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canadiandiamondWhat a glorious, glorious weekend it has been, indeed. And it's still Sunday! Ok, I do have to go to work and prep for a trial in the morning, which isn't going to be a long one but still have to get ready, however I'm still all :D from yesterday.
Friday wasn't that bad, really, work was a pain - I got sucked into a much longer court appearance than I thought I'd have, eating up all of my morning and requiring a quick after lunch appearance for a decision, then the afternoon was just mreh - but the night was alright. My sister came home for the night so we got to hang out a little, then we had a raid in LOTRO on E which was a bit messy but we got the job done. Key to note here, we did the first 2 of 3 raid bosses, as it was super late by the time we finished those two, and left the last (and hardest) for Saturday night, which is what we always do.
Saturday started off very well too. I woke up and called my cousin, who'd called me Friday after work to see if I wanted to hang out, and made arrangements to meet up. We hung out last Friday night and played some co-op Left 4 Dead which omg we have so much fun, it's ridiculous. And we play on our huge new TV at the house in Salmon Cove, which is nice to visit every now and then on top of it, hehe. But yes, he called me this time which rocked, and he picked me up around 1:30pm. First we popped into a local high school to watch a bit of a junior high girls basketball tournament - Terry used to coach basketball (he's a teacher) and one of his friends has a daughters who was playing yesterday, and he said he's stop by to see her play. It was kinda neat, I haven't done that kinda thing in ages, getting out in that kind of an environment I mean, so I enjoyed it too. We only stayed for a half hour or so, and then we called to order a pizza, picked it up (the high school is about a 10m drive away so we had time), then after a quick pop into Wal-Mart where I picked up two new 360 games - Borderlands and Kane & Lynch 2, since we were almost done with Left 4 Dead, was looking for L4D2 but alas - we headed to Salmon Cove. Where, after eating the pizza and getting ready to game, we found out I'd left the Xbox 360 adapter at home in Carbonear, whoops. >.> So there was a quick jaunt back here to get that, then back again, haha, and then we gamed!
We played some Left 4 Dead, doing the last episode we'd never tried before - each episode is like a mini movie, complete with a poster of your characters and rolling credits when you're done XD - and after about 2 hours we'd done all five chapters in it, and we survived! The goal is to make your way through zombie infested areas and, at the end of the last chapter, survive a massive surge until your rescue arrives and then gtfo. Terry never did finish the first two of the four episodes, dying after I was already on the helicopter/boat (the boat one omg, he was literally jumping for the boat when he got nom-nom'd, we aww'd and then we lol'd), but he made the last two on the airplane/AMV. Such a fun game, and I need to find Left 4 Dead 2 sometime so we can play that too. Not having that, though, we moved on to Borderlands yesterday, which we started around 5:30pm yesterday, and before we knew it, it was 7:30pm. We're playing it in co-op split screen mode and just, wow. It's a shooter/RPG hybrid, where you choose from 4 basic classes and level your character, there's even a skill tree to invest points in after you hit level 5 (had a hard time explaining the concept to Terry, kinda, but it's something I live and breath in MMOs and was so happy to see it there!). We chose the same class, the Hunter, as we both wanted to snipe and such, and we had it down pat - we'd see hostiles off in the distance and synchronize our sniping to take them down before they knew we were there. XD So much fun, omg, though I'm considering hopping on this week some time to level another class, maybe a melee one, because when we get into the thick of it up close we're running about and strafing and it gets kinda chaotic. XDDDD We'll see though, having a lot of fun with it, and it looks like this game is going to hold our interests for awhile.
After that, I came home and picked up some supper with Dad, and then settled in online for the night. We had the last raid boss to take out, if you'll remember, and I had to make some food before the same. It was a rough start, kind of - we didn't have nearly enough kin members signed up to do it. This has been a real problem of late, and last weekend there was lots of talk about throwing in the towel, or changing things a lot at least - recruiting more, canceling things if people don't sign up in advance, that kind of thing. But we decided to stick it out last night and scraped together enough people (12 needed) to run the raid, and away we went! It was also rough starting off, since some of the play styles of the non-kin players didn't mesh that well with ours, but eventually we fought our way to the top of the tower and started the boss fight.
Now, I'll pause here to talk about the raid a little bit. Yes, it's only a game, I know, but this raid... this raid has been around for, let's see, I think it's over a year now. It's been a pretty frustrating one, to say the least, and I've been trying to beat it since, oh, last January or February, I reckon, back on Silverlode on my characters there. No one really expected to beat it on the day it came out or anytime too, too soon, really; these things take time, as you learn strategies, teach them to people, etc. But yeah, we never, ever came that close in my other kin, and we tried, and we tried, and we tried, and we tried, and... you get the drift. To the point that, even after having a static group of 12 people to give it their all week in, week out we still couldn't get it down, it lead to some of us breaking away and moving to another server. I didn't move, not completely, but it's pretty fair to say I raid on the new server now and hardly, if ever, on the first. My wife and I rolled completely new characters on this new server, leveled them to the cap (65 currently), geared them out, and started running this same raid on the new toons.
So, last night, there we were, fighting the good fight once again. We had a rough time at first, mainly with people not paying attention after we wiped and releasing themselves - there's a way to have one person revive and rez all of us without having to release and run allllllll the way back up, which is a 5m+ run, but we just could not do that for some reason, which was frustrating. We have it 4 or 5 tries, with a few actually coming close - the fight is basically the Lt. of Dol Guldur riding a nazgul, and you hit them both together until the nazgul hits 150k morale, then the Lt. hops off and you deal with them both. A few times we got the nazgul down but died fighting just the Lt. Each and every time we effed up the quick rez thing, and some people were going to leave, but we tried it one more time. And... omg, we won. We beat the Lt. Which probably doesn't mean that much to most of you reading this, but it's just... wow. Such a monkey on my back for so long, for a lot of us, and it's now lifted. It took over a year of trying, leaving (effectively, anyway) our kin, making entirely new characters, leveling and gearing them, and... it's done. Words cannot express how happy I felt when the boss went down, omg, they should've sent a poet. ;_; And, not only that, but my toon ended up with some armour loot; I rolled 2nd highest, actually, but the person who rolled highest was out of kin, and when he heard it was our kin's first kill, he passed on the armour for me so it stayed in kin. Such a gracious, amazing thing to do, can't thank him enough and told him I'd help him with whatever I could anytime, because yeah, wow. So not only did we take him down, which was more than enough to make me :D all night, but I got some gear out of it too, holy crap. It was just such a thorn in my side for so long, but yeah, so so SO glad to have it gone now, you can't imagine. :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
Alright, I just had to get that out there, and woo, yay! What a weekend, seriously, just amazing. And still have today to let that all sink in, once I finish with work anyway. Speaking of which, need to get showered and head out and do that before it gets too much later, but yeah, just had to type all this out first. I was going to last night but after the post mortem chat and hanging out it was after 4am my time and I was just too tired, happy but tired, so I elected to just pass out for 8-9 hours and now here I am. Yay, great weekend! :D Hope everyone else had a great one too!
Friday wasn't that bad, really, work was a pain - I got sucked into a much longer court appearance than I thought I'd have, eating up all of my morning and requiring a quick after lunch appearance for a decision, then the afternoon was just mreh - but the night was alright. My sister came home for the night so we got to hang out a little, then we had a raid in LOTRO on E which was a bit messy but we got the job done. Key to note here, we did the first 2 of 3 raid bosses, as it was super late by the time we finished those two, and left the last (and hardest) for Saturday night, which is what we always do.
Saturday started off very well too. I woke up and called my cousin, who'd called me Friday after work to see if I wanted to hang out, and made arrangements to meet up. We hung out last Friday night and played some co-op Left 4 Dead which omg we have so much fun, it's ridiculous. And we play on our huge new TV at the house in Salmon Cove, which is nice to visit every now and then on top of it, hehe. But yes, he called me this time which rocked, and he picked me up around 1:30pm. First we popped into a local high school to watch a bit of a junior high girls basketball tournament - Terry used to coach basketball (he's a teacher) and one of his friends has a daughters who was playing yesterday, and he said he's stop by to see her play. It was kinda neat, I haven't done that kinda thing in ages, getting out in that kind of an environment I mean, so I enjoyed it too. We only stayed for a half hour or so, and then we called to order a pizza, picked it up (the high school is about a 10m drive away so we had time), then after a quick pop into Wal-Mart where I picked up two new 360 games - Borderlands and Kane & Lynch 2, since we were almost done with Left 4 Dead, was looking for L4D2 but alas - we headed to Salmon Cove. Where, after eating the pizza and getting ready to game, we found out I'd left the Xbox 360 adapter at home in Carbonear, whoops. >.> So there was a quick jaunt back here to get that, then back again, haha, and then we gamed!
We played some Left 4 Dead, doing the last episode we'd never tried before - each episode is like a mini movie, complete with a poster of your characters and rolling credits when you're done XD - and after about 2 hours we'd done all five chapters in it, and we survived! The goal is to make your way through zombie infested areas and, at the end of the last chapter, survive a massive surge until your rescue arrives and then gtfo. Terry never did finish the first two of the four episodes, dying after I was already on the helicopter/boat (the boat one omg, he was literally jumping for the boat when he got nom-nom'd, we aww'd and then we lol'd), but he made the last two on the airplane/AMV. Such a fun game, and I need to find Left 4 Dead 2 sometime so we can play that too. Not having that, though, we moved on to Borderlands yesterday, which we started around 5:30pm yesterday, and before we knew it, it was 7:30pm. We're playing it in co-op split screen mode and just, wow. It's a shooter/RPG hybrid, where you choose from 4 basic classes and level your character, there's even a skill tree to invest points in after you hit level 5 (had a hard time explaining the concept to Terry, kinda, but it's something I live and breath in MMOs and was so happy to see it there!). We chose the same class, the Hunter, as we both wanted to snipe and such, and we had it down pat - we'd see hostiles off in the distance and synchronize our sniping to take them down before they knew we were there. XD So much fun, omg, though I'm considering hopping on this week some time to level another class, maybe a melee one, because when we get into the thick of it up close we're running about and strafing and it gets kinda chaotic. XDDDD We'll see though, having a lot of fun with it, and it looks like this game is going to hold our interests for awhile.
After that, I came home and picked up some supper with Dad, and then settled in online for the night. We had the last raid boss to take out, if you'll remember, and I had to make some food before the same. It was a rough start, kind of - we didn't have nearly enough kin members signed up to do it. This has been a real problem of late, and last weekend there was lots of talk about throwing in the towel, or changing things a lot at least - recruiting more, canceling things if people don't sign up in advance, that kind of thing. But we decided to stick it out last night and scraped together enough people (12 needed) to run the raid, and away we went! It was also rough starting off, since some of the play styles of the non-kin players didn't mesh that well with ours, but eventually we fought our way to the top of the tower and started the boss fight.
Now, I'll pause here to talk about the raid a little bit. Yes, it's only a game, I know, but this raid... this raid has been around for, let's see, I think it's over a year now. It's been a pretty frustrating one, to say the least, and I've been trying to beat it since, oh, last January or February, I reckon, back on Silverlode on my characters there. No one really expected to beat it on the day it came out or anytime too, too soon, really; these things take time, as you learn strategies, teach them to people, etc. But yeah, we never, ever came that close in my other kin, and we tried, and we tried, and we tried, and we tried, and... you get the drift. To the point that, even after having a static group of 12 people to give it their all week in, week out we still couldn't get it down, it lead to some of us breaking away and moving to another server. I didn't move, not completely, but it's pretty fair to say I raid on the new server now and hardly, if ever, on the first. My wife and I rolled completely new characters on this new server, leveled them to the cap (65 currently), geared them out, and started running this same raid on the new toons.
So, last night, there we were, fighting the good fight once again. We had a rough time at first, mainly with people not paying attention after we wiped and releasing themselves - there's a way to have one person revive and rez all of us without having to release and run allllllll the way back up, which is a 5m+ run, but we just could not do that for some reason, which was frustrating. We have it 4 or 5 tries, with a few actually coming close - the fight is basically the Lt. of Dol Guldur riding a nazgul, and you hit them both together until the nazgul hits 150k morale, then the Lt. hops off and you deal with them both. A few times we got the nazgul down but died fighting just the Lt. Each and every time we effed up the quick rez thing, and some people were going to leave, but we tried it one more time. And... omg, we won. We beat the Lt. Which probably doesn't mean that much to most of you reading this, but it's just... wow. Such a monkey on my back for so long, for a lot of us, and it's now lifted. It took over a year of trying, leaving (effectively, anyway) our kin, making entirely new characters, leveling and gearing them, and... it's done. Words cannot express how happy I felt when the boss went down, omg, they should've sent a poet. ;_; And, not only that, but my toon ended up with some armour loot; I rolled 2nd highest, actually, but the person who rolled highest was out of kin, and when he heard it was our kin's first kill, he passed on the armour for me so it stayed in kin. Such a gracious, amazing thing to do, can't thank him enough and told him I'd help him with whatever I could anytime, because yeah, wow. So not only did we take him down, which was more than enough to make me :D all night, but I got some gear out of it too, holy crap. It was just such a thorn in my side for so long, but yeah, so so SO glad to have it gone now, you can't imagine. :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
Alright, I just had to get that out there, and woo, yay! What a weekend, seriously, just amazing. And still have today to let that all sink in, once I finish with work anyway. Speaking of which, need to get showered and head out and do that before it gets too much later, but yeah, just had to type all this out first. I was going to last night but after the post mortem chat and hanging out it was after 4am my time and I was just too tired, happy but tired, so I elected to just pass out for 8-9 hours and now here I am. Yay, great weekend! :D Hope everyone else had a great one too!
