Day: December 8, 2008

More guinea pigs

Posted on by Nimgimli

Sorry for the lack of posting today. Was feeling rather under the weather and not up to writing.

Which is the prefect excuse for more guinea pig pictures! Which I know most of my gaming readers will roll their eyes at, but I did get a couple of requests for pictures of the two older girls.

Here’s the old girl, Isis, helping Angela play Everquest 2. She’s pretty happy to hang out in her “Cuddly Cup” (the actual name of them, I’m not being cute) getting scritches and being in the midst of things. Look up “nosy” on Wikipedia and you’re likely to find a picture of Isis.

Here she is on duty, making sure no wild carrots sneak into the house unchallenged. Isis and Mimi live in separate cages because Mimi’s youthful exuberance drives Isis crazy. We leave the doors and tops of the ‘cages’ open and the girls show no inclination to ever want to make an escape. They seem to really like their “houses” and are happy to go back to them after playtime.

I don’t have many good pics of Mimi because she never sits still. But here she is, pausing for an instant before continuing to squirm around in circles in *her* “Cuddly Cup” (separate but equal, these girls.) Mimi will be two in later winter, Isis is about four. So far Mimi hasn’t really showed signs of slowing down, but Isis is fairly sedate.

One of our favorite “games” is tug-of-war with this chewing stick of hers. She shows no interest in this stick unless I’m holding it. When she sees that, she gets very focused on pulling it out of my hand, after which she promptly drops it and ignores it. My considerable paunch is her favorite place to perch while playing this game…luckily I’m an extreme sloucher or she’d slide off!

First taste of LOTRO RuneKeeper

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been doing my best to resist rolling another LOTRO character since I have a passel of them in their teens and only one over 30. But the Runekeeper’s combat/healing system intrigued me, at least on paper. I’ve never been able to stick with a traditional healing class… I just don’t seem to have the mindset for it. But I thought maybe the Runekeeper would be different.

So tonight I caved.

I spent so much time creating him that I didn’t get to actually play much. But what’s really weird is that he has no weapon, except his rune. So when he melees (which isn’t very effective and isn’t something he should be doing) he’s just swinging this brick-like rune around. Really odd.

At the puny level of 3, I’m thinking this is going to be a pretty group-centric character, but we’ll see. I have 1 HoT, 1 DoT that stacks but takes a long time to cast, and a couple of DD lightning spells so far. It takes a long time to kill stuff, which makes him feel a lot like a healer.

Obviously level 3 is insignificant insofar as getting a feel for a class. But I just had to share the weird brick-fighting technique. I’ll play him more sometime over the next few days and see what happens after he gets to the teens.

At this point my characters are “born” with almost a full bag of freebie stuff! 4 cloaks, 3 Moria Coins, a Bree Steed Receipt, a decorative piece of armor and a ring of agility!