I’m off to Comic-Con today. I missed it last year and we theoretically won’t be in the area next year, so my husband and I made it a priority to go this year. I’m not a huge comics person, but I wouldn’t mind meeting Neil Gaiman (although I think he’s talking tomorrow, not today) or the Penny-Arcade folks, or a handful of others.
Anyway, I’ll catch up with the comments and e-mail when I get home this evening.
(You can read all of Kaet’s adventures, starting with why I’m doing things this way, by checking out the series Table of Contents at the end of this post. Alternatively, if you are here primarily for juicy pet-related news, feel free to skip these bits — they’re optional.)
I had started writing these posts about my new Dwarven hunter, Kaet, in her own voice — in character. But although I enjoy that sort of thing once in a while, I just can’t keep it up for very long. Anyway, her limited knowledge of game systems design gets in the way of the things I’d like to say. *grin* And so I am spared that indignity — as are you!
I got an interesting e-mail today from a reader who let me know that my standard response about how pets with “caster” stats are just all-around inferior is no longer correct. If you hover your mouse over the Intellect stat on the pet panel, he said, you will see that caster pets get extra Spell Critical Hit out of their higher Intellect. And indeed, this seems to be the case. Hovering over the Intellect of various creatures (with their actual Intellect shown in parens) gave me these results:
The dragonhawk and the nether ray have caster stats; the raptor does not. But it doesn’t look look like more Intellect benefits the casters so much as their status as casters does — the actual Intellect score seems to be immaterial.
That title sounds … odd … but in fact I wanted to call attention to the interesting work being done by a hunter named Someone over at his blog, Someone: Hunter on Wildhammer WoW Realm. In particular, check out this post On Bestial Discipline, Go for the Throat, Focus, Byte and Claw…, as well as his work on the special ability spreadsheet itself.
I’ve been playing modern graphical MMO games for something like 8 years, and in that time I have learned a lot about what drives me as a player. I like having good solid direction — which often means that I enjoy the low levels better than the high levels. I like to have a goal outside the game as well — a personal project that I am working towards, like leveling a hunter with each pet family or taming every pet in the game. I like to make alts and start on new servers — I like the feeling of starting clean with no baggage or commitments.
But on the flip side, I get distracted easily — and once I have been distracted I find it hard to pick up where I left off. This becomes a particlar problem when I have too many characters, too many goals, all hung up on some minor snag that encourages me to leave this one for a bit and try something else and then I forget what I was doing and when I come back I’m all confused and now I don’t want to try to remember or deal with it so I think I’ll make another alt on a new server …
You see the problem. :>