So I was at the store

looking at a rack of hoodies, and there's a guy standing there next to me looking at the same rack, and it's awkward and we end up striking up a conversation. He says purple looks good on me and I laugh and we talk about my pet rabbits and how he can make grilled cheese. He's really pretty for a boy and he has a green pen in his pocket and I draw a picture on his hand and he compliments my art skills and asks for my number. His phone is in this case that looks like a Crayola green crayon and he says green used to be his favorite color, which is why he's got all green stuff. So I put my number in and we go home, and I just know he's actually going to call me for once. And then--

I WAKE UP

ASDFGHJKL:LKJHGFDSASDFGHJKLLLLL;;;

Over at Mnemosynister

Recent posts about Dragon Age: Origins:

DAO: Return after a while.
DAO: Origin stories pt. 1
DAO: Origin stories pt. 2
I'm going to maybe replay DA:O.

Recent posts about Rift:


Rift: Level 30 + Healer Spec + Guild

No more sick!

I took my final antibiotic tonight. I skipped a few accidentally but I've finally finished the whole horrid-tasting bottle. And now I'm supposedly strep-throat-less. Thing is, I never actually feel like I have strep throat. The doctor tests me for it and tells me I have it, but I feel fine. It's only after I take the pills that I start to feel horrible. Headache, stomachache, muscle cramps... ugh.

Medicine is not for me. I prefer remedial ice cream.

Game blog

I talk too much about games so now you can just go over to Mnemosynister, my new blog, and read that stuff there. Not here anymore, unless I feel like it. So that'll cut down gamer entries. 'Kay?

So I was going to give City of Heroes a try.

And that's when I realized that I only wanted to create a superhero, not actually play it.

So never mind on that.

In the meantime

When I'm not dealing with my grandparents or working, I'm writing, drawing/painting, or playing games. Obviously Rift has been sucking my time, but with that (temporarily?!) out of commission, I need something new. The answer: Project Zomboid.

But no PayPal option means no game for me. As soon as there is one, however, it's Rock Paper Scizzorz for me! Or perhaps Stand On Top of the Other Guy But Be Bigger.

Rift, again: Crafting, questing, lag.

Sup, homies.

Just kidding. Anyway, I've recently figured something out: teenagers aren't supposed to play MMOs, apparently. There was a guild conversation today where age came up. Some kid said he was thirteen, and got laughed at. Apparently, "Healers should be 30, tanks should be 20, dps should be 13." I'm mostly a tank and sometimes a healer, and I'm fourteen.

Lucky me. Am I very mature, or very misplaced?

That aside, Rift has been going well. I might as well make this into a gamer blog with the way I'm going. :B

I leveled up a whopping ton. I got the level 20 achievement and I'm level 27 as I type. Level 30 will be a milestone for me, because in MMOs I usually don't get to level 30, sometimes even level 20. It just goes to show that Rift has my attention for the time being. It probably helps that my summer break just started (well, two weeks ago, but that's about how long I've been playing).

So I'm level 27, and I realize that I need to complete this quest in the Saga of the Endless chain, which involves going into a dungeon that I won't be able to go into after level 31 again until level 50. I get worried, so I go and spend my time farming mining mats and pumping up that skill, then working my armorsmith so it's actually useful before I get to level 50 (assuming I reach 50). It's not really a noticeable kind of armor upgrade from the quest rewards I get, but it's still useful to train the skill while I have the mats in my quest hub area.

I'm an Expert Miner and an Expert Armorsmith now. I wish there was a title there with those so that I could have a different title than "Champion of Freemarch." Oh, well. And I didn't bother to farm rams for my Butchering skill, so that's going to come back and bite me in the ass. Actually, it already did when I had to buy linen cloth rather than make it. But that's another story.

Anyway, I quested all the way through Stonefield, and finally got to go to Scarlet Gorge, the official third zone. (I say official because I accidentally took a brief sojourn into Scarwood, but it doesn't matter.) I'm pretty far in that chain as well, though lately I haven't been doing EVERY SINGLE QUEST like it's so tempting to do. I keep rerealizing, oh, yeah, this quest isn't necessary. Why am I going this far out of my way to accomplish it?! It's totally healthy, ha.

All this was going perfectly well, and I was slaughtering miners, you know, same old, same old, when suddenly the LAG MONSTER APPEARS AND EATS MY FACE and two minutes later my computer/the server/whatever catches up and I am dead, hurray.


But it's really awful. Constant, horrid spikes of latency, making the game basically unplayable. When something that I can't escape aggro'd on me, I'd have to hope that I could beat it with the few shots I could get in, because I certainly couldn't play very well. I was stuck running up and down the main Scarlet Gorge road looking for chromite so that I could go craft instead. That would have been great, except that lagged and I disconnected an endless amount of times and I died an endless amount of times and shops took ages to open and once the soul resurrection technician's speech box wouldn't open so I was trapped in soul walk mode... Then, while crafting chromite bars, one bar took eight minutes and all the while was that highly irritating crafting noise for armorsmith and a bar that appeared to be full.

If this doesn't get better, I'm cancelling my subscription, and I am taking my money somewhere else. This is ridiculous, and I'm not paying for a game I can't play.

Rift: Rogue and Cleric

Now that I've posted a long, dramatic entry about my life, I'll actually get to the good stuff.

As I said, Rift is my game right now. In my parting with mage (ranged dps, oh how I have come to dislike you), obviously it was a choice between warrior, cleric, and rogue. And I've never been a person for warrior... I don't know, but it just doesn't appeal to me, plus warrior doesn't have that flexibility I want to expect from this game. It's pretty much just dps and tanking.

So it was a choice between cleric or rogue. I went rogue.

On the Alsbeth server, which was medium popularity when I started but now has a huge-ass queue (supposedly - I guess the times that I get on just aren't popular times), I began playing as Vaethereal (hey! that name sure sounds familiar), a Defiant Bahmi rogue. I'm a Defiant through and through, story and attitude (and race) wise, and the Bahmi are awesome, so it was a given.

Anyway, I started with Assassin, added on Bladedancer, and much to my chagrin finally nabbed... Ranger. Oops. Stuck with that horrid choice for the rest of the tutorial, I even eventually had to get rid of my pet tank pig (ahem, I mean, RAZORBEAST) because he stopped following me. A glitch? An inopportune button-press that I didn't know how to reverse? Whatever it was, I never found out. End ranger career.

I finally got out and chose something else, I don't even know, and those solo dps days were fun, sure, but I had just discovered bard when I finally cracked and figured out that rogue was simply not for me. As a dps Assassin I was vulnerable and didn't think my damage was quite up to par with what I wanted, plus melee dps isn't my thing. (All this talk of dps! What have I become, a scientist?!) At least, not here, in this game. And as a Bard (support), I just felt too un-useful, especially at early levels. I got to level 18 before quitting.

Also on the Alsbeth server, I began a cleric character (look me up; my username is Mnemosyne, another alias of mine. I'm elusive like that). This went much smoother, much better. I decided early on that I was gonna be a fucking tank for once. Cleric in Rift has healing of course, but also tank with the Justicar soul, and dps if I wanted cruise control. I like tanking. I like healing. So here I was.

I pumped my Justicar full of steroids AHEM I meant points. Eventually reset it because I had points in Sentinel that I didn't really need, so I tossed those over to Shaman for extra defense and damage. When I finally got up in the Justicar soul enough that I had the AoE attack Even Justice, I considered myself ready to tank. Add that to another attack whose name I forget that forces monsters to aggro to me, and I'm not the best tank ever, but still half viable at least.

I messed with a healing role (alternate build), but haven't put it into practice yet. I just wanted it just in case it was the only way to get into a group.

Speaking of groups, on Vae I got invited to the cross-MMO guild Suspiria, but since I dropped that character for now, I was getting lonely in the middle of my kill quests with no one talking. I don't talk much, so it was good when I finally got invited to Dragonheart. I'm not sure if I like the guild yet - too much social, not enough help or events or dungeon runs, etc. - but it's better than listening to battle chat all day. "3 hit points! 17 hit points! Critical hit!" Ugh.

When a quest finally required it, I did my first real instanced dungeon, ever. (I never do level caps, remember?) But this was only level 20 or so, so I jumped right in and tanked as best as I could. Again, the only problem with cleric tanks that I can see is the aggro, but Mein of Leadership helps with that. It's the best possible thing they could have done for the Justicar tank, I think, because it gives 300% threat, 100% more armor and 90% more endurance. I messed up a few times... but it was my first instance! And the people were nice, considering my newness, and the two "veterans" helped a lot and didn't let the three newbies, including me, down. All in all, I thought I did pretty well, but I didn't ask them. (I only had to apologize once, and apparently people wipe often in these instances, so I have no complaints!)

I now play primarily as a level 22 Defiant Kelari Cleric named Mnemosyne on the US Alsbeth server. Find me and chat me up. :)

Inky's MMORPG History: An EPIC TALE!111!1

Writing stuff about Rift makes me think about the days when I tried to be a game blogger. It never worked out. Either I stopped playing or liking the game, didn't have enough time, or couldn't think of anything to blog about.

I've looked around a lot, poking and pulling and tugging here and there, and found that Rift fanmade content is 20% critical acclaim, 5% denouncements, 10% beginner's guides and 65% soul guides (AKA guides to the class system). Oh, and there was one website about the lore, not counting Telarapedia, so I guess take about 5% out of somewhere and put it in lore. Probably out of beginner's guides.

Here's why I don't make a good MMO blogger. I don't do MMOs.

What's that I hear? "But Inky, you've been all over the MMO genre! You've done derpy games no one likes and glorious games everyone likes! That's a lie, you hear me? A lie!"

The sad thing is, I have in fact. I have beaten around the brush so many times I have practically ripped all of the leaves off and ruined my lawn. I've become jaded about MMOs, completely jaded, and it kinda hurts.

MMOs used to be my stock game. They were free (well... the free ones, anyway) and they let me have a character. Suddenly I became anyone I wanted. I was a badass mage who incinerated my enemies alive, summoned demons from horrible alternate planes of existence, and electrified the skeletons out of huge wild dogs. I was always a mage in those early days. I loved the idea of magic, and hurting monsters with it.

And I was only seven or eight at the time, I believe. But I've always been a mature writer, always spelled correctly, always been a grammar Nazi - a little perfectionist child too smart for her own good - and no one suspected any the wiser. I was never called out for being a kid, and always got offended when people would say things like "get thes kids off teh internts! D:<<" because I was (and still am) one of the heavy majority.

It was like that for a long time. I'd choose the mage class without even thinking about it. I went through acres and acres of MMOs. Each fell before me, so quickly that I can't even remember their names. There was one with horrid graphics, a minigame crafting system, and an "epic quest chain" that even I, at my fertile young age (ha ha ha), recognized as "go here, kill level one monster ten times, go back, go here, kill level two monster fifteen times, go back" repetition. That stuck in my head because it was actually later in this chain, after I'd figured out that graphics weren't everything. Still, after walking around in a world where everything looked like a version of the Linux penguin, I figured out that I did actually care.

There was another one that was outrageously difficult that I never got past level eleven on; I don't know how it's doing now, and though I never deleted it from my laptop, I still don't plan on going back. Not now, probably not ever. And another, where I learned to really love the races because they were equivalent to classes, only to find out that - after the really long download that my computer kept rejecting - the game sucked.

Then I met MapleStory.

Oh, it was love at first sight. After going through the tedious tutorial and finally figuring out how to work the damn thing, I was in graphics heaven. Sure, I looked like a generic chick alongside a sea of other generic chicks, but the colors kept me going. The first time I played MS, it was early on in my MMO career; I got to level 2 and stopped. I don't remember why...

Between a horde of other MMOs, I tried it again, and got further as a mage (as usual). I learned to hate it. The community, the graphics, the quests, the advertisements, the attacks, the classes, the options, the "customization," the cookie cutter enemies. God, how I hated all of it. I stopped playing again. Until I returned again maybe a year later, thinking, "I should give MS a chance then, see if I like it now that I'm older." Nothing doing. If anything, I hated it even more. This was my most outstanding experience, in my life thus far, of online douchebags. When I finally came back the last time, they'd JUST added new classes. I tried the "Hard" difficulty one and, wow, it was fun (again)! I knew it wasn't meant to be. And I was two hours into playing it when I threw up. It was the flu. And every time I think of MS now, I feel sick, and for that I'm grateful, because MapleStory is a horrible game. I still don't know why I kept going back to it. Power in advertising?

That terrible relationship over, I was on the lookout for a rebound, and there probably were a few. But soon after that, I found Dream of Mirror Online, or DOMO. I got in, made my character, learned to love the graphics. Typical of me.

But what was great about DOMO was the plot, at first, though I never got that far into it. It was quick 'n' easy, a drive-by plot, but I still had a REASON for everything I was doing. And there was a dungeon early on, one that I came to be an expert at and understand. After that it only got better. I discovered the class system - you could change it whenever you liked, to whatever class you had, as long as you'd unlocked it. It was great, and it helped me discover non-magic classes. I actually never played a mage class, strictly. I played Fencer briefly (which I regret not doing more PvP with, because in retrospect it was a marvelous PvP class) as a transition class so I could get other classes unlocked. I got Doctor, and - WHAT? I was decent at healing?

And then I got Dancer and discovered the wonders of AoE attacks, and sure, I loved that to death, but I discovered other marvelous things too, like Musician, which I loved and still love. It was the main support class, and maintaining buffs became a pastime. Speccing and training my Musician class helped me learn about buffs, stats, etc. which I hadn't understood for a very long time. Not to mention that I was doing something very useful without being in the line of fire, which was great.

And finally, just before I took a long DOMO break, I explored the Mercenary class. And it was all about... tanking.

Oh, could I tank. I had a talent for it, I think, maybe. A knack for beating the living shit out of people who aggro'd onto my teammates without even thinking about it and keeping the aggro on me. I loved it. I loved never dying because people would always keep the tank healed at ALL COSTS. You know what happens if the tank dies? Everyone wipes, that's what. The feeling of power that came with tanking was great. For once people got panicked if I had to leave the group in the middle of a grind. AoEs like Dancer and pullers like Thief were a penny a dozen, but Merc tanks were rare and precious. If you didn't have a tank you were done.

That's how it is with all games, I guess, but DOMO taught me how much I like the exact roles that I WASN'T playing back then: support and tank. I took a break from DOMO and still am, but I haven't permanently quit it and I might yet return one day.

Guild Wars was great, too. I wish other pay-to-play games were pay-once-and-you're-done. And bringing partners who weren't people was fun, until I realized that this WASN'T an mmo. It was... something else, a video game I was playing while talking to other people on occasion, if at all.

But eventually I did discover several things about GW that made it so great. For one, it was plot intensive. A lot less kill-and-grab quests than most, though of course there were those too. Complex classes that required skill to master, not just thoughtless button-mashing (well, at least at first). The ability to create level-cap characters for PvP purposes taught me to love PvP for the first time. When we'd get a really good random group together and all would go smoothly, we'd string together two, three, eight victories before we met the rare better random team and would be taken down. And of course I loved the ambiance, the music and scenery. Nightfall was my favorite. And I loved how everywhere outside of the towns was an instance. Must've been VERY costly to run on a server... but for once, there was no one parading around taking my mobs and loot and just generally kicking my ass.

Somewhere in there I tried World of Warcraft like everyone does. I loved it when I opened the box. I read through the manual anxiously on the way home as my mom drove me to our house (I'm still not sure if she knows what an MMO is, or if she'd have approved back then, but I was antisocial and didn't talk to anyone anyway). I was a Night Elf Druid. But oh, the grind. It hurt. Wow, it hurt.

I barely made it to the level where I got to be a cat. So stupid. Didn't even train the skill. I expect if I went back and tried again, I'd be a lot more efficient, but hey. Maybe WoW and I just weren't meant to be.

Oh, plus there was this other elf who came onto me and told me to take my armor off. Mark of maturity, right there, for me: I laughed and ignored him. A year before I'd have freaked out. Go, me.

Anyway, there've been others. Now I'm at Rift.

Tl;dr MMOs are not for Inky. But she tries anyway.

Hey nonexistent readers, you just raeg at my long self-centered post nonexistently, k? I'll care so hard.