Shamoozal.com - Smorgas Board

Just thought I would start a thread since I couldn't find one. I had the first one, but didn't pickup any of the expansion packs. I liked some of the concepts, especially the instancing as you then didn't have to fight with other people over doing what you want to do because they happen to be able to devote 24x7 of their lives just mining, or looting, etc., the best spots in the game. I also liked the fact that it was simply the upfront cost, not a recurring monthly fee for what was in a sense very much like other MMO's.

I might pick this up (it came out yesterday).

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What? Am I the only one interested in this game? Come on guys

Just read the review.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/08/r ... your-time/

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I think most people on here play WoW. I don't think people have time to devote to multiple MMOs.

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"If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. "

That is just it. Guild Wars 2 is designed with that exactly in mind!!! They removed the "grind" of MMO's because there is no cash/profit incentive for them to keep people playing month after month after month just to gain a level or two. It is a one time fee to buy the game. You can immediately jump into PvP areas which gives you an immediate (temporary) boost to max level and good equipment, so that you can figure out what playstyle you like, character class, build etc., without having to waste months of time before you realized that you hate that class or build.

It is essentially everything that MMOs have, but without the monster time commitments. And for those players who do want those kinds of commitments, there is the massive world PvP areas with forts, castles, supply lines, etc., that need to be sieged (using catapults, and other siege engines), captured, and held against others, which is a persistent area, requiring coordinated assaults, and raids.

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Meh, I don't know if that's good or bad. I don't play MMOs. They hold no appeal for me.

Hopefully Heart of the Swarm beta comes out soon but I'm not too excited for it since some of the new stuff they added, especially the Protoss additions, are kind of sucky.

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"If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. "

I'm playing GW2, it's awesome. I hear a certain fellow named The Dante is playing as well.

I'm in Stormbluff Isle. I have an elemental and a guardian. I had initially started as the elemental, but he is just way to squishy. If he pulls more than 1 guy that has a ranged attack, he is dead, but can wipe the floor with guys that are all melee and need to be close to you (since he just runs circles around them hitting them with chain-lightning). I got him up to level 26 I believe before making the guardian. Since the guild I am in is starting to do more and more PvP, WvW, and dungeon runs as groups, the guardian has been seen as a much more useful class due to good AoE damage (with the right weapons), and incredibly good and useful group buffs and healing (case in point, just using the mace you heal everyone nearby on every 3rd hit, and once you unlock elite skill level, you can do a 5 person complete heal (it does have a 3 minute timer but still, that is around 100k of healing at max level!)).

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Hey, that's me.

So what server are you guys in? I'm still leveling up. Finally made it past lvl 40. I need to do some more of my storyline missions (I think I am about 20 levels higher than the storyline missions are).

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I'm on Dragonbrand

Well, I went into WvW for the first time the other night and got my butt handed to me. I did manage to get 2 kills, but one was using a siege weapon, so I don't really consider it, and the other was during a zerg rush which I probably just managed to get the last hit in on someone. 1v1 I was getting the hell beat out of me. That said, I was only level 60 (raised to 80) but did not have the benefit of the bonus trait points, and I was still using my lvl 60 weapons....

It also didn't help that the majority of the combat was ranged combat, and a guardian really doesn't have good ranged attacks. Everyone was using long range spells, guns, or arrows, none of which the guardian does well (even the scepter skills with the guardian are horrible damage wise or can easily be dodged by simply walking since they move in the air so slowly).

I am seriously considering a warrior, ranger, mesmer, or necro now. Mesmer's really can be useful it appears, especially with faking people out and making them run away (since a couple mesmers and a few other characters mixed in may look like a MUCH larger group of people due to the fact that 1 mesmer can make 2 duplicate clones of him/herself and people will think they are outnumbered and fallback).

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I finally see why people have been saying warriors are "easy mode". They might not heal as well and certainly once they are down they are usually not getting back up, but I can take on a group of 5 or 6 mobs that are 2-3 levels above me and kill them all. I can't even take on 3 mobs that are my same level in my elementalist (assuming I am not in a group or am the primary target).

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I need to read up more about the mystic forge and what you can make. I am also just starting to really craft, and want to get my cooking and jewelery up. You don't realize how much cooking gives you in bonuses until you start adding it up. Most everything gives at least a 10-20% exp bonus and then other side bonuses, like 40% chance to steal life on a critical hit. For my warrior build which has a >90% chance for critical hits (100% as his adrenaline fills up), that really, REALLY adds up in keeping him going. There are all kinds of other things you can get on critical hits as well, which I am intend to look into this weekend.

I'm sitting on about 80+ mystic coins and want to know what I can use them for as well....

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So I read up some more on the mystic forge and basically, if you are not lvl 80, it is useless to you, don't even bother (which is what I am doing for now). I might pickup some mystic coins in the market for cheap, as I see them possibly being worth more than what they are currently going for (some things need 50 mystic coins to forge, and since you only get 1 per day as a daily and then some more in monthly achievements, they are pretty rare for only a couple silver).

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Woohoo! Finally have a lvl 80.

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Well, I have 2 pretty much fully geared lvl80's now. The only thing missing from them are the best "back" item (which I decided to hold off since this Thursday they are adding new dungeons and a new tier of armor higher then the current max). The new stuff is now going to grow in stats as stat creep inevitably occurs (there is some type of upgrade slot which will either grow automatically or for a small cost to whatever the new "max" in the game). This kind of sucks, given how long it took to get my current guys with max gear that fix their current builds (let alone 2 or 3 sets of armor depending on what I want to do (i.e. PvE, PvP, or gear/money farming). I went for the PvP gear builds which also make for good dungeon builds (typically). My warrior now rules in the World vs World. I was averaging a kill every minute the last time I was in there, and only died 2 times in the hour that I played (one of them because my client screwed up and I could not issue any commands other then simple move... no attacks, skills, etc., could be done).

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You comment in this thread like how I comment in the Starcraft thread.

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"If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. "

And me in the TF2 thread.

Figure it has been a couple weeks since I commented

So lately I have been farming dungeons for gold which I have been using to buy gems (which you can also purchase with real money, and then convert for gold via the same mechanic, although with a cut of the gold going to bit heaven and disappearing from the game). The gems can be used to buy vanity items, but also some real upgrades, like additional character slots (you only get 5 while there are 8 professions, so if you want to make a character with each profession, you either have to delete one of your other ones or buy extra slots), as well as extra bank slots to store gear/loot, add an additional bag slot to a particular character, etc., etc...

I have picked up 3 additional character slots, 1 bank upgrade (will really need 2 or 3 more to be honest), and an extra bag on each of my main characters (the ones that I have up to level 80). I might get another one or two as well to make an additional character using a different race (since there are some racial abilities which might be more useful to certain character builds).

I have to admit, I really am liking the last update that came out a week ago. The new dungeon is really good, but it also shows a serious issue with the game in the mechanics for finding groups to run dungeons. There is no "looking for group" chat channel. The best you can do is use the "map" channel, but that is limited to just that particular map, and also only your specific server/instance of that map. If there are more then X number of players in a map, an "overflow" instance is created or an already existing overflow instance from another server is used (when you are in the game, you need to pick a server to play, just like in WoW, and you mainly just play with people on that server, except if you are in an overflow instance where it might be people from your server or any other server which is overloaded). The fact that the "map" channel is limited to your instance makes it extremely difficult to find people since in popular maps, there may be 5, 6, 10, 20 overflow instances (and you don't even know how many there are, and can not directly travel to one, just random load based at the time entering the map). They need a global "looking for group" channel that spans your server's primary instance of the map as well as all potential overflow instances, so you can actually communicate to all the people at once who might also be looking for a group to run the same dungeon that you want to run.

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Well thought I would post an update...

I am now fully decked out in ascended gear on my main character. That said, I still need to upgrade them which will take a little while longer (the drop rate on mist essences has really been low last two weeks, so I still need 5 vials of mist essence, 1 glob of mist essence, and 3 crystallized shards of mist essence to finish up infusing the ascended gear and making the infusions to go in the infusion slots). Not to mention I need 100 more skill points to purchase the eldritch scrolls (I have enough for 1, but need 2 more). That is going to take a while (considering the fastest way will be running Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon, that is still about 120 runs of that dungeon... the good news is that I would make enough gold doing that to pay for all the other raw materials I need...).

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Hey Fallen Kell, how come you stopped playing Rocksmith man? You only got your guy to level 4. Some of the trophies in that game are just ridiculous. 15 million points on those dumb arcade games? Who is sitting there playing those for that long? Worst trophies ever.

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"If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. "

I like to play this game as it has good plot as the player is tasked with reuniting the members of the disbanded Destiny's Edge! But it supports only Mac OS X i have heard this

Everyone post aaron2 makes blows my mind.

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"If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. "

I stopped playing because I had to take my Les Paul into the shop for repairs. It needed it for a long time, but I finally got to the point that the neck and intonation were so screwed up I couldn't fix it myself anymore. And one of the pickups stopped working (well really it was the selector switch/wiring).

The Les Paul is over 40 years old, so it really isn't a surprise that it needed some work. So the neck was shimmed to correct how it sits with the body, the nut was replaced, a new three way selector switch installed and all the wiring was replaced (as well as the wiring layout removing the original ground loop which would on occasion act as a radio antenna). While I have other guitars I could have used, I simply stopped playing for a while there.

I'll come back to it eventually, but I just picked up a really good bass (a 5 string Warwick Jazzman) from a guy I work with for super cheap (relatively, it originally retailed for just over $3k, and even the used ones still go for over $1k). I had always been interested in learning bass, but never owned one. So I have been fooling around with that over the last month or so that I have owned it, trying to get familiar with the fret lengths, string spacings, and the differences scales/note fingering between it and guitar. I do have to say that this things sounds amazing, even with my fumbling on it. I am thinking of getting some lessons from someone, but there really are not that many good teachers around me (there are a couple by where I work, but they are still a good 20 minutes from work, which puts them about 45min drive from my home).


Back on topic:

I finished upgrading my ascended gear. Everything is infused, as well as having infusions that upgrade stats in their infusion slots (so not just the +5 agony resist infusions, but ones that give +power or vitality, etc as well). I had a couple really good daily runs at Fractals of the Mist lvl 20 the first 2 times I did that level, where I had 6 shards of mist essence drop for me. I then did the grind to fully upgrade the backpiece so it is all nice and glowing (man that was expensive, 500 globs of ectoplasm, 2 gifts of ascension (500 mist relics each), 2 shards of mist essence, so all total that backpiece took 2850 mist relics, and around 135gold worth of ectoplasm). No wonder I am always broke in this game (well I do have about 30gold in the bank, but I have been neglecting my crafting skills and will probably use all of that finishing them (the bonus is that I will level some of my alts the easy way with crafting).

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