Nine Muses

Though I am enjoying the overall writing style and the character description quite a bit, I am slightly frustrated with Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself.  I am on page 128.  There are only 527 pages.  This means that I am roughly 20 percent done with the book.  I think that this is an adequate amount of time to have at least started in on the plot.  Maybe it is there and I’ve somehow missed it.  It just seems to me that none of the characters have any real sense of direction.

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It looks like Blizz have posted some further details on the Mastery system coming in Cataclysm.  As I tweeted earlier, I am intrigued, yet cautious.

Many of the changes that have been made since Wrath, or maybe even further back, seem to be designed to make the game easy mode.  At the same time, I find the idea of not having cookie cutter talent builds, or of not being told I’m a gimp for not choosing this one particular talent particularly appealing.

I don’t know if these changes will actually result in that, though.  It seems to me that the min-maxers or theorycrafters or what-have-you will always run the numbers and say, definitively, that this one way of speccing and of playing is best, and that there are few viable alternatives, if any.

I’d like this to lead to more character customization, but I don’t have much faith that it will.  However, I do think that Blizz often has a better idea of what’s good for the game (if not good for me) than I do, and so I’ll cross my fingers and hope that it turns out to be as much fun as they’re making it seem.

I don’t know if you, oh handful of readers, have been following the drama that is the Allods Online Cash Shop Pricing Fiasco.  (Scott Jennings details it well here.)  Essentially, the prices were exorbitant which cast a sort of pall on any enjoyment one might get from the game itself.  I believe, as others have stated, that the typical invested free-to-play gamer shouldn’t feel the need to spend more than a regular monthly subscription fee ($15 to $20) to keep up with the crowd.

It looks like gPotato, or their management, has heard the rabble rousing, and have promised us an altered more palatable pricing structure sometime this week.  As I’ve been enjoying the game, brief though my time in it has been, I’m very glad to see this.

I was going to make a short post just to say that I had finally earned that last point in Thrown Weapons and been granted the Master of Arms achievement.  Then I read a new blue post about the changes in stats coming with Cataclysm.  This piece in particular, under the heading “Going Away Completely,” caught my attention:

Weapon Skill – This stat will be removed from the game completely. Classes will start with all the weapon skills they need to know and will not need to improve them.

I guess it’ll turn into a Feat of Strength achievement, probably, but gosh, that sure feels like a whole lot of work for nothing.  Maybe I can use it the next time we’re talking about questing uphill in the snow both ways, back in the old WoW days (and liking it!)