Overall, I like the game. It MIGHT just be related to the fact that I’ve been spending the past couple of months watching old Star Trek episodes.

Firstly, the menus etc. are obviously just copied from Champions, I recognize many things including the sucky auction house and the keybindings dialogue. Which obviously means that it has many of the same issues right off the bat — you can’t save keybindings between one character and the next; playing at higher resolutions makes the UI painfully small, but increasing the UI scale breaks a number of parts of the interface (the buttons that control my away team didn’t scale properly, and overlapped each other); the button to cancel your target is the same one that brings up the game menu (though to be fair, that’s a failing that even WoW still has), and I still have not figured out if there even is a way to use emotes that doesn’t involve navigating several menus (there’s an emote menu that lets you choose from a list, but trying to type that emote in chat just resulted in an “unknown command” error).

I do like the character creator quite a bit, though after all the hype I’ve heard, there was not as much customization as I was expecting. Sure, there are several dozen different types of ears to choose from, but what does it matter when the vast majority of them are horrifically ugly? I smirked to myself about the ease at which you can create night elves in STO, since there are long, pointy ears as well as extra-long eyebrows and face tattoos.

I rather like the character I made. You see, when I was a child, I considered myself quite an artist, because I favored the romantic notions associated with such people. But I have since discovered that in truth, I am a scientist, discovered that I am not so much creative as precise. Even though my career is not traditionally science-based, being able to use the scientific method to narrow down my understanding of some elusive glitch fills me with great joy. Combine this with the fact that my most cherished times in WoW were playing as a healer, and I feel a certain amount of serendipity that the Science Officer class in Star Trek Online is the healing class. I mean, it makes sense, because they’re the doctors as well, but the way this concept meshes with game mechanics feels very harmonious. The fact that I identify this strongly with the class probably means I’m never even going to THINK about creating one of the others, despite my strong altoholic tendencies.

Meet Lieutenant Kiryn Silverwing, though technically when I took this picture she was still only an Ensign a few minutes in to the tutorial.

I’ll finish this tomorrow. I’m tired and I wanna go to sleep =P

A most amusing thing just happened. Khoa tells me not to feed the trolls, but this conversation was just too amusing, and I really couldn’t resist.

One of my serious pet peeves as a warrior tank is when people attack things before I have a chance to. It means that I can’t build any rage, and things end up running around willy-nilly attacking other people until I can scrape together the rage to get them off everybody.

The scene is:

I queue for a random run (warrior level 47 now woot) and end up in an in-progress Sunken Temple almost immediately.

They’re standing near the stairs, and apparently already cleared half the place and were going up to the dragon section. Cool by me. I follow them up. We start clearing out dragons.

We get to Jammalan’s area. The place with the trolls who fear and turn into ghosts and chase you around (though the ghosts don’t seem to do nearly as much damage as I remember) and I was doing my best to pull the mobs back so that we won’t get feared into the rest of them and pull half the room.

But of course, there’s this warrior in the group who seems to make it his personal mission to charge straight into each group I pull when it isn’t even halfway to where I’m standing and thunderclap, forcing me to run up and try to salvage the pull… then trying to say that it wasn’t his fault he pulled the next group because he was feared. I kindly warned him once or twice that he should wait for the mobs to get to me before he attacks them.

Our rogue has to leave suddenly, so I keep pulling as our replacement feral druid tries to find her way to us. During the last pull, surprise surprise, the warrior charges at the mobs before they get to me and gets feared all the way into the boss.

I know I should have resisted, but it was just too much fun.

Replacement feral druid apparently ran into some dragons on the way to us, which doesn’t surprise me since Dreamscythe and his buddy spawn as soon as we kill Jammalan. Rather than stick around in this obviously incompetent group, he left.

This other replacement player left after listening to us argue for a bit as well — we ended up 4-manning the rest of the place because I declined the queue, I didn’t want to put anyone else through this madness.

He shut up after this and didn’t say another word for the rest of the run. Whether in a “oh. oops” or a “whatever, I’m not gonna argue with this noob any more” I can’t be certain. I was a little disappointed. I was hoping he’d put up more of a fight. I guess I’m a little bit of a troll myself. *cackle* I’m rather pleased that this entire exchange was still in my chat log at the end of the run.

Well, I don’t expect to be entertained by Star Trek Online for more than a month or so, but I’ve gotta do my proper research on the competition, so I’ve deactivated my account preemptively, so that I won’t get billed automatically next month. I’ll keep playing my alts until then, of course. I’ll probably preorder STO at some point soon, since I fully intend to actually buy it, I might as well get the goodies that most likely come with said preorder.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying my best to play as many of my characters as possible, flitting between my warrior, priest, hunter and warlock willy-nilly. I’ll probably end up spending the rest of my 20k gold buying epic flying mounts for another few characters before Cataclysm hits. For now, I’m trying my best to remember where my abilities are, and upgrading my gear with liberal use of Pawn. Who can be bothered to remember the relative values of crit vs. haste on four different characters at the same time? I’m sure there’s quite a bit of error in my calculations due to differences in level, talents and overall intent of play (I don’t intend to raid, after all, so that’s quite a bit of error) but I find it much more fun to just trust the approximate stat weightings on Wowhead and not stress too much about getting the very best possible gear down to a few decimal places.

A strange thing happened to me last night. My hunter was running Nexus, a death knight had gone AFK, and we were sitting around before the first boss waiting for him to come back. All of a sudden, I found myself back in Borean Tundra. I have no idea what happened. I wasn’t vote-kicked, it said “you have been removed from the group” and the run previous to that had been quite friendly. I was topping the dps meters, hadn’t said much other than helping out when people didn’t know which way to go. I’m truly baffled.

I left two groups today, both for Mara: Waterfall.

In the first, I dropped into the water to see the druid healer running away at high speed towards the hydras. I manage to save him, and the first thing he does is start spamming Wrath on them, and does not stop DPSing until the hydra is dead and I’m at half health. He then tosses a Rejuv on me.

Oh well, no matter, I don’t take that much damage anyway, and as long as he heals me when I need it, I don’t really care if he DPSes or not — I DPS on my priest as long as the tank is topped off, after all.

But when I ran towards the next pull of dimetrodons, and he’s standing right next to me, I inform him that he needs to stand farther away, because they silence.

He doesn’t move at all. He doesn’t cast anything. He doesn’t even jump around like an idiot. We kill the dimetrodons, and the rock elementals path in around that time, and we kill them too. I barely take any damage, so after all this I’m only around half health. The healer still isn’t moving. I take a step, and notice that he apparently has me on follow.

So I stand there, and say in party chat “I’m not moving until I know my healer is paying attention.” Though I couldn’t vote kick him, we only just started. Rather than wait the ten minutes it would take for the debuff to wear off so that we could find a healer who was actually present, I left the group and read some blogs for a while.

But my second story here is much more juicy.

Things went quite smoothly until we killed the first boss, Landslide. As I was walking down the slope to continue on, I noticed that the healer and two of the DPS had taken a LOT of damage, and were reduced to around 40% health. The healer was topping them off, and I realized as I continued running down that they had jumped off. I got to the next pull (with the warlock following me instead) with the priest, rogue and hunter still back where they had jumped.

The priest caught up with me and I pulled the next group, while asking them why they had jumped, trying to figure out the logic there. I noticed after I pulled that the rogue and hunter were somewhere else, getting themselves killed as they most likely aggroed something by running down the wrong path on the way back.

When I questioned the fact that it took them LONGER to get there because they jumped, the priest told me to “shut up and tank”. I did not feel like I had to put up with that kind of abuse, so I left.

While I was in the middle of writing this blog post, I got a very angry whisper. I can only imagine what must have happened after I left to prompt that kind of response.

This is the reason I keep the profanity filter turned on.

Today’s failpug story comes from Zul’Farrak, and my warrior.

The instant I load the place, the hunter, named Hëädhünter (I repeat his name here, as I repeat the names of all people who piss me off spectacularly), said that if “Sang” dropped, he gets it. I was this () close to asking him what a hunter would want with a parry sword, but since I didn’t particularly want it myself due to my heirloom sword, I made a weird face at the screen and let him alone. (After looking at his armory later, I have to ask “why do so many otherwise more or less smartly-geared hunters go after such idiotic melee weapons?”)

He then proceeded to demand Might. The adorable dwarf priestess pointed out to him that there was no paladin in the group. I pointed out to him that he already had Battle Shout, which is the same thing. The priestess and I became fast friends over the next few pulls.

Behold! Actual screenshots! I’ll try to get more of these.

We got to that intersection where you can choose to go left to Gahz’rilla or right to Antu’sul, and for the past few pulls, the hunter has been pretty much standing around doing nothing, with an “I’ll just wait for them to kill stuff and I won’t have to do any work!” apparent mentality. The pulls around there were tricky, and we kept aggroing a few more, and a few more, and a few more. The rogue ended up aggroing a pull over on the left path, and we headed that way to clear them out. The hunter was facing away from us, and started actually yelling at us to follow him.

I had attempted to vote kick him, but it wouldn’t let me because he had run off towards the boss he wanted to fight OMGRITENAO and got us in combat again, and for SOME REASON it won’t let you vote kick someone while in combat.

(And yes, I do keep the profanity filter turned on. I believe that profanity should be saved for times when it is really important, or it’ll lose its impact and you’ll have to keep inventing new ones — I see no reason why I should have to look at other people’s typed profanity if I can so easily avoid it.)

Our replacement was a very nice feral druid who ended up popping out of form to hurricane quite frequently due to how many mobs I was normally pulling. The priestess decided to pop her dual spec and spend the rest of the run as shadow, since I didn’t really need to be healed anyway, and it went wonderfully.

The stairs, yet again, went as a “pull everything at the bottom, wait for it to respawn, then AoE it down a second time” and I wonder if this will become standard procedure in my groups from now on. I could get used to something like that, it’s a serious rush to tank two dozen mobs at once, even if they are nonelites.

After the stairs though, we sent the goblin off to blast open the door (wowhead informs me that Weegli Blastfuse is the only mob in the game with “stfu” in his name) I talk to Sergeant Bly to start the fight. People are like, does anyone have the quest? No? Why are we killing them?

And I had to stop and think to myself… doesn’t he drop a blue or something? I could have sworn he was considered a boss fight. I could have sworn one of my alts got a blue polearm from him once. (Though looking it up now, we probably just forgot to loot the shadowpriest until after we fought Bly and I just assumed it dropped from him) I’ve never come to Zul’Farrak and NOT killed him. Poor Sergeant Bly. I betray him every time I come here and I don’t even know why I’m doing it any more!

(Not that I ever knew, apart from “he’s the leader of a strange cross-faction party of adventurers and the goblins wanted me to get something from him”)

We did wipe on Gahz’rilla, but that was due to my own ego, the waves of Shadow Hunters that aggroed on me because I was confident that we didn’t NEED to clear out the rest of the mobs nearby. I spent less time tanking that fight and more time either frozen in a solid block of ice or hopping on the ground as a frog. Lesson learned.