SWTOR Early Access and Other Sundry Stuff

So… It’s 2:15 pm in my time zone.  I still haven’t received an early access email for SWTOR, yet I was able to log in this morning at 7:00 am. My 1st character auto-joined my guild and everything.  I reserved some names for myself and tonight plan to actually go back in and create the characters’ appearances to match my ideas for the names.

Still can’t get over the fact that I could log in 7 hours ago and yet still haven’t received notification.  Too weird.  and yes, I checked my junk and spam folders — it ain’t there.  Go figure.

Some useful links I’ve seen:

Server List

Holocron Locations

How Crew Skills Work

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Even though I let my EQ2 sub go, it lasted a few days after the new expansion.  I logged in to check out the new look for Freeport.  It definitely looks nicer than it used to — better colors and lighting, no more dead trees — feels like it’s more alive.  I was a bit surprised that the “racial ghettos” were just plain turned off — I’d have thought that also would have been redone, but no biggie.  I got an email saying the door to my Mistmoor Crag estate had been moved, but even though I went to the inn it said it’d been moved to, I only found doors to the inn room housing.  Not that I cared much and looked too hard for it either.  I thought it odd that that door had moved while the portal to all the other specialty housing had stayed in South Freeport, byut. . . devs decide what devs decide, no?

Sadly, nothing really made me go “this is awesome and I should keep my sub going and log in a lot” so I have let the subscription lapse.  I may come back sometime and buy the expansion so I can check out a Beastlord, but. . . who knows?  I did love the game, and don’t know why it just doesn’t “have it” for me anymore.  Perhaps it was just burnout from having played it more or less exclusively for so long.

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On the Rift front, I’ve re-discovered the joys of the melee rogue yet again.  I shot up from level 38 to 43 in about 5 hours over this past weekend.  I had a bunch of rested xp, which helped, but I also decided to scrap the “melee ranger” build, since it looks like it’s designed more for level 50 anyway, and go a bit deeper into Bladedancer and Assassin as a hybrid.  I’ve seen variants on this called “BladeSin” or the cruder “AssDancer,” and thought they looked interesting.  At 39 all the base points for the 2 main souls were where I wanted them, and I started adding in Riftstalker for the Attack Power bonus and (eventual) healing on kill, though currently I really don’t need it.  Build is here if you’d like to see it.

It’s pretty much a single-button macro and the parses on solo mobs jump all over the place, ranging from 350-ish to 700-ish, depending on which cooldowns are available, hit rate, crit rate, etc.  Even with that dps being a bit spotty, I’ve soloed even-level elite mobs with it, so I’m pretty impressed with how much hurt it lays out.  The 40% poison proc rate plus Leeching Poison makes me more or less invulnerable to groups of 3-4 solo mobs, and I can pull entire rift groups including the nerfed “boss” of the cycle and come through just fine.  Amazingly non-squishy with that healing poison on.  Downside is the build has no range, but between RS’s teleport and Flash of Steel I can still usually close gaps pretty quickly.

Got into a dungeon finder group last night and tested out my Marksman/Ranger group build to see how it’d do.  Early on the tank had a bit of trouble with aggro, both with me and the healer, but once he got settled in the run went smoothly.  the overall zone wide parse wasn’t terribly impressive, but I still felt like we killed mobs really quickly and my parse was the highest ZW, so I won’t complain.  Got 3 nice gear upgrades from the dungeon too, including a new chest piece that looks nice enough that I changed all my appearance slots around and re-dyed all my armor to match it.  I didn’t get a screenshot for this post, and I’m not actually sure when I’ll play Rift again, what with the “New Shiny” and all of that, so you don’t get to see, but. . .hey it’s free to read and you get what you pay for 😉