Atomic Playboy

My hunter in World of Warcraft finally hit level 60, the max level in the game. So now I’ve finished the game. Time to play something else.

Or not. One might even say that the real game starts now, with the endgame content opening up for me. Tomorrow I’m going on my first Molten Core run, for some hot action. Since I’m a bit poorly equipped it might be very hot indeed, I could use more fire resistance items.

There’s really lots of stuff to do when you hit level 60. Apart from the obvious Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Zul’Gurrub runs, you can participate in battlegrounds to gain faction reputation and get cool stuff.

…well, that was pretty much it. But it’s not like that is something you do over a weekend. I wrote a long list of various equipment I’d like to get now that I’m 60, and that will keep me busy for a good long while.

I play a hunter, and we’re a pretty special class. We’re focusing on long-range damage with bows and guns, and have a tamed animal who does the close quarters battling for us (if things go as intended). I’m not as flashy in combat as the fireballs and pyrotechnics a mage slings, but I do a steady stream of damage instead of high bursts of damage like mages do.

And having a pet can be a great advantage; the pet can keep one enemy tied down while I deal with another one. My current pet is a Stranglethorn tigress.

Her name is Pinky.

World of Warcraft: The Board Game. I’ll probably end up buying that, I’m a sucker for board games.

Dystopia was finally released the other day, after about two years in development. So far it’s just a demo with a single map, but it still rocks.

Dystopia is a multiplayer mod for Half-Life 2 that takes elements from Starsiege: Tribes, Deus Ex and some cyberpunk and tosses it all into a blender. The result is an objective-based game where two teams, the Punks and the Corp Mercs fight against each other by taking over or defending objectives.

There are three armor classes for both teams, the standard light, medium and heavy, each class with its own set of available weapons. You’re equipped with a melee weapon, a light machine pistol and a heavy weapon of your own choosing. Then you get to the really interesting part: the implants.

Each armor class has a certain amount of slots for implants (think equipment) that give you certain abilities — thermal vision, stealth suit, sound wave triangulator, a cortex bomb… These all draw energy when activated, which replenishes slowly over time when no implants are running.

The most interesting implant is the Cyberdeck, which allows you to jack into cyberspace terminals. When you do this you enter a Tron-like world where you can hack items that affect the real world — open and close doors to help your team or restrict the other team, reprogram defense turrets to fire on the other team, and other stuff.

The fighting takes place in both cyberspace and the real world, and sometimes it takes a coordinated effort in both places so that your team isn’t torn to shreds by defense turrets when they try to open a door.

This is a great mod, and still only in its first beta stage. Future versions will include vehicles as well. I’m playing quite a bit with some guys from the Penny Arcade forums. If you see [PA]Echo on a server, that’s me.

Best description of IRC ever: “multiplayer notepad.”

I just switched my feeds to pass through FeedBurner, so you probably saw some duplicate entries marked as unread recently.

I’ll write more starting next week. Promise. I’m visiting Stockholm now, so I’m kinda busy here right now.