memorize any strategies beforehand - you just jump in and play your class and your role well, and chances are you’ll do fine. If you don’t play your class well, chances are you’ll get schooled and then have to go to the forums and whine about it.

So I hit level 52 on my GWF and decided to try Spellplague Caverns again for a Dungeon Delve event. That turned out to be a huge mistake. Do not ever go into this dungeon. Ever. It is just not worth it. There’s no way the loot justifies the time spent. We had a GWF (me), cleric, wizard, and two rogues. At first. Somewhere before the first boss, one of the rogues disconnected and someone had the brilliant idea to kick him and get another from the queue.

I think I’m going to lay off of Neverwinter until the big upcoming patch. I find that I have little interest in doing anything in that game except running dungeons, but since it is nearly impossible to get through a queue after level 50, I just stand there doing nothing most of the time. I’m rather hoping that the next patch will make the dungeon queue work a lot better. If not, then I doubt I’ll play it much more until they make some changes.

Well the “big patch” for Neverwinter came a week earlier than I expected. Guess what? No changes in queueing - it still takes forever. So I’ve basically given up on Neverwinter, so it’s all Rift all the time for me! My mage reached level 60, so now I’m a “fresh 60.” I’m not sure how long the total journey from 50 to 60 took, but it took a little over a week to get from 55 to 60.

I’m finally listening to the audiobook of the much-talked-about Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, read by Internet super-celebrity Wil Wheaton. Though I’m only a handful of chapters into it, this book is clearly an 80s geek subculture nerdgasm from start to finish. It’s fascinating, hilarious, and depressing - despressing because of how many of the obscure references I understand (like, roughly, all of them). Now I’m going to take the fanboy hat off and put on the author hat.

I finally got to Grandmaster Runecrafter (375), one tedious point at a time. Then I realized I could have been buying recipes from the Runecrafter Vendor all along … I never scrolled down below the 375 recipes heh. Speaking of professions I bought a fourth profession slot for Artificer, because I had removed it from my cleric to make him a pure gatherer. At the time I thought I would level it up and be able to runebreak the artificer items I made to get to grandmaster, which is still a sound theory, but I hit Runecrafter 375 before I even got to Artificer 150.

All this hubbub over the Neverwinter cats and the 7-hour rollback has got me thinking something I’ve believed for a while. It seems to me that the most important thing that an MMO developer should focus on during their game development is … not the game at all. They need to focus on logging and tracking functionality. They need to focus on being able to “undo” any item in the system.

I’ve got MMO fever pretty bad right now - sorry IRL. :/ So I’m getting ready to start tanking RotF on my new Defiant warrior, and since I’m stuck at work for a while I thought I’d go lookup some up-to-date “low level tanking” guides first. Except there aren’t any. I found where someone asked for one on the forums, but the basic response from the tankerotti was, “Just do anything.

I queued for healing twice with my mage last night. I ticked the “Mentor” checkbox and a Random Normal dungeon, because I’m a chicken, and wanted to see if I remembered anything at all about Chloromancer. So first I got into Storm Breaker Protocol, one of the SL dungeons. First I hit as healer, then someone refused, then I hit as a DPS. When I arrived, the group had just gotten beyond the mech suits.

So I tried to get in a random expert with my mage, something I try to do at least once a day. It was Archive of Flesh, and right away the support guy says it’s his first time. No problem, it’s the right thing to say that up front and actually pretty ballsy because most people don’t admit it. :) For a while, he did basically no DPS so he was actually trying to play a support role - normally not required unless the healer requests it, but no big deal to me.