Double Vision

First, a quick movie review. Terminator: Salvation sucked. Connor meets his pimply-faced “father” Reese. Oh, and some robots fight. There, hopefully I just saved you 10 bucks.

Ape said I should accept the time-travel hokum in this installment as I did for #1. But the first Terminator didn’t really rub the future stuff in your face. And IIRC, the link between Reese and Connor isn’t solidified until #2. Even still, the action was quite fresh at the time and Stan Winston’s genius made it all work.

T2 worked because: Great music, great CGI, great action and there’s a Gatling minigun.

T3? I’ve managed to excise that dreck from my brain.

So, basically, no more Terminators for me. Of course, if the T:S DVD cut includes Christian Bale’s little “performance” at the expense of the sound guy, then I’ll buy it. Bonus points if the include the Halo machinima version.

Friday ended with not much Vana time, which was spent trying vainly to skill shield. Saturday I spent more time trying to skill up shield. Over an hour and only ONE full point. Clearly I’m doing it wrong. I even plunked down the cash for a Light Buckler (type 1 shield with +5 skill) that will hopefully increase the proc rate. I also bought Blessed Mitts for the Haste and MND boosts. I couldn’t get the pants because the stock was asking more than the 100k recent bids were suggesting.

Late Saturday, after dinner and game night with Ape’s ex, his wife and Ape’s sis’s family, I logged in at about 12:45.

For those of you who were not there, and believe me, almost ALL of GD was there, care to guess when I logged out? Almost 7am. Know why? Because while messing around in Windy, I saw a bunch of GD in the Rancor’s Den. I’ll pass on the obvious Star Wars jokes and move on to the reason. Aleu informed me there was an O-hat run going on. An O-hat (optical hat) is a pretty snazzy pointy hat for level 70s.

I’ve seen plenty of WG shouts for O-hat runs before but having only one 70, and figuring anything requiring 10+ people would be too hard I didn’t bite. And, I’d mistakenly assumed it was more for the meleers out there. Aleu, Yalto and Fal (and possibly others) had been going on for over a week about getting ready, farming triggers, etc. So I never really gave it any thought.

But as is usually the case with me, I’m up for anything that can give me endgame-like battle hardening and the chance for skillups. And hanging out with my friends as a large group is always great too. After the first fight, and seeing the first hat doled out, I realized I’d messed up.

The group, as I recall: Archer, Aleu, Yalto, Falout, Rask, Juilan, Feiht, Siloette, Drakhan, (Elvaan WHM), Tempest/Kadi, and at least three more. There was a Bard with Juilan.

The fight is with Hakutaku, a nasty multi-eyed jelly that loves to paralyze and burn. Aleu put me on Paralyna duty. Only Paralyna. This seemed odd to me and I asked if that was what she really meant. “Watch and see” was the answer. Clearly, casting Paralyna is a full-time job with this guy. I barely had time to do anything else between Haku’s frequent Hex Eye attacks.

The fight lasted close to 20 minutes. Things went pretty well with Juilan orchestrating the party setups and melee positioning. I believe he and his friend got their hats first and left. That took us to 13 (again, IIRC). We weren’t sure if we could handle the fight with just Archer tanking. But 8 fights later we had done it. 8 fights and 5+ hours /yawn

The first few fights went well but towards the end we started dying. Falout fell out at some point and we had to D2 him as he was too close to the roving Millioneyes. And Feiht spaced out for like 2 full fights. There was much talk of D2ing her as well but she returned explaining the baby had woken up.

She stuck it out to the end, and due to some lousy /randoms, she was the last to get a hat. Some in GD were talking about pulling out (it WAS late) after GD was taken care of. Thankfully everybody stayed and Feiht got her hat. And I got a Wooden Eye, one of 5 eyes needed for the Haku trigger.

However, there was a bit of unpleasantness. I don’t recall how it came up exactly but I think it had to do with the weather in some player’s town, which as they described, was “as cold as a witches teat. [sic]” Turns out Feiht is Wiccan and some discussion of that flowed waiting for the last Haku to spawn.

I was disappointed that some of my GD friends chose to make light of Feiht’s beliefs. They aren’t my beliefs either, but there’s nothing wrong with them, especially if they work for Feiht. And for the love of God, one would think a game where people role-play as various races, do fantastical battle against a menagerie of mythical creatures, and use abilities and spells from the standards of fantasy fiction would lead to a little tolerance and open-mindedness.

As I fell to sleep, well after the sun had come up, I felt bad for not providing a counterpoint to the discussion.