I levelled Bard up to 66, decided I really couldn’t be bothered putting up with retarded parties, and switched to Beastmaster, currently level 32. Fun times…

Gamescom has come to a close now, and there was actually some reasonable information out of it relating to FFXIV, I was pretty surprised to see a playable version of the game there actually. Overall what we know so far sounds very promising, we just need SE to pull through now.

Blizzcon was also last week – and the WoW Cataclysm stuff that was posted up, frankly, looks fucking terrible. I am pretty disgusted with what they’re doing with the game now, it’s pretty much been dumbed down so much there’s not much of a game left. Being a Blood Elf Warrior would be pretty cool though. Can I be arsed levelling 1-85 though? Very unlikely.

Between now and “2010″ (or whenever we finally get FFXIV) I’ll generally be filling my time with dossing about, and playing Aion when it’s out in a few more weeks.

I would give my first born child to get into Beta for FFXIV, also.

San d'Oria

In our first night of adventuring, we revisited some highly nostalgic areas!

We chose San d’Oria as our starting location, previously we had both played out our time in Bastok mostly, and a little in Windurst. So this was a bit of a change for both of us.

We followed the introductory quests, I was surprised how good they are now! Got handed a nice exp boosting ring, some gil, some exp, given a (very) basic introduction to the game.

After doing our own things for a while we met up and decided to go ahead and do the San d’Orian mission that sends you into King Ranperre’s Tomb. Now, remember that neither of us have played the game in a good few years – I was quite impressed that I managed to remember my way around inside. Having said that it did take us a while to remember where exactly the place was in the world…

Once inside we realised we didn’t really have much of a clue what we were doing. We killed mobs all through the tunnel, eventually finding the tomb we had to click on to trigger the cut scene. We thought that was it, so killed our way back out again… While chatting along the way we decided we must of missed something, so Alex did a bit of digging and we realised we were meant to kill some Ding Bats for a drop as well. These guys apparently only spawned at night, so that’s why we missed it. Fuckers. Who does that?

Trees. Grass. Rabbits, somewhere...

So, slightly annoyed, we turned around and went back through the tunnel, again.

We were happily killing Ding Bats and skeletons along the way when we came across the area the Spook spawns, unfortunately he took interest in us before we could run away, our low health made some more skeletons take interest as well.

Splat.

We decided to give up at this point and come back another day.

So that was our first evening back in Vana’diel, we ended up around level 10 which isn’t bad going all things considered. I highly doubt there will be any dunes parties for us… But you never know…

Esti & Petale

Last night saw my return to FFXI. Technically it was a few days ago, but I didn’t do much due to waiting for Alex to get his copy and patch it and such…

It all came about mainly through boredom, and somewhat through a rekindling of Final Fantasy interest due to FFXIV news, or lack thereof.

So after much debate over which jobs we should level, I have decided upon levelling Red Mage, and Alex has gone with Samurai. I’ve always been highly tempted by Ninja though, so there’s definitely potential for flaking there Unfortunately it would be stupidly expensive for a newbie to do. Sigh.

I was pretty impressed by the changes they have made, lower level mobs are giving more experience now, and there are these awesome Training Regimes that give additional experience once per Vana’diel day.

This will certainly make it easier for us, we’re intending to duo (potentially trio) our way to level 75. Obviously we’ll join parties if the invite comes, but for the majority, we will be grinding our way there in much smaller groups.

Gavin has also decided to give it a try, I’m not really holding my breath on how long he will last, WoW took his virginity, FFXI is going to slap on a gimp mask and double penetrate him. I don’t think he really knows what he’s getting himself in for. He died to his first mob because he had no idea he had to equip the weapon in his inventory.

Oh the joys!

On with the adventuring.

Oh so hot...

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to delude myself that FFXIV is going to be perfect in any way, shape, or form. I am however, a massive Final Fantasy fan. I have fond memories of having a neighbour who patiently translated the original games when I was young for me as I watched him play, on through playing them myself on import, to getting my first console and having them all neatly lined up on my shelf.

Final Fantasy XI was my first proper MMO that I actually played seriously, and likening your first love to your first MMO is not an uncommon analogy, and rightly so. You’ve (generally) moved on from it, so you can reflect on the bad points, but they’re often shaded by the memories of the good points.

This is a surprisingly difficult topic to write about, people who play FFXI will no doubt have their own opinions on matters, and people who haven’t played FFXI will not really understand it.  Not because they’re incapable, but because they haven’t experienced it first hand.

Ask any FFXI player, any one at all, what their favourite aspect of the game is. I 100% garuntee that they will answer you thus: “The Community”

Final Fantasy XI: Community Edition

The reason for this immense feeling of community comes from many aspects of the game.

Firstly, your reputation is absolutely, 110%, TOTALLY the most important thing there is. You invest so much time into a single character, levelling different jobs, meeting different people, and the inter-networking that exists on a server means if you fuck someone over, everyone is going to know about it.

For this reason, everyone is pretty much reasonable. That’s not to say that everyone is friendly, but generally the people you group with, and the people you do interact with are going to be aimaible – why? Because if they’re not, you’ll complain to your linkshell (guild) and in turn their reputation will take a down. Think of it as real karma in a game.

Secondly, you rely on people for everything. To level. To gain your AF armour. To level your weaponskills. The list is endless, there are very very few things you can do alone in FFXI.

Thirdly, there are generally fairly niche communities on the various servers. The Japanese generally keep to themselves, the English speakers generally keep to themselves, and on Bahamut, eventually the Europeans generally kept to themselves in forming their own End-Game linkshell.

This interlinking network of niche communities, all relying on each other to co-exist and make progress leads to the game becoming totally community focused.

Final Fantasy XIV: Casual Edition

Picture this: You get home from work, sort out dinner, get around to logging in to your favourite MMO about 7-7.30. You decide tonight you’re going to get some experience points on that class you’ve been working on…You put up your LFG flag, and you wait for an invite that may or may not come. While you wait, you do some fishing, some crafting, or some farming for peanuts. You could technically log out 4 hours later having achieved nothing.

Games have developed over the past 10 years away from the strictly Eastern MMORPG methodoly of grind-central. Us Western folk decided we wanted our grind disguised and made a little more engaging. Even Aion, which has a very clear Eastern feel to it, is littered with quests from what I saw of the recent beta weekend – so maybe all MMO’s are swinging this way nowadays.

Square Enix have stated that they will be aiming to move away from the very time-intense gameplay of FFXI. They have said that people won’t be forced down the party-for-exp route… Excellent news for people like me who moved on from the very hardcore gameplay of FFXI. Though I think the general concensus of the people who still play FFXI is “omg noobs crai” etc.

Final Fantasy: Online

Now, these two aspects, in my opinion aren’t going to mix to recreate FFXI. This is a good thing, but I won’t try and convince anyone of that fact right now – especially an FFXI player.

How are they going to make the game less group-orientated and maintain the community feel that FFXI nurtures? I certainly don’t have the answer, but I’m sure some will argue that the community nurtures itself. All I know is that FFXIV is due to bring in a much larger crowd, and if they keep on making some of the promises along the same lines as what they have been, then they’ll probably be keeping that crowd too.

Character affinity + Casual friendly = Win.

Om nom nom Druid

Well, it’s been far too long since I posted anything here, and to think, the last post I made said the exact same thing… Oops!

So what the hell have I been doing recently?

Mostly I levelled my Druid to 80, geared it up for Naxx, and have since tanked Naxx 10, 25, and the first few bosses in Ulduar.

There was some fun guild issues, which left us guildless for a while, but a chance run in with a Paladin led to me meeting a whole lot of guys who recently transferred to the server in a guild named Midian. Chances are we will be joining them this week. I’ve been very impressed with the people I’ve run with and I think the guild has a lot of potential, one shotting 4 bosses in Ulduar when 8/10 people hadn’t even set foot in it before is not to be scoffed at.

Druid….

I’ve pretty much stopped playing my Priest now in favour of the Druid, I have a lot more options this way. I’m not quite sure how the Druid came about, I think Alex wanted to level his Shaman, and I levelled with him, and it just went from there really!

Fishing…

I also took up fishing regularly. Odd, I know. I finally managed to catch the Sea Turtle mount yesterday, I’ll be sure to get a screenshot for the next post!

That’s all about WoW for now, but E3 was last week so there’s a whole bunch of news floating about which I’m sure I’ll post about soon.

The illustration is copyright Wizards of the Coast, please don’t sue me. I love you.

Slacking

Yes, I have infact failed at posting anything for quite a while. I know… Multiple reasons honestly…

I’ve not really been up to a massive amount of exciting stuff in game at the moment, infact, it goes something like this:

Levelled the Alliance Warrior to 72, got bored. Levelled the Alliance Priest to 71, got bored. Levelled the Alliance Rogue to 64, or something, bored.

Dropped the bombshell on my friends that I was considering heading back over to Horde, it went down surprisingly well. A couple had been considering it themselves, a couple were happy enough wherever, and one of them whined for 10 minutes but ultimately would go along for the ride.

Flaking. It’s what I do best.

So, we’re back over on Horde now. We made a new guild named “Still Alive” – it works on multiple levels. Primarily, yes, we are infact still alive having left the server for a few months. Secondly, it’s all about the cake.

What am I doing on Horde? Well, certainly not going back to 25 man raiding, I don’t think I can handle holding the hands of 15 morons while 10 of us do all the hard work.

I’m currently playing my Paladin, Ainia. I’ve switched her to Protection and am gathering up some gear. A couple of our new friends are levelling up, and are about level 53 at the moment. When they reach 63ish I will play my Rogue some with them so she can get levelled up, and maybe finish off my T0.5.

The other reason why I haven’t really updated much here recently is the fact most of the news kicking about is about Patch 3.1… Exciting times, no? Maybe, but I don’t considering writing blog posts about news that people can find on MMO Champion, or whatever news source they prefer very interesting. If there was some ground breaking piece of information coming out of them, but no… Just the general slew of class changes and boss drops.

Yawn. Until the patch comes out, I will keep up to date as I see fit, but won’t really be writing about it every time a new release comes out on the PTR.

Anyway, on with the gearing up and levelling I suppose!

Boost - Glucosetastic

*Edit 01/03/09* – I’ve just completed up to the Hellfire Ramparts stage, and have updated this post with some new tips I’ve also updated the level ranges, and added in Stratholme.

It’s been some time since my original instance boosting  that resulted in my Priest, Warlock and Paladin getting to 60 the first time round. The Priest and Paladin happened to go on to be the first two characters I levelled to 80 as well.

I became fairly proficient in running three accounts at once and boosting the linked characters in instances, my original guide was fairly hazy, and had a couple of steps that aren’t really necessary.

Project: Alliance

It’s fairly irrelevant what faction you play on, my original guide did take into account the fact that Horde can hop into RFC at level 8, however anyone can get into Shadowfang Keep at level 10 anyway, and those two levels will take about 20 minutes by just running around doing the quests.

Things to remember

The 12.5 minute rule – This one kicks in both early on, and nearer the end. You can’t clear an instance in 5 minutes and reset it and go again, because after 25 minutes you’ll be stood around twiddling your thumbs. Likewise you don’t want to spend an hour in an instance, because you will have invariably wasted time on packs of mobs you don’t need to.

The experience gained from mobs curves – When you start out in an instance you will be significantly lower level than them, often skulls. The experience will curve upwards as your babies approach the level of the mobs, and the drop off when they surpass them. This works in your favour as a booster, because often the experience will curve roughly the same rate as the levels increase in length – making it fairly easy to work out how many more runs until you’ll be dinging.

Paladins or Death Knights – Use a plate wearing tank class with awesome AoE to boost if you want the maximum exp/hr. Warriors are fine to a point, as are Druids. Neither come close to a Paladin or DK however. Paladin does win here due to it’s rez ability.

On with the guide…

So you’ve got your accounts setup, and it’s time to head into the instances to boost some mad experience points. Your first mission will be to get one of those characters to Shadowfang Keep. I do not advise running both characters there at this level – just concentrate on getting one there alive and then use the Refer-a-Friend summoning feature to get the other character right along as well. This will save you time, as you will invariably die along the way.

Shadowfang Keep – 10 til 20

A Boosters Dream

The final level you switch from SFK to SM is up to you, but you can enter SM at level 20, so remember that if the experience points seem to be getting too lame for the effort.

You can pull SFK in 2 pulls, but remember that you need to do an instance in an average of 12.5 minutes in order to stay away from the reset timer restrictions. So if you don’t want to be standing around, you may as well chill a little and loot some mobs, might get some lucky blue drops to sell to the twinks.

You can kill most the instance while leaving the two characters being boosted by the metal grid at the front, the nice design in here makes it virtually perfect for boosting in this way.

Scarlet Monastery – 20 to 40

Scarlet Monastery

The idea here is to complete the Cathedral and Armoury as often as possible without hitting the 12.5 minute timer. You can pull the Cathedral in three pulls, and the Armoury in two. Feel free to spend a little bit of time looting after that, as the cloth will sell fairly well.

Armoury – Pull everything up to the first set of stairs inside that go up, right back to the entrance. Then run everyone through to the foot of those stairs, and pull everything through from Herods door back.

Cathedral – Pull everything in the lower courtyard back to just inside the door to it. Then pull everything from the upper courtyard to the foot of the stairs. Next just pull the final boss and everything inside the Cathedral will come too.

Once you have the timings down this will be an immense amount of experience, very very quickly.

Blackrock Depths – 40 to 50

Blackrock Depths

This is an interesting boosting location. Okay, I lied. This is where it gets boring. The levels are longer, the mobs take longer to kill, and you stick to the 12.5 minute rule.

The idea is to enter the instance, head straight ahead into the circular area, and kill as many mobs in that area as you physically can in 12 minutes. Hop outside, reset, and do it again. It’s not pretty. It is however, strangely efficient.

Stratholme – 50 to 55

Baron runs. You will be getting a level per run, so you’ll only need five, it’s worth killing everything on the dead side, but don’t bother looting.

Be extra careful to watch for gargoyles and those annoying shades that yell that the living are here, I had a couple of baby deaths due to these before being wary… Luckily the corpse run is fairly small anyway. If you’re near the end and don’t fancy a massive run, providing only one of the babies died, hop into the living portal and summon it across using the alive ones summon. Much quicker than running!

Hellfire Ramparts – 55 to 60

The home straight, congratulations on making it this far. You’ll need to get a mage to portal you, or a summon at level 55 as you can’t get through the Dark Portal, however it shouldn’t be hard to find one on even a remotely populated server these days.

Once you get there, I find it worthwhile to spend a little time here. Kill everything. You will invariably be grossly undergeared at this point, so you may as well try and get some green armour to get yourself going into Outlands.

Job Done

If you made it this far, it’s time to go and get all your characters training, level up some trade skills… Level your weapon skill if you are melee, and then finally head out into the big wide world.

Hopefully someone will find this remotely useful, it’s really the most efficient route I found of levelling using Refer-a-Friend.

Patchtastic

Ahhh, got you there. You thought I was going to blog about how awesome the 3.1 changes are, and how the PTR is up.

No. I refuse!

Everyone is blogging about it. WoW Insider even managed to spam their front page with stuff while I was eating my breakfast this morning. They even managed to pull someone out of bed to write about the Druid changes, because apparently 15 other new posts relating to a patch isn’t enough.

Previous patches…

Looking back to TBC for a brief moment. The release for the expansion was 16th January 2007, I can’t really remember the entirity of what was available, but I do recall both SSC and TK were accessible providing you had done the attunements.

Black Temple was not released until patch 2.1, which came along on the 22nd May 2007. A good 5 months to reach level 70, and progress through two tiers of raiding (not really…) – Black Temple was then the pinnacle of raiding for quite some time, allowing people to collect up all their shiny T6.

I’m not counting the Zul’Aman Patch in here, as it wasn’t really raid progression, more helping people plug the gaps in their gear before hitting up Black Temple.

After T6 was the Sunwell gear, which was 25th March 2008. Ten months after Black Temple got released.

Total shelf life of TBC for raiders: One year Six months, give or take.

In comparison…

Well, WotLK was released on 13th November 2008, and I’ve predicted a March 18th release for patch 3.1, so that’ll be about four months, and we’ll have access to the second tier of raiding in WotLK.

So what is there to come? Blizzard seem to have changed their patch methodology somewhat since TBC, which is fine. They went to release with less tiers of raid content, no objections from me.

My problem is, we have (probably) over 18 months left WotLK, and only one more “official” tier of raiding, and then maybe a token raid or two after that. I’m just not sure what other content they have to put into this patch, and having not gone digging for it, I can’t even take any wild gue…

Wild Guesses!

I can actually make some wild guesses. Now we have swimming mounts, I want to see Azshara. In all her tentacled freaky glory.

Going foward…

I hope Blizzard stick more to their short and sharp development program, trickle feeding people content is definately an improvement. I just hope they have enough up their sleeve to last until the next expansion without people getting bored. That or they need to announce their “next-gen” MMO!

Image borrowed from Penny Arcade, please don’t sue me.

Ulduar Concept

It’s fairly widely known now that patch 3.1 is on the PTRs. This patch finds itself being hyped up for a whole bunch of reasons.

Raiding might not be a joke anymore!

Raiding is easy at the moment. Naxxramas is pretty much a joke, anyone who thinks otherwise needs a big dose of l2p. The only challenges come in the form of the hard modes… Or should I say, hard mode, singular. Sartharion 3D is about the most challenging thing out there, and the 10 man version is being pugged on our realm, so it really doesn’t say a lot for that does it?

Ulduar is being promised as, and really, it has to be, the turn around for raiding. They gave us the warm and cosy introduction, entirely bastardising the most menacing raid zone in the history of the game, and now it’s time for them to turn that around and present us with some challenges.

You can have more than one spec!

The new multi-spec system should be a nice new introduction really. They’ve been trying to be open enough about how it will work, which is nice. Hopefully for the cost of a reagent we’ll be able to switch talent specs outside of comabt. Win!

Will this save the lack of healer/tank issues? I highly doubt it. Will it cause a nice bunch of drama in some guilds? Probably. Will the trainer cost of this make people emotastic? We’ll see soon enough.

Mounts can swim!

Okay, now your mount won’t have a freakin’ Gremlinesque spaz if you get it in water. About freakin’ time.

Nerf Death Knights

Not sure if that’s happening, but I know there are a whole lot of class changes incoming which will hopefully pull a few classes into line with others… There’s no real firm decisions just yet, and it’s too early to try and guess how they’ll actually end up when they go live.

Not that it really matters yet!

Having re-rolled, we’re not even back into Naxx yet, so I doubt we’ll be at a position to hop right into Ulduar when the patch comes out. Hopefully this will work to our advantage, we’ll have to take alts in our PUG spots, which means their mains should have done the content to death and will therefore know it as well as us.

What am I doing here?

You could have got here in any number of ways, I’m going to guess you got automagically forwarded from MassDispel.net. You could have also typed in the URL, or searched Google.

What is this place? Where’s the fish?

This is a new blog. I created it as the old domain, MassDispel.net, was virtually irrelevant after the mass re-roll. The fish is a lie.

Mass re-roll? Whatcha talkin’ bout Willis?

After the drama of this previous post, a re-roll took place. We changed from our Horde mains on Kilrogg to new Alliance characters on Argent Dawn.

Previous post? You said this was new!

I imported the posts from MassDispel.net as there might be some information people are still looking for, who knows.

Not me. Now… What’s with the domain name?

Well, I wanted to blog under a banner that didn’t pigeon hole me into a certain topic. Now I have the freedom to blog about what I want, and it won’t matter if I get bored and re-roll again.

How u mien 4 fish?

Dynamite. You heard of strip mining? It’s like strip poker, but sexier.

So what are you doing on Argent Dawn?

Levelling a Warrior named Esti. She’s level 70 at the moment. 

Thanks for answering these fictional questions..

You’re welcome.

So there you have it. Welcome to my new home, where you can expect a good deal of schizophrenic Q&A’s, many rants about whatever is annoying me, and hopefully some useful WoW/MMO related stuff.