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[terrycloth]

You Are a Werewolf

You're unpredictable, moody, and downright freaky. You seem sweet and harmless, until you snap. Then you're a total monster. Very few people can predict if you're going to be Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. But for you, all your transformations seem perfectly natural. Your greatest power: Your ability to tap into nature Your greatest weakness: Lack of self control You play well with: Vampires

What Kind of Monster Are You?

Ha ha ha, it's a fair cop.

Bonus Ani DiFranco Quote:
Some people wear a smile as a disguise. Those people who smile a lot... watch the eyes. I know this 'cause I'm like that a lot. You think everything's okay, and it is... 'till it's not.


I was screaming and swearing at Final Fantasy Tactics this morning... after leveling up for a while so that the rest of my team wasn't five levels behind the main character (whose level sets the level of all the enemies), I decided it was time to do another story battle. BIG MISTAKE. The next story battle was 'protect random dumbass', who's up on a rooftop surrounded by enemies.

He goes first, and runs to the far edge of the roof and hides behind a pillar, so that I can't even target him. All the enemies surround him and drop him to 2 hp. But wait! ONE of my guys can get close enough to use black magic (which ignores LOS) on him, and if I use the really *powerful* spell it'll take long enough that he'll get a turn and can run out of the area (he wasn't *totally* surrounded), so it'll blast the enemies around him and leave him alive. I mean, I'll still probably lose because he's at 2 hp and out of range of healing, but...

But no. He decides to camp out right there in the blast radius, and takes 182 damage out of his remaining 2 hp. GAME OVER.

I guess if I get a *white* mage (or preferably three white mages) in position to heal him, I might be able to actually win this on the second try, but battles you can't win without seeing how they're set up to make any reasonable team fail the first time really piss me off.

COH: It's fun, but I haven't been playing it much because other things are shiny still.
EVE: I'm getting kind of bored of it I think. I should probably cancel the account.
WAR: This is what I've been playing mostly. And probably will be for at least the next couple months, judging by my stint in WoW and EQ2, which as I've said before are the same frickin' game. Having a regular team might stretch it further, 'only just barely runs on my computer' and other annoyances might make me snap sooner.

PvP is only fun when you win, or at least come close to winning. This means solo PvP sucks. Scenarios are still okay when you're soloing, though, since you get plopped on a randomly generated PUG. The half-dozen quests for tier 1 Empire characters that send you into the PvP zone to do normal click-the-glowy and hunt-the-npc missions were a really bad idea, though, unless the idea was to give Chaos players free targets. Note that the equivalent Chaos missions aren't in the PvP area. Neither are the equivalent dwarf, greenskin, high elf, or dark elf missions. Just Empire Chapter 3.

Classes I've played a bit:
Engineer: Ranged DPS. Nice AoE damage in PvE. It's also good for getting high up on the scoreboard in pvp, but doesn't actually accomplish much. Single-target damage is weak, survivability is iffy. "Wow, Engineers seem really useless in pvp. I accomplish nothing and get killed a lot. Those shamans seem a lot better." Later, after switching to a shaman and facing engineers in pvp: "Wow, engineers really *do* suck in pvp. I thought I was just whining."

Warrior Priest: Melee healer. That should tell you all you need to know. If not, let me spell it out for you -- in order to heal, they need to charge up using melee attacks. They get a few (maybe five) free heals from banked 'fury', but in any protracted combat they'll need to be attacking in melee. They need to be attacking in melee *more often* than they heal, about two attacks per heal. This already makes them about 1/3rd as efficient as a healer who can just use action points (because their attacks are weak as shit, so they're only useful for charging up heals). Then, remember that everyone on the opposing team wants to kill them, and by wading into melee they're pasting a big 'kick me' sign on their back. The kick-them-when-they're-downer? Their heals have long cast times, so when they're in melee they can't actually cast them. FAIL.

In PvE they're okay, though -- tanks' aggro control works (sometimes), and you need less healing in general, so their heals effectively cast for free since they spend fury instead of AP.

Shaman: Ranged healer. Uses AP to heal. Charges up stronger attacks by healing -- 6 heals (and since WAR heals are heal-over-time, putting them on everyone preventively is the best strategy if you can use fast-regenerating AP to do it) and then one attack at +50% damage. Like saaay... the big beam of death which does like 500 damage base. In PvE, you'll be doing 5 or 6 attacks and then one big boosted heal, but that works just fine too. Lots of fun.

Witch Elf: Melee DPS. Actually does enough damage to actually kill another player in a reasonable amount of time (although they're pretty fragile themselves). Got nothing but damage, of course... in PvE, they *tear* through ordinary enemies like tissue paper, one by one, though. Pretty fun to solo with 'cause it's fast.

I've been doing Cultivation on my Witch Elf. During combat. I just keep the window open... it's annoying, though -- if you die in PvP it takes 30 seconds to respawn, which means that three times I didn't get to water a plant because you can't do it while dead. I got very little sympathy from the rest of the scenario party when I complained about that, though. >:)