Kunnia Reborn!

After a long hiatus I have started playing my beloved druid Kunnia again. She is now a troll instead of a Tauren (cow-type creatures). To the left is an older picture of Kunnia in flight form. The best part about druids is they can instantly pop into forms, so you can fly instantly instead of waiting a few seconds to summon your mount (I believe it's 1.5 seconds now to summon a mount). Very useful when you want to jump off of mountains and survive. Also makes questing feel like it goes quicker.

I joined a new guild in WoW that is starting to raid a bit. I'm not sure if I'll be able to raid and at all, due to my schedule becoming more and more full. I would be very happy to raid again. Healing is still relatively challenging, though the challenge is mostly a result of my low quality equipment. It should get easier and easier as I get more gear, and when it does I will lose interest again.

I think I'm going to try and focus on Rift more than WoW. The advantage to playing Rift is I'm playing with Germans and am in the correct time zone. I'm just not feeling very motivated to play any MMOs as my time becomes more precious.

Noblegarden

This week World of Warcraft is hosting my favorite of their events, Noblegarden. Blizzard brings happy easter joy to it's cash cow WoW. The basic premise is to go to a starting towns and collect eggs. Eggs contain chocolate which allow you to buy easter items from Noblegarden vendors. The items available for purchase include, a rabbit pet, and event clothing, along with a few other fun festive prizes. I

honestly don't care too much about the item rewards

themselves. The joy of this event for me has always been egg hunting. The eggs spawn in the same spots, but there is a competitive nature to attempting to get all the eggs before everyone else.

I am currently playing more Rift than WoW, but the newest addition to the dungeon finder may change that. It's called Call to Arms and basically incentivizes tanks to queue by giving them extra rewards such as rare mounts. I would really love Reins of the Raven Lord. You can read more about Call to Arms on WoWs official website.

More to come on Wednesday!

Beach at Sitges, near Barcelona.

First Steps as a Bard

This first picture is of Xeoni in a group in Iron Tomb, one of the first Rift dungeons.

My beloved Xeoni is a bard in addition to being a ranger. As I've mentioned before, Rift allows you to switch between 4 different soul sets. My secondary soul on Xeoni is bard. I tend to swap over to bard while in groups because it's fun. I've always enjoyed music oriented classes.

One of my favorite MMO characters was a musician in Star Wars Galaxies. You would sit in a cantina and play music all day long. It was fantastic, you never had to leave to fight things. I would chat with adventurers when they came in and hear about their epic quests, but I didn't have to leave town unless I wanted to. This might sound silly after all, why would I want to play virtual music in a game when I could play a real instrument? Well... actually I don't have a great answer to that question. I'll go with a combination of my Star Wars obsession and my MMO addiction. Those would be the two reasons I enjoyed it. All bard classes remind me of those happy days in SWG (before SOE ass raped it of course).

My next favorite musician class in a game was the bards of Dark Age of Camelot. They were a hybrid of healers and bards. You needed to do something called twisting while playing DAoC bards. Twisting only applies to bard classes and is when you start a song, then start another, and another to get the effects of all three (or more), while refreshing what you started with. Master bards would twist together songs to get effects at just the correct moments. For example if the group needed extra heals, you could twist in extra healing songs. It was a very dynamic and fun class to play. Plus PvP in DAoC was amazing and bards had the ability to mesmerize their enemies, thus preventing the enemy from using his skills.

Both SWG and DAoC are pretty dead games now. Today SWG is a mere shadow of what it used to be. DAoC could be worth revisiting in the future.

I think this is my last photo of Paris, well of me in Paris anyway. Be prepared for Barcelona next week!

EDIT: I just read the latest update from the blog Epic Slant by Ferrel. He talks about the upcoming patch changes in Rift. Check it out here.

The Joys of Playing a Ranger

It was a dark stormy night in Stonefield. My faithful boar, Charlie, and I were enjoying an evening stroll when... a WILD RAM ATTACKED US!

Ok that was I lie. The ram was non-aggressive and I attacked it to take screenshots (Charlie was harmed during the taking of these screenshots, he died). I'm enjoying playing as my Ranger immensely. Charlie is the greatest companion I could ask for. He has great aggroing abilities and with my pet heal we can handle 4 mobs without much problem. Pets are nice when you want to get up and make a sandwich, because they'll take care of those nasty mobbies while you're afk. I only wished he looked cute.

Rangers are great soloers thanks to their pets. Too bad I get bored of solo content, but luckily Rift allows me to swap to another soul set and then TADA I can be a tank, or bard, or sneaky little roguey bastard. The soul system in Rift is amazing. For those of you who don't know, Rift gives you the option of 4 classes, Rogue, Cleric, Warrior, and Mage. Each class has 8 souls available to it, and you can have 3 souls active at one time. The souls are typical RPG classes, things like Necromancer, Paladin, Bard, and Shaman. You get to save 4 presets of your soul choices and swap anything you want outside of combat. I think it's super cool, and you would think it would solve my altaholism... You can find a full list of the Rift classes here.

Sometimes I don't pay attention to Charlie's health while we are questing together. This almost always results in his death and I follow him to the grave pretty quickly thereafter. This is a picture of a dead Xeoni the Ranger. I should take better care of Charlie the boar.

My one problem with Rift is there seem to be updates nearly every day. This is good of course because they are fixing problems but I have a daily limit on my internet. I'm allowed 1 gig total in upload and download. MMOs luckily do not consume bandwidth in mass, but when I get surprised with a 100 meg patch I kiss 1/10th of my internet for the day goodbye. Ah, well the real problem here is that pesky internet limit. Darn you student housing! The internet likes to go down at random times as well... should be interesting if I ever get to raiding in Rift.

And I'll never forget Paris.

Cursed by Alt-a-holism

Hi my name is Susi and I'm an altaholic (Someone who can not focus on just one character in an online game, usually known as their main. These people have many "alt"ernate characters) urbandictionary.com. I've decided to abandon my Cleric in Rift for now and start playing a Rogue Kelari named Xeoni. I enjoy healing, but the draw of the bard was too strong. I'm leveling as a Ranger-Marksman-Saboteur, and having a blast both in PvE and PvP so far.

I have a new-found love for PvP and I believe League of Legends is to blame. A buddy of mine from Colorado (check out his blog http://www.bsamaripa.com/) and I have been playing a couple LoL games. We were lucky last night and had two phenomenal teams. After not playing for months I'm finally getting back into the swing of it. I love pwning newbs. Find me as TowerDivingPanda if you want to play.

I don't quite get the same rush playing PvP in Rift as I do in LoL but it is enjoyable all the same. It's also a great break from constantly questing.

I think I'll add another picture from Paris.

A new beginning

Hello there welcome to my blog. This is my first time attempting this whole blog thing so let's see how it goes.

I've wanted to start a gaming blog, specifically focused on MMOs, for a while now. I'm calling this Gaming Abroad because well I'm studying abroad. Currently I'm in Regensburg, Germany at the University of Regensburg. I'm from Colorado though and an avid female gamer and MMO player.

I'll probably throw some other gaming related posts in here. On occasion I play Magic the Gathering with the local group here, so for the sake of keeping in the theme of gaming abroad I'll post any future experiences I have with them.

I purchased Rift in the middle of March before I went to Paris. I'm playing on the German server Brutmutter. My current main is a level 28 Cleric, Amishra. I joined a guild called Circle of Friends, which has been an interesting experience. It's an open recruitment type guild so you get all types of people in there. If you've ever been in one of these guilds you know what I mean. I fall into the social achiever category of MMO gamers, but I appreciate being in a guild who doesn't mind the fact that my German isn't completely up to par.

This is a picture of Amishra and her new hammer. The hammer is a reward for a quest you get from killing the big boss dudes from the Part 2 event for River of Souls event. So you Americans can have a chance at it on the weekend. Trust me you weren't missing much by them pushing it back a weekend, in fact be grateful. The event was a little buggy, which of course is why they cancelled it.

The biggest challenge I've had playing on a German server is understanding the German internet lingo/MMO slang they use. Not only do I have troubles sometimes understanding what they're saying, but I also feel uncomfortable telling people when they need to change something. For example today I ran Mines on my little Cleric with Warden as my main soul, so I was healing. Anyway it was clear after two or three pulls that we really needed to CC or risk wiping (we wiped 3 times in total on trash). The tank was ok at holding aggro but taking massive hits from 4 mobs. I have no clue what Germans say for CC (Crowd Control for you non-MMOers out there...) so in English I typed out "We need CC O.o" in hopes someone knew what I meant. Luckily they did and started turning mobs into squirrels. We finished the dungeon, but it was rough going. Even though the group was only ok, I felt I could have done a much better job healing. I'm still toying with my healing souls. I have a great build for PvP healing, but PvE healing is still a bit of a challenge for me. It's a bit disheartening since I've been a healer in every MMO I've played since EQ, time to do some research on the forums...

And in closing I would like to add a picture of me in Paris, because it's gaming abroad after all.