Token Female Gamer

For its 13th anniversary, celebrated this past March, EverQuest finally went free to play. How it managed to maintain a large enough player base to support its continued existence for thirteen years is beyond me. Whatever the case, it is now free to play, which of course meant I had to go back and check out my characters.

But since its been so darn long, finding passwords and email accounts and user names turned out to be a bit more challenging then expected. After a bit of back and forth with costumer service, I now have access to both my old accounts.

My characters are all still there and I have no clue how to play them. I can’t even remember what spells did what! My hopes of having it all come flooding back were quickly extinguished by the realization that EverQuest has changed a lot in the past seven years.

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It’s been pointed that I may have been a little overzealous in denigrating my current World of Pandacraft raiding experience. Thus I would like to clarify that I do quite enjoy raiding, really.

What I am struggling with the most, is that my character feels particularly ineffective right now and that my ability to change this is being hampered mainly by my unwillingness to run 400 daily quests a day. (Many gear upgrades no longer come from the actual raids, but are instead purchasable via valor and require faction.)

The recent 5.2 patch also managed to nerf Warlocks into the bottom ranks of dps. Though the change was to bring the very top tier of Warlocks more inline with other classes, the middling and lower level Warlocks (like me) end up bearing the brunt of the changes.

This also means that I have to go back to the drawing board and figure out a new talent and glyph spec. Mostly I rely on the internetz for this tedious task, but currently no one seems to agree on what is the best Warlock Affliction build.

I also get to dump mastery as a stat, which I have been gearing for, and am supposed to instead aim for haste. Knowing me and how slow I am to accumulate new gear, I might just be able to hit the haste cap in time for the next big Warlock nerf.

Maybe I should just level a monk. Viva la Raid!

Mist of Pandaria (MoP) is the latest expansion to the ever popular World of Warcraft Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. With a brand new continent, new playable race and class, new talents for all classes, Pokemon and Farmville, the ever expanding world of Azeroth has gotten just a bit more crowded.

Following a rather extensive WoW break, I dived into Pandaria with tempered enthusiasm. Between the disappointing Cataclysm end game and Pandas becoming the new playable race (Blizzard swore that would NEVER ever happen), I found my expectations understandably depressed.

But now, with a little over four hundred hours under my belt, it’s quite clear that I liked the game better then expected and that a review is far past due.

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I was lucky enough to play on two different servers with two very different, yet awesome guilds. Inner Loop (last post’s pictures) ended up being my raiding guild, while Fourth Wall was my role playing guild. (Yup, I am that nerdy!)

While my bard in the Fourth Wall guild never made max level, she had a ton of really silly fun. Some of the best stories came out of spending time with these crazy people. =P

Images after the jump…

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With the recent new computer purchase I spent a bunch of time going through my old picture files. Turns out that I had a hidden stash of old EverQuest pictures. As per request I am downloading the best here to share. Funny enough, most of my pictures turned out to be me casting illusions on everyone. Lot more trolls and dwarves running around then usual. =D

I will note here that though I played on two different servers, these are all from the Inner Loop Guild that played on the Rodcet Nife server. Can do Fourth Wall next if there is demand. =P

Images are after the jump since there are quite a few of them.
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Proof that Puzzles and Dragons hasn’t been taking up all my time, my World of Warcraft Monk made level 80. Actually, I’m a bit delayed, she is level 81 already.

Not that its taken all that long, leveling in WoW has speed up to such a degree that its actually fun. Or maybe the fun should be attributed to the Monk class, as the amount of overpoweredness that is bundled into this class is ridiculous.

My goal had always been for my Monk to catch up with my husband’s Monk so we could forge ahead together. This finally happened some twenty levels ago. We have since been almost exclusively running dungeons together. Amazing experience, mostly because all the quests for the dungeon are found at the entrance. Then its just a matter of completing the dungeon, and the quests on the way, and levels just seem to fly right by.

To make the entire process even smoother I went with the Brewmaster talent spec (tank), while husband went Mistweaver (healer). This combo makes the wait time, when queuing for dungeons, quite minimal.

Turns out the Brewmaster and Mistweaver Monks are actually really decent at dealing damage, which means I’ve simply stayed in Brewmaster even for the minimal questing we have done. Clearly, Monks are super awesome to level in any talent spec (yes even healing! ~insert sounds of thousands of priests crying here~). I have also completely forgotten how to play Windwalker (DPS talent spec). Oh right, faceroll Spinning Crane Kick!

Instancing is a phenomenon of the persistent online multiplayer worlds of gaming, where segregating players into their own separate versions of the game creates the illusion of privacy, or change.

Despite my preference for multiplayer, I don’t actually like the ‘random other people showing up in my game’ all that much. More often then not his or her presence actually impedes my own progress, never mind the total jerks who enjoy making everyone else’s experience miserable (and we know the online gaming world is rife with those types).

This is one of the main reasons why I favor instanced. Having the option to literally block all the random people out of existence is a wonderful thing.

But its not simply about privacy, instancing has also allowed for less persistence in MMORPGs, where the world can change slightly for each single character, or allow for an entire personal storyline to unfold.

It’s a powerful tool that has been able to tackle some of the worst problems of required persistence in online MMORPGs. Every time I remember the three am wake up calls to go raid that stupid world spawn, I thank my lucky stars that someone invented instancing.

Multiplayer – simply because almost every game is made better by playing it with friends. In fact, friends have been the reason for my trying various games in the past and sometimes they are the reason I stick with a game longer then I would have otherwise.

EverQuest (WoW also) is a perfect example. I would never have played half as much had I not had friends and a guild with which to share the experience.

Friends are an awesome resource for help and support; they make the boring parts fun, and the irritating bits bearable. That doesn’t mean they aren’t sometimes aggravating themselves, but so far all the positives heavily outweigh the negatives.

I should probably also clarify that almost all the people I play games with online, I know in real life. My gaming friends are awesome and I am extremely fortunate to have them. <3

All that being said, I do love single player games. And even though I am a very social gamer, multiplayer will never fully replace my single player needs. There are plenty of times when I need gaming alone time. Thankfully multiplayer and single player aren’t mutually exclusive and I can enjoy them both at my leisure.

If given the option, I always pick female characters. Thankfully more and more games are making either gender available to play, but even in games where gender is assigned, I will go with the female option as my first choice.

Even though I have tried playing male characters, I simply don’t identify with them as much, which does impact my enjoyment of the game. My interest really wanes quicker.

This doesn’t mean that I never play games with male protagonists. If the game is good enough, it transcends gender. For example, Diablo 2’s necromancer is by far my favorite class, which only had the male gender as an option. On the other hand in Diablo 3, because either gender was available for each class, I made all my characters female.

In general I favor graphics that stay far away from the uncanny valley; preferably cute, with bright complimenting colors and clean lines. In short, Cartoony with a strong Anime slant.

The game I picked for best graphics in the first 30 days segment was Kiry’s Epic Yarn, a graphically brilliant game, which is a perfect example of my cuteness tolerance.

But Kirby is a round ball, and though very cute, isn’t really the greatest example of my bipedal character preference, nor 3D backgrounds. Guild Wars 2’s characters are fairly good and the backgrounds in World of Warcraft are pretty, but I think the game that sums up my artistic preference the best is Aion.

While I didn’t play the game for long, as the mechanics were troublesome at best, I still found the graphics stunning. I loved the character looks, very anime with lots of style options and the backgrounds were vibrant and lush with color, absolutely beautiful. If only the game itself has been as great as the graphics.