Sunday, September 25, 2005

Group Experiences

Been busy.... levelling toons left right and centre.

More drivel will be posted sooon.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

It's been a hard days night...

Started a new toon on Test Centre to be ready for the new ranger revamp hitting TC before going Live. Except I created this toon more than a year ago as there were rumours then of an upcoming revamp, lol. At least now we've got dev's posting and discussing.

Anyhow, after leaving him for so long with just novice ranger and a little bit of rifles I got into a group to grind some weapons XP, ended up clocking up 1,000,000 rifle XP tab in what felt like a couple of hours but was a bit more. Tho not much.

So, another couple of sessions like that and he's good to go. Just need to figure out what to do with the stack of hide I hauled in.... guess I'll trade it with a tailor or maybe do a HUGE factory run of traps... ;)

My other toom, he's sort of stuck between BH and smuggler with Master Pistols. Eventually I'll figure out what to do with that one, lol.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Could be good, at a pinch

OMFG!!1!1!111one!1!1!!!eleven!1!!!11 teh nu rangorz r teh roxors... and other l33t type bollocks.


Took a couple of hours off last night, went to do some RL socialising. Sometime after midnight I plonked my beer infused carcase in front to the puter, opened the SWG forums and saw I had a couple of PM's.

"What you think then??" Blank look from me...

"Hey, check out the new proposals... whaddaya think" So off to the In Dev forum and there's a HUGE thread discussing the new Ranger proposals. Two years of waiting and we finally get some dev love.

I'll let you, dear reader, decide for yourself what you htink of the changes, but, to all intents and purposes Ranger is no more. The thread should be entitled "We Were Rangers" as most of our working skills are going to migrate down to Scout. We'll be getting new battlefield traps, some sexy stealth skills and the ability to sneak and steal.

Needless to say the community is divided. Even I've got mixed feelings. It's good in parts.
For long enough Ranger HAS been Scout Plus, so that's a sensible move there from the devs, and the stealth/steal thing? Sure, every other MMO has a rogue class, maybe it should be a smuggler thing, dunno.

Mind you, today, I've been thinking how cool it'd be to sneak into Jabba's palace and steal Oona's leotard...

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Water Water Everywhere

Back on Tatooine for a few days R&R after flying endless destroy missions in Endor space.

Sitting in the 'tina sharing a caf with some other scruffy nerfherder types I overheard somebody say there's only the one fishing hole on Tat. "Bollocks mate" I heard myself say "there's got to be for or five places to fish on this rock..."

And that's how I found myself scanning the planetary map for anything that looked vaguely blue-ish and then heading over there with my jar o'bugs and a fine fishing pole that our guild crafters had made me a while since.

Easiest one to find was the Imperial Oasis. About 6km west of Mos Espa, its not great for fishing if you're not on the best of terms with the Empire due to the garrison they have right by the waters edge.

Then it was off to the Krayt Graveyard and, sure enough, up in the hills theres a pretty decent sized pond. Just keep an eye open for dragons coming down to drink. They don't seem too keen on sharing their watering hole with others.

South about 7k and there's a small pond nestling in the bottom of a deep, almost volcanic crater.
Some of the locals say it's an old sarlac pit but I reckon they were just ragging on me. Leastwise I never caught anything begger than a minnow there.

Then, heading on the way back to Mos Eisley to pick up my ship, we found another oasis tucked away in a side valley. Probably 3k from town, slightly north east-ish. Looked a popular place, judging by the amount of houses crammed in around it.

Next time I get the chance I'm going to set up a fishing lodge there. Sell some poles, bugs, camps... yeah, nice place to retire to.

Monday, September 05, 2005

Pack up your troubles... yada yada

So, new feature "Pack up your house" came in recently. And It Works!!

Just dragged my loot store, a small generic, halfway across Tat to my main centre of operations just outside Mos Espa.

Really simple to do.

From the housing management terminal select "pack up this building", read the dialogue, click OK, see your house vanish from around you.

After a few minutes moonwalking while the database and game engine go "whuh? where'd it go...?" it's time to head to the new location.

If I wanted to I could keep the house stored im my datapad indefinitly, just keep paying the rent as usual. There's an option on the icon in your datapad.

At the new site, select "unpack this house" and you get the normal structure placement screen coming up. I like to get as much front porch as I can so I tinkered about, trying the house onthis slope, that slope and eventually settled for sticking it next to my shop.

Oh, one thing, you can't store a house which has a vendor inside. Or a PA HAll for that matter, which is a pain as I really want to shift mine.

ah well, n/m :)

Smarts, Traps and No Armour

One difference I've noticed when playing double combat elite templates, or from watching others play them, is that we still end up going toe to toe withthe critters, even when we're riflemen with 65m or more range.

Well, if you're wearing top end armour, you've had it sliced and ADK'd, you're not fussed about decay. And you do as much damage up close as youdo from the far end of the field BUT you don't need to run in to loot and harvest.

On the other hand, I have a couple of low to mid end toons who never wear armour, rarely die, hardly ever have wounds and seem to do pretty well against most stuff up to the elites and double gold elite.

Why? Because they use a combination of smarts and traps.

Leading an attack against a pod of creatures with a P-dart or a stink bomb let's you apply a state to the creature and also draw it away from the rest of the pod as it aggores on you, only you and you alone.

You pull back, dragging the critter away from it's pals, hit it with your heaviest attack, immobilise it with a snare or KD shot, hit it again with your heavy and by now the first traps states are wearing off, hit it with another trap. Gives you a moment or three to draw back again and, usually, finish the bleeder off.

Run in, harvest, loot, heal if necessary and move in to start dragging the next one out.

"Rinse, wash and repeat"

Oh, just remember to watch where you are moving back to.... I was grinding on Dant and, yup, backing away from some bols I went straight into a voritor lair. BAD news. Still, nice trip to the cloner, gave me time to get a fresh mug of coffee and take a nature break ;)

So we start with a retirement...

Finally retired the last of my Ranger skills on one of my main toons today.

I've been slowly whittling away at them over the past few weeks, sacrificing the abilty to make camo for a little more offence or defence mods, swapping my big HTFB camps for a little BH skills...

The skill point investment in Ranger has, since CU, made the profession less attractive as a skillset though, in the main, the Rangers you meet in game and on the forums make giving up the ideal of being a Ranger really hard.

Mind you, I've still got at least two other toons with Ranger skills and am working to Master Ranger on one of my TC toons. Hey, one day there will be a revamp, lol, and I don't want to have to start totally from scratch again ;)

What's this all about...

For me, this blog is 'just' an online journal, but I hope that it's entertaining for any misguided souls that manage to wander in here ;)

Ever since the dark old days of D&D (yes, I'm old enough to remember Gigax, Jackson & co) and pen and paper, turn based war games, I've really preferred playing scout/ranger type characters, maybe with the odd rogue sneaking in once in a while.

Nowadays, I play SWG, AO and wandered into EQII briefly under their 'suck it and see' offer of a weeks free play. Mostly I play SWG tho, for all it's quirks and challenges, as I just couldn't get 'into' the other games in the same way. Even after several hours of caffeine and pizza fueled keyboard mashing I was still very much aware of 'the game' whereas I find SWG to be far more immersive and while I'm playing I 'am' my toon...

So, what else.... I enjoy 3d modelling, mostly landscapes, townscapes and structures, hang out on some game related forums and, uhm, well, the rest is just RL crap and we don't need to go there ;)

Travel well,