Endgame Viable

Am I crazy or did GW2 make green items better than blue items, which is 100% the opposite of every other MMO in history? Did they just arbitrarily pick the colors or is there some logic to it? Somebody “on the Internet” said blue < green < yellow makes more sense because it follows the color wheel. But, like, green < blue < purple follows the color spectrum (ROYGBIV). (69 words.)

Guild Wars 2 is an awesome game. But there is one thing about it that drives me insane. In fact, I have the same problem with almost every game that has a pointer. You can’t see the pointer! This is a major problem in GW2 because many of your abilities are ground-targeted spells, so you need to be able to point to the spot where you want to cast it. (I use the option that automatically casts wherever you are pointing.) If you’re out soloing it’s not a problem, but many times you’re in an epic battle with fifty people pounding on a boss and there’s flashing and fireworks and dazzling spell effects going on all over the place. Picking out the pointer in those situations is near impossible for me. Even when I wave the mouse around like I do on the desktop, it can still take a long time to find the damn thing. (214 words.)

00:00 - Took forever to get the stream running tonight. 01:48 - Dr. Who in the Old West is just weird. 04:45 - His face still looks weird. 08:13 - I guess this is a nod to steampunk. Well, more like a jumping up and down pointing frantically to steampunk. 09:38 - I wonder if this actor is American or if he’s a British dude with a great accent. 10:33 - So far Rory and Amy are props in this episode. (195 words.)

A Cavern of Black Ice by J.V. Jones was a hard read for me, but I made it all the way to the end. I should warn you that there is no resolution whatsoever; it’s one of those series books that simply stops, rather than providing a self-contained story. According to the Internets, there are four more books planned, but only two have been released. (403 words.)

I really don’t remember how the last season ended, and I haven’t yet seen the Christmas episode. (Thank’s for nothing, Netflix.) 00:00 - Who’s Hannah? Oh. 02:30 - WTF! They’re all grown up! And broken! 04:15 - Why doesn’t Matt Smith look human? His face is all … weird … 05:20 - And why is he slurring his words? I mean, more than usual for British television. 06:00 - The intro looks different somehow. The tunnel is more blue-green than blue. And, oh, that red fire is definitely new. (240 words.)

Liveblogging Dr. Who stream on BBC thanks to a proxy … 00:35 - Sometimes it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on without rewinding a bit. 01:40 - Oh, the dog barking outside was actually on the stream … 02:30 - Wow, he doesn’t even ask anymore. 02:50 - That was a super-fast setup. 06:00 - Wait, is that a two-headed dinosaur? Oh, it’s just a pair of them hanging out together. (181 words.)

I’m trying an experiment. You may have already noticed it. I’m going to post the text of my novel draft “Airworld” as I write it (more-or-less). Some days I might post thousands of words, and some days I might post a couple of sentences or nothing. (Lately it has been more of the latter.) I’m also trying an email subscription plugin. The idea is that you subscribe and new posts are sent to your inbox, so you have a serialized story delivered right to your doorstep without the hassle of using a bookmark link. The emails don’t seem to be working yet, but I’m still tinkering with it. (184 words.)

Whoa.. I knew that Necromancer had melee-ish capability when you equip daggers, but I didn’t realize until last night just how much raw damage it puts out. I’ve been using a Staff or Axe/Dagger combo, but last night I decided to try out Dagger/Dagger again, and holy crap I was suddenly killing stuff super fast. I’m still not really happy with the Necro’s AoE capabilities. I haven’t found any decent AoE damage spells (compared to the Elementalist at least); it’s mainly AoE debuffs, which are not terribly useful in PvE events. I mean they are useful, but everyone just blasts AoE damage so debuffs aren’t necessary. By the time the debuff spell finishes, all the mobs are dead anyway. (170 words.)

The hype is finally over and Guild Wars 2 is out (if you pre-purchased it, that is). After being down Saturday morning, GW2 worked flawlessly for the rest of the weekend. Usually the hype far overshadows the actual game. But in this one rare case, it’s possible that the hype was justified. Let’s talk about Guild Wars 1 for a second. I never got into it. Certain things just bugged me. Mainly the lack of a jump. I’m not one of those people that bunny hops everywhere, but I never realized how often I jumped until it was missing. The other thing I couldn’t get past was left-clicking everything instead of right-clicking. (410 words.)

Well I thought it would be a nice Saturday. I’d get up, log into the Guild Wars 2 Head Start along with the rest of the entire Internet, and have a nice morning of adventure. But nooooooo. It’s been down for two hours now. Not just intermittent connectivity issues; we’re talking 100% dead. And the information coming out of ArenaNet is somewhat lacking. About once an hour we get something like, “We’re looking into connectivity issues. Thanks for your patience.” (80 words.)