I find that it's really hard to get a blogging rhythm going. I'll give this another shot. No holidays in sight to mess me up! So... back into the world of Istaria.

Things are back to quiet and solitude now.

Last week was sorta hectic.

I'm all for helping hatchlings on their Rite of Passage, but wow, back and forth every evening? One of them was for a good friend, so I can't really complain there, another was for a hatchling that I spent a lot of time teaching, and two more were their friends. All in all, I guess it was worth it. I was rather pleased to see hatchlings with at least adventure level 50 again. I've seen so many groups where the prospective adult could only stand by and watch as their bigger friends fought /their/ battles. This was different. They were in the fray, fighting alongside of me, doing damage, and not dying from the first hit. If they are reading this, thanks for letting me be a part of your Rite of Passage and reminding me of the joy and pride of mine. It was a pleasure and an honor.

As an aside, anyone who wants a quiet place to battle Kaa should try the shore north of the spiral. There are no undead mobs near there, so adds can be kept to a minimum. Getting there is pretty uneventful and mob-free too – take the Eastern entrance to the Western deadlands. Jump off the cliff before you enter the blight and head north/northwest to the shore.

Oh yes, solitude and quiet.

Strange. Lately there seems to be an influx of new players, but it feels... different. Dragon chat and New Player Assistance have been well populated but very quiet, if not silent. It's a little disconcerting to see so many names and nobody talking. Perhaps they are all engrossed in whatever it is they are doing, or maybe it is because I catch the tail end of peak hours. Indeed, the latter may be a factor, as the number of visible players plummets shortly after I log in. I wouldn't be surprised if those remaining fell asleep while crafting.

Ah... crafting. Well, not crafting, lairshaping. Thats what I seem to be doing the most of lately. I think it deserves a dedicated entry or two, maybe more. In other words, not now!

So, when will my next entry be? I don't know. It'll be up when it's up -- that's the only promise I can keep!

It is as if the frustrations I expressed earlier were heard by the gods and acted upon. Once more, I set out for the Satyr Isles, prepared to spend all morning to get the elusive essence of an undead wisp.

Luckily, I found a quiet spot... Well, it became quiet once I killed a the few wandering blights in it. I wasted no time in donning my Scale of Revelry and firing off a Prime Bolt at a nearby floating green sphere. It came closer and fell to a flurry of attacks.

I held my breath and looted it... Nothing! Ah! But wait! Another cursed wisp popped up where the other one was! What luck! In short order, I went through three more wisps and made off with some essence, just as the undead hordes began to notice my presence. Rarr!

Upon logging in, I noticed that there was going to be a “Valkor Adventure Event”. An event? Whoa! “This should be good!” I thought.

Luck was with me that Saturday, as I had the opportunity go get on during the time the event was scheduled. Friends informed me that there was a system message sent out right before I logged in. It said that Valkor was trying to ally with the Nahguk Ogre tribe. A quick check of the visible population showed a lot of high rating players on. Imitating Agent Smith, I said out loud “No players, your Valkor is already dead.” In came the reports that they found him (it?) ... dead.

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Greetings!
I suppose a short introduction is in order here. I've been playing on Chaos since early 2005 -- not old by any means, but not fresh and new either. So, what is life like for an older Istarian Dragon? Read on and find out!

Island Hopping
There are days when everything goes your way and days when nothing works out. Then theres days like today, when everything comes at you at once, demands your attention, and beats the living daylights out of you.

I've been charged with the task of collecting semi-rare drops off of Satyr Isle mobs. In particular, those floating green balls of frustration which are impervious to all damage except from that done using a special scale or talisman.

“No problem!” I thought, as I grabbed my pack of special scales and flew off to the West from Sslanis, towards Dahibi. I hoped it was just how I remembered it from previous hunts: put on the appropriate scale, find the wisp, pull it, and kill it. Of course, it didn't go that smoothly.

I found the wisp, found a quiet spot near it, and pulled. As the wisp wandered into the range of my claws, a Blue Vexator came up from behind and began to attack. I focused my efforts on killing the wisp first – Gold Rage, Silver Strike, and the wisp was... re-deaded. Back to the Vexator, and the ghost casting debuffs on me, and.. waitasec! Where did that come from? Now there is a warrior hacking away at me, a Kwellen smashing me, and something shooting lightning arrows at me!? No. not good at all! Not good! With a third of my health remaining, I took to the air and thought to myself: “That was close. Good thing they can't get me up here.”. As if my mind were read, a root spell was cast upon me, and I immediately fell to the ground -- in the middle of a seething group of blights and other undead. Can't move, can't fly, can only hop like a hatchling.

I hate the new aggro, dynamic grouping and falling to the ground when rooted.

This sequence of events – pull the wisp and get swamped by everything else, was repeated two more times before I gave up for the night. Tomorrow, I hope to find better (read: safer) places to continue my quest for undead wisp innards. Hopefully I will be in the company of friends so that there is a chance of surviving. If we still fail, at least we can laugh at the amusing orientations of our corpses.

Yeah, it has been a long while since my last post. I havent been able to log in much lately, and to be honest I was starting to wonder if I would ever be able to get any play time at all. This weekend, I found some time.

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You havent heard anything out of me for a bit for a couple reasons. The first and foremost is I am moving, so that makes it a little hard to get in and post. The other reason is I have really not done much of anything. Well, perhaps I havent done anything out of the ordinary is more like it. I have been on a Rift hunt or two now to help out Adult Dragons trying to become Ancients. I always enjoy fighting in there. The other thing I have been doing is working on my lair. I have 4 corridors now complete, and my hall is nearly 40% complete. A painful 40%. The next 60% will be worse though as I tend to save the stuff that requires more bits and pieces for last. I imagine it will be a bit before I finish that. It looks like everything else on my first couple of floors should be easy after that.

Nothing really big has gone on in game lately. There is a quest that people have been working on, but I have kind of kept out of it since the end of it just seems like camp-a-boss...worse than some of the others. Some of my guildmates in Obsidian Order, and some of the folks we chat with in the Order Alliance chat worked this weekend on a rope bridge that was kind of out in the middle of nowhere. When I logged off yesterday, they had it 75% complete. I have no doubt that by now it is finished and now leads people to a small island with who knows what on it.

That is it out of me for today. Hopefully next time I will have done something more exciting.

Logged on to a very quiet world last night. Guild chat was quiet, as I was the only one on, NPA chat was quiet...maybe no one needed assistance. There weren't too many people at the forge either. Maybe it's because it was Friday night, and some people have that affliction known as "real life"?

I bought a cargo disk, and headed to try it out. Nice! I was able to carry a heck of a lot more resources than before - which is the whole point, no? The fact that it limits your speed to "Steve Austin in super-slo-mo" is kind of interesting. Here's a picture of me with my disk, working on raising my blacksmithing skill. I managed to get up to 18 this round, which raises my smelting skill to 169. Not enough to make silver or iron bars yet.

After that, I decided to hit the beach again, go whack on some beetles. They don't cast painful spells like the skeletons, AND they don't attack en masse. I can pick and choose my battles with them. This is on the beach outside of Kion, in case you were wondering. I spent a while smashing them, and I think I've got the hang of combat, at least on the simpler things like these beetles. First, auto attack, then hit them with a power strike before they have a chance to react. Then I'll keep attacking until I need to Rend Armor. If they're being particularly stubborn, I'll use a Critical Strike on them, but I don't like to do that very often because of the long cool down timer on it, and it definately wouldn't help in the middle of a group of mobs.

On the way down to the beetle's nests, I noticed this interesting looking sight. I wonder if there's something over there (not that I can swim out, because Horizons doesn't have swimming, but it still looks cool).

Logged in tonight after hearing about some political stuff going on within the guild. To protect those involved, I'm not going to name names or get into details, but some very unpleasent things happened today, so nobody was in much of a mood to actually play the game.

I thought I'd take a trip back to NT, and see if I could do some exploring. There's a section of level 6 skeletons, that I avoided when I was 'growing up', and I thought that now that I was level 13, I could handle whatever puny damage they could dish out.

I was wrong. I'm getting slammed left and right for 25 points, 37 points. All kinds of spells going off that I've never seen before, and before I could even make it to the top of the hill, I was dead. That seemed a bit harsh to me, to put those nasty little buggers so close to the starter area. You'd think that there'd be more easily managed mobs that close. To my detriment, I thought wrong. And paid a very painful price for it!

Between that disgusting little death, and the other stuff going on, I decided to hang it up and call it a night. Maybe I'll head over to AC and see what's new and improved over there...