Dragon Age Origins - Gift Giving Guide

Dear LGG Blog,
I have been playing lots of Dragon Age, as I mentioned in my previous post, and I thought I'd share this gift reference I've compiled seeing as it's saved me some time! I posted it on my NEW gamer site:

Gift Giving Guide

^^

Oh Dragon Age, How I Love You! <3

Dear Blog,

Oh it's been such a long time since I've played a game I loved this much! Nothing ropes me in like a good story with rich lore and history and a bit of romance! I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I am in total <3 with Allistar! He's just so goofy and cute, and the rose! *heart melts* If only he was real... and you know, I was a warrior tainted by the blood of the blight destined to rid the world of the archdemon while restoring peace and order... lol.

I played this game for a week, and did absolutely nothing else! Wake up, Dragon Age, sleep, wake up, Dragon Age, sleep, and repeat! By the end of it I'd built my own little fortress of pop cans, plates and chip bags, lol so I had some serious cleaning to do to avoid creating a blight of my very own in the living room, but it was worth it!

I get so into games when you can chose what your character is like! The character customization wasn't bad, a good variety of face variables to play with, but as with most games I would have liked to see MORE HAIR STYLES! I know, I know, it's probably not something a lot of people are concerned with, but damnit why can't more games have a good variety of hair styles and colours!? It can't be that hard to create them and just throw them in there... can it?? I would have liked to maybe see a paragon vs renegade type bar that filled up during the game, like in Mass Effect, but I wasn't disappointed with my character's range of responses to questions and situations. Had Bioware made my character actually speak, like in Mass Effect, well that would have been very cool, but as it was, your character is limited to yelling out things during battle or while picking locks. The graphics were somewhat lacking, but to be honest I barely even noticed once I got into the game.

My favorite character was of course Allistar, but I also liked Zevran! That cute little bisexual elf always had interesting things to say, and I was quite glad I didn't kill him! Lelliana was cool, but also kind of annoying, and Morrigan I liked, although she always disapproved of everything. Sten was an interesting fellow, and I loved Shale, who is available in The Stone Prisoner downloadable content pack. Oghren I absolutely hated, lol I have no time for rude drunken dwarves and was sad when he wasn't killed. Wynn was handy, yaaa healer, but she was also so preachy! Lol, what can you expect from a elderly spirit healer I guess... Loghain I haven't played with in my party yet, but obviously I hate him.

As for dowloadable content, I got all three that are available so far, The Blood Dragon Armor of course came with the game, and The Stone Prisoner lets you get the party member Shale, the flamboyant golem (though I guess he should be flamboyant, since he's a she, lol). Warden's Keep sounded like a good idea, You get a chest in which to put all of the equipment you don't want to carry around, but don't want to sell, but I was under the impression that once you cleared out the keep, you would get it as a base. That isn't the case, you can just stop there in your travels and there's two vendors out front. I was somewhat disappointed about that.

The different Origin stories are fantastic, I'd have to say my favorites are either the Mage, the Human Noble or the Dwarf Noble. My first character to finish the game with was a mage, and had my boyfriend not been sitting beside me at the time, I would have actually cried when Allistar and I broke up, hahaha. I was so mad that my grand scheme to make Allistar king and myself queen was thwarted that I actually stopped playing for a couple hours and reloaded my game to redo it and make sure Allistar and I stayed together (if only real life was so simple, lol). I have recently made a human noble rogue, which I am pretty sure CAN be queen! We will see. I won't give much away about the ending in case anyone who reads this hasn't finished the game yet, but I will say that I went with Morrigan's ending, though that was hard seeing as I am in love with Allistar, lol. I believe there are 4 main endings to complete to get the achievement, but will update for sure once I finish it!

It takes a really good game to keep me playing once I finish it, I haven't even played Mass Effect through enough times to get all the achievements yet, but I intend to with Dragon Age!

As a final note, it was very enjoyable killing Dr.Frankenfurter, I had recently watched Rocky Horror Picture Show, and didn't like it, lol so I smiled lots when I fireballed his face off!

C'mon Bioware! GIVE ME MORE DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT! Maybe an expansion!? Oh I'm excited! <3

Oh WoW Guilds How You FAIL!

Dear Blog,

So I am standing around waiting for a guild raid to start… On the calendar it said 5:45pm server time, so of course I logged in at about 5:30pm just to make sure I had everything I needed and was all repaired and such… It is now 6:55pm server time, and guess what? We’re still not even close to getting started!

I hate when raid guilds operate like this! The leader is like, oh there are 11 people who want to raid? Great! Lets do a 25 man! …. Seriously, wtf? Like, did you never learn to round things to the closest number?! How can you think getting 14 more members is a more logical choice than to drop one member and GO! I liked in my old guild how we’d have a raid time and once 45 mins had passed from the scheduled time of the raid, we’d call it if we didn’t have the members and couldn’t PUG the extra spots. That way, I didn’t end up wasting hours standing around for a raid that will probably not happen.

So at this point the raid still needs 8 members… so I am wondering if I should just be like SCREW YOU GUYS IM OUT! Or like fake a DC? Or, if I should wait it out, lol. As it is I quit the guild a few days ago because they had stopped raiding, now they are basically just wasting my time that could be spent finding a new guild damnit! I only came back to this guild because the guild leader invited me like 7 times in an hour and would NOT leave me alone, so it was either come back, or put the kid on ignore… Now I am wishing I’d gone with choice # 2… lol. (seriously, invited me SO many times and I just kept declining till he wore me down, lmao, see screen shot)

So now that I am finished my blog, we are down to 11 raid members… YEP! Back down to 11… and it is 7:10pm… So I am just gonna exit WoW for now and go do something else, hehe. Why must gearing up be such a hassle!?

Idiot Raid Leaders FAIL! FAIL! FAIL!

Dear Blog,

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, I am starting to do the raiding thing a tiny bit on my new main, Sylvadora. She's not geared that great, only like a 1750 gear rating, but I just started gearing her. I usually do about 2-2.6K dmg, which isn't anything to brag about, but it's average for a ret pally at the stage I am at.

My guild's been slowly breaking up (as all guilds I join do) so I have been pugging heroics and VoA as often as I can.

I joined a VoA 25 group a couple days ago when Wintergrasp ended, and waited around for about 30 minutes for it to fill up. I even invited one of my friends to help speed up the process. Once the group was formed the leader Koyuki from Maelstrom, informed us that if we didn't have an arena team, we didn't get to roll on PvP gear. No one really seemed to mind this rule, and since I have an arena team, I didn't complain, but the way he said it was pretty douchey and I started to worry a bit.

The group started at Koralon The Flame Watcher, which I have done a few times now. I know this boss is new and not everyone knows it yet, but no one in the group said they didn't know what they were doing, and so we started. The tank stood in the same spot the whole fight! He just stood there in the fire, lol. There were so many Flaming Cinders that I kept having to back out and stand there until one of them went away so I'd have room to not burn to death while DPSing. I also was trying to help heal up myself and the tank because no one else was getting out of the fire, so the tank was dieing when the healers tried to heal the group...

Needless to say, it was a horrible attempt!

Then after we all run back in and buff up, the raid leader points out that I only managed a 1.5K dmg ON THE WIPE attempt. Two seconds later I am booted from the group. I was the last person alive who wasn't standing in the flame cinders, I helped keep the tank up, I healed myself, and tried to DPS when I could get in there, but they kicked me out!

Of course I was furious because I had been standing around for this thing to start for such a long time AND because the raid leader was such a complete idiot for judging someone's dmg on such a feeble attempt, so I whispered the raid leader. I explained that the tanks are supposed to kite the boss to avoid a flame cinder build up, and that no mele dps were doing dmg to their full potention unless they were standing in the flames getting owned. Of course... no response!

My friend stayed in the group, which wiped three more times because the tanks kept dying while standing in the flame cinders and then the group fell apart. So I was happy about that, lol.

The point of this blog is just to point out that simply making raid desicions based on a freaking DMG meter is rediculous! Koyuki you are a SUPER dumbass and I'll be sure to avoid you in any raid situation from here on out, and Koralon is easy, when the whole group doesn't stand in the flames!

Idiots! Idiots! Idiots!!!

>< I so hate pugs!

I <3 Heirlooms!

I just happened to have a few Emblems of Heroism and a couple hundred Stone Keeper's Shards sitting around, so I decided to grab myself a couple of the pieces of heirloom gear... I got myself the cloth heirloom chest with my emblems and the mantle with my stone keeper shards. I decided on cloth because I already have a 80 paladin and deathknight, so that makes plate kind of a waste, and three classes could wear cloth, so it seemed logical.

Both the chest and the shoulders give you a 10% experience bonus from killing mobs and quest turn ins, which makes it 20% if you have both! There are weapons and trinkets as well, but they don't give any experience bonus, so I wasn't as concerned about getting them. I do intend to save up the 325 stone keeper shards to get the Grand Staff of Jordan for my clothies however!

I probably should have spent my emblems on something more practical for my 80, but after hearing about Cataclysm, I am just thinking that it's probably best if I put my efforts into leveling up alts, not gearing up one single toon. All that gear is going to be useless again, just like after BC AND WotLK, and I don't know if I have the heart for it again, lol. I'm still going to raid as much as I can with Sylvadora and enjoy my days as a ret pally, but I do have like 8 level 70 toons who I still need to get to 80, plus all my new horde alts, so that will take up a lot of my time!

The point of my blog though, is to say that if you have an 80, and you aren't sure what to do with yourself, start getting yourself some heirlooms so that leveling up your alts is a breeze! All you have to do is complete the weekly Wintergrasp quests for Stone Keeper Shards and run heroics for the Emblems! The heirlooms bind to your account, so you can send them to any alt you want!

<3 LGG

Sylvadora's Got A New Guild!

Once again, I must apologize for slacking off with my posts! It's summer time, and whenever I haven't been gaming, I've been outside enjoying the sun! I haven't been slacking off on my gaming however!!!

On a recent trip to a family cottage I got in some much overdue quality Rock Band 2 time, which was a refreshing change from my diligent WoW schedule! I also have been perfecting my anime drawing skillz, which lets me draw game characters better! So worry not dear fellow gamers, you are not losing me to the real world yet! ;D

Onto my post...

So Sylvadora is my newest *main* in World of Warcraft. I rolled her on a RPPvP server after my Regular PvE server began to bore me and every guild I had joined crumbled to the ground. A few RL people I knew played on this RPPvP server, so I figured I'd give it a try. I must say the PvP aspect adds a lot of excitement to the game! I really think after leveling 2 80s on the PvP server, that leveling on my PvE server again will be somewhat boring!

So I just recently got Sylva to 80, and decided I would attempt to find her a guild. I wasn't looking for anything that was like RAID EVERY NIGHT PROGRESSING THROUGH ULDAR 25! or anything, I just wanted a group of people who might want to run heroics with me from time to time. I had only asked in general a few times over one day when a nice hunter invited me to his guild. It was cool because right away he asked me what I wanted to do, so we went and did some dailys together and chatted a bit. I logged off that day feeling positive about my guild choice, but unfortunately when I logged on the next day, THE GUILD HAD FALLEN APART! I moped around for a few hours, still in the guild with it's like 3 other members that hadn't been online in 4 months, deciding that I was WoW Guild Poison =(

A previous member of the guild messaged me later on in the day, and explained nicely that the guild master had decided to abandon their guild and join up with another guild which was having more success than they were. The previous member asked if I also would like to join, even though I had only been with them for a day, and I graciously accepted!

So now little Sylvadora has herself a guild! They run heroics with me, chat with me, do PvP with me, and even bring me to Naxx! The guild master is actually GOOD at being a guild master, which I haven't seen since my days back in Lords of Hatred (oh how I miss those ppls!), and they address any issues with their members quickly, which makes me lotsa happy! As a bonus, they are also raiding Ulda, which I am not quite geared enough for yet, but at least I know it will be open to me whenever I get there! The name of the guild is even good, which is more than I can say for like any guild I've been in this year. It's called North Storm =D which has a nice ring to it I believe!

So, for any of you WoWers who are missing your old guilds and unable to find a new one that compares... Don't give up!!! All it takes is a bit of good timing and good luck apparently =) There are still good guilds out there!

That's all from me today, I'm going to do some Wintergrasp! Hehe, I will blog more later ^^

*As an after note, I am pretty sure this guild is done for like within the month... Guild drama, lol crushes guilds even when they are full of potential...

MOUNTS! MOUNTS! MOUNTS! Changes in 3.2

I must say I am excited! With the release of patch 3.2, Call of the Crusade in game mounts are seeing a huge reduction in price and level requirements!

Apprentice riding (skill 75) which used to be available at level 30 (recently down from level 40) is now available at LEVEL 20!!! It will cost only 4g!!! Which will make leveling those early characters a BREEZE!

Journeyman Riding (skill 150), also known as the epic ground mount, is now available at level 40 and will only cost 50g which is a huge reduction in price, seeing as the training was about 500g at level 60 not long ago!

Expert Riding (skill 225) is now available at level 60 for 600g! That's not too much of a price reduction, but it's trainable 10 levels earlier now, which means you can literally fly through your Outland quests! hehe Also, it's FASTER!! Flying/running at a very nice speed of 150% up from 60%. Faction discounts DO apply to the price of this, which means 570g at Friendly, 540g at Honored, 510g at Revered and 480g at Exalted.

Artisan Riding (skill 300) is still available at level 70, and has not seen any price reduction, other than now your faction rep discounts apply to the training. It is 5000g at Neutral with Honor Hold or Valiance Expedition for Alliance and Thrallmar or Warsong Offensive for Horde. 4750g at Friendly, 4500g at Honored, 4250G at Revered and 4000g if you are Exalted.

As a nice side note, the casting time for any mount is now only 1.5 seconds, down from 3!

Yaay for WoW nerfing!