Gorth

Woke up at 2:30 in the night. Not voluntarily, but I have for habit sleeping with open windows this time of year (temperatures being around 20C at night) Didn't noticed the thunderstorm sneaking up on my until it sprung it's surprise. Alarm clocks have nothing on a lightning strike close enough to not having any delay between the bright light and the sound Didn't get more sleep that night, so it's a very long day at work today.

Just for fun, tried a star fortress in heroics mode with a guy looking for a group on Odessen. It was the longest and most painful star fortress ever. the mechanics are completely broken. With a tach accuracy of 110.14% and his force accuracy also being 110+ percent, between 80 and 90 percent of all out attacks got resisted, dodged, deflected etc. It just took forever and we wiped several time on the exarch. because we did so little damage, our healer companions invariably ended up having boss aggro. After persevering for 2 hours, the Belsavis boss was dead (lots of micro management of healers sending them running after us in passive mode to evade the boss until aggro was lost). Of course, the boss doesn't drop a single thing anymore. Way to go Bioware. Edit: Of course we missed each and every interrupt (as they depend on accuracy too), so boss got pretty much a free run with nothing interrupted

Apparently the blue chiss girl was supposed to have an alliance alert. Guess what? Never saw the shadow of such an alert. She is now another generic companion with no backstory and no personality. Thank you for letting us grind to the second highest DvL tier for nothing Bioware.

Someone somewhere dubbed it the NGE (New Grind Experience). A play on the fate of SWG which apparently didn't survive some bad decisions either. Curious about how this affect current subscriber numbers. In any case, bored to tears grinding Bestia adds. It's just the fastest way to level up alts. Usually from 65 to 70 in about 20-25 minutes and then the real grind starts

HM EV is perfectly doable in a mix of 216/220 gear with set bonuses. A few of the dps guys in my regular group were dying to try out starparse with the class changes. My poor assassin girl getting rushed to 70 so they had a tank on voice chat (I assume to use my countdown for optimal openers). It was as easy as ever. Did chapter I on an alt. Not sure what to think of the story yet, but I did like stomping the pesky little skytroopers with my big walker feet. The command point system has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Enough fun already... New thread here

Start of old thread End of old thead Australian humour... the See you in the Northern Territories ad (trying to attract tourists to the Northern Territory, also known as NT). You can supposedly get merchandising too with the slogan on it May not be safe for work, depending on your colleagues Cu in the NT

Rank 6 gifts are a blessing if you don't want to spend 30 minutes just right clicking on a pile of rank 5 gifts... now you only have to spend 10 minutes I would be surprised if it isn't one of the first things to get "fixed" taking priority over any game breaking bugs.

5.0 is so completely the utter cluster**** I feared. Utter and completely mind numbing grind of the most frustrating and unfun kind just to try to hide that this game will have gone 2 effin years with nothing but a wz and an arena map as New content. This is going to end badly. No, a series of disjointed cutscenens for an uninteresting story broken up by skytrooper grinding is not "content" in my book.

Yeah, going to be interesting. I give it 4 weeks. If it's still this *&^%$# gear system I know my raid team wont be around (and I'll probably follow suit).

Left it to patch overnight and logged in for 30 minutes before heading for work today. Mostly greeted by partially empty quickbar slots and bills to pay for new crafting skills Yeah, so far it feels like losing more than you gained. My raid group and I plan to run non-stop sm ops the next few weeks on our alts to boost command points and then *hopefully* get something useful. Damn you TrueNeutral and your choice of thread title... you Jinxed it! If I get a bit of spare time over the weekend, I might try the new story a bit on one of my alts. Edit: First point on the agenda is to get to level 70 of course. Still got piles of the bound xp boosts on my level 65's so shouldn't take long.

My trusty old made to order Alienware laptop is still going strong, 3 years later. Runs physically based rendering without problems (except for massive heat generation, so not for small rooms) and just about every game/application I've thrown at it like a dream. The price was not for the faint of heart though. Yes, I know, ostensibly a gaming machine, but that's probably what I use it the least for.

The shocking realisation that you are getting old and things that used to upset you doesn't seem quite as important anymore? "overly rough sex."... thanks, I didn't like the (now coffee soaked) keyboard much anyway Good to hear you're recovering though. For what it's worth, I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one who would miss you around here.

The only recognizable victim so far has been the fandom. Of both Obsidian and Avellone himself. That must be how he children of of divorced parents feel. Time for some self recrimination? Was it something *we* did???

Chapter One gameplay from Polygon (video and link on Dulfys site)... Dulfys take on the command point grind Didn't even know she knew how to be snarky

Still having fun playing swtor. Got fairly close to getting Coratanni and Pearl down yesterday. Got Ruugar down to around 30% in one pull. Sadly it was getting late, 3am for one of our healers and 2am for myself, just no concentration left (Our American, Indonesian and Malaysian team members were a bit better off, but not by much after a long day). You really learn to hate the ricochet shot mechanic Ah well, we'll be back for revenge.

Do I really want to know what a **** hydra is?...

Clever business people. Give us all your money or we break your kids heart! You weren't allowed to call the police hostage negotiators? On a sidenote, A/C's are a mixed blessing. Spent the entire past week with a severe cold, despite there being close to 30C outside during daytime. Blasted icy cold rooms... *sniff*

The new gearing process is Biowares way of telling people to "GTFO" and "Transfer to another game" I suppose. Nothing about it looks fun or interesting, rather more like 180 degree the opposite. As for story, lost interest in the Zakuul stuff a long time ago. Only chapter that was any fun so far was the Shroud bonus chapter. Only thing that would vaguely rekindle my interest is if I get to kill Quinn. Then I would finish the expansion on all the alts that started on it just so I could kill him a dozen times. Who cares about romancing Arcann??? People are weird. Give me a romance option for Scorpio instead. Hottest bot in the galaxy Edit to add: Was it my imagination or are they revisiting the idea of M4-78?

Still plugging away at hm master and blaster in Swtor. Now practicing phase 2 and making it to second rain of pain. Need to work a bit on positioning there and then we should be ready for the last "burn" phase. Sheesh those mocking taunts from master are getting annoying

New thread here

Start of old thread End of old thread While waiting for Tyranny to download, we had a go at HM Master & Blaster in Swtor. That smug taunt of Blasters after each wipe is seriously getting on my nerves now We were trying a new tactic for phase 1 to see if we could work around the random nature of it in a more predictable way. I.e. a routine that would allow us to consistently reach phase 2. Our poor Juggernaut tank was probably going insane first from gettng the timing right for such a long period of time and later from boredom when he got a bit of alacrity so it wasn't millisecond timing anymore (using the ability to lower cooldown on force jump when attacked and immunity to knockbacks after force jump means he can jump the boss, ignore the knockback, walk backwards and jump him again, rinse and repeat for much of the encounter). We got phase 1 pretty much perfected so we can do it consistently, but sadly didn't get much time for me to practise dealing with Master in phase 2. Ah well, next time we'll get to phase 2 much faster and consistently. With the phase 1 method above, not much need for hydraulic overrides anyway, so I'm going to focus on gearing up my old assassin to deal with Master.

Ignore the barbarians at the gate... I noticed the painter did a bit of self censorship. Cleverly hiding the guys right hand and left foot (which were supposedly severed) behind him and his rib cage doesn't look particularly crushed (I guess people only wanted so much blood and gore in a painting)

Our Lizard Overlords has sent his representative to my place again... Not really, but I was delighted to see that my matted glass window next to my front door has yet again become home to a gecko at night. Little guy just seems have worked out a good deal there, sitting and waiting for insects to be attracted by the light. Sometimes I even leave the light on at night just for its benefit. Yeah, I'm silly like that sometimes.