I think I've ended my last entry talking about how Claire's PC is now running with my old, failing PSU. Which is a bit of a stupid thing to say, considering I'm the idiot writing this blog and I could just look it up. Either way, the PSU died pretty much ten minutes after I've told the world that both our computers are running fine, so we had to order a replacement one, but now we're finally working with both PCs again, both of them running fine, I can do my job, we can play our games, life is good.
As it turns out, functionality had been restored just in time. A friend contacted me last week, saying they needed me for a Mass Effect 3 multiplayer session to show off some of the new DLC. I love Mass Effect, but my friends rarely ever play it, then there was Space Marine, Guild Wars 2, my computer problems... I'm sorry, ME3. I'm making excuses here, but the sad truth is that I haven't called as much as I should have. I haven't stayed in touch and we've not seen each other since March. And I feel shabby for having neglected you so long.
To be fair, you've been a bit of a bitch back when I quit and some of your DLC has simply scared me off. A krogan vanguard? What the hell were you thinking? It's one thing having a squishy human or an asari with the ability to fully restore their modest shields by bumping into an enemy. But the kroguard is twice as tough when it comes to both barriers and hit points, hits like a fucking truck and headbutts boss monsters into submission - which caused two forseeable reactions: Kroguards soloing gold difficulty and people kicking other players out of their sessions for wanting to play one of those overpowered toads.
Back in my day, turian sentintels were considered cool!
But a whole lot has changed in the meanwhile and I barely recognized the game when I got back the other day. New maps on earth. Well, "new" to me, anyway. Vancouver looks insanely dull and Rio has a blocky, pixellated bitmap "horizon" going all around the map. London is littered with lamp posts, which block biotic powers, rockets and just about any kind of force known in the galaxy. I want a suit of armor made of British lamppostium! But all my nitpicking aside, they're some of the coolest maps around in terms of playability. Quick and easy to figure out, the enemy can spawn practically everywhere around you and you can't just park your ass in a safe corner for the duration of the entire match to farm easy credits like on Firebase White. Which, by the way, has been fixed and can no longer be exploited. Yay!
Being a creature of habit and hating change with a passion, I dusted off ol' Hawkeye, my turian sentinel, and his M-96 Mattock. That stuff was great back then. You know, back when the game was still new, silver difficulty was considered a tough challenge and my stuff was still nice to have. It looked like this:
If you can't be bothered to sit through the whole thing, just look at this for some manly screaming and me saving everyone's day.
Basically, we're a bunch of old men playing a game on a low difficulty setting using fairly average guns and characters. The guy who recorded this session is mostly aiming for the crotch (apparently it's easier to hit than the head) with a basic M-8 Avenger assault rifle, because that's just the kind of stuff you get to work with at an N7 level of 20something. Skill levels in our little group ranged from inexperienced to 'been gone for months and got no fucking clue what's going on.' The latter would be me, in case you haven't noticed.
But I like having a clue, so I went and got one. Holy fuck, so much new stuff! Good stuff, too! First of all, the kroguard is no longer the one character to rule them all. Balance has been restored with the help of some incredibly cool new classes. There's the N7 slayer, who teleports through solid objects to appear behind an enemy and guts them with a massive katana. There's also a less cheesy version with dual laser-whips for massive AoE goodness. The fat little volus engineer boosts his team's shield rates to near-invincible levels. Sure, all the new guys still cover the same basic classes (soldier, engineer, sentinel etc.), but they all add some unique twists on old mechanics. For instance, the new turian havoc and ghost characters make up for their lack of mobility with a little propulsion pack, which helps them get away from grenades and other nasty shit. The ghots's stealth ability directly boosts damage on assault rifles rather than sniper rifles. The result is ridiculously powerful:
Not my most glorious solo ever, but it gets the point across.
Today, there are so many different weapons in ME3, it actually feels a little too much. Which game seriouslyneeds twelve (!) different shotguns? There are 54 weapons in this game right now, not counting melee, biotic or tech attacks. To be fair, some of them are pretty unique and work a bit like stuff you'd expect to find in Unreal or Quake, not realistic shooters like CoD or BF. For instance, the Striker assault rifle fires a barrage of explosives, allowing even a completely blind retard with the inability to aim for the head to rack up dozens of kills. The Scorpion pistol shoots little mines, which can either be fired in front of a bad guy's feet or right at an unfortunate enemy, where they will detonate a few moments after. Launchers, upgraded, fully-automatic versions of basic weapons and self-recharging guns, which don't require ammo. It's all there.
With all the new stuff, finishing all waves on gold with a reasonaby well-geared squad isn't that difficult anymore. It's still challenging, but entirely doable. Soloing the toughest bits still requires exploiting the relatively stupid AI and the most powerful abilities and guns, so it's not the total cakewalk some folks on the official forums might claim it to be. And since gold mode can now be handled by a dedicated team of average Janes and Joes with better than average gear, there's an all new platinum mode, which more or less throws all the nastiest shit from the lower difficulty settings at you right from wave 1. Enjoy!
To make things even more fun, they've also added new baddies: Geth bombers, which will happily nuke the shit out of any group of players, Cerberus dragoons, who run around in heavy armor and spank you with their laser whips and, of course, the Collectors. You know, those zombified bugs, scions and protheans, who harvest entire planets. Bit weird, though, those protheans. Hyper-advanced species, millions of years ahead of mankind, their ridiculous, mushroom-shaped heads making up 30% of their bodies, yet they refuse to fucking wear some god damn helmets. But easy headshots or not, those guys are the new badass faction in ME3 multiplayer and they're harder to beat than any of the other guys. Fun stuff!
So... long-term motivation? Definitely. I may not care for every single gun or character in the game. Or every tiny achievement and the brand new titles and banners you get to show off in the multiplayer lobby. But they add a sense of progression. Sure, none of this is real, actual content, but it's a bit of an ego boost when a little medal icon pops up and tells you that you've just scored headshot no. 500 or you've just completed a hundred enemy waves on your current character. And it's nice when you actually get to unlock some new stuff every now and then (credit gain has been boosted a LOT since I've last played) instead of getting the same crap over and over again in every box. Which is exactly what happened before all the DLC came along and I simply had nothing left to unlock.
That said, unlocking stuff is also my biggest complaint. It's 100% random, which I hate. When I play CoD, I know I need this level or that amount of points to buy the gun I want. On ME3 I have to spend ingame credits or RL money on dumb boxes, which contain random shit. Some will find that exciting and just try stuff as they unlock it. But when you want to play one character in particular, use that one gun you're drooling over, then you're at the mercy of the almighty RNG. And when you really, really want that krogan shaman and a cool new shotgun and all you unlock is asari characters and pistols all day long, the whole thing will start to feel like a bit of a kick in the nuts. And they're deliberately doing this - a player, who is desperate for new stuff, is more likely to shell out real money on item boxes, which may or may not hold the desired objects. Bastards!
But let's not be unfair. You may not get the stuff you want straight away. But the DLC is entirely free, the optional RL money item box purchase aside. New maps, new mission objectives, tons of new stuff, no cost. How's that for DLC pricing, CoD & BF?
Nothing funny today, nothing about the games I play, just a bit of a status report on that bucket of screws I depend on to pay my bills.
PC seems stable for now. It has been running without crashes since Sunday, but knowing my luck, the next blackout is waiting around the next corner, now that I'm writing about how it all works again. I hope it's all fixed now, I hope the problems won't come back and I'm seriously starting to doubt my computer troubleshooting abilities. It's almost like some stupid classical crime show - I can fix the PC problems of all friends, family members and neighbours around me, yet the only PC I cannot fix is my own. What a fucking cliché! It's like Monk solving hundreds of murder cases and never figuring out the death of his wife or the date doctor hooking up fat people, whilst being unable to establish a healthy relationship. I'm hoping this is my minute 182 or my season 8, final episode, my happy ending, because I'm tired of replacing parts and buying new shit all the time.
The problem didn't even seem all that complicated: I'd run a game, any game and after a seemingly random amount of time, ranging from 30 seconds to five whole hours, my screens would go black, my sound would get stuck in a loop and the whole machine would lock up, requiring a hard reboot. Half of the time, it wouldn't even boot up anymore. Black screen, all fans spinning out like jet engines and the only way to get around this would be by re-seating the gfx card, unplugging the PSU, doing all kinds of random voodoo shit until the damn thing booted up again. Sometimes it would boot up after I removed some of my RAM, making me think I had found the problem. So I played around with reduced memory for a day, two days, everything seemed fine and the crash came back. Tried Memtest to be absolutely sure, ran it for 20 hours, no problems.
So it wasn't my fucking memory. And I thought, hey, maybe it's an audio problem, what with the sound loop and all and after some research, it turned out there's a lot of people who get crashes with Nvidia's HD audio driver, which automatically installs itself every fucking time you boot windows, no matter how many times you remove it. And yes, one of the audio controllers shared an IRQ with the gfx card, so I disabled the bad guy, hoping it would fix my problem. No joy. Mind you, that was after I had removed my sound card and tried disabling onboard audio in the bios settings, messing around with absolutely no sound at all. Nothing worked.
What else could it be? Temperatures? MSI Afterburner showed absolutely no problems on the GPU front, but core temp complained about my quadcore CPU reaching 50-60 degrees under medium workload. Nothing alarming, but far from ideal. So I went and bought some thermal paste, removed the massive cooling fan, dropped one of the screws in my PSU, removed my PSU, removed all screws from the PSU to open the damn thing and remove the screw from the fan, wiped the old thermal paste off my cpu, applied the new stuff after watching a dozen videos and forum threads on the perfect way to apply thermal paste... seriously, google that shit. People have flame-wars of religious proportions on how to apply thermal paste! So yeah, I've done that, put the machine back together, ran a game aaaaand it blacked out again.
So I checked the manufacturer's website for my gfx card. It's a factory overclocked one, which comes with one major flaw, right out of the box: The default voltage setting is too low and the card just dies after a minute or two. It's a known and confirmed problem, I figured it out the day I got it, fixed it with MSI Afterburner and the thing had been running fine for over a year. But if a manufacturer misses such a critical problem, then maybe there was even more crap going on with the card. And lo and behold: 20+ forum threads about how the actual card uses cheap aluminium heatsinks as opposed to the copper ones you see on the website, the packshots, yada, yada, yada. Card gets too hot, there's no proper thermal paste on the gpu, you get the idea. So I went and took the damn thing apart and yes, no copper, only aluminium and the "thermal paste" was a crusty old booger. So I freshened that up a bit, put it all back together and crashed again. Some more research revealed that certain cards actually crash, because the VRam gets too hot, not the actual GPU, so I applied thermal paste to that as well and it didn't fix anything. Back to square one.
Of course, I've also upgraded my bios, chipset drivers, tried gfx drivers from a year ago to the latest beta ones, but to no avail. I won't go into how the nvidia updater sucks and downloads the wrong shit for certain mainboards, causing even more problems. Let's just say I had to spend half a day undoing the damage done by the updaters and fixing utilities provided on my board's official support website.
By this time, I was getting more and more convinced that my gfx card was the problem. I ruled out the memory, all drivers were up to date, it wasn't an IRQ conflict and the crash seemed fairly obvious: It would happen during games. On some rare occasions, playing video files would result in the same thing. And then the PC would refuse to boot up again, the fans on the card would go nuts, reconnecting the card would help boot it up again. At that point I was completely ignoring the fact that removing random shit like a stick of memory would sometimes fix it as well, god knows why.
I've also tried to rule out a faulty PSU by disconnecting absolutely everything I didn't need. No dvd drives, no fancy USB shit, just one hard drive, gfx card, onboard sound, memory, rodent, keyboard, that's it. Unplugged all the cooling fans in the case, removed absolutely everything that would consume power and wasn't absolutely necessary. It didn't fix anything. And I refused to believe there was anything wrong with the PSU, because it was a brand name 500w PSU, my gfx card only required 450w and that combination had been running fine for over a year, so why would it blow up on me now? Wear and tear can cause exactly that kind of problem with a PSU, but at that time, I was absolutely sure it was my gfx card.
So what's the easiest way to rule out a damaged GPU? Replace it. I removed my Nvidia card and borrowed Claire's HD6850. And my machine wouldn't boot up with it, no matter what. The Nvidia chipset on my board probably didn't help things and I couldn't fit her card in the primary PCI-E slot, so one of the two SLI-slots would have to do. And those weren't too keen on doing anything with Claire's ATI hardware. It just didn't boot up at all. Plan B: Put my gfx card in Claire's PC, see if she crashes. And of course we couldn't pull that off, either: One of her PSU's 6pin PCI-E power connectors was damaged. Damn thing just wouldn't stay connected to my gfx card, so we couldn't even power up the damn thing. And since my mainboard doesn't have any onboard gfx, we had to buy a replacement card.
So we checked our finances, tried to come up with some clever way to afford at least a mid-range current gen gpu, but there was just no way we could afford something like that at that time. A friend helped me out with his old GTX280. Awesome piece of hardware back in its day and still not the worst choice today, if you can live without tesselation and other fancy shit, which 95% of today's games don't even support, anyway. And what do you know - I put that thing in there, it booted up straight away, no problems, no crashes, no nothing. For a whole day. So I did something incredibly stupid. You might wanna take notes, because this is gonna be important later on. :P
I ran MSI Afterburner to check on the card's clock settings. Yes, the card was fucking nice, but it was still a downgrade from my old hardware and I decided it couldn't hurt to do some research on safe settings in order to overclock the card at least a little bit. You know, get some of that old power back. And the furmark tests were fine, I got a small performance boost out of it, I ran a few more games aaaaand it blacked out. Exact same crash again. Black screen, sound loop, lawnmower when I tried to reboot.
I've restored the card back to factory settings the next time I managed to boot up. The overclocking I had done was minute at best, there was no way in hell I had damaged the hardware, I did a lot of research beforehand, but I didn't wanna push my luck, so I went back to default settings. And it blacked out again. And again! What's worse, booting would now fail half of the time, thanks to a bluescreen: C000021a, initialization of a knowndll failed, 0xc0000221, blah, blah... damaged hardware. Did I melt my friend's gfx card after all? I put my old card back in there, same error message, so at least it wasn't that. Whew.
I was running out of ideas and out of options. Try a google search for black screen crashes. Hundreds of forum posts and no useful answer. 90% of the time these threads will just end without a proper solution and the rest of them ends with any random piece of broken hardware. PSU, GPU, memory, the whole damn board. If I had saved any money, I would have blown it all out on a brand new machine at this point.
Instead, I tried to reconstruct my working and gaming environment using Claire's old laptop. I'm a guy. I hate change. I want stuff to stay the way I know it. So I connected the laptop to the large LCD screen, plugged in my gaming mouse and a keyboard, replicated my desktop and customization settings the best I could and started gaming and working at (almost) 720p and the modest frame rates an old 230m budget gfx chip, which had been outdated three generations ago, could muster. Not a happy experience. And a couple weeks later, the laptop would start overheating and shutting down without warning. Of course. No laptop is designed for that kind of torture, not for prolonged amounts of time.
That's when I decided to try something we should have done ages ago: Put my old PSU into Claire's PC to see whether or not it crashes. If my PSU was really failing, Claire's machine would black out as well. In my desperation, I've also done something that didn't seem possible before: I put Claire's PSU into my machine. Remember? One of her power connectors wouldn't fit in my gfx card. I forced it. At this point I no longer gave a shit about damaging my hardware, I just slammed it in there until it fit. Oh the potential for analogies!
And Claire's PC worked. With my PSU. To be fair, her HD6850 only requires one modest 6pin PCI-E connector, so the entire system is a lot less demanding and much more energy-efficient than mine. But it worked, it was stable, her machine, my PSU. And my computer with her PSU? No fucking clue. Remember those blue screens I had? The defective hardware was my hard drive. Maybe it had been failing all along and that's what caused the crashes. Maybe I was being too careless and damaged it whilst rummaging around my machine's intestines over and over again. Whatever the cause, the HDD was dead, would no longer boot up Windows, crashed on me, finito, end of.
So I've ordered a new 7200rpm Barracuda. Used some awesome little utility called 'Parted Magic' to rescue as much of the data as I could possibly grab off the failed drive. Started a new installation of Windows 7. Took me a day to get everything back in working order. You know, all my image and video editing software I need for work, my FTP settings, text editing software, KMPlayer, the works. Started a game and my gfx card crashed. Not a big deal, I just forgot to install the latest version of MSI Afterburner to crank up the voltage a tiny bit. That known and confirmed problem, that tiny little bug one can fix with a click or two. And the machine blacked out again.
Brand new windows. New hard drive. Different PSU. Memory had already been checked three dozen times. And the PC would crash with either gfx card on the old Windows installation, so that wasn't the problem. But fuck it, I put in my friend's old GTX280 for the heck of it. Nothing else to do, right?
I didn't wanna risk overclocking again, so I just ran the card, no Afterburner, nothing else. And it all worked. For a day. Two days. Three days. No crashes whatsoever. Put in my own gfx card again. Crashed. Motherfucker!
The problem was MSI Afterburner all along. At some point, with some update or during some stupid moment where I fiddled around with the fucking settings, I must have enabled low level hardware access. A quick google search revealed that this feature could cause the exact same crash I was experiencing. So I turned it off and the crashes stopped.
Three months. I've been having this problem for three fucking months. Replaced the gfx card, checked the memory, applied fresh thermal paste in every possible spot, switched PSUs, installed a new hard drive and a new OS. Okay, the HDD was necessary, as the old one had definitely died. Maybe it died from all the crashes and hard resets, maybe I physically broke it whilst taking the whole machine apart time and again. Fuck if I know. Unticking one god damn checkbox in one stupid little program fixed my problem.
But there has been one small incident, which made me feel at least a little better about the whole mess. We put the old GTX280 in Claire's PC. The one that runs on my old PSU now. It died after five minutes. The PSU was failing after all. It still runs her modest little ATI card just fine, but we should replace the PSU as soon as we have a little extra money, just to be safe. So it wasn't Afterburner alone. I'm not a complete idiot after all. But pretty damn close to it.
So. A failing power supply unit. And one tiny setting in some little overclocking and monitoring utility. What do you know. But my machine had been screaming for a fresh, clean installation of Windows for a long time now. And the new HDD is pretty damn sweet. So it wasn't all bad. I just hope that this is really gonna be the end of it. Time to catch up on all the gaming I had to miss out on!
One of the things that bug me about GW2 is how the vast majority of rangers I come across are complete and utter pussies. They grab a bow, they spam their attack buttons, end of story. That's a perfectly valid style of play. It's also fucking boring and - while I don't rule out that some of them actually know what they're doing and dish out okay damage - many of them are worthless and a fucking waste of space. That's okay, GW2 can be enjoyed even with a shit build and when you're completely stupid. And in all fairness, some people simply want to use a bow and absolutely nothing else and they have every right to do so. What pisses me off is how all of them seem to be doing it. A bit like 90% of all warriors using greatswords or swords and axes and 90% of all Guardians using greatswords. Cookie cutter shit.
I don't do cookie cutter. This guide shows you how to kick ass with a dual wield ranger, who depends on swords, axes and a metric fuckton of melee. This is not "the best build" around or some shit. There are no DPS meters in this game, no simulators that parse the strongest possible setup and I'm grateful for that. This build works, it's fucking fun and it's different from the mind-numbingly boring longbow/shortbow playstyle. Is this "better" than bow specs, then? Is it worse? Beats me, who the hell gives a shit? It's not the point of this guide. The point is that you can do more than cookie cutter and still make it work. The result looks a little bit like this:
As you can see in the video, I still need to upgrade my back slot to the level 80 guild backpack, the rest is as good as it gets.
Farming the spawn-zones around Grenth solo, taking on whole packs of enemies without going down. The damage numbers on crits may not be as high as on a warrior or guardian, but the insanely high bleed stacks and poison DPS more than make up for it.
This guide explains my build, how it works and why I've picked particular traits and skills. This isn't the law, you're free to change, customize and experiment and maybe get even better results or more fun out of it that way. What I can say is that I can solo-farm around Grenth without trouble, I rack up massive amounts of wvw kills without AoE bow spam and I'm enjoying this particular play style a lot more than my fully exotic greatsword guardian and his hurrdurr AoE mashing crap. If you dislike any of the stuff I just said, this guide is not for you. Move along.
Overview - The Manly Ranger
The manly build utilizes axes and swords, traps and 'Troll Unguent'. With a high condition damage rampager build and a crit-rate close to 70%, the manly ranger depends on crit procs, bleeds and poison. Thanks to his large health pool and a powerful HoT with a very fast cooldown, this particular ranger can take on multiple foes in melee, wreak havoc and come out without the slightest dent in his rugged beard. He is more difficult to play than flurry/100 Blades warriors or greatsword guardians. Due to the lack of mobility on his offhand axe whirl, he gets a small disadvantage in the AoE department and monster tagging gets a bit more difficult. Traps and a pet make up for that to some extent.
Pros
+ High ranged and melee DPS
+ High survivability
+ Great bleed and poison damage
+ Can handle large groups of enemies solo
+ More to do than just spam the same AoE over and over again
Cons
- Dodge, trap, circle-strafe... you can't just sit back and let your pet take the hits
- Good sigils for 3 main weapons are very expensive
- Mass monster-tagging can be difficult with axes
Like a Baws - Manly Traits
Your trait lines will look like this. (Source: Ninjalooter.de)
We're going for a 10/30/30 setup. Yes, we're only spending 10 points in the Power line on a full DPS spec! Weird, huh? Well, let's have a look at the 'Marksmanship' trait line:
Power is a nice stat. We want power and speccing into this trait line increases it. So why not go for the full 30 points? First of all, the secondary boost, "Condition Duration" is useless. A maxed out 'Marksmanship' trait-line increases your condition duration by 30%, which sounds awesome. But let's do the math: Let's say one of your attacks causes bleeding or poison for 6 seconds, i.e. 'Serpent's Strike' or 'Splitblade'. 30% extra would change duration to 7.8 seconds. That's not a lot of damage for 20 trait points.
Another thing is the actual traits. Put 10 points into 'Marksmanship', unlock 'Steady Focus' and to 10% more damage on full endurance. That's great. We want extra damage. But look at the stuff further up the trait line. The 15 points trait 'Alpha Training' grants 'Opening Strike' to our pet, which is fun, but not necessary. We run this show, the pet is just backup. Our 25 point trait, 'Precise Strike' turns 'Opening Strike' into a guaranteed critical. Big deal - we're going for 70% crit rate, we don't need guaranteed crits! Same goes for most of the selectable 'Marksmanship' traits. They mostly buff pet and bow damage. We don't use bows, we don't spec into beast mastery, so nothing to do here.
Our first full 30 points go into 'Skirmishing'. This is an abolute no-brainer. Higher crit chance, higher crit damage, we want as much of that as somehow possible. The 5, 15 and 25 point bonuses will grant us swiftness and fury on weapon swapping, as well as 10% more damage from flanking attacks. We want the former, because we swap weapons a lot and the latter, because we want more fucking damage. Our 10 point trait of choice is 'Sharpened Edges', because it supports our build perfectly: We're speccing into high crit chance and high condition damage and this trait can cause bleeds on crits. I don't need to elaborate, unless you're a complete moron.
There's nothing great in the 20 point trait section, so we're going for 'Pet's Prowess' to raise our animal companion's crit damage by 30%. Our own damage always takes top priority, but in this case, there are no damage boosting abilities for us, so to the pet it goes.
For our 30 points trait, we're going with 'Honed Axes'. Since we're choosing 'Rampager' stats on our gear instead of 'Berserker' stats, we're gonna need as much extra crit damage as possible and 'Honed Axes' provides exactly that.
Our final 30 points go to.... *drumroll* Poof! 'Wilderness Survival'. Sure, the 300 points of added toughness won't help us do any more damage, but the 300 points of extra condition damage will! After spending 5 points we gain 'Natural Vigor', which regenerates our Endurance 50% faster. Which is good - we're doing 10% more damage at full Endurance, remember? For ten points we get various fun traits to choose from. Personally, I like 'Shared Anguish', because it causes your pet to eat enemy CC effects in your stead. Also very handy in WvW! 15 points, 'Companions Defense'. Meh. 20 points: 'Offhand Training'. Reducing the cooldown on 'Whirling Defense' from 25 seconds to 20 seconds? Fuck, yeah! This is our hardest-hitting ability, so we're boosting that sucker! For 25 points we get 'Pack Strength'. 5% extra damage, while we're above 90% health! Woo! At 30 points I pick 'Sword Mastery' to reduce the cooldown on 'Serpent's Strike'. Faster poison attacks ftw! If you're a wuss, you can also go with 'Empathic Bond', 'Bark Skin' or 'Hide in Plain Sight', which are very cool defensive abilities. But why would you, if you're a manly damage dealer?
1337 skillz - Picking the right Skills
'Troll Unguent' is one of the coolest healing abilities in the entire game. Sure, at level 80 it may only regenerate about half your maximum health over ten seconds, but the HoT effect is powerful enough to keep you fighting. What's more important is the ridiculously low cooldown of 25 seconds. Once 'Troll Unguent' wears off, you only gotta survive another 15 seconds until you can use it again. Master the ancient art of circle-strafing, keep your opponents crippled with traps and nothing shall kill you.
Ahh yes, traps! 'Spike Trap' should be in your utility slots, because it causes bleed damage and serves as an AoE when timed right. Another fun trap is viper's nest - similar effect, but poison damage. Double the conditions, double the fun! And since we love those bleeds, 'Sharpening Stone' is our best friend, causing our next five attacks to add even more bleed stacks!
Our elite slot goes to 'Entangle'. Not only does it cause enemies to bleed even more, but it works as an excellent oshit-button, should we have to make a run for it. What's rooted can't come after us!
So why are we picking all this stuff? Read on!
Teach me, oh wise one! How to play a Manly Ranger
So how do we play this shit? First, let's look at our weapons: Stereo axes are our weapon choice numero uno, a sword goes into the secondary weapon slot's main hand section, that's it. Now pick an enemy. Stare at it. Roar. Beat your chest. Be manly! Now throw your axe. Now get close enough to actually hit and throw again. The enemy will come at you. If there are multiple baddies standing close to each other, your axe will ricochet off the first one and hit the guy next to him and so on. 'Winter's Bite' and 'Path of Scars' are nice attacks against far away targets. If you're facing two or more guys at the same time, use 'Splitblade'. If there's only one enemy, wait until he gets really close, then use 'Splitblade' to get as many bleed stacks on him as possible. Use 'Sharpening Stone' whenever available for even more bleed damage.
Once the enemy closes in for melee attacks, switch from dual axes to sword+axe. Use 'Whirling Defense' to beat the shit out of the sucker - do not move or you will cancel your attack! Wait for the progress bar to finish! This attack is most efficient with 'Sharpening Stone' activated. If there are any live enemies left at melee distance, use both traps. Don't forget 'Serpent's Strike' to renew the poison damage once your snake trap wears off. If you need to get away, try using 'Hornet Sting' rather than a dodge move, to avoid losing Endurance and your 10% damage buff along with it.
Don't be afraid to use 'Troll Unguent' the moment they hit you. If you feel you cannot simply beat the enemy into submission, circle-strafe around them and keep them away with 'Spike Trap' and 'Entangle'. The AI is easy to trick that way and you can beat just about any kind of baddie, unless they use powerful magic and ranged attacks or you step on an elder dragon's dick and there's nobody around to help you.
'Entangle' is also a great tool to help take down tougher enemies or large groups of foes, due to its nice radius and high damage. Don't waste it against harmless baddies!
Should an enemy ever get stuck fighting your pet or just stay outside melee distance for whatever stupid reason, don't be shy to run towards him and whip out your sword. Melee damage is *always* greater than ranged damage, especially against single targets. Unless you're a fucking spellcaster, of course.
As for dungeons, well... melee is fucking useless 90% of the time, so you'll want to stick to throwing axes, unless you're absolutely confident to take on enemies head-on. If a champion punches you in the face, that's usually the end of you. Same goes for every other class in DPS spec and since just about everyone uses DPS spec, well... you get the idea. The right pet
We want maximum DPS and since canines get the highest Power and decent amounts of Precision, man's best friend is the way to go. Just don't pick a fucking hyena - their power stat is pathetic and the summonable bonus hyena usually runs off in the wrong direction, pulls some shit and get itself killed. You're usually next.
If you just can't stand canines, cats and most birds are an okay choice, too. They get nice crit ratings and most of them have bleed attacks, which we're stacking anyway. I'm not a big fan of moas, spiders and any pet with balanced stats, since they don't excel at anything. Bears are a nono. You want damage, you wanna get toe to toe with the monsters and you don't need a fucking bear to take the hits for you. Bears are tanks, you're manly, you don't want a tank. Go with a DPS pet. Don't be a maverick.
Dress to Kill - The right gear
You can see the gear I'm using at the beginning of the video. So instead of explaining what to get, let me tell you why.
We're not using any defensive stats at all and as you can see, soloing in Orr works just fine. If you're a huge fan of dungeons, adding a bit of toughness and vitality may help, but then again, if you're that kinda player, you're not going to use my build in the first place.
We're choosing 'Rampager' gear (highest crit rate + condition damage) over 'Berserker' gear (high crit rate + crit damage) for two reasons. First of all, we can keep up 8-10 bleed stacks on any opponent, in any battle, without problems. Using all the right abilities and skills at the right time can temporarily stack 'em to over 20 in tough fights. So we wanna buff that shit. We need those bleeds and poison attacks to do as much damage as somehow possible. The other reason we're going for this particular set of stats is a high crit chance. Since crits can randomly cause bleeds with this particular spec and some of our weapon sigils proc on crit, we need the highest crit rate we can get.
As you can see in the video, I go with Superior Runes of the Scholar. They add a large amount of power to make up for the 200 points we're missing by not maxing out our 'Marksmanship' trait line. They also add another 10% of damage while we're above 90% health. Add that to the 5% above 90% health from 'Wilderness Survival' and the 10% whilst at full Endurance from 'Marksmanship' and a possible 10% whilst flanking from 'Skirmishing' and we're getting the most ridiculously exaggerated amount of bonus damage you could imagine. They also raise our crit damage by 8%, which adds up nicely to the extra 10% we get whilst wielding an axe in our main hand. 'Honed Axes', remember?
There are plenty of good alternatives, of course. Most people go for "Divinity" runes. Personally, I think they're overrated. +60 to all stats might sound nice, but what the fuck am I supposed to do with extra toughness, healing and vitality? Sure, the 12% additional crit damage is nice, but I'd rather have the added Power and flat DPS bonus from Scholar runes at a slightly lower bonus to crit damage. If you're a cheapass, you can go crazy with stuff like runes of the flock. An attack bird with a 5s blind attack on 10% of your hits isn't so bad and the additional healing power adds to your survivability. Of course this goes against the whole idea of manliness and maximum damage, but it's still a fair choice when you don't have a lot of gold.
As for sigils, I'm going with the following:
Axe, main hand: Superior Sigil of Bloodlust
Axe, offhand: Superior Sigil of Strength
Sword, main hand: Superior Sigil of Fire
Explanation: The Bloodlust sigil buffs our Power by 10 points after every kill, generating a total of 25 stacks, or 250 extra Power, which lasts until we go down in battle. And we don't go down in battle, because we're manly rangers! Switching from our axe to a sword does not remove the stacks! Nobrainer, buy it!
The Sigil of Strength has a chance to grant us a temporary stack of might on each critical hit. At level 80, each stack of might provides 35 points of Power and Condition Damage. Since this weapon remains in our offhand at all times, we always get to benefit from might procs, both in melee and ranged combat!
The Sigil of Fire has a 30 percent chance to generate an AoE flame burst upon critical hits. We crit all the fucking time, this sigil procs a whole LOT and we want every bit of AoE damage we can get. Gimme!
There are valid alternatives, depending on your taste, play style and budget. A word of warning: You can only use one stat-buffing sigil at a time. If you put a Sigil of Bloodlust on one weapon to boost your Power and a Sigil of Accuracy on the other to boost your Precision, you will only get stacks for one of the two, not both. They don't mix!
Buffs like Might *do* stack with them, however, as they only last for a few seconds and not until you are defeated.
Yay, war! The Manly Ranger in WvW
Whenever people talk about WvW, they bring up stupid shit like "One on one situations in WvW". Let me tell you how WvW works: 90% of the time you follow a fucking zerg and you'll be attacking a fucking gate. Sometimes an enemy zerg shows up, everybody spams ranged AoE attacks and one zerg lives, the other one dies and starts bitching about shit in the team channel. Sure, on some rare occasions you might end up in a 1vs1 and the other guy might actually choose to fight. You know what's a lot more likely to happen? The other guy runs until he finds 3 friends to beat the shit out of you, the 3 friends are already there but you cannot see them or the fucker uses Gamehack, gets infinite amounts of Endurance and has no cooldown on his skills. Or you're so perplexed to run into that one single enemy player, you completely forget to move when he one-shots you with 100 Blades.
It doesn't matter what god damn class you play in WvW. You sit on a tower and operate a fucking arrow cart. You kick down a fucking gate. You spam AoE attacks when the enemy zerg arrives. Every class can do that. But this is the internet, you're probably 14 fucking years old and know more about games than I ever will, so you're gonna disagree with me. Fine. So try that, should you ever end up in an actual, real, fair one on one battle:
Circle-Strafing and cripples (Spike Trap, pet abilities) are your best friend against average Joe, because average Joe is an idiot. If the guy is smart and leaps at you, possibly uses some CC to prevent you from getting away, switch to your sword, use 'Hornet Sting' to get away, pop your heal and when the sucker gets into melee range again, hack him to bits with 'Whirling Defense'. You're a ranger and he won't see it coming, because they're all stupid and use nothing but bows. This ability is also useful against casters, as it reflects most of their shit and throws it right back at them. Use 'Entangle' when they try to run away or you need to make a run for it, yourself. If they're not running, use it for some extra bleed stacks. Don't forget to switch pets if pet #1 gets downed, that's why they come in tag-teams.
In the much more likely zerg vs zerg battles, just throw your axes. The ricochet-effect, 'Splitblade' and your pet will make sure you get credit for just about every single idiot who dies around you, resulting in a high kill count and more loot bags than you can eat in a day.
I have about 15 years of dating and relationship experience. One third of which has been spent using Claire. That alone speaks volumes about the quality of this GF operating system. So here's an honest review, based on my personal experience with Claire 5.0
I wasn't actually looking to upgrade my girlfriend OS, when an online popup from Claire's manufacturer opted me to give Claire a try. I wasn't entirely sure at first, since Claire is only available in English and all my previous GF systems came with German language recognition. Voice operation had been a bit of an issue when I first interacted with Claire, but I was very pleased with the appearance of the user interface and the overall touch-support, slide to open and instant plug & play.
Claire is compatible with most common games such as Diablo, Guild Wars 2 or Mass Effect and even supports certain console games like Smash Bros. and Soul Calibur. That said, Claire is known to be a major resource hog with certain applications such as World of Warcraft. Keep Claire away from it or the game will keep her above 90% CPU and memory usage at all times. Certain fun apps such as chocolate, Pringles and tomato.pasta 2.49b cannot be run in the same environment as Claire and will automatically be deleted by the OS.
Maintenance with Claire is so-so. The OS is scheduled to defrag your storage space once a month. It also comes with a limited laundry cleaning utility, which fails to recognize anything that isn't directly owned by the Claire. I highly advise against using the included dinner generator. The results are generally less than pleasant, which is a known problem with all English GF systems.
The developers have included a few plugins, which seem to serve no obvious purpose.
I don't know how or why it is doing this, but I'm assuming this particular plugin is a physics experiment in its early stages and has not been removed upon release.
Other features, such as facial recognition, are in an early beta stage and tend to glitch out:
Due to Claire's slim design features, the OS is only available with A-class boob storage. An upgrade to B, C or even higher boob volume is only possible through expensive 3rd party enhancements and generally discouraged by Claire and its manufacturer. On the plus side, Claire is a very light-weight OS and runs fine in any mid-range environment. Operating Claire alongside feline apps and most reptile programs should not be a problem. Most larger canine apps will cause Claire to freeze and crash.
As with all programs of this kind, Claire is not compatible with other GF systems. Multi-boot options have been discussed, however, and may be a possibility, once connectivity options between Claire and similar systems have been fully established.
Claire is by far the best GF OS I know. While the minimalist design might not appeal to everyone, most bigger systems are known to inflate over time and take up more and more space. Maintenance features may be limited, but they run reliably and don't just prompt the user with annoying, ever-repeating popups, reminding them to go and clean up after themselves. I'm particularly fond of the instant joystick support with all force-feedback features fully enabled. Previous GFs would often hesitate to fully support my Thrustmasterperipherals, which resulted in lots of frustration and eventually uninstalling the OS altogether. Using the uninstaller of my previous GF caused a whole new series of unwanted problems, from deleting half of my stuff to leaving behind a Trojan, which I can't seem to get rid of.
I'm hoping that future releases of Claire will bring updates to programs like nopants.exe to enable users to run it all year long. Noshirt.bat has already seen a similar upgrade and it's about time the rest of this plugin family follows. Customization options for less feminine deodorant and reduced fart noises are also sorely missing. Of course, I'm nit-picking here and there's always room for improvement on even the most incredible programs.
Have you ever rummaged through a dead guy's stuff? I used to do this a lot. It's called charity work.
You've probably seen one of those tv shows about folks, who clean up after the not so dearly departed. People without friends and family, who kick the bucket and quietly rot away for a while until somebody complains about the smell or some unpaid bills. And no, that's not what I did. So why am I bringing this up? Because at the end of these shows, you always see the dead guy's belongings, their whole identity, everything they ever had, as it gets piled up and chucked in a dumpster. Which creates a nice, dramatic effect, but it's not always how it happens. Okay, if the corpse has practically liquified and there's maggots all over the place, then that's probably how it happens. But sometimes people die in a less creepy fashion and they leave a whole lot of stuff in pristine condition. And no relatives.
Here's a few sad, ugly truths about the clothes and things people get through charity:
The biggest part of what's actually being donated by people is garbage. I'm not talking about how "the colour on that is so early '90s" or how it's got a hole or two. Donated clothes tend to be dirty, full of holes and in such a horrid condition, you wouldn't even wipe your ass with that stuff. To many people, these collections are just another special garbage can, just for clothes. Figues - there's one for glass, one for paper, why not have one for old clothes, right?
And the nicer stuff, which is being donated by nicer (or dead) people, doesn't always go to people who really need it. I have seen people showing up at the local welfare place once every week, filling as many plastic bags with free stuff as they could carry and the next day you'd see these things for sale at a flea market.
I may have taken a thing or two for myself when I helped out there. In my own defence, I did need them and I didn't sell them to anybody. One of these things, a dark leather coat, came from some creepy old guy, who owned a whole lot of creepy old stuff. A book titled "The Negro" was among his belongings, which compared black people to animals rather than human beings and even raised some ideas on how you might capture and tame them and train them for war. He was that kinda guy and it was probably that kinda coat. You know, loooong, dark, leathery, but it doesn't have any nasty insignia on it or anything. Judging by the guy's stuff, it must have belonged to a very bad person. Now it's mine.
I have also claimed an old lady's refrigerator. She died, she didn't leave anyone behind who cared for her stuff and it just so happened that I needed a fridge. There was a deer in it. And it was haunted. Well, it did seem perfectly harmless when I put the fridge in my bedroom. Yeah, I know. But there was no space in the kitchen and you cannot criticise having the bed, PC and fridge all in the same room until you've tried it for yourself. It's fucking awesome!
Claire and the fridge in my bedroom. At first, she was horny and everything seemed okay...
One thing I like about England is how you can throw stuff away. Empty bottles, empty coke cans, just put them in the recycling bin and that's that. By German standards, this isn't overregulated enough. So they put a return fee on everything. So when you buy a can of coke, you pay for the coke and you pay an extra 25 Cents on top of that. You'll get your 25 Cents back when you return the empty can to the shop. At some point in history you probably had to fill in a form, as well. Anyhow - whenever you empty a beverage container in Germany, you hold on to that shit, so you can return it to the supermarket. I used to stack them on top of the haunted fridge.
Claire used to sit next to the fridge. There was a nice red sofa next to it. If you look closely, you can see about 2% of the sofa in front of the lower fridge door. She sat there. And cans, bottles and plastic bags would rain down on her for no reason. She told me the fridge hated her and it throws stuff on people, so we switched places and nothing happened. Not a single plastic bag.
Put Claire on the sofa and stuff would start falling on her. Sometimes I'd come back from the shower or a trip outside and she'd tell me about how fridge ghost threw things at her while I was gone.
Fridge ghost. It had a name now. I still loved that fridge, haunted or not. Look at my bed. Workout happened there. Stuff that makes you sweaty and thirsty. And we don't smoke. But how cool is it, when you can say, "Care for a coke?" afterwards and reach for that door handle and get ice cold refreshment without having to leave the bed?
I loved that fridge. I was sad when we had to leave it behind that fateful morning where we packed whatever things we managed to rescue on our journey to Nottingham. It never played any tricks on me. There's probably a perfectly logical explanation to the whole thing and why it only threw things at Claire. But how boring is that? I'll stick with fridge ghost.
And guess what? The other day, a computer game jumped off the shelf and missed Claire by an inch. "Guild Wars Factions". How interesting. Sometimes the lamp next to Claire's spot on the sofa starts to shake a bit when she sits there. Sometimes empty cans roll around the kitchen when nobody is in there. Did the ghost follow us? I'm excited!
Of course I don't genuinely believe in ghosts. I just like the idea. If I took a closer look at the shelf or the lamp, if I had looked at the fridge, I probably would have figured out what's really going on. But sometimes life is just a lot more fun when you make up your own explanations. So if there's random stuff flying around my house to freak out my partner, I'll go with ghosts. Because it's more fun that way.
In other news, I seem to attract more readers than I knew. If you're familiar with this blog, then you'll know I'm not a fan of the dungeons in Guild Wars 2. I may have compared a playthrough to an attempt at pleasuring a bear with sandpaper. In my magazine column. And they put it on the website, without telling me. And opened it for user comments. Then somebody showed me the result. Holy fuck.
I have learned a few things today:
- Sarcasm and sitirical text doesn't work online. Ever.
- The average 14 year old cannot tell a review from a column.
- People consider my column a "bad third party translation" of this blog. Hilarious.
In fact, one particularly annoyed user actually copied one sentence out of my blog, from god knows how many weeks ago, where I dare say that playing a dungeon on GW2 with my guild mates was "fun". Yet in my column I say the dungeons are shit. Cue the conspiracy theories! Oh and this!
Yes, I had fun playing some shit content with people I know and love. How that one sentence turned into "The English original of this article is so much better" and "I cannot believe you'd defend such a shitty translation" is entirely beyond me. How anyone could misread, misunderstand and misinterpret my blog in such a spectacular fashion just melts my brain.
So, once again, just for you, just to be perfectly clear: I fucking hate the dungeons in Guild Wars 2. And if you wanna know why, maybe you should actually read my fucking blog, all of the stuff about GW2, not just copy and paste one sentence, completely out of context, and tell people somebody was ripping off my blog, Google-translating it and secretly putting it on the magazine's website, thank you very much!
And while I'm already at it: Because I dare criticise the dungeons and how they work, because I actually dislike them and make fun of them, some people come to the conclusion, that I simply don't know what I'm doing, telling me to "L2P", how they hope I haven't been paid to write this shit and some other nasty things I don't care to bring up here. Because of my fucking opinion.
Funny. I had a level 80 toon in full exotic dungeon gear three weeks after release. I have two of them now. Because I don't know how to play and I have no fucking clue what I'm doing. That stuff just fell out of the sky and I picked it up, you know.
It's hilarious how some of you believe, in all honesty, you're oh so fucking awesome, incredible, the best of the best and anyone who disagrees with you must be a noob. Well, let me tell you something: Every fucking idiot can beat every dungeon on Guild Wars 2. That's how they are designed. The biggest of idiots will do so by constantly dying and respawning until they throw up. Which isn't the most elegant "tactic", but it actually works. A team of skilled players will do it without wipes. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good you are or how much you suck, everyone can do them. Even I can. And I'm a fucking noob and I don't know what I'm doing, remember? Hey, since you're already dissecting my blog, maybe you wanna go find the screenshots where I show off my dungeon gear?
Let me tell you something else: Playing dungeons, hard modes, killing bosses, coming up with strategies, is my fucking job. I've been writing guides about that shit when half of you were happily swimming around in daddy's scrotum. Just because you think the dungeons in a particular game are good and I think they're shit, doesn't mean I don't know how to play them, how to handle my class or how to handle basic mechanisms such as dodge moves. You get five fucking attack buttons per weapon. It's not fucking rocket science. You can beat dungeons that way? Well, congratulations - so can everybody else, you're not special. So why am I describing wipes, fails and general drama in a satirical column? The fact there are so many of you out there, who cannot actually figure this out and need an explanation, is what really makes me mad.
See, that's the fun thing about Guild Wars 2. It keeps telling people how awesome they are for finishing the easiest of tasks. Oh my god, you've followed a bunch of NPCs in your story quest and killed some zombies! You're so amazing! You must be the chosen one! Well, guess what? You cannot fucking fail. If you die, you just respawn. If you suck really hard, you may end up naked, but you cannot actually fail. It isn't that hard. So you're awesome for beating some quick 5-man-instances? Don't make me laugh. Get off your high horse - the days where people were impressed with your "endgame" gear are gone along with month-long 40 people raiding to complete a full set. And I don't miss them.
Don't get me wrong. I don't disrespect anyone for liking the dungeons and for having their own opinion. Lots of people enjoy the chaos, having no taunts, no predictable aggro management, no targeted heals. There's nothing wrong with that, just because I hate it. And, dungeons aside, I fucking love GW2. Why the hell do you think I'm constantly blogging about it? What pisses me off is people telling me I shouldn't be paid and I don't know what I'm doing, based on my personal opinion and one sarcastic column, which makes fun of the unpredictable chaos. Agree with it or don't. Don't be a dick about it.
My PC has gone the way of the dodo, the laptop doesn't really handle Guild Wars 2 too well and my motivation to play has somewhat abated. Otherwise, my 2nd toon would have hit the level cap considerably faster. This is something I haven't done in any other MMO - and since people seem to think there's a point in bragging about this, I have been around since UO.
To me, playing an online game isn't just for fun, it isn't just a hobby - it's escapism in its highest form. I roll that one character, who I believe matches my play style and personality and then I stick with that. I'll play him to the level cap, get all the gear, titles and crap I care about having and that's that. I don't do alts. Sure, there has been the occasional "I'm bored, let's roll a rogue" phase on WoW, but those characters are more of a fun side project whilst waiting for new content, they never get off the ground and generally phase into nothingness within just a few hours.
Grimclaw The Slayer. Battle-hardened veteran, destroyer of dragons, insanely fucking boring.
My problem with my first maxed out toon on Guild Wars 2 was twofold: First of all, getting all the most powerful gear, the best upgrades, runes, sigils and crap, all the sexiest stuff - it took absolutely no effort. You can just buy all the most powerful weapons and armor right off the auction h... ahem, trading post. The sexy flaming stuff you can see on the screenshot required some token farming. Mind you, that stuff is purely cosmetic and in no way more powerful than the stuff you can craft and buy. And once you're fully geared up, you're done. My personal story has ended, I have slain the final boss baddie, it's all happy happy joy joy until the next content update is done.
Of course I could just continue exploring the world, help the guild mates and noobs around Tyria, take part in events, blah dee blah. Fuck that. Greatsword guardians rely on their auto attack, a situational leap and a ridiculously overpowered AoE attack, that's it. You literally mash one fucking button. Hurrdurr, simplification to the max! I don't care how awesome and powerful my character is, he's just no fun to play.
Incidentially, I had the exact same problem when I rolled another warrior - the class I originally intended to play. You use two, maybe three hotkeys, over and over again. I'll admit things get a lot more intersting in pvp, as thinking, moving enemies generally provide a greater challenge and demand a more varied style of play, but that won't stop the pve combat from being so dreadfully boring.
I'm not entirely sure what today's game designers are thinking when they "revolutionalize" MMO combat. On SWTOR, your warrior types had about 250 different attacks, each and everyone of them too situational to be really useful. An attack, that only works on stunned enemies, one against baddies you've just knocked down, one that only works when you've built up rage points, one that generates said rage points, one you only use when you're out of rage, but your rage-building attacks are cooling down and one when your opponent is under 20% health. I actually had to write a guide about that shit. Describing how to operate a fucking space station couldn't be any more complicated than this.
And then there's the heavy melee classes on GW2. Leap, auto attack, AoE, rinse, repeat. Derp!
And then I started having fun
In my boredom, I did what I do on all MMOs after maxing out my first toon and just before I quit them for good: I rolled some random toons. I created an engineer, because they look insanely cool with their leathery steampunk pirate coats and their dual pistols and because I don't like thieves. But the engineer was too complex for me - flamethrowers, turrets, potions... I can appreciate their quazillions of abilities and play styles that go along with them, but it simply didn't work for me.
So I tried a thief for their ability to use stereo pistols and gave up again, because I still don't like thieves.
I didn't really want to play a ranger, because they don't get to use guns. Let me repeat that. Rangers. Cannot. Use. Guns. Fucking RANGERS! A warrior uses rifles, even the fucking spellcasters get to carry a pistol and the RANGER is not allowed to use the coolest RANGED WEAPONS. But I didn't want to be a spellcaster, all the other classes didn't make me happy, so ranger it was. Whee!
You know what? Fuck guns. You know why? Because there's a fucking massive battleaxe in my main hand. You wanna know what's in the other hand? Another fucking battleaxe! Because fuck you! Yes, sure, I get to do exactly the thing I criticize about warriors and guardians: I can whirl around like a moron and take down a dozen baddies in a ridiculous, whirling AoE attack. But unlike my buddies in full plate, I'm not limited to that one dumb trick.
Enemy is running away? Throw the fucking axe at him. Whole bunch of enemies running around? Throw five goddamn axes! The really satisfying part about hitting a sucker with your axe isn't even the nice slashing noise or the floating damage numbers. The axe will bounce right off and hit the next enemy. In fact, the axe will fly around and hit a whole lot of enemies, if they're close enough to each other. Add traps, debuffs, various DoTs, the ability to deflect projectiles and the fine art of circle-strafing and suddenly I'm single-handedly taking out whole camps of baddies, where my other toons would get their asses kicked.
I miss the cool-looking plate armor a bit. But come on. Black leather coat. And a stylish hat. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing, both on and offline. Ahem. Anyway. I like being in the middle of the action, fighting at the front, tearing baddies apart left and right. That usually means warrior. Turns out it's the ranger for me on here. Oddly enough, I get a 50% larger health pool than the guardian, on top of powerful healing abilities, an optional healing passive and even one of my pets can cast a small HoT. Sure, rangers are all about survival, but what they're doing with this class goes way beyond Bear Grylls. Do I smell a potential nerf here?
One thing that usually kills my fun when leveling alts on most games is repetition. I've already done that quest, I already know the story here, I've seen this before, I don't wanna do it all over again. I don't watch the same movie twice. By the time I'm watching a Simpsons episode for the 3rd time because there's nothing else on TV, I've already memorized most of the dialogue, which annoys Claire to no end. I tend to get bored. It's worse with games. Downing a spectacular boss baddie may feel awesome the first time around, but the second time around it feels like a chore. Yeah, I'm weird like that.
GW2 mitigates the problem to some extent, since you get to choose your own path through your personal storyline. My guardian is a member of the blood legion, death before dishonour, go in, kick ass, that kinda thing. Naturally, his sire was an honoured soldier and when he had to choose whether to side with an order of scholars and spellcasters, a network of spies or the militaristic vigil, he'd obviously pick the last option. When given the option to lie in wait and ambush the enemy or attack them head on, he'd always charge right at them, which usually resulted in some dramatic casualties throughout the entire storyline. Brute force all the way, not very stylish, but he got the job done.
With the ranger, I've picked an entirely different course through the storyline. I've sided with Ash Legion and the Order of Whispers, both of which rely on intelligence and stealth and generally operate as assassins and spies rather than soldiers. My ranger's old man is a rogue shaman, who has sided with the enemy. Of course, even with all the different faction and background history choices, the whole story still escalates towards the same end, but all the way to the final mission you get to choose a course of action and each route plays out differently. On my guardian, I chose to escort a bunch of tanks (actual charr tanks, not guys in heavy armor!) across the battlefield. As the ranger, I decided to take out a whole army whilst testing out a heavy battle-suit with fancy lasers and explosions and all kinds of freaky explosive stuff with shiny particles. Eventually, I even came across that same group of tanks, which was now getting wrecked, as I chose against fighting alongside them on that playthrough.
Of course, one problem still remains: The first half of my gear is complete and I'll probably max out the rest within the next 1-2 days. And then? With wvw queues still taking several hours and new content still being far, far away, there really isn't much to do besides traveling around the world, playing Events as I run across them and help the guild mates with their stuff. I'm not sure if this will keep me entertained for long.
But with no subcription fees and no need to un/re-subscribe, taking the occasional break really won't hurt much. Yay!
This blog is turning into some kind of diary I'm sharing with the general public. Maybe that's the whole point of a blog, I'm not entirely sure. Beats writing notes into a little pink book starting, "Dear Diary..."
So yeah. PC. Great. Everything seemed alright when I got the replacement graphics card. Even ordered a little adapter so I could connect the whole thing to the new Samsung telly again. And then, out of nowhere, I got the old blackout again. Whole thing just crashes, screen goes black, sound loops, that's it. And of course the damn thing would refuse to boot up for no apparent reason until I unplug the power cable, re-seat the gfx card, remove a memory stick and do all kinds of random, pointless voodoo shit to calm down the angry spirits that haunts this pile of trash.
So what does that mean? Why would the whole thing just black out like that? Apparently, it wasn't my GPU's fault and after 12+ hours with memtest and running the machine with only 1 instead of all 4 sticks of memory, I could rule out the RAM. HD Audio drivers had been deactivated ages ago, tried disabling the onboard sound in bios, but to no avail. The crash persisted.
Sounds like a faulty PSU, right? Running some demanding game, heavy workload for the PC, suddenly the thing just cuts out. So Claire and I switched power supply units. And once again, my blackouts were gone for what must have been a week, I could play non-stop without issues, yet Claire didn't seem to have any problems with my old PSU, which we believed to be faulty.
Then Windows wouldn't boot up. Tons of bluescreen errors, instead. Faulty hardware. You don't say! After every ten or so failed bootup attempts, I'd actually get into Windows, but suddenly I was unable to access my savegames in Torchlight II and Paint would refuse to save edited image files, because it couldn't detect my hard drive. Which, incidentially, had begun showing S.M.A.R.T errors on the bootup screen. So the HDD was dying!
Eventually, the S.M.A.R.T warning disappeared, but the bluescreens got more and more frequent and then the blackouts came back, as well. As the proverbial last straw, I decided to try for a Windows 7 inplace upgrade installation. Ya know, install a fresh windows on top of your old one, back to factory settings, make sure it's not just a really nasty virus or some crap. But that's when my Windows died altogether and I could no longer boot it up. At all.
Thanks to some nifty tool called 'Parted Magic', I can still check on all of my data (or what's left of it), I've been able to backup most of my important stuff and judging by the many read and write errors I got when trying to access my windows drive, it's pretty safe to assume the thing is toast.
So now I gotta get myself a new hard drive. Which isn't as bad as having to buy a whole new machine, thank godzilla, but since hard drives don't grow on trees I gotta wait for some money. I've just finished a pile of articles and all, but chances are, the money won't be there before the end of next week - if that. And since stores in Nottingam charge at 50-100% more than Amazon, I'm gonna have to wait about another week until the new drive actually gets here. That's two weeks of sitting around without a working PC.
And getting a new HDD alone won't do anything. Reinstall Windows, from scratch. I know, not a big deal with Win 7 and all my important stuff being on "the cloud" and what not. But then I gotta re-download all my text and image editing software, KMplayer, 7zip, Fraps, FileZilla and a billion other programs you probably don't care to know about. Try and restore Windows Live Mail. Is there even a point to that, now that I can just import everything into Gmail and access it online? I'm used to live mail and all its predecessors and find gmail awkward and difficult to get used to, but storing stuff locally and failing to do backups is not the smartest way to handle stuff.
It's this stupid late 90s internet mindset. I don't trust companies that store my shit online. What if the guys hosting my favourite MMO lose my characters? What if my email provider loses my favourite letters? Back when I first got online, stuff like that actually *happened*! Ragnarok Online, for instance. Whoops, database problems, we had to roll back your toon to the state from four days ago, sorry!
Today, all those games, websites and services do something that I suck at: Create backups. My stuff is actually safer online. And easier to access. So... do I really still want Live Mail? Do I want to actually download all my email and store it locally and then lose it to hardware failure again? Do I even need all my email from half a decade ago?
I just hope that the new hard drive will put an end to all my pc problems. According to google, a faulty HHD can cause these crashes, black screens and everything. So can fucked RAM, GPUs and PSUs and I've ruled out each and everyone of them.
So what am I gonna do if I still get that black screen crap on the new drive? Only thing I haven't actually replaced is the motherboard. And I find it hard to believe that a defective motherboard would cause this kind of problem. A motherboard works or it's broken. It's not gonna make your machine run for a while, then crash it, then refuse to boot, then boot up again. Unless there's a hairline crack or some shit, which opens and closes as I reseat my gpu and memory whenever the damn thing stops running.
Still - I might be confusing cause and effect here. I cannot say for sure whether the defective hard drive is causing the crashes or whether the hard drive problems have been caused by the repeated hard crashes. Should the blackouts persist, I'm gonna have to replace the whole damn board. And since I won't go look for a second hand version of my old MSI P7N Platinum, I'll be looking at a brand new one, which will require a brand new CPU and compatible memory. If I go with something reasonably modern, I'll be looking at a bill of 350-400 Quid. Argh!
One cool thing about me being a freelance writer and Claire not having to leave the house before noon every day is how we can sleep all day and do fun stuff all night. Like watching Sherlock until 5 in the morning. Sherlock Holmes is probably the only guy more popular on British Television than Adolf Hitler, so I've completely ignored this modern interpretation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels until just recently, when I had to realize that there won't be any more Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad before next year. I like it. If you're familiar with the show, then I won't have to explain why I like it and if you haven't heard about it so far... well, you might wanna check it out.
Spelling and grammar in this particular entry might be a tad off, as the English section of my brain operates at only a very modest capacity when I don't get my usual 8-12 hours of sleep. A white van containing a bunch of assorted inconsiderate assholes has parked in front of our house at 8 o' fucking clock today. They parked a ladder in front of our bedroom window, which appears to be some kind of strange custom around these parts, as it must have been the third time this year they're doing this. This time, however, not only did I count the voices of three inconsiderate fucks, who were having a loud conversation right in front of our open bedroom window (curtains were open, wasn't very hard to figure out we were trying to sleep) - they've brought a fucking radio. I don't know what the hell is wrong with our roof and I don't particularly care to know, seeing as nobody even seems to be occupying the top floor right now. But the problem, whatever it may be, seems to require monthly visits, as well as throwing loose bricks onto the patio. Claire tells me it's about a leaky crack in the wall. I could have sworn I saw flying roof tiles, but after only 3 hours of sleep and her bony shoulder attacking my fucking front teeth whilst tossing and turning in a much too noisy bedroom, everything's gonna look like flying roof tiles.
Ahh yes, teeth. I can taste blood and breakfast coke this very moment.
I don't know what the proper procedure is when a bunch of assholes play loud music right in front of the bedroom window. Logic suggests the kicking of asses. Reason suggests they're gonna fix the fucking roof anyway, they've been paid to do so and radio or not - they're gonna make a whole lot of noise. Reason also suggests they're three hired cavemen, who lift heavy objects for a living and I'm too sleepy to remember which trouser leg I've stuffed my cock in. Which, of course, wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for these people outside my window, because I wouldn't be wearing any fucking clothes to begin with. And all delusions of grandeur and urge to show off in front of the missus aside - tasting blood and fearing for my teeth once this morning has been good enough.
Yesterday was fun. Claire's birthday. Wanna know what we did? Wanna know why her birthday was so fun? We went to the supermarket. I'm not even being sarcastic.
I don't celebrate mine. Sometime around my 15th or 16th birthday, my family just stopped giving a shit. And presents. So waking up a year older was as exciting as it got. But Claire's birthday is fun. There's always a pile of cards with cats on them. I have never seen so many cards in my life. Back in Germany, you do get a basic assortment of cards, which say happy birthday, get well, some guy died, that kinda thing. I don't believe that greeting cards are that basic and simple over here. Ever. They're more like rare items on Diablo. They get prefixes and suffixes. 'Happy belated birthday to you and your partner from your aunt and her dog!' I'm not actually making this up. There are greeting cards for every possible family member, pet, lover, gay relationship, what the hell ever.
What's more important than the impressive assortment of available greeting card messages and the cat pictures you've seen as internet memes a half decade ago, is what's on the inside: Money. I always look at that huge pile of money, smile, nod, pretend I didn't see anything and ask myself, "Why in the actual fuck do you refuse cards and gifts for your own birthday, you moron?"
The thing about birthday money is that you're supposed to have fun with it. It's not for regular grocery shopping or bills. And dear god, do we need to pay bills and buy groceries! Who the hell doesn't?
Sitting around on that pile of money, trying to figure out how to have fun with it, actually feeling burdened by the very idea we might not spend all that cash in a fun enough way, it turned out we're quite possibly the most boring couple on this whole island, certain sexual fetishes aside. Our first impulse was to go out. You know, hit the town, watch a movie, go grab a bite. Tell you what: Nottingham sucks. It's raining so much around here, we don't even need the bus anymore. We have a fucking canoe. And it turns out we don't actually care about movies. We didn't go watch The Avengers. We're not getting it on dvd when it comes out. I'm not even torrenting that shit. We. Don't. Give. A shit. About. The Avengers. Or Dredd. Or Prometheus. Most of all, we don't care to be surrounded by the local dipshits at the cinema. Wha'eva, do you know what I mean? GAH!
Then there's the matter of 'grabbing a bite'. Birthday. Can't just go to McDonald's for that when you're older than 7, can you? The problem about Restaurants in England is that they're in England. Don't get me wrong! If you're into Fish'n'Chips, England is the place to be. You can get a mountain of food for tiny amounts of money around here, there are more chip shops than people in Nottingham and they're all as fast as they are inexpensive. But that's not the sort of thing you'd want for a birthday dinner. Maybe a place with tables and metal cutlery. Possibly candles or a cheap, yet difficult to pronounce bottle of wine. And the main course is always followed by the same question: "Was it as good as my cooking?" And then we laugh.
I'm a 9th circle pastamancer. I had to learn how to cook when I was about twelve years old and my stepmother decided "to go on strike". That was her way of telling my old man she didn't appreciate having to do all the chores around the house. Because, you know, drinking beer and having no job is a whole lot of work and you can't possibly be asked to cook food for your kids every day. And since he was the one with the job and I was hungry, I had to get my ass in the kitchen and figure out how to turn raw plant and animal matter into edible meals. Eventually, the parents split and taking care of sustenance would become a regular thing.
Now, if you're somewhat familiar with my blog, you may have noticed that I don't usually have a mild interest in things. Either I obsess over something or I just don't give a fuck. Cooking falls into the former category. When I cook, I create art. I can fry something as simple and basic as a fucking hamburger and the thing will look like one of those fake, airbrushed plastic things you see on the photographs used in food chain advertisements. But my stuff is actually edible and tastes like food. It doesn't simply taste like good food, mind. It tastes like licking a fucking angel.
For the really good stuff I wear my Kempinski Hotel Cooking Academy apron. This is my badge of honour, my full body diploma, my Tier 16 dragonslayer raid armor. Nothing else. Just the apron. And unlike Jamie Oliver, I look like a man when I do.
The art doesn't stop there. I don't just provide oral satisfaction (WTF, brain?!) - my food itself creates art. This is where I would provide a picture of Claire's shapely tits, which, for obvious reasons, I cannot do. Actually, Claire wouldn't mind. I'm just not sure about the nudity rules around Blogspot. Or Claire's mother. So let's just say that a sight, which used to be nothing but ribcage and nipples has been turned into the most amazing set of boobs one could possibly imagine. Great food does that. Or large amounts of any kind of food, probably, but let me have this.
So we didn't go to the movies. We didn't eat at La mushy pasta or at Chéz dry chicken. We didn't order pizza. We went to Tesco. Fucking hilarious.
The whole thing was probably even more awesome for me than it was for her. Ever had one of those dreams as a kid, where somebody would give you a ton of money and tell you to buy whatever you want at the toy store? We did that. But with food. Buy the most awesome meat, no matter how expensive. All the fresh vegetables you want to work with. Herbs, spices, wine, go nuts!
Two hours and sixty Quid later, we had everything I needed for one kickass dinner. All the fresh meat, Danish bacon and vegetables I could carry. And a bottle of wine with a lizard on it. Claire is gonna take some of that stuff to work today. Not to eat it. To share. To show off. To show the world what I can do. Bards of future generations will sing songs about my cooking. Every drop of gravy they will taste from this day forth will have to measure up against my very own creation and fail miserably. Every single dinner, the very need to consume food, will turn into an endless, unavoidable chain of disappointments after this one, this incredible dish. I am the maker. I am the alpha and the omega. I don't fucking cook for fun. This is what I do. This is who I am. I am pleased.
On an unrelated note, I'm really enjoying those pills.
