I watched some very amusing “Let’s Play” videos of two of the GWJ guys playing Dark Souls, and decided that I finally needed to get this “killer” game. By killer I mean it has a reputation of being mercilessly difficult. So I got the “Prepare to Die” PC version from Steam. Okay. So yeah, it’s hard. But it’s not hard in the way you might think. It’s hard because the controls and camera management are impossibly obtuse for a PC game, at least initially. (525 words.)

I got into a couple of particularly bad Rift dungeon groups all in one night, and they both basically came down to a fight between the tank and the healer. “You’re a terrible tank” vs. “you’re a terrible healer.” One group was in Realm of the Fae. The tank was a dwarf warrior who clearly didn’t have a tank soul setup, and played with a two-hander generating no threat whatsoever. He didn’t attempt to gather any mobs that got away from him either. (839 words.)

I started listening to steampunk audiobook Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, which I have heard from multiple sources is a great series, and the premise intrigued me as it is an alternate history of World War I. Also, later books in the series won awards and stuff. Unfortunately, nobody told me that this was a young adult series, where the two protagonists are 16-ish. In fact, I would argue that this is not just young adult, but middle grade, because the kids act like middle grade kids and are usually accompanied by adult guides. (444 words.)

I spent most of the holiday weekend queuing for lowbie dungeons with my new collection of lowbie Defiants. I’ve realized that I don’t like tanking with a warrior … dealing with the builder/finisher mechanic interferes with focusing on the tanking. Maybe I just need to forget about finishers. Anyway I generally prefer the cleric tank, where you don’t have to really do anything but spam the AoE attack. (I say that knowing full well that you almost never see cleric tanks in raids or expert dungeons. (360 words.)

Since there are a lot of new people flooding into Rift, there have been complaints on the forums from the usual suspects about how easy it is to level. I can confirm that yes, it’s really easy to get from 1 to 50, and it’s now easier than ever. It used to be harder, but even back when it was hard, it was still pretty easy for a veteran gamer to get to 50. (514 words.)

I am writing this newbie guide because there are a surprising number of people who go into the first couple of normal Rift dungeons without knowing these basics. Perhaps they have never played Rift before, or they have never played an MMO before, or they have never played in a group before. General Do remember that playing in a group requires different skills than soloing. Do avoid using tank pets because they interfere with the actual tank. (342 words.)

Again, it is hard to mess up Iron Tombs on Normal. My Bahmi warrior uses a Reaver/Paladin build, with more points into damage abilities than armor/endurance abilities for better threat. I also now have a Cleric that I tank with, for which I use the standard tank preset. When you start, first determine if people need the quests. If they don’t, you can skip a lot of side stuff. The trash mobs are straightforward all throughout. (566 words.)

I’ve been on an audiobook kick lately. I realize it’s “cheating” to listen to a book instead of read it, but it’s just so darn convenient. You can actually accomplish other things simultaneously while listening to a book (like driving, washing dishes, playing games, paying bills, etc.), whereas if you read a book, it’s pretty much all you can do. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, read by Wil Wheaton. Great nostalgia book, although I could have lived without the cliche “real world is better than the virtual world” moral. (411 words.)

Hrm. Over the weekend I started to realize that Rift is actually not as much fun as I thought. My mage is 60 and has a bunch of expert dungeon gear, so the only way left to advance that character is raiding with the guild, but the thought of setting up ventrillo and signing up for schedules and all that crap is not very appealing. Even the expert dungeons are kind of painful. (283 words.)

It was a light, ordinary evening in Rift. I did a blissfully un-dramatic random expert SL dungeon (Archive of Flesh) with a good tank/healer duo and ended up with a nice purple mage dagger at the end, which is probably the best I will ever see until or unless I start raiding. So I’m in this guild, right? But it’s one of those guilds that basically takes anyone, no-questions-asked, so it’s got thousands of random people in it, so I see a lot of fellow guildies out in the wild even though I don’t know any of them. (704 words.)

I did one random expert 60 last night with my mage and got into Golem Foundry, which is one I know fairly well now (thanks to many previous PUG wipes). Everything went fine until the tank accidentally needed on a green dimension item before the last boss (the aptly-named Manslaughter) and for some reason the healer had a complete meltdown about it. None of us even noticed (including the tank) but the healer took it as a personal insult or something and we had to kick him because he stopped healing the tank. (473 words.)

I now present my newbie tanking guide for Realm of the Fae (Normal). I am roughly two years late in writing this guide, but it’s actually hard to find a guide like this that isn’t written by a theorycrafter who is used to max level tanking. You can queue for RotF at level 15, but it’s probably better to wait until level 16 so you can bring an AoE attack ability with you. (678 words.)

So I tanked Realm of the Fae on my level 16 Bahmi warrior for the first time, using a Reaver/Paladin/Tempest build. (Technically you can queue for it at 15, but I waited until 16 so I had an AoE attack.) I was pretty nervous beforehand - tanking is stressful for me, and I had not seen RotF in about a year, and who knows what they might have changed for Storm Legion. (684 words.)

So I tried to get in a random expert with my mage, something I try to do at least once a day. It was Archive of Flesh, and right away the support guy says it’s his first time. No problem, it’s the right thing to say that up front and actually pretty ballsy because most people don’t admit it. :) For a while, he did basically no DPS so he was actually trying to play a support role - normally not required unless the healer requests it, but no big deal to me. (1267 words.)

I queued for healing twice with my mage last night. I ticked the “Mentor” checkbox and a Random Normal dungeon, because I’m a chicken, and wanted to see if I remembered anything at all about Chloromancer. So first I got into Storm Breaker Protocol, one of the SL dungeons. First I hit as healer, then someone refused, then I hit as a DPS. When I arrived, the group had just gotten beyond the mech suits. (939 words.)