LoL: Learning Alistar, And the Return to Normal Mode

Ah, conflict and failure. Both are things I shy away from. Both are key components of League of Legends.

It's one thing to battle against a computer--the computer doesn't have feelings that can be hurt (yet) or a self-image that can be damaged by you roflstomping it's ass. Which is why, once Co-op vs. AI mode came out on LoL, that was the only mode I played. From (I think) level 15 to level 22. I played several different champions and learned how to play fairly well...against bots.

But this was starting to seem boring and not challenging enough. I looked at all the pretty champions I owned (46), many of which I've never actually played, and formulated the following plan of action:

1. I will learn how to play each champion I own. Since I intend to eventually own all of them, this will hopefully mean I will learn how to play every champion with some level of proficiency.
2. I can only play a maximum of 10 Co-op games with a champion before I must start playing it in Normal games, against real people, on the Summoner's Rift map.
3. I must have at least 10 wins in Normal mode before I can move on to the next champion. I have not decided if I should also add 10 wins for Twisted Treeline or not.

 I will be proceeding in alphabetical order, which means I start with Alistar, since I don't own Akali. Here is a picture of the purple cow:

Why he is purply-blue, I have no idea.

I ended up dispensing entirely with guides since Alistar has had a recent update and many of the guides have not been updated to reflect this. Some have, but they weren't working for me. So I figured out what my problem was, which was running out of mana, and started from there.

My initial runes were health quints, followed by flat mana regen seals, cooldown glyphs, and magic penetration reds. I switched to movement speed quints after three Co-op games, because he seemed so slow. I also started building Boots of Swiftness to help with his movement speed. Once I started building normal games, though I would sometimes build Ionian Boots of Lucidity for their cooldown reduction.

I've been starting my games with two Fairy Charms and three health pots. It gives me mana for the spamming, which allows me to use my E constantly once I hit level 2. I then build into two philosopher's stones, which reduces my need to farm so much (I suck at last hitting, especially on melee champions). It gives me a lot of health and mana regen, which also help with the spamming. I try to get an AP item after that, either Deathfire's Grasp or Morello's Evil Tome. Then it's on to Aegis of the Legion, Frozen Heart, and if the game goes on long enough  or I need more armor, Guardian Angel Armor and/or Banshee's Veil.

So far, my games are looking like this:

Right now it's an even 50/50 win-loss ratio, which I find unacceptable. Games either go well or they don't; I either die a lot or I don't. There's nothing for it but to keep playing, I suppose, but I'm going to require some sort of winning streak before I move on to the next champion; winning ten games isn't going to be sufficient if I have to play 20-30 games to get those ten wins. I'm going to have to play this by ear.

Wish me luck! Also, pray to whatever deity you subscribe to that my improvement is rapid, for the sake of my teammates, if nothing else.

RS: The Fremenik Sagas

Runescape came out with the Fremenik Sagas on Wednesday. I headed over to try them out. Spoilers below.

First, I had to do a real dungeon to find a certain frozen Skaldrun. Since I had all the frozen floors done already I set my dungeon to a Small with a Complexity of 2, and three rooms into it, I found him:

I lit a fire by his feet and soon he was dancing a jig thawed out sufficiently to tell me he was a bit of a storyteller and if I could meet him on the surface, he'd tell me some stories, provided I could find the memories to trigger them.

Once Skaldrun skedaddled out of the dungeon (can't say I blame him--if I had to stare at the same wall for hundreds of years I'd probably have gone nuts too), a white bearskin obligingly appeared in the same room. It whisped to vapor as soon as I touched it. Seeing as I only was in this dungeon for Skaldrun, I exited and went to find his tent.

Skaldrun had set up in one of the nearby camps. I guess it would be significantly warmer than the ice block he'd be used to, but it was still a bit chilly.

I'm guessing centuries without good old UV radiation left him a little white around the skin cells. Anyway, he let me into his story of Three's Company.

Three's Company lets us see some of the fabled Signature Heroes in game for the first time:

Left to right: Ozan, Sir Owen, and Adriane

Ozan was your standard rascally ranger/rouge character; Sir Owen was a stolid, somewhat humorless paladin, and Adriane is a mage. A bright, witty, red/pink haired mage at that. They were busy chasing a criminal known as Carn, who is posing here with several of his pets:

There's always one not looking at the camera.

Our three adventurers stick it to the bad guy and then argue over what to do with the behemoth. I chose Adriane's choice, which was to study the creature and learn how Carn hypnotized it in the first place. I also think she trained it to be a lapdog once the quest was over.

I don't have as many pictures from the next two; I did the required floors to get the memories and then I set out to do Vengeance. First, we watch our irritable, doomed adventurers sniping at each other in the home room:

Front row, left to right: Ican Haz, Kay Thanxby, Lola Wut. Back row: Lotheria Seldorina

Ican Haz only used quickchat, and stole all the food off the tables in the beginning, refusing to share with his team. Lola Wut was snippish in general. They marched into the next room and proceeded to murder a bunch of guards, one of whom survives and sets out to kill all the adventurers one by one for killing her baby brother.

Thok it to 'Em was my favorite of the three sagas. For most of the time, you play a character named Thok who slaughters his way through a dungeon on a quest to find help for his injured older brother. His special attack seems to change every time it's used, and the dungeons are all labeled with how Thok sees them:

Don't mind the edges, its an artifact of fast image processing.

Thok bullies a prayer door into opening without having the prerequisite prayer level, and screams "Chaaaarge!" alot. He defeats a Warped Gulega for the Pretty Lady:

Not pictured: Pretty Lady

They were all enjoyable, and a nice bit of Dungeoneering XP. I decided to do some more dungeons on my own so I can reset my prestige. It's a nice change from doing Barbarian Assault to fill my penance horn for mining.

I'm a Monster...Rawr

WARNING: Untranslated nerdspeak ahead.

As LOML could tell you (sadly shaking his head at my eccentricities), I like playing monstrous, odd, or just plain weird characters when I play roleplaying games. I also lean towards characters that don't depend on dice to do things during combat as my luck seems to roll towards the low end of the scale. Probably the weirdest character I managed to play was a Dracotaur sorcerer in a D&D 3.5 game...said sorcerer was male, shamelessly hit on the half-black-dragon female in the game, and had a consort who was half fae, half centaur, and they made little mutant faedracotaur babies.

Close runner up is probably the Dhamphyr changeling cleric of the Raven Queen I played in my last 4.0 game...

And then there was the Goliath bard...

I have an affinity for the unexpected, which probably explains why I like Terry Pratchett so much--the world suddenly looks fresh, and curious, and exciting if you take the absolute value of something and then flip it. I have all the sophistication of a lead brick being dropped from a great height, and deeply involved layers of intrigue make me want to grab a hefty-sized weapon to hack through the layers of BS...

It might be due to my upbringing, but I really prefer the world to exist in clear-drawn lines of good and evil, right and wrong, This-Person-Deserves-an-Ass-Whipping and This-Person-Does-Not-Deserve-an-Ass-Whipping. Even after growing up and finding out that most people didn't even try to be the person they wanted other people to think they were, I still try to live a life as an open book. Admittedly, you might have to turn several pages and the font's really big and I tend to snap on your fingers if you spill stuff on me...

Who am I kidding? I highly suspect everyone wants to think they are special in some way so they don't have to face the fact they are horribly ordinary, and I suspect myself of being the same way. And then I am faced with a awesome example of human stupidity, and I hope to God I'm not that idiotic. I feel like an alien when I make small talk to people and find that those people seem more at their ease around me because I did so. Some days when I was still working in the school library a little switch would turn on/off in my head and suddenly every other person looked alien/skeletal/put together weirdly and I have to concentrate so that spoken English doesn't devolve into a string of random syllables.

Has the How to be Human for Dummies book been written yet?

What I've Been Doing on Runescape

It's been awhile since I've done a Runescape post, but that doesn't mean I haven't been playing.

The big thing that I've been doing (and that I'm quite glad to have behind me) is getting all the Livid Farm spells:

I also made 94 farming, thanks in large part to Livid Farm:

Also 90 crafting:

So now that I'm done with Livid Farm (thank Guthix), I have returned to doing slayer with a bit of a vengeance.

With a bit of Herblore Habitat mixed in. Good times, good times.

I've Done It...

I've done gone and graduated. That's a Bachelor of Science in Geology for yours truly.

My education hasn't gone quite how I've wanted it to go--but that appears to be life for me. I thought I'd get degrees in Astronomy and Physics and a minor in computer science, but the financial aid ran out and it was a case of getting a degree or else.

What will I do next? Find a job so I can live in a house and eat food while LOML continues getting his AA, apply for grad school for planetary science and hopefully continue this getting educated business.

As far as for the day after graduation, I intend to sleep until the sun is well into the sky and then, until I find a job, I will clean house, sort the bajillion Magic cards that I suspect are breeding as fast as the cockroaches, play Runescape, get better at LoL and tennis, and...

I suspect I will not run out of things to do.

8 Realms Beta

I actually got into the 8 Realms beta, done by the makers of Runescape, which is the first time I've been in the beta of any game, so it is a new experience. Also, this is my first time playing a "social strategy" game. Sadly, I've only taken one picture of the in-game image, but here it is:

This is my first settlement in the Ancient Age. It looks quite different now (for one I'm in the Classical Age), but I can't take any more pictures on account of the server being currently crashed. It's happened quite a few times in the past few days and I've been reporting several bugs, but I guess that's why it's a beta. I don't get the "social" part of the game yet but I guess I'll figure it out sooner or later.

It's a good game to have open while working on homework or take-home finals or studying (like I've been) as it's not too demanding, for the most part. I've been a lovely strategist in that, when my armies get massive enough to cause a negative gold drain, I send them off to conquer some patch of resource and hope fewer of them return. Good times.

This game is a bit slow for my tastes, but if you play Farmville you might find this right up your alley.

Ding Dong...

...the bastard known as Osama Bin Laden is dead.

In case you've been living under a rock and didn't know already.

I don't feel particularly elated, or relieved, or...anything, really. The effwad got what he had coming. So sometimes there is justice in this world.

This, however, won't deter the rise of stupid, cruel people who consider human lives to be a numbers game and who will do awful things in the name of religion.

But it's good to know the good guys can win.