Behold Ragnaros – the Firelord!  He who was ancient when this world was young!  Bow before him, mortals!  Bow before your ending!
- Majordomo Executus

I’ve always considered it a bit of a shame that the longer a massively multiplayer online game lasts, and the more it grows, the more obsolete its original content becomes.  Once reserved for World of Warcraft’s elite hard-core raiders, Molten Core now lay mostly void of players.  It used to take a raid of 40 skilled and dedicated players to assault Molten Core and ultimately kill Ragnaros.  Molten Core was the type of place that the majority of players would have only dreamed of ever seeing.

Ragnaros is old news now; just another long forgotten mob whose time has come and gone, the spotlight having left him long ago and now shining down on some frosty guy up in Northrend.  He still gets the occasional visitor, those seeking an achievement, and even those just looking for kicks and giggles.  When I started playing WoW, I wanted to see two things above anything else: Onyxia, who I got to kill a while back, and the Firelord himself.  Last night all the cards fell into place, and I, along with five friends, ventured into the original end-game.

Our “raid” consisted of:

80 Shaman (Enhancement)
80 Death Knight (Unholy)
80 Rogue (Combat)
80 Warlock (Destruction)
80 Druid (Restoration)
70 Warrior (Fury)

To spawn Majordomo Executus (who in turn summons Ragnaros) we needed to kill all eight bosses in the zone.  While none of the encounters were overly difficult for us in our state of overpowered awesomeness, I can certainly see how it would have taken 40 players to get through them back in the day.  Just reading through some of the strategies listed on WoWWiki shows just how much planning and precision some of these fights used to require.

Seeing Ragnaros appear from the lava was quite awe inspiring; in a word, he’s huge.  Our first attempt ended in a wipe.  We picked ourselves up however, and went right back in.  Our second attempt went much better, lasting about six minutes before Ragnaros was killed with all raid members alive and kicking.

The fight itself wasn’t anything spectacular.  Our level and gear advantage meant we didn’t really have to worry about his abilities too much, relying instead on a tank and spank approach.  Obviously the experience will never live up to what it must have been like for those guilds who put all the hard work into beating Ragnaros the way it was intended, but I’ll take it.  It was really cool to see something I had never thought I’d see.

While it appears that I’ve been able to transfer over the site intact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was the odd broken link here or there. The end result will hopefully be a more stable site, and while it may be completely psychological at this point, I think I’m getting a slightly faster response time. One thing for sure is the back end side of this web host (Host Gator) is much better than my previous host, having more features and up to date applications. All seems well so far, but of course it’s much too early to say for sure.

For those who may be wondering, my old host was Netfirms. I was with them for two years, most of which was just fine and dandy. Periodically however, especially lately, my site kept going down and having connection issues (timeouts, slow speed, etc). The flip-side to that, is I know of someone hosting their site there who is having no problems at all.

As for moving my WordPress installation, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it went. Working in the IT industry has led me to expect that not all things go as well as they’re supposed to, especially when you’re dealing with databases. Fortunately I just have a rinky-dink site with a tiny database (hey, it’s how I use that database that matters!) and things seem to have gone smoothly.

Out of curiousity, I’m wondering if any of my readers have any suggestions for a web host?  I’ve tried researching it for the past little while but I’ve found it very hard to get a concrete picture as to whether a particular host is good or not.  I’m looking for a “shared” solution; I don’t want to spend a pile of money on this, but I also have other needs which prevent me from using the free WordPress hosting.  Just leave a comment if you have any names to try.  The new host I signed up with seems to get favourable reviews and they have a forgiving money-back guarantee so I figured it was worth a shot, but I’m open to other suggestions.

Prior to Timesink, I had maintained a personal blog where I talked about various things, games included, but it was mostly about my family as we prepared for the birth of my daughter. I was always hesitant to talk about games there because I knew that it would be of very little interest to those that read the blog, in addition to my fear of outing myself as the geek that I am. In the meantime, I had a friend at work who would consistently bug me to start a gaming blog, more specifically, an EverQuest II blog. I call this friend “The Great Enabler“. Most of his sentences start with “It would be totally awesome if you…”, the key word being “you“. It would be totally awesome if you did this, or you did that. I usually resist “the totally awesome thing of the week”, but quite often, my will depleted, I give in. To date, I’ve been talked into playing the Mechwarriors clix game, Warhammer 40k, Dungeons and Dragons, and EverQuest II. I stood firm on starting a gaming blog however, and thought I’d get away with it too, but of course, given that you’re reading this right now, I eventually gave in.

At the time, we were regular readers of Aggrome, the first EQII related blog we found. When Aggro stopped posting daily about EQII, January-ish 2007, a great void opened up in my browsing routine, and as each day went by without a new Aggro post, the “Great Enabler’s” voice started to rise up again from the dark recesses of my mind. On March 21, 2007, I gave in to the pressure welling up inside me, and published Timesink. I had no delusions of grandeur, in fact, I figured the blog would be read solely by my “game buddies” at work, which would have given me a readership totaling three. Imagine my surprise when on March 30th, a comment was left on the site from a total stranger, Gaff, from the Trot Line blog. This was both a bit of a thrill for me, and quite nerve wracking as well. Someone other than my “circle of friends” was reading the blog. Soon after, I started seeing links back to Timesink on other blogs, and traffic to the site steadily increased, especially after a couple of my posts appeared on EQ2-Daily, and SOE’s Town Crier. Yep, I had hit the big time!

Now, a year later, the site has changed a little bit. I no longer play EQII and have started talking more about other games. To keep abreast of all things EQII, the “Great Enabler“, also known as Joe, has joined Timesink to post about his exploits in EQII. This will be a good thing for Timesink, as content should come sooner and more often. The downside to this is that the “Great Enabler” has started whispers of creating a podcast. NOT. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.

I still enjoy doing this blogging thing, and definitely still enjoy playing games, so between myself and Joe we should have lots of stuff to talk about here. Lots of games have been discussed on this site in the past, like Vanguard, Oblivion, and Company of Heroes, but EQII has certainly been the major theme to this point, and I don’t see that changing.

That said, there is one major MMO that has never been discussed here before…

That said, I know you’re dying to know, so without further ado, here is the D&D character I would be, which happens to fall in line pretty well with the kinds of characters I like to play in RPGs:

I Am A: Lawful Good Human Paladin/Sorcerer (3rd/2nd Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-14
Dexterity-17
Constitution-17
Intelligence-16
Wisdom-15
Charisma-12

Alignment:
Lawful Good A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. He combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. He tells the truth, keeps his word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished. Lawful good is the best alignment you can be because it combines honor and compassion. However, lawful good can be a dangerous alignment because it restricts freedom and criminalizes self-interest.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Primary Class:
Paladins take their adventures seriously, and even a mundane mission is, in the heart of the paladin, a personal test and opportunity to demonstrate bravery, to learn tactics, and to find ways to do good. Divine power protects these warriors of virtue, warding off harm, protecting from disease, healing, and guarding against fear. The paladin can also direct this power to help others, healing wounds or curing diseases, and also use it to destroy evil. Experienced paladins can smite evil foes and turn away undead. A paladin’s Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that they can cast. Many of the paladin’s special abilities also benefit from a high Charisma score.

Secondary Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Anyway, I’ve decided to give Akismet a try as I’ve heard good things.  The reason I never tried it in the past was because it needed a WordPress.com API key, which required creating an account and blog on WordPress.com.  I prefer to use my own host so never bothered, but now I see you can create a WordPress account and specify a user account only, no blog.   So, I’ll give this a try for the next while, and sift through the spam logs and try to find any legit comments.  Sorry to those who may have had their comments eaten, I wasn’t shunning you!

As an aside, wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where you didn’t need things like spam filters, firewalls, and virus scanners?

For those with bookmarks or links, please update accordingly.  In the meantime, there may be some linkage hiccups for the next day or so, as I hunt down any references to the old address.

Regardless, here I am.  My aim for this blog is to discuss the game(s) that I’m playing at the time of writing.  For the immediate future, that means Everquest 2.  I really like the idea of using the blog to follow my in game characters quests and progress, so that’s what I’ll do for the immediate future.  One of my first posts will be an introduction to my main EQ2 character and my alts.  Where I go from there is left to be determined.

I can’t promise daily updates, but I’ll sure as heck try.  In the next few days I’ll try and find the time to create my own style/theme for the site.  I’m not putting a high priority on that however, as content is king, or so they say.

Welcome to Timesink!