Two expansions, EQII and LOTRO, and a big patch (WAR) and I’ve been tied up at work 12-18 hours a day since Sunday….

Still not sure whether I’ll be able to play tonight or this weekend or if more overtime is incoming.

I love my job, but it can get “interesting” (in the ancient Chinese curse sense) sometimes.

I have only a minute so this post is just to say I haven’t died and I haven’t quit any games I play.

• Keen and Graev on Mythic changing their mind about “required” armor sets
• Mark Davis interview about Heavy Metal Event on Ten Ton Hammer
• Yay! Everquest II 5 Year Player Rewards — note that they won’t be active until The Shadow Odyssey goes live.
• Casualties of War are Ten Ton Hammer’s Guild of the Week.

Well, Esri’s been in Tier 3 for a bit now, she’s level 24 1/2 or thereabouts. I’ve been doing mostly questing with about a scenario an hour thrown in and “grinding” influence at empty Public Quests. I’ve been strictly in the High Elf - Dark Elf pairing, with about 1-1/2 hours of Gunbad thrown in. I’ve done less than an hour of Open RvR (I did the scouting quests and killed one level 28 Witch Elf who jumped me right after I crossed into the lake thanks to a helpful engineer who set up a turret on the bridge).

I have to say that, so far, I’m seeing no signs of the dearth of Tier 3 PvE that I’ve seen all over the blogs. Maybe it drops off when you get to Chapter 12… I’ve just finished up Chapter 11 and am getting ready to make the switch to the Chapter 12 rally point. I finished every quest in Chapter 11 HE-DE and quite enjoyed them. They got me from level 21 to about halfway between 24 and 25. I’m thinking Chapter 12 should get me to halfway to 26 at least, given my usual rate of advancement. That is with doing about 1 scenario per hour of play, not standing in the war camp and doing them back-to-back-to-back… From what I’ve been reading everyone has been complaining that they have to do ALL the quests in ALL the pairings… So far I’m just not seeing that.

Switching to Path of the Guardian has much improved my PvE survivability — not aggroing all the surrounding mobs. I still switch from “Defense” to “Passive” when the mobs are closely packed to prevent pathing errors, but I’d say Ravi is on “autopilot” about 85% of the time. In scenarios I generally put him on passive until the end game gets close, because I want him on “Defense” when I spawn back in PvE. He dies easily in RvR, but I’ve noticed some improvement since I picked up “Furious Mending” (heal over time for you and your pet while Trained to Kill is active) yesterday. Strictly observational, I don’t do log-parsing.

I’ve had a four day weekend, this will be the last day off. Don’t ask why I’m posting at 5:00 AM, because I don’t know. I just ate some cereal and a cup of hot chocolate and I think I’ll try to go back to bed in a few… Just woke up and could not go back to sleep. I’ve had a good weekend. Got everything done I wanted to do and quite a bit of WAR time. I’ve got a busy couple of weeks at work coming up, but then another four day weekend for Thanksgiving. Of course, Thanksgiving will be busy all day, but the rest of the weekend is pretty relaxed. We don’t have company, just the three of us and I don’t do Christmas shopping on Thanksgiving weekend. Just football, games and TV.

• Michael Crichton, science fiction author, dies: article on Wired discusses his career. One of my favorite authors, years ago, and the creator of one of my favorite TV shows, ER, died this week. In his later years he was a little blatant in his political proselytizing in his books and his politics didn’t match mine, but “Coma” is still one of the scariest sci-fi books I’ve ever read. My husband, pretty much a non-reader, recognized the name and called me at work to tell me he had died, so you know his books are on my shelves. He will be missed.
• Massive Gamer magazine clued me in to The Guild YouTube Series. Check it out if you haven’t seen it!
• Some White Lion Tips from a Rank 40 White Lion on the CoW Forums — especially check out the Mastery tree tips on page 2.
• Warhammer Online Heavy Metal Event starts on November 17th. It includes Daily quests and a scenario accessible to all tiers. The daily quests are soloable and there will be a 10% Renown bonus for the Reikland Factory scenario.
• Mythic’s Grab Bag #4:
  1. Group leader must be in the same zone as you in order for you to get Influence at PQ
  2. Female and male models available for both Knight of the Blazing Sun and Black Guard careers. I’m glad to hear that. While I’m still enamored of the White Lion and having a lot of fun on Esri, I do love tanks!
  3. Heavy Metal daily tasks are designed to be done solo. So this event will be “casual friendly”. Glad to hear it
  4. Zone Control 101: A good explanation of how Zone Control works.
     Zone control is based on several pools, each of which is worth a percentage. Together, these pools tally up to 100%. Every time a player is killed, a quest is finished, or a scenario is completed (win or lose), this contributes points towards zone control. Battlefield objectives (BOs) and Keeps are binary. This means that once you own a BO or a keep, you have a chunk of zone control points that don’t go away unless the enemy takes it from you. And much more information.

From the Herald:

To access the Public Test Server, locate the new patcher: testpatch.exe in your main Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning directory. This file will be automatically downloaded when the Public Test Server is opened.

Simply run the testpatch.exe file to start the patcher. Just like the live game, it will download everything automatically, just click play and you’re good to go!

Creating a copy of your Live character to play on the Public Test Server is easy, too. Visit your Mythic Account Center, login, and click on the Character Transfer Button above your Game Account profiles. Then, follow the instructions to the Character Transfer Center. Once you are in the Character Transfer Center you will see three options at the bottom. Select “character copy” and then fill in the information on the next page to choose the character you wish to copy.

Once you have confirmed the copy you can view the status of the transfer as it is processed. Please note that you may be required to change the name of your character to avoid naming conflicts. If for any reason there is an error with your transfer, you can click on the “More Details” option to find out why the Character Copy was unsuccessful.