Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Wow, what a month!

So many things happening, where to start? I guess I can start at the beginning of the month. I managed to bribe Seridove over at L2valut to add my name to the list of featured heroes. I figured that there is a good chance that I will never be hero again, or not again for a VERY long time so I might as well take advantage of it. I'm pretty sure I've been overusing alot of hero priviledges, i.e. I pretty much will shout for almost anyone on Bartz unless you're trying to sell like some D grade piece of gear (there's a good chance that I personally have dramatically decreased the number of people who leave Hero Voice turned on in their chat preferences).

About being a hero I guess this probably is the best time for me to be a hero since it does somewhat reflect the state of the server as well. Bartz is in a relative state of peace at the moment, there really is not much large scale PVP going on at the moment. There is some, like that which is going on between Nova and Vestige, but in general my feeling is that there is alot less than what Bartz has seen historically. I am hoping that this is the calm before the storm since, too much PVE = boring...even I can admit that. I think there's a balance in the game that everyone has to decide for themselves what they want to get out of it, some part of it is pvp, some pve, some community interaction, and when personal metrics are applied to each of the various attributes of the game- hopefully at the end of the day they are able to get what they expected out of it. For the most part I have met my expectations with respect to what I would like to get out of L2, and I have no shame in it. Anyway, so as I was alluding to earlier - a peacetime Bartz has a peacetime Spectral Dancer hero.

The Damned has recently become, arguably, the most powerful active alliance on Bartz at the moment. With the departure of the Uprising Alliance, all of our wars pretty much ended overnight. So we've done nothing but the war against mobs...
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Their departure seems to be a trend as the general population of Bartz feels as if it is either declining or becoming inactive. Many say the one thing that can really revitalize the interest in L2 is server transfers or merges. I tend to agree, and hopefully an influx of new live players from other servers will displace all of the automated players in the catacombs and other hunting areas.

Let's see...what else, I was lucky enough to be in the bubble when one of our Gladiators used his level 80 skill...here's some stats of my hawkeye (PR's had about 500-1000 patk more than this, mind you)


Some of you guys might be used to that kind of p. atk, but I'm not...so I was pretty floored.

What else...Oh, since NCSoft announced that they have resolved compatability problems between gameguard and the Logitech G series keyboards, I went out and picked up a G15. I haven't really used the macro features yet, but I think the Ventrilo plugin is great! The LCD displays who is transmitting by default, and the various G15 buttons allow you to see other data from vent such as, who is in your channel, system messages (i.e. who logged in/out, left/joined channel etc).

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Oh, and lastly I went to my first successful Antharas Raid!
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In some non-L2 news, I got bored at work today and took apart a type II CF card...I always thought these were kinda neat because the non-flash based type II cards are basically just tiny hard drives with mini-platters, spindles and heads!

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...And that's that, thanks for stopping by!

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Spectral Dancer Hero, Bartz!

Somehow I managed to become Spectral Dancer hero on Bartz! (yeah...I know...it's all about feeding and it's a sham, etc etc.) Nevertheless, still fun as always- here's a few stills.

Now that you have a fun cancel stick, and you're not at war, what do you do? After grinding a bit I decided to mess with some farmers, so easy to cancel their buffs and let the mobs do the rest. Wow, it's going to be SO hard to go back to using Duals again!