BurgZerg

Kudos to the dude that wrote this site. BurgZerg uses menu pulldowns to manipulate and display everything related to virtues in Lord of the Rings Online. It's been an indispensable tool for me as I've worked on catching Kammris up on his negligent deed grinding.

Conan the Librarian

Once again, my sensei asks me, "James, what is best in life."

I dare not flinch when I respond in a rote voice, "To fine your patrons, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the illiterate."

Cue the war drums. I'm mounting up. I'm fining and driving my library patrons before me. I may soon hear the lamentation of the illiterate.

Soon, but not yet. More to follow, possibly.

Why Does It Grow So Well There?

I turned 39 last week. It’ll be the big four zero next year, so I’m savoring my last milestone in the thirties.

For those of you who are curious as to what 39 is like, all I can say is it’s very similar to 29 except my nose hair grows faster than the hair on top of my head. Also, if I eat anything an hour or two before bedtime, my stomach rumbles and lurches with plumes of volcanic acid action. Mind you, this doesn’t stop me from eating before sleeping. At least not yet. I gamble that digestion issues will steadily worsen as I get older.

I got some great birthday gifts this year, including some sweet, lovable cards from my girls. My Ma made me a Star Wars fleece blanket, complete with Darth Vader heads plastered all over both sides in a black and orange color scheme. I love that blanket, more so because it’s got maternal love sewn right into it. If I get a chance, I’ll post a picture of it this week.

Wifezilla scored me a pair of nice hiking boots in anticipation of our Colorado trip this summer. She got a new pair herself eight years ago, right before Hallie was born. Of course, she hasn’t worn them once since so she’s just as excited to slap her boots on and do some serious hiking.

Arrrggghhh Virtues!

I did a bit of research on Champions and it turns out I’ve assigned Kammris all the wrong virtues. Well, not all. I’ve got him slotted with Justice and Valour, but all classes seem to take those two. But the other three were totally wrong and too my complete dismay, the other three traits he needs are all bottomed out at one. That’s right, Kammris did not follow Lukenbach’s policy of clean up a zone’s deeds. As a result, I have my level 47 toon running around lowbie areas beating the hell out of level five mobs.

/sigh

The good news is that the earliest deed requirements start with 30 mobs for the title, 60 for the virtue. Those requirements tend to double as you venture farther out into higher level zones. The highest I’ve seen so far is Angmar, 150 for the title, 300 for the virtue.

Luckily, Kammris is a champion and he chews through stuff pretty quickly. The biggest barrier is finding an area with a high concentration of the needed mobs. The higher the density, the faster the grinding goes as you don’t waste as much time waiting for respawns. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an onerous process. It’s fine when you grind these things as you level, but most painful when you don’t. Kammris was my first toon, however, and at the time, I underestimated the importance of virtue selection.

I’ll be paying for my naiveté with a few weeks of mindless grinding.

Reds

After watching 60 Minutes the other night, I’m convinced more than ever that most people involved with Wall Street and the banking industry would sell the United States of America if it meant making an extra dollar. I really do think that. As the months have passed since the economic shit hit the fan back in September and Congress has scolded and shamed automaker CEOs and banking CEOs and the morons in charge of the SEC, I contend that all these people knew full well the harm they were doing and went ahead and did it anyway because nothing was more important to them than making money.

Nothing. Not even the short and long term health of their nation’s economy.

An interesting side effect of our country’s financial crisis is the stark light that has been shined upon the excesses of the rich and powerful. I’m the world’s leading proponent of a free market system, but even I get urges for Red revolution when I read about billion dollar CEO salaries, spa retreats, and conventions in Vegas. Communism is clearly a failed economic philosophy, but there’s just something wrong about the fact that 5% of the world’s population owns more than 75% of the world’s wealth.

For the most rich and most powerful, it begs the question “How much is enough?” One million dollars? Five million? 20 million? A hundred million? I’m not wealthy myself and so can’t speak from experience, but it’s my estimation than any salary over 2 million dollars pushes well beyond the realm of good pay for a good day’s work and into the realm of compensatory substitution for a tiny wenis. With more than 5 billion people on the planet, does anyone really have the right to half dozen mansions and a dozen sports cars? Don’t million dollar salaries far exceed the amount of risk, work, and responsibility a human being undertakes in the name of running a company? In a free market system, are there limits to how much wealth one human being can accrue?

I know I sound like a commie bastard, but I’d like to remind any detractors that I wouldn’t be thinking these thoughts if the banking industry hadn’t bled our economy into cardiac arrest. If angry mobs rise up and burn and pillage the estates of the rich and powerful, all those BMW driving, caviar munching, polo playing elitists have no one to blame but themselves for killing the golden goose and unleashing a growing sentiment of disparity and unfairness within a slumbering U.S. citizenry.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if we come out of the economic crisis unscathed, politically speaking.

A Minstrel's Best Spell Rotation

Perusing the Lord of the Rings Online forum boards, I stumbled upon a thread entitled “Solo Mob Spell Rotation,” or something to that effect. Curious, I took a gander and got quite an eyeful. Turns out (surprise, surprise) I have not been soloing with Lukenbach my minstrel as effectively as I could be. But first, here’s the general consensus among minstrel players of the best solo mob spell rotation:

1) Call of echoes – DoT, but more importantly lowers the mobs resistance
2) Ballad of Resonance – Buffs light damage
3) Call of Erome – AoE, but more importantly significantly lowers mob’s resistance to light damage
4) Piercing Cry – Best minstrel damage spell, best applied after Call of Erome
5) Noble Cause – Melee attack
6) Call of Second Age – AoE. Almost everyone includes this spell in the rotation, but it gobbles up a lot of power.
7) At this point, mob should be dead or close to it. Rinse and Repeat.

I tried this rotation and noticed immediate improvement in raw dps. I started seeing Piercing Cry crits in the 700s, where previously I had them peaking at no higher than 500. My old rotation included getting my three tier one ballads up and running, followed by Piercing Cry and Noble Cause. I only used Call of Erome and Call of Second Age for multiple mobs.

Big mistake.

Even though it’s an AoE attack, Call of Erome significantly decreases the chance a mob will resist a light based spell attack. Since mob resistance got jacked up for Mines of Moria, spells fizzling harmlessly of monsters emerged as one of the biggest new challenges facing minstrels in the expansion; it’s especially heartbreaking and frustrating when the best crit and damage spell a minstrel has, Piercing Cry, bounces off a mob’s hide.

But it need not be that way if the minstrel properly employs everything in his arsenal in the most advantageous order.

So I’ve got Lukenbach following this new solo spell rotation and really like his newly discovered killing efficiency. Even so, I’ve gone back to playing Kammris, my champion. Kam is almost 47, which puts him at the minimum level requirement for the teal one-handed swords I made months ago. I can’t wait to see Kammris turns into a human chainsaw with a pair of those beauties equipped.

The DM Is Tired . . .

Long live the DM!

Craig, the current Dungeon Master of my heart, turned traitor and wants to rejoin the filthy player ranks, creating a power vacuum by which not one, but two former friends wrestle each other in warm pudding for the right to Master Dungeons

With a campaign ending and another starting anew, the new management requested each player to list their top two or three character choices. Here are mine, ranked in my order of preference. Please note I went to considerable trouble naming my prospects, ascribing them a homeland, and triangulating their religious affiliation.

1) Stick Powers

Luskan Half-elf Warlock, devote worshipper of Asmodeus

2) Luz Canun

Vilhon Wilds Minotaur Barbarian, raging follower of Gruumsh

3) Waylon Pacadyrm

Calishman Genasi Swordmage, lukewarm devotee of Oghma

I can't tell which will be the bigger deal-breaker, my name or race selections.

Dragon Age Slips to the End of the Year

I'm late reporting this, but my intention isn't to report, but to bitch.

In most circumstances, I could give a rat's ass when EA elects to release its games. But when they bought Bioware last year, I cringed that they would apply their asshat business tactics to a company I not only respect, but dearly love. The dudes at Bioware have made some of my favorite games and Dragon Age looks to be another classic waiting in the wings.

That being said, EA can kiss my hairy ass. Delaying Dragon Age to coincide "with the release of the console versions of Dragon Age: Origins?"

What. The. Frankincense.

If this shit river flowed both ways, I wouldn't be so incensed. But a ton of titles release console first, with the PC version following months later. I've never heard of a console game being delayed for a simultaneous release with its PC sibling. So why give PC the shaft now? Because the PC is the thinking man's machine, inaccessible to the masses, and thus a poor marketer of goods and services. God save a country whose citizenry can't master a technology more complicated than opening a tray and placing a shiny disc inside it.

This irks me even more because I watched an X-Play interview of a Bioware employee bragging about how much Dragon Age payed homage to the PC platform by getting its version in advance of the console crowd.

The very definition of talking out of your ass.

Grind the Good Grind

After feasting at the tables of Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3, I've once again returned to some MMO fare, namely Lord of the Rings Online. I spent a good chunk of Saturday splitting my time between Kammris and Lukenbach, both of whom are sliver close to leveling, 46 and 56 respectively.

I've learned something valuable from this past month's MMO respite. Right before I took a break from LotRO, I had been grinding Lukenbach's traits. Early in my minstrel's career, I had done a remarkable job of keeping his traits up to date. I had a zone-clear policy whereby Lukenbach wasn't allowed to exit a zone until he had completed every trait that region offered. With that policy in place, Lukenbach's traits scaled right along with his leveling.

Now, that plan is all well and good for those early zones; entry level traits have modest grinding requirements, 60 mobs for the title, another 60 for the trait. But later zones grow just shy of exponentially, 150 for the title and 300 for the trait. Such numbers track well past my MMO gaming patience and faced with such daunting numbers, Lukenbach quickly abandoned his high horse policy and placed trait grinding on the back burner at every opportunity.

That catches up with you at higher levels. And after the recent expansion, along with new content, Turbine applied some different mathematics to Mines of Moria. It's beyond the scope of this entry to outline the changes. Suffice to say, every class got a dose of nerf, made even more painful by those players who had neglected their traits.

So in the late days of December 2008, Lukenbach reluctantly turned his attention back to trait grinding only after getting his ass kicked over and over again in the Mines. The problem is that trait grinding always precipitates me dropping the game for extended periods of times. Which is too bad because when I played again last Saturday, I marveled anew at the scale, detail, and fun inside Moria.

I have more trait work to do (like the slaying of 200 more hillman in Angmar). But that will have to wait else I stop playing again. I'm not sure how or when I'm going to get those 200 savaged killed. Maybe when minstrel's get the new skill, Nuclear Chord.

The Christian Bale Rant

I have to admit, I loved the Christian Bale rant that exploded on this past week's headlines. it was long as it was eloquent and will serve as radio DJ fodder for years to come.

You can hear Christian explain the context of the rant and apologize for it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twjEIWL1vTs

Deathbed

I've been near death these last few days. It all started last Sunday night when I felt a tiny tickle in my throat as I watched the Super Bowl. The next day I felt run down, but functional. That Monday night after work, I crashed. Headache, slight fever, congestion. The whole nine yards. I took Tuesday off and seemed to get better. I returned to work Wednesday but Thursday witnessed an acute relapse, which unfortunately coincided with an important presentation I had to give to about forty peer librarians. I got through my presentation relatively unscathed, but went home early.

I've been at home curled up in a fetal position ever since.

I'm feeling better as I write this, Saturday afternoon, but I'm by no means completely healthy. I don't know what kind of wonder bug I contracted but it's a tenacious little beast that has its claws firmly sunk in my upper esophagus. At the height of my fever-induced delirium, I fantasized wrapping my lips around the end of a flamethrower and hitting the trigger because gallons of boiling tea just doesn't seem to be doing the trick.

I'm also picturing scraping the infection off with a butter knife, like sliding peanut better off a slice of bread, but I haven't worked out the logistics of maneuvering the utensil down my throat.

Born to Folk

I think it's the funniest show on TV today and now that its new season has begun, CNN has an interview with Bret and Jemaine and their show Flight of the Conchords.