Gotta love these ads

<--- This is one of many ads I saw today. What caught my eye was the minus sign. I was thinking it might be fun to take them up on their offer and have them pay me $4.95 as well as the 1000G, and I don't even play WoW. But, five bucks is five bucks, right? I could have a lot of fun and sign up for a million gold. that would be $4,950.00 to me, then. A pretty decent living, but why stop there? I could order a billion gold, or a trillion, and really make a fine living. Of course, then there'd be the problem of what the heck would I do with game money in a game I don't even play?



*disclaimer: I don't cheat or advocate cheating. This post is purely to make fun of a typo, and while I don't usually stoop to pointing and laughing, these companies pretty much deserve it, because this kind of cheatery is despicable.

Unique!

So, I googled my name this morning, for kicks. It's amazing the stuff that comes up. For instance, I learned today that there is only one person with my name in all of Canada.

Skirmish Tips and Tricks

I'm no expert at skirmishes. I am in the process of learning all kinds of things about skirmishes, and with any learning process comes encounters with various problems. Following are some tactics I've developed to overcome various problems I've run into.

Problem: My soldier initiates fights before I've had a chance to do some crowd control.
Tip: Run backwards toward the fight. This puts your soldier the farthest away from the skirmish. Then do your CC while everyone is still positioned favorably. The non-CCed baddies will rush up to you, and your soldier can wallop them to her heart's content.

Problem: The NPCs keep doing ____ which I don't like.
Tip: Let 'em run out of power. Then all they can do is auto-attack, which, while still potentially a problem, is better than letting them have their full arsenal of actions you don't like.

Problem: I can't do the optional encounter without becoming overwhelmed!
Tip: get yourself into a position where you are in a fight with several baddies and no lieutenants, and then pull the optional encounter, and focus on that one. As long as those other baddies are still alive, I've found the next fight won't start. This is better than having both the encounter and a lieutenant in your face.

Problem: I can't see my fellows' soldiers' health bars. How can I heal them?
Tip: The coloured marking (looks like a 4-pointed star) under every soldier and NPC is a health indicator. Green means healthy, yellow means about half health, orange means desperately needs healing and invisible means your soldier/NPC bit the bullet so why are you still looking at the ground?
Tip: You can also target any of your fellows and their pets and soldiers (as well as your own!) by hitting certain hot keys, F1 through F6. Hitting the key multiple times cycles you through your fellow and his pet and/or soldier. F1 maps to you, and F2-F6 map to each of your fellows.

Problem: I need a couple more seconds to heal up/eat/prepare before the next fight!
Tip: Predict where the next fight is coming from, and run away from that spot. Your NPCs will be fine for a few seconds while you hide from combat and prepare.

Problem: I keep running out of power!
Okay, this hasn't happened to me but I keep reading how it is happening to others.
Tip: In non-solo skirmishes, do power-restoring FMs.
Tip: Bring a LM (What? Okay, so I'm biased. ;))
Tip: Try power-conserving stances/instruments/skills. Skirmishes have a big endurance factor to them.
Tip: Boost your will/fate/ICPR/OoCPR stats.
Tip: Allow your soldier and NPCs to do more of the dirty work. Possibly, place a hunter fire someplace where you are not likely to get caught in combat. Hang out there while the NPCs handle things for a few seconds. Be ready to rescue those NPCs when you do decide to join the fray.
Tip: Consumables are your friends! Bring the biggest, bestest blue potions you can get your hands on. Scrolls of battle/warding cut down on the amount of work you need to do. Food that restores power is handy, too, and of course, hope tokens never hurt.
Tip: Watch those lieutenants to see if they are doing something to your power.
Tip: Try a herbalist. Apparently they heal power as well as morale.

Soldiers vs Pets

I've been thinking about skirmishes and trying to figure out the nature of the beast, so that I can learn how to excel at them. I play a lore-master, primarily, which means that I am used to having a pet to do my bidding. I thought that surely my soldier would be the same kind of thing and that I had a leg up on how to deal with them. Well, I don't. Soldiers are a whole different thing, really. Here are some key differences:

Control
Your pet will obey a variety of commands, such as 'kill everything that can blink' or 'sit still no matter what'. You can't control your soldier. Your soldier is a free-'thinking' being who will do basically as she pleases. She is like your classic townsperson who has 'had it up to here' with the evils besieging her town. She's frothing at the mouth and raring to go and you don't have any ability to hold her back (other than not summoning her in the first place - a bad idea). She'll break your roots and mezzes and she won't care. She'll run up to the boss doing AoE if it suits her - you can only tell her to attack something else if you want her to stop that.

Positioning
As mentioned, you can tell your pet where to be. You can tell them to stay or follow. You can try to control your soldier's position, but you'll have to be clever about your own positioning to do this. I believe this depends on your soldier's role, but an example is the warrior, who insists on being in front of you. This translates to always being in front of you no matter which direction you are facing. She will run off ahead of you, so if you think there's something there to aggro, be prepared for her to begin the fight on her schedule (not yours).

**Handy trick: I've taken to backing toward fights, so that I am between my target and my soldier. That way, I can initiate the fight by mezzing my choice of targets (I don't have to face my target for that to work), and then the others rush toward me, and since my soldier is standing further from them than I am, and facing away from them, it buys me more time to drag them away from my mezzed target before she opens up her AoE attacks.

Relative Importance
Pets are important, but if you lose your pet, you will probably be okay. Soldiers are much more important in the land of skirmishes. You will constantly be outnumbered, and I am getting the impression that your soldier isn't just there to help you take the edge off of that. I believe the idea is that your soldier is supposed to be, in basic terms, your equal. If you're in a 3-man skirmish, then from what I've seen, it appears to be about the same environment as a full fellowship instance. A fellowship skirmish is more or less like a 12-man raid environment. I haven't tried a 12-man skirmish, but I bet it's like a 24-man raid. The key difference is that your soldiers don't communicate with you, and they don't have a whole lot of variety.

With all this in mind, I will be focusing my skirmish marks on getting my soldier up to my level, so she can be a formidable teammate rather than a throwaway helping hand.

LotRO: Seige of Mirkwood

I am very, very excited about this new expansion for Lord of the Rings Online. There are so many great things about it and so very much for me to do, especially over the next few weeks, that I consider it a moral victory to do things like sleep, go to work, and perform at concerts. Those people you read about who take time off work on update day - I get it now - I wish I'd done the same, but I know better *sigh*. Here are some of the attention-grabbing features of this update:

Skirmishes!
These puppies are the ultimate in customizable game-playing. You can scale the size, the difficulty, and the levels of the baddies you're fighting (rewards will vary according to your selection). You can start them wherever you want - no more travelling for 15 minutes to get to the battle site. You get your own soldier companion who definitely has a mind of his/her own. You can customize your soldier's race, gender and 'class', and you can control how they get stronger - skillwise, levelwise, and attribute-wise. You can pick from a variety of instances, and there are oodles of things to spend your reward skirmish marks on.

Mirkwood!
I have not paid much attention to this yet, considering the presence of skirmishes in combination with all these obligations (sleep, work, concerts) hogging my time. However, it's a new region, with new monsters, a new rep faction, new quests, new places to see and explore, and new raid content as well.

Crafting!
With the inclusion of 5 more levels to gain comes the need for shiny new gear, and shiny new things to stuff into your shiny new legendary items. This expansion features more than just new recipes - it comes with a few new kinds of recipes. Now you can craft a 4th type of relic for your LI (some tradeable, som BoA). You can also craft new armour that comes out in different ways (I will have to check this out sometime soon!).

Item Management
This update comes with an optional adventure pack, which comes with new shared inventory of up to 20 items (I think?) that you can share with all your alts. Even if you didn't purchase this adventure pack, you can still take advantage of the new mount system to gain a free bag space slot or two (or in my case, 6) by converting your mount token to a mount skill. Each horse token becomes its own skill! You'll probably need this space too, for your different types of skirmish marks. Aside from inventory, you will also have to re-spend your legendary points on each of your legendary items, because they all got a make-over as well. And, while you're fiddling with all this, you can also customize your toolbars so that your choice of buttons display.


Along with this expansion, the website utility known as my.lotro.com has also been revamped to accomodate skirmish info as well as a host of other tweaks. It's all very neat to see. My.lotro now keeps a skirmish log for you, with all kinds of stats and even some charts. One thing it came with was a big reminder of all the characters I've made over various servers. Their new lottery feature includes a list of all your characters that are eligible for the lotteries, and today's lottery looks like it is available to every character. Seeing this, I looked over at my character list, and I have an even 30 characters, including monster characters. This number is about to change to 31, as I am planning on taking advantage of my new character slots that came with the adventure pack I purchased.

I think I will be verrrrrry busy over the next little while!

Musings on 'Socialism'

Socialism is spoken as though it were a dirty word in the US, and this sentiment is spreading northward into Canadian territory as well. I'm not sure quite why that is, really. This is a continent that has a very large percentage of Christians (of various stripes). Christian institutions, on the whole, seem to advocate socialism, in a sense, in that they often organize charities and emphasize helping those in need. In the bible, you come across stuff like this all the time:

Proverbs 31:9 (New International Version)
Speak up and judge fairly;
defend the rights of the poor and needy.

So where's the political disconnect? I will confess to being largely ignorant on the topic, but it seems to come to light mostly with the public healthcare issue. The have-nots want it, and the haves don't want it. And before it gets seriously considered, before too long, someone spits out the dirty s-word and all thought on the topic ceases. The problem is that just like other public institutions such as road infrastructure and schools, policemen, firemen, television, and many other things, public healthcare helps everyone and it helps the population as a whole.

Yes, there's the issue of how to make healthcare work, what exactly the nuts n bolts of such a system would be, but people have a hard time thinking about it because the word 'socialism' pops up and people's brains shut down. I live in a country that has public healthcare and I'm glad we have it. Could it be better? Sure. How? That's a difficult question. Would I give it up completely? Not easily. Does this make me biased? I suppose it well could, but even so, we're also still a capitalist country. Just, we seem to choose tenets of the socialist philosophy that enrich our lives, and the tenets of capitalism that help us excel as well. I think the key is balance. I don't think 'socialism' should be a show-stopping word, and I don't think 'capitalism' should be, either.

Road Trip - Day 7 and 8

Well, it sure looks like I've procrastinated quite a lot on this road trip report...

Day 7 involved on of the weirdest 'enter a building' procedure I've ever encountered. We woke up in our ginormous hotel room, ate a buffet breakfast, and headed for downtown Detroit in search of information on a particular rent collection/payment program. The building we had to go to was a government building, and it must have been a pretty important one, because we had a hell of a time even getting inside, due to the building's security. Most public buildings involve entering the front door, but not so for this building. We tried it, and right away people from inside the bulding were running toward us yelling, "Not this way!" They shooed us out right quick. People outside the building helpfully told us we had to go around to the side to enter. So, we tried this, and again, people ran toward us yelling, "Not this door!" and "Not this side!" So, back outside again, and thoroughly perplexed, we looked for another entryway.

We did eventually find a way in, and, once inside, we had to wait in line to go through security. This is not really an issue for us since we don't carry weaponry or illegal stuff or the like. However, this time, we had with us every shred of electronic equipment we had brought on our road trip, since it's foolish in the extreme to leave that kind of thing in the car. As everyone there says, "This is Detroit!" So, the security guys who had to x-ray our bags had a really fun time taking out each and every item, including tangles of cords and wires, papers, and quite the assortment of other knick-knacks. Then they very sloppily put everything back in, so that papers were crumpled and things protruded in a badly balanced and uncomfortable arrangement.

Getting to where we needed to go once inside the building also took us a while, considering that after the strict and unadvertised entry procedure, they just sort of turned us loose. We did eventually find a listing someplace for the general block of floors we needed to head to, with the obvious first choice turning out to be under construction - no offices were open on that floor and we probably shouldn't have been there, but we didn't know that at first. We did find the office we looked for, did what we had to do, and then on our way out, the woman helping us realized I wasn't my boyfriend's kid sister but an adult in my own right, and then she spent another 5 or so minutes gushing about how young I look, which totally made up for the rest of my experience in that building.

After this escapade, we decided it was probably time to head out - out of the city and out of the United States. We headed for the border, which featured a lot of signs pointing us toward the 'Bridge to Canada'. The bridge, called the Ambassador Bridge, is pretty impressive, and so even if the signs hadn't been there, it would have been relatively easy to find. At the border, the border crossing agent almost didn't believe us that our total declaration after a week of travelling through 10 different states was $9.00 (fridge magnets for every state we went through, except I forgot to buy a Minnesota one). As well he shouldn't have, as it turned out we also had an $8.00 map that we'd forgotten about.

Once in Canada, we stopped for lunch at a McDonald's that had a recycling program (which was nice to see and something I totally wish we had in our city's fast food joints). Then we headed for Hamilton, which is where our flight the next day departed from. We found the airport, made arrangements for dropping off our rental car the next day, and then continued onward to... Niagara Falls! This was somewhat spur-of-the-moment, in that we'd just decided we should go there the night before, in our hotel room. The conversation went something like this:

Me (to myself): I wonder if that place is close to where we're going...
My bf: What place?
Me: That really famous waterfall... you know, really big, popular, Canada side is totally better...
Him: You mean Niagara Falls? o.O
Me: Yeah! We should see if it's near where we'll be!

...pause while I look it up...

Me: Yes, yes it is. It's practically right next to Hamilton. Looks like it's about an hour past it.
Him: We are going there.
Me: Woo-hoo!

So, we got to Niagara Falls in the late afternoon and, since we had to pay $20 just to park there, spent some time looking around and signing up for a tour through some tunnels behind the waterfall. It was quite a nifty experience, and very... damp. We were given rain-covers with our tickets and it's a good thing, too. Water was spraying everywhere, which made for quite a nice rainbow. The town there is very touristy - it reminded me of Vegas, with all the tourist attractions, lights, restaurants (with views, of course), and fancy hotels. And of course, there were people all over the place.



After that, we went back to Hamilton, searched for a restaurant that was open for us to eat at - it was about 9:00 pm, and due to the economy or something, half the businesses downtown, where we were, were closed down. Two Subway sandwiches and a nice walk later, we bedded down for an early wake-up the next day.

Day 8 consisted mostly of just flying home. We returned the rental car with over 5000km more on the odometer than when we picked it up initially. Waiting for us at home were two lonely cats and a LOT of veggies in the garden.