Lytha's Blog

My wintersday activities so far...

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Lytha

, 23-12-2009 at 08:02 (673 Views)

Juliania did the EotN wintersday quests so that I could charm the new pet with one of her heroes. That jingle moa looks even stupider than other moas, so I think I've finally found the ideal pet for, probably, Hayda, who's also as stupid as a chicken that's been dropped on the head as a chick.

Ms. Velour did the EotN wintersday quests as well, with a Dunkoro instead of a MoW. This seems to be an excellent idea, because neither charr nor UW critters posed any real danger. Might use the same team setup for Nefertari in a while. And then she did some snowball fights, because I thought that I might want to grind the title a bit. But what's the point? I am not going to EotN with her, in all likelihood.

And now Nefertari did the first two EotN wintersday quests and then some snowballing. From Vanguard rank 0 to Vanguard 5300 points, so far. Observation: if a hero has a pet, then the pet will join in for the fight. The pet will also attack sometimes, when the aggressors are so close that it notices them. Setting the pet aggressively on some foe would probably work too. Since not all attributes are set to 0, it might be a good idea to put 12 points into beastmastery and to bring a pet.

A funny observation about these snowball matches: The Pvpers always whine about the Grenth's skill, yellow snow, being utterly useless, right? Well, it's the total opposite here. Avalanche just sucks totally. So much in fact that I've begun to just rezone until I got the yellow snow.

Yellow Snow-Matches are faster, my team has a far better chance to survive a bit longer, and the last few foes that I most probably have to solo will be done with faster.

=> PvPers are morons.

Right. That aside, I've done some ETQW and some more Thief Gold. I expect this to continue, most likely with next: a quick and short summary of Thief2 for the blog and then a "replay: Thief 3."

Thief > snowball fights with mentally challenged AIs as team mates.

ETQW > snowball fights as well, though the mentally challenged NIs are an issue in that game as well. (If you did lie around on the ground, waiting to be revived or for the new spawning time - and would see a medic approach your corpse, would you then tab out? Happened all the time yesterday on that server I normally don't visit.)

I've climbed up the medic ladder to medic #4004 already.

One ETQW match yesterday was particularly sweet. Island, I was strogg. Normally, I'd hang around near the vault door that the GDF has to blow up. This time, I did hang around more in the front lines of our defenses, next to a soldier who wasn't suicidal too. I did hide behind a crate and he would shoot every GDF that walked past. Then I'd heal him up and make another spawn host. We couldn't even leave this corner because the GDF was merrily shooting with the tank's gun through the entrance door.

That soldier was a better buddy to heal than guildie is in this game. Guildie is a suicidal nuisance to the foes (and to his medics), and while he may survive dancing nekkid (bunny hopping and circle strafing) among the foes, I certainly won't.

Speaking of "nekkid dancing among the foes" - that's a bit mesmer-like. It's about distracting, irritating and confusing the foes, weakening their resistance or their numbers. He used to do that in earlier games of the sort (LMCTF) with customized soundfiles to enrage the foes even more.

Yeah well... I'll stick to my hopefully smart and laid back engineer and soldier buddies, I think.

Besides, if I play Thief or ETQW, I'm not going to be whispered to about the latest "lets grind for Nick" strategies - which isn't helpful when I'm already busy cursing the A"I" of my snowball fight buddy hero, and not in the mood to say for the 20ths time that I am not interested in -ing Nick.

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Done the EotN quests with medic and guildie. I like the new team setup (we took a dunkoro instead of the MoW, which meant jesus beams and an overpowered Goren).

Guildie was by far better in the snowball fight this year than last time.

That aside, no significan progress on the medic ladder (it's now #3992). The team desperately needed a radar, so I went covert ops.

So. As a Strogg, I can hide and attack GDF with my flyer drones. As a GDF covert though... what the heck do I do? I am too clumsy to snipe and my camera is better as a radar than as a bomb.

I guess I should try to hack some hostile deployables, but then their enraged engineer will inevitably shoot me. :P

Buuuut: I got a promotion! Finally, I hacked the 2nd objective, which was needed for the rank of "Second Lieutenant".

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Nefertari went ahead and did the last of the EotN wintersday quests - with a team of 8 instead of just 6, but I wanted it to be relatively safe, and then got enough norn points for the first rank.

She also did all of the rift warden's quests, once. Once is really enough for these quests... they suck if you repeat them too much.

I won't touch the idiotic other wintersday quests, especially the ones in Istan. God grief, these suck so much. Especially Dwayna's quests there: "I won't give you a quest marker, so you'll have to wander across all these newbie zones, killing these newbie monsters without much reward. Repeatedly." Yeaaah sure.

That aside, I'm at the moment torn between replaying Thief Gold immediately (doing it better than last time!) or moving to Thief 3. I've got the iso files of both Thief 2 CDs now, but to be honest, I don't have a clue what to do with them. And when I read some more on TTLG, I remembered that Thief 2 as a total was the reason why I delayed my purchase of Thief 3 for years and had lost my faith in the people of Looking Glass completely - yes, Thief 2 is that bad.

A bit like Star Wars (original series). Part 1 was good, part 2 sucked completely, part 3 was okayish again.

What's worrying about this is that Thief 4 is in production now, and if it keeps following the Star Wars pattern, then there'll be an obnoxious child as protagonist, accompanied by the most obnoxious cgi buddy ever. :P

What stops me from Thief 3 right now is the knockout in the first mission. It's a training mission (with blue footsteps marking the way you're supposed to take and blue arrows pointing at the items you're supposed to pay attention to), and one of the objectives is to knock out the poor innkeeper. For no particular reasons - it's easy to sneak past him. But if you do, you get the "please try again" blackout of the screen + teleport back to the entrance of the inn.

I thought someone at TTLG had found a way past this obstacle, but turns out (after half an hour of barrel pushing and crate stacking) that his method only deals with the last of the guards... and that guard has never been a problem for me, because there's a lamp behind him and you got water arrows - so what's this stupidity about barrel pushing and crate stacking and wall mantling all about?? Well, at least I now can push barrels around without knocking them over. The havock engine of this game sucks. :P

I guess I just have to accept that one single knockout and move into the game. A bit like the training dummy in Thief 1.

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Some Thief 3 played.

I had a short spell of Oblivion, but for some reasons this doesn't hold my interest for long enough so that the freshly rolled character even makes it up to level 2 anymore at the moment.

The ritualist is a crazy overpowered thing right now. I've done some speedy vanquishes with her. I guess it will bore me quickly enough though - you don't need to think while playing her. It's just explosions of yellow numbers, which is satisfying in its own way.

Anyway, I've moved her into EotN now and will farm the snowball fight for a couple of vanguard points, I think. Just for the case that I might not get bored of this sort of gameplay too soon.

(Though doing this grind is a sure way to bore me of a character, as evidenced by Nefertari at the moment.)

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Now that I've discovered a better way to deal with the snowball fight (flag the necro hero to the foes and activate his skills manually), I've grinded Kuolema to 15kish points, and Nefertari to 20kish points.

I think that this is more than sufficient, given than Juliania has 181k points Vanguard, didn't vanquish Sacnoth more than two times, and that I didn't grind books until I would throw up on the thought of them. Dungeons and quests give points as well.

But I might do a little more of this when I'm bored. Don't know.

That aside... hot water bottle and a fluffy blanket and a cat on the lap would be the most welcome things right now. No surprise that I wandered off and played some ETQW matches yesterday (shooting maybe even some more people than I was being killed. With the shotgun, to boot.), on the height of the monthly testosterone curve.

Women on pre-mens. They're dangerous.

Updated 01-01-2010 at 14:37 by Lytha

Categories: Not about specific characters

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Comments

Noa Brightington - 23-12-2009 09:33
I hate to be the one to defend pvpers, but in this instance, having a pvp split of skills would probably work for the best.
In the pve snowball fight, your goal is to kill people as much as possible. Yellow snow accomplishes that very well I think, due to the fact that it's disease, and when it hits target, if several targets are bunched up, and all the same type, it spreads quickly, thus, 150 degen points x however many targets are bunched up.
In the pvp snowball matches, your goal is NOT to kill the other players, but to run presents. Killing the players is only a means to the end. Not only that, but high end pvp'ers don't bunch up for disease spreading among them, and some players who get hit by yellow snow, they can run among the foes, and spread the disease to those guys instead.
In that instance, yes, yellow snow does suck.
Lytha - 23-12-2009 09:46
I don't think so. YS is a condition removal, and it isn't slowed down by dazed, so just remove the crippled of the retarded Avalanches while you're crawling the gifts across the map.

And the "whine whine disease spreads on our team too" nonsense? You have a condition removal. The others don't.
Noa Brightington - 23-12-2009 11:34
The thing is, disease in the pvp format just causes degen. it doesn't cause slowdown.
In a given situation, your team has the degen. other team has the avalanche. It takes a second or so to activate the prep, and then you have to toss a snowball to make it work.
Avalanche is more like a shout, very quick to use.
Yes, you can degen the runner of the present, but that doesn't stop them. Avalanche will slow them down, making them take slower to get present to base, and also make it easier to hit with snowballs. Also avalanche is an aoe cripple. If anyone is assisting the present runner, which there usually is, the avalanche will slow them down as well if they're to close.
I'm not normally one to agree with keddie, but in this case, they're very much right. There's a big difference in skill capability here, and equally good teams will come down to who gets avalanche, and who gets yellow snow.
In this case, it becomes br, or blue resign.
Lytha - 23-12-2009 12:22
Which part about "YS is a condition removal, Avalanche's snare functionality is done with a condition" wasn't clearly enough worded in my previous response?

Avalanche isn't instantly applied. It's a 3/4 second activation time, can be interrupted easily even without daze. Also, it's a spell, so daze them more. 1.5 seconds casting time is absolutely not instantaneous, nothing "like a shout" at all.

Yellow snow also doesn't have 1 second activation time. It's 3/4 second, just like Avalanche. However, contrary to Avalanche, it's not affected by dazed at all!
Noa Brightington - 23-12-2009 13:48
okay, I'll give that yellow snow is faster to activate, but that's still time you're activating that, then having to use the next skill to apply it.
If one side has a present runner for dwana, say you have one present runner, and one person covering them, and at least two grenth people attacking. They have to spend the second or so to activate the skill, THEN use snowball skill to apply it to the foes, of which, it does NOT slow them down from getting the present to kids.
Now reverse the situation, and you have a present runner for grenth, and someone assisting them, and two people trying to stop them.
They hit ONE skill, and that slows them down, and then they can use the snowball skills to beat them down. If they try using yellow snow, that leaves them open for getting hit even more or inturupted.
If there was a way yellow snow could be targeted to another player, REMOVING their condition, THEN it'd probably rock.
But anyway... this is getting pointless.
In the greater scheme of things, it probably doesn't matter because most teams you get in snowball arena suck. The big question becomes, who's team sucks less.
Lytha - 23-12-2009 15:00
To remove one of your conditions, you use Yellow Snow. Not Yellow Snow + Snowball.

The disease is a nice little bonus, but the main point of this skill is that you can get rid of your crippled and dazed. Without having to cast for 1.5 seconds, because you're dazed in the first place.

In the snowball fight, I love it because I can remove the dazes. In that retarded pvp setting, you can use it to remove your crippled. Also, look at the recharge time of the avalanches and compare it with that of the yellow snow.

Edit: rightnow I am trying to figure out how I feel about you calling in the cavallery by telling Kiddo that I disagree with his pro judgment about the oh-so-important wintersday skills.

If you want to incite an argument between him and me, you're mad. Besides, I don't argue with pvpers who're on my ignore list half of the time, for being trollish turds.

I'm also intrigued how you're distorting whatever I've said about them being balanced into "lytha says that YS is better".

It's quite a bit like "lytha considers that she might maybe not visit nick this week", which occurred some weeks ago, only it's "accidentally" more violating to the original meaning of what I said, and it's done in public, too.

Or like being completely deaf to hints along the lines of "I don't give a crap about -ing nick, and I don't want to talk about him" - I think one of the clearer hints along these lines got morphed into the considers that she might maybe not visit nick this week.

I don't give a crap about what pvper think about me, but when someone whom I considered as a buddy misinterprets anything I say, then maybe I should think about this a bit.

Updated 23-12-2009 at 23:45 by Lytha
Cartomancer - 26-12-2009 12:49
"yes, Thief 2 is that bad."

No, it isn't! :P

I agree that the setting in T2 could be better (you were talking about it in another post), I liked the "medieval" style of T1, whereas some of the Victorian/industrial places in T2 were a bit meh. Despite of that, there are some fun missions in the game, and it's definitely worth (re)playing. Of course there are some missions that suck as well, but it's the same with TG and T3...

For the Thief 2 ISO files that you have, I believe that you can just burn them on CDs using some CD burning software.
Lytha - 26-12-2009 14:40
Oh, then I will need to move these iso files to a friend. My DVD drive isn't for writing CDs... at least, I don't think it is.

I really don't know if it's worth replaying. When I think of Shipping&Receiving, I see a too bright atmosphere, lots of stupid guards, lots of locked doors infront of my eye. I get the feeling that it was very much like Thieves Guild, on the enjoyability scale.

Framed was fun, Trail of Blood was fun and Life of the Party (until you enter the tower) was fun. The rest... uhm. Either okayish or total and utter crap like the following that I recall from top of my head:

Soulforge. Giant empty rooms, stupid jumping puzzles, robots, turret room, and item crafting, here we come.

... or CtJ/Masks - stupidest idea of game design ever.

And Kidnap. Gaaaaaaah!

The bank was also just stupidly oversized. Sorry, I know that people loved it. But it's just too huge and too tedious.

A few too many missions that I really really don't want to suffer through.

Wasn't there even an objective in Running Interference, Expert mode (?) that forced you to knock out some of these guards for no reason at all, so that you had to play it in Hard or Normal to get a clean 0 knockouts stats? If there was, then it really just screams: "fail! fail!"...