Tuesday 19 January 2010

A Break From WoW Means More STO

Post Soundtrack: “Star Trekkin’” by The Firm.

Gosh, it’s been a while since I posted…  I guess I should explain.  My enjoyment of WoW has been in sharp decline (again – sorry Blizzard, but Icecrown just hasn’t done it for me, and chain-running 5-mans was never an particularly appealing alternative), so in my attempts to cast around for a distraction I decided to invest some bandwidth in the Star Trek Online open beta.

No, she's not a dwarf.  There's just something appealing about tall, leggy green-skinned female aliens.

Meet my latest time-waster, Lt. Commander Nuobe, my Federation-side character in the Star Trek Online open beta.

I’ve leveling Nuobe to L15 and a Horde, I mean Klingon, captain to L13 so far, and I think (despite having run into some quite amusing bugs so far, most of which will hopefully be getting patched pretty soon) I’d likely get my money’s worth from picking it up when it launches.

Fun Bug #1: In space no-one can hear you scream while you wait for your ship to spawn after zoning out of a ground mission.  Probably because you're too busy holding your breath, I guess.

I’ve stopped raiding for the time being (I let the healing officer know of my decision – fortunately they have sufficient healers that they’ve been able to continue in IC without me), and basically just log on to do transmutes and make cloth while I take my break.  Needless to say, I suspect my WoW posts will be few and far between while said break transpires.

However I’ll probably post a little about my STO experiences, as it’s proving to be an entertaining little timewaster (and there’s room to get into the game mechanics a little bit, from what I’ve seen so far – the documentation is pretty awful from my experiences so far, hopefully something else that’ll be improving when the game goes live).  It’s certainly a change after so much time spent with WoW, but with my dissastisfaction with my dwarven horde it’s come at a good time to have a solid chance.

Bug Two: Shades of Inner Space when your tier-2 escort materialises for your ground mission instead of your captain.  Sadly you can't use your photon torpedoes on the enemy captains.

Between the PvE-focussed Federation missions, the PvP-focussed Klingon equivalent, and of course the possibility of PvP between the Feds and Klingons there appears to be enough content (and with enough variety) to keep me busy for a while, and it might even be fun.

I’ve also been spending a good few hours playing Defender Chronicles on my ipod touch, and it’s a blast – well worth giving it a try, if you’re a fan of RPGs or tower defense games.

I’ve not forgotten about WoW, however – I’m planning on doing an update to my Disc Priest PvP gear guide after the next arena season starts, and I’ll probably also update my disc priest levelling series once I…  well…  do some more levelling of her.

So be patient, stay tuned, and live long and prosper.

/vulcan salute