Month: February 2005

Since Doug said that his favorite area/storyline in WoW was the Undead home area, I went back to my Undead Warlock, Malika, and kept at it. I got her up to level 6 last night, and it was pretty interesting. The class description did turn out to be more-or-less correct that Warlocks are a good solo class–at least in the first six levels, she didn’t die, and was able to accomplish all the beginning quests in a reasonable amount of time. Having the pet imp is a big boon, if you use him pretty ruthlessly (letting the enemies whale on him so that you can cast spells uninterrupted). I’d probably feel bad about it if I was a hunter, and my pet was a wolf or something, but a demonic imp that you can re-summon whenever he dies? No problem. According to the back-story, Warlocks are definitely evil, even if Undead aren’t necessarily so (the humans in the area that you have to fight are all aggressive anti-undead fanatics, so even a self-defence-only character could conceivably complete the quests that involve killing them) and it’s certainly… different trying to role-play an evil character. It may come easily to Doug and Scott, but I’ve almost always played nice characters, whatever their nominal alignment was. I’m trying to get into the spirit of things (heh) with Malika, but it’s not coming all that easily.

Well, I tried again last night, and had a much better time. After perusing the WoW forums for a little bit, and finding a relevant thread, I realised that a lot of people objected to people using the team invite if you haven’t spoken to their character first, either in a whisper or locally. There are people with similar feelings in CoH, but CoH gives you the Looking For Group flag and the unwritten rule that seems to have evolved in the community is that it’s rude to send a “blind” invite to someone without the LFG flag set, but it’s perfectly acceptable to do so for anyone who has it on. (Not that there aren’t people who violate that assumption in both directions: if you’re a defender you’re going to get blind invites no matter what your LFG flag says, and there are people who hate blind invites even when they’re looking for a team. I think the technical name for the latter is “pricks.”)
So, anyway, this time I tried to form a team and encourage RP by walking up to a level 16 Paladin and asking “Do you have any advice for a young Paladin?” This led to our teaming, speaking mostly in character, and joining with another team hunting the same area who also spoke mostly IC. It was much more fun, and I managed to hit level 14 before we broke up for the night. I’m hoping that this wasn’t a fluke, and that I’ve actually cracked the social code for how teaming works in WoW. We’ll see. I’ll probably try again tonight.

CoH has just added a spiffy new feature: Global Chat. Now you can tell if your friends come online, even on a different server, and you can talk to them across servers. You can even make customized chat channels. Neat. My global “handle” is Mysterious_J. To initialize the global chat client the first time, type /chatbeta 1. This will create a handle for you, which is either your current character name or, if you have a CoH Forum name, the forum name. You can change it once. To add a global friend you type /friend @theirhandle and they’ll get a notice that you’re trying to add them as a friend, which they can accept or decline (to prevent griefers from friending you to find out whether you’re on, and as what alt, and following you around). To send a tell, type /t @theirhandle, message.

Well, I’m not cancelling just yet. Paladins turn out to be much more fun than Warriors (thanks to Paul for the suggestion), but…

*While levelling is pretty quick at the beginning, it seems to slow down much faster than in CoH and a lot less happens when you level. My Paladin is now level 13, but I don’t think I’ve gotten a new spell since level 10, nor been able to weild a new weapon or acquire better armor. So the only thing that seems to happen is stats get unnoticeably better (at least, I can’t tell any difference from having them go up by 1), and you get extra talent points, which again provide very small incremental benefits.

*There’s still very little customization: all stats for a class start the same and advance the same, and while in theory you can choose which spells to take, in practice you can afford to take them all (at least so far). That leaves talents, which so far you do have to pick and choose which ones you want, and magic stuff, which Paul tells me is eventually how characters end up being different.

*Finding people to team up with is hard I think I offered to just about everyone near my level fighting in the same area last night, and all I got was refusals. The one time I did team up with someone I regretted it, because he just charged off, wandering farther and farther from the area where I had quests, and every time I asked what he was up to he just said “kill stuff”

*It’s the rp server, but I hardly notice any rp going on, except people standing around the inn in Goldshire. Maybe it’s all on team chat so I can’t overhear it…

*Are there any trainers or a forge anywhere in the Westfall area? I can’t find them, but running back to Goldshire is a pain in the butt

*I briefly tried a Horde character (an Undead Warlock). Interesting to see the area they start out in…very reminiscent of the Playstation game Medieval. Ultimately too creepy for me, though. I don’t really like running around staring at my character’s exposed spine all the time…

*I also tried a Dwarf rogue briefly. I like the snowy area outside of Ironforge, but I’m not sure about the class. Hard to tell at 1st level, and I didn’t get to try any of the quests, because that’s the character who had the unfortunate choice of companions. I should have realized there was something bizarre about a 6th level character wanting to team with a just-materialized 1st level…