I Have No Idea What I Am Doing Anymore…

Patch days are never straight forward. This one would have been easier if I hadn’t had a brain crushing migraine for most of the day, which is great timing by my head I must say. I dragged myself out of bed at 11am, fired up the patcher and by the time I came round again at 4pm (no work for me today, throwing up behind the bar is frowned upon) it had more or less finished. So I logged on for a while.

The new loading screen is pretty

I will miss Deathwing though, I have a soft spot for dragons, even one with a Skip for a lower jaw.

Of course the first thing I did was log onto all my existing characters to get all my mounts and pets logged. I finally got enough pets to get Stinker! I adore Stinker, and as much as I’d love to be a pet collector I just don’t have the patience, so this was a real bonus for me. Never mind the fawn you get at the next mile stone, amorous skunks ftw! And the Blue Drake languishing on my rarely used Belf Priest is now available to the characters I do play. I do now have 6 White kittens in my pets list, far more than any other pet.

After the squeeing about Stinker I decided to sort of Pinkamena with new talent choices. I have to say I love the new Travel form, and I took the Glyph that allows me to tame critters and have them follow me for an hour. I also took the camouflage glyph, because a girl can’t just be one colour kitty all the time. Thing is, after all that, and reading up on Noxxic I still have no clue as to what I am doing. My shadow priest looks even more complicated, and I’ve not dared look at resto shammying yet! I am hoping once my head settles down it will be simpler.

Oh, and if anyone wants to add me, my battletag is chaotickitty#1891 and I’m on the EU servers.

P.S Nearly forgot, I now have the internet at home, so no more going to my dads to use it. G is happy about this too, but I must explain to him about ‘Internet Search History’…

Presenting Pinkamena!!!

I commissioned a brilliant artists called Aly Flock to do a picture of my Druid, Pinkamena, with her Winterspring Cub. She didn’t disappoint!

Isn’t it cute! I highly recommend her to anyone, she is talented, polite and has a very quick turnaround. And very reasonable prices.

The Secret World and I

In an effort to ease my WoW burnout I’ve been pretty much only logging on to raid, which off has left a huge hole in my schedule. So decided to give The Secret World a go.

Published by Funcom, it’s described as a ‘modern day’ mmo. Horror based, it has elements from HP Lovecraft, Stephen King (the is an Overlook Motel), as well as conspiracy theories and urban legends being thrown in the mix. You can chose from 3 factions, The Illuminati (they aren’t giant lizards sorry), The Templars and The Dragons. I chose the dragons as I liked the deck combos, but more on that later.

I was a little disappointed with character creation. In someways it’s really detailed, you chose you entire outfit, and there are loads or hairdos and make up choices to chose from, but you can’t customise your height, weight or build, which I liked about the other Funcom title Age of Conan. So you are stuck with a generic skinny and slightly flat chested female character, whereas I like to make my character of a bigger build.

It’s not a newbie friendly game I have to say. It tells you about Ability Points and Skill Points, but not much more than that. The beauty of the game is you continually gain AP and SP, so you can eventually get every skill in the game, but it doesn’t make that clear at first. You build what are called Decks: Weapon and Skill sets that suit your play style. When you start the game you chose your first weapon skills, then you can combine it with a second weapon skill. For example my character uses Blades and Elemental magic, but you can have any combination. And as you gain more points you can build more decks, so you aren’t stuck with one role. Rather than character levels you progress through gear level, or Quality Level. And you can repeat quests aft a set amount of time, so say you have completed all content with one Deck, then you can go back and do it again to build other Decks. This isn’t however explained to you when you start up, or it’s not very clear if it is explained.

Gameplay wise I love it. Rather than buttloads of quests to ‘kill X number of Y mobs’, there are investigation quests which involve puzzles and research, and sabotage missions, which involve stealth and cunning. For example in one quest you have to decipher a message in morse code, so you have to look up how to do that. There are even web pages set up for the game you have to find to get needed info. However I am well aware this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so whilst it attracts me, it probably puts others off.

Graphically it’s very pretty, but it requires damn good hardware to run on anything more than the lowest settings, or so I’ve found. And the background music is very atmospheric, though maybe a tad repetitive after a while. It’s one of the few games recently to creep me out and I feel the BGM has a lot to do with it.

But does it have staying power? Can I see myself continuing to play it once MoP hits? I honestly don’t know. But what the hell, I’m having fun now, and that’s the main thing!

So if you are on the EU servers look out for Elphane.