Paladins should be melee-healers?

I don't disagree as such, but if you're bored with life as a Holy Paladin, ( /wave to the accountants who find it exciting) expand your horizons and try a captain in Lotro.

TCaP Middle Earth

A couple of members of my WoW guild, TCaP, have joined me in LOTRO. If a couple more come as well it'll mean some exciting gaming on the horizon. An immediate WoW revival *might* kill it but that would be a shame. WoW (for me anyway) will pretty much be just raiding on the healing priest, levelling a worgen rogue come cata and then raiding/pvping on rogue. Not a substantial time commitment. While raiding in LOTRO doesn’t seem to be as polished or have as much content it definitely has the potential to provide some fabulous raiding experiences. Not to mention getting a group out on the ‘Moors. My Warden hasn’t experienced much group content yet as finding a group can be pretty tough for lower level wardens. While soloing fine in a group setting we’re unable to Tank or DPS reasonably in a group setting until a high level.

Duoing a Loremaster with my wife’s hunter at the moment, which is interesting but I think buffing people as a Captain may be more satisfying than debuffing mobs as a LM. Even after the debuff’s are fixed to work properly.

Hmmm, if the group enjoy the ‘moors I may be able to parlay that into convincing them to go for a Darkfall trial - an experience I’m saving until I have someone to duo it with. (My wife laughed at my prospects of getting her to play a full-loot sandbox.)

WOW

I mean that in every sense of the word. The announced raiding changes for Cataclysm have blown me away.

I thought WoW and I were done. I'd have probably spared a few touristy hours to explore cata with my wife as a Worgen rogue, but there were just too many disappointments in WotLK for me. Both game flaws - the gearing curve fuckups (all the more disappointing post-Sunwell), the dumbing down of the game and the general insipid repetitive gameplay. And personal issues - being unable to field regular continuation nights of raiding.

WoW has some extremlely serious issues, but it's still the best raiding game out there at the moment. Raiding with friends is fun. But it becomes less fun when you're enslaved to the tyranny of daily dungeons, forcing people to commit days in advance to continuation nights before letting them in the main raid - arguing with IRL friends when they later fail to make the cont nights, etc. We were a casual guild with most people have a wide range of IRL commitments and erratic schedules. We tried to make it work and it just wouldn't in the current raiding game.

But in Cataclysm our guild will work perfectly. I've been accused of being anti-casual and elitist with a constant railing against the dumbing down of raiding in wotlk. Filling in random slots with pugs is a terrifying experience as so many people seem genuinely retarded with little knowledge of their own class and zero of others or how they interact. To bring raiding down a level achievable by these sub-humans is an MMO tragedy. This view isn't anti-casual tho. It's simply anti-retard.

Casual friendly changes incoming that I wholeheartedly support.

- PVE pts changing into PVP pts and vice-versa (at less than 1:1 rate)

This is balling. Variety is the spice of wow-life. I think a 0.75: 1 rate would be optimal, but I imagine we'll see something more like 0.9:1

- Multiple small raids instead of one big one.

Boo-fucking-yah. This is the one that got me crazy excited for wow again as it solves the issues that broke us up. Can't make the cont night? Can only make the cont night? Who the fuck cares? Seperate lock-outs biatch. New night = new raid.

- Same gear for 25 man and 10 man raiding. Shared lock-out.

Woooooooot. 25 man gear being a tier ahead broke 10 man raiding. You could trivialise 10 man progression by jumping in some 25s and getting the uber-gear. It also forced you to do 25s for the better gear and you end up running the same instance sooooo many times WoW becomes a chore instead of fun. It's a game - it's supposed to be fun. Maybe now that people don't feel forced to run everything all the time, they'll be more interested in making their raiding more enjoyable by actually... you know... learning their class and improving their skill level. (I can dream). Either way, the reduced "work-load" is another huge plus to our merry band of men.

- Maximum number of high-level pts you can earn per week.

fuck yeah! this gets better and better. Earning enough points from raiding to max me per week and not having to do the daily dungeon every day sounds fantastic.

If this all happens its truly casual friendly. Hard-cap on the badge equivalent means you dont have to complete every badge-awarding activity every day "clocking in to work". Same gear level for 25 and 10 man means the 10 mans should be more like the challenge they were intended to be instead of a joke on gear-check fights.

Blizzard has earned some serious kudos from me with this. I'm probably even going to resub early, kill Arthas for giggles (tho mainly because a WC3 friend is dying to do it) and check out ruby sanctum.

Of course Blizzard could still disappoint me (hell, they may even be a clear favourite to do so) by simply dropping the difficulty of 10 and 25 man raiding so the retard quasi-casuals (as opposed to genuine time-casuals) can complete everything. But for now they have me excited again.
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I feel like blogging again

My gaming time (and interest tbh) is sporadic. I have lots of different interests and work takes me off traveling often. But something I've missed is writing about gaming.

Recap since August:

August: Restarted WoW, fell heavily into raiding.

November: Attempt to start semi-casual raiding guild, serious about progression but without attendance requirements to include all the people with erratic schedules.

February: Guild implodes as it becomes impossible to get a monday continuation going. I emo-quit WoW.

April. Restart Lotro after long break and remember how awesome it is.

I've also just bought an xbox (with FFVIII and Halo 3) that wants my attention. I have Dragon Age still staring at me wanting play (I liked it on first play and somehow never picked it up again). And Warcraft 3 arrived yesterday which I've been looking forward to trying forever.

So the summer lull in quality gaming most people are lamenting isn't really going to affect me. I have plenty still to find time to play and Darkfall is finally installed on my harddrive waiting for me to find a spare week to play it.

Sunday's Top 3

3rd: Syncaine gives us a cataclysmic reality check.

2nd: Veneretio helps confused warriors in 3.2

1st: snafzg wants open PVP to be more meaningful.

SW:ToR

Heartless is now of the opinion I've been expressing to anyone who would listen for months - SW:ToR is not going to be the second coming.  

Development resources are limited and the full voice acting schtick is going to suck dry a huge portion of their budget and time.  By declaring this their focus Bioware were effectively telling us that the gameplay would not be original or revolutionary. 

I'm obviously still going to subscribe and play with friends who are excited about it, I like the IP, etc.  It looks like it's going to be fun, just not the runaway best MMO ever.  I would also love to proven wrong on this subject, it's just that thousands of rabid fanbois saying something doesn't make it true.

There's a link to the latest video on Heartless's site.  (As I found it there I won't link it directly from here.)

Champions Online - 1st impressions.

I didn't bother joining in with the first round "reviews" of Champions Online that most other blogs produced as they can all be summed up by: wtf is up with the patcher.   I hadn't planned to play the first day anyway as I tend to assume there will be issues with things like this.  100k+ people all trying to patch their pre-installs at once was never likely to be the smoothest of experiences.  My mind boggles at the people outraged they couldn't play immediately, and I'm left to wonder what sort of brain-damage would lead people to expect to be able to do so. Perhaps the drooling, twitching, Halo players decided to apply for open beta en masse...

And that thought should have started the alarm bells ringing for me, should have prepared me for what I was to face when I finally did log-in to CO and my previous serenity was swiftly kicked in the nads.  It's a console game.  Worse, a console game that looks and feels like something I could have played in the mid-90s.  The collision detection is absurd, the physics engine bordering on ludicrous and the combat mindless button mashing.  The tactical/strategical combat we were promised?  Well, maybe if you compare it to Black Belt.  

The voice acting is reminiscent of 50s B-movies.  I hate it - and voice-acting is something I usually don't give two hoots about.  As long as it's passable I don't care (which is probably why other people are getting boners over SWTOR and I'm predicting that the budget drain of this "feature" will gimp the game) - but this is just painful.

So far, I hate everything about the game.  My gloomy predictions over Star Trek Online have also darkened.  I don't see how a studio who can produce this steaming pile of turds could possibly produce a quality rendering of the ST IP.

As a disclaimer I should probably say that I'm playing with mouse and keyboard.  Mouse movement.  Just.  Doesn't.  Work.  And I'm only a few hours in.  I still have a lot of builds to try and a lot of content to see.

I have a friend who LOVES the game.  He's a console gamer tho.  I think what I'll do is go buy an xbox controller, adjust my expectations of CO considerably downwards and try again.  I'm already committed to £65 and 6 mths of playtime, so I may as well explore it further to see if I can find a way to make this fun.  Heck, I love a challenge. Although, I was going to warm up with something easier like feeding 5000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish.