Tyler F.M. Edwards's Blog, page 3

Song of the Month: The Tragically Hip, So Hard Done By

I’m going to see a performance by Lauren Mayberry tonight, so there’s a temptation to share more of her songs, but while it’s hard to argue there’s such a thing as too much Lauren Mayberry, I have already given her a lot of love recently (and always), and I think there’s something else worth drawing inspiration from.

Canada is currently experiencing a surge in patriotic pride following the unprovoked belligerence by our newly fascist southern neighbour. What better way to mark that than by honouring the most Canadian band of all.

The irony of using an American platform to share this is not lost on me.

I also made a meme inspired by this song a few years ago.

Song of the Month: JJ Wilde, Best of Me

Back in November, I made the last minute decision to attend a concert by JJ Wilde. I was a bit on the fence going in; while I like her music, she’s never really been a favourite.

This is the song that convinced me to go:

Unfortunately, while JJ and her band put on an excellent performance, the sound quality in the venue wasn’t the best (I genuinely think her voice was too powerful for the equipment), and I also ended up catching one of the worst respiratory infections of my life from the crowd.

According to my rapid test, it wasn’t covid, but it might as well have been considering how sick I got. At one point I had to go a liquid diet for several days because the coughing had ravaged my throat so much I couldn’t swallow solids. Weeks later, I’m still getting the sniffles now and then.

This is still a great song, though, so there’s that.

Gaming Round-Up: Wrapping up 2024

Time for another grab-bag on the games I’ve been playing lately, focused particularly on what I played over the holidays and into these first days of 2025.

This also marked my first few weeks playing with my very expensive and unnecessarily powerful new gaming computer, which I have dubbed the Thundercougarfalconbird.

New World

New World remains somewhat back-burnered as I remain unhappy with its sudden hard shift towards forcing everyone into raids and PvP in order to progress, but I did log in for my holiday event rewards, and I made some progress with crafting.

Originally I wanted crafting to be my main endgame activity, but the extreme grind involved put an end to that plan. Since then, however, I have occasionally undergone spurts of trying to level up my skills again, usually because my storage was full. In the past I had managed to max out furnishing and cooking, though the value of those skills is limited.

As the holidays approached, though, I realized that a number of my skills were getting close to maxed, so I made the final push and got to 250 in armouring, weaponsmithing, and arcana.

I still can’t make any useful gear, of course. That would require yet more grinding to get all sorts of rare trophies and crafting gear, to say nothing of the high end materials I’d need (and of course the mats for 725 gear are only available from the raid).

But what I can do now is make my own weapon and armour matrices, and that will save me a lot of gold on upgrading artifacts in the future. There’s also a certain satisfaction in making them yourself instead of just buying them from the trading post.

Saints Row reboot

I’ve only played one or two short sessions in the past few weeks, having finished the game months ago, but GODS IT’S SO PRETTY ON THE NEW COMPUTER.

Diablo IV

Diablo IV recently ran yet another free trial recently, this one featuring the new spiritborn class.

I didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for the spiritborn as a concept. It uses the same resource mechanic as the monk from D3, and while I did play a monk and even finished the base game campaign with it, I always found it a bit clunky, and I abandoned it for good once the crusader game along. I wasn’t in love with the idea of essentially the same class but with a new (and admittedly cool) Mesoamerican theming.

I think the spiritborn improves on the monk, but I’m not sure it entirely fixes the fundamental issues. The tuning is a lot better this time, so you don’t feel nearly as resource-starved as you did on the monk, but there’s still a certain clunkiness to a resource that doesn’t naturally regenerate but also requires an inconsistent number of builders per spender.

If you’re going to do a resource that’s not affected by time, I think it would make more sense to use more precise numbers. The spiritborn’s builders are all about three-hit combos, so I don’t know why they didn’t make it take precisely three builders per finisher. Instead it’s always just slightly off of that, and passive abilities add more uncertainty to your resource generation, so you just never quite get into a clean rhythm.

I think the spiritborn also suffers from the extreme homogenization of class design in D4. Almost every build of almost every class follows the same formula of a builder, a spender, and four cooldown abilities. It’s not the worst playstyle, but it shouldn’t be how every class plays, and it fits the spiritborn very poorly. Spiritborn clearly wants to be all about hit combos and resource-management, and baby-sitting all these little cooldown abilities doesn’t fit with that at all.

On the plus side, it’s a very aesthetically appealing class. The visual and auditory design of abilities is excellent, and I do think the mix of Mesoamerican spiritualism with martial arts makes for a very fresh-feeling aesthetic.

They also have much better character models than any of the other classes. I’m not one of those person who thinks all video game avatars need to be super hot, but all the classes in D4 pre-spiritborn just look… unhealthy. Every character looks like they have an eating disorder and/or the flu. The spiritborn actually look like healthy, normal humans.

Overall, I liked the spiritborn more than I expected to, but I don’t think it’s going to be the thing that convinces me to finally buy the game.

The First Descendant

The majority of my gaming time for the last few weeks has gone towards The First Descendant, despite or perhaps because of the fact it’s one of stupidest games I’ve ever played. I’ve put most of my thoughts on that into a column for Massively Overpowered, though, so I’m only briefly mentioning it here for the sake of thoroughness.

I’m not entirely sure right now when Bree plans to publish the column, but hopefully within the next week or so.

Heroes of the Storm

Not much to say about this other than I’m still playing, albeit sporadically. D.va remains my de facto main these days, insomuch as that term ever has any meaning for my indecisive self. She’s now my third most-played hero of all time, though it’ll still be a bit before she catches up to Tassadar and Jaina.

The recent buffs to D.va have only encouraged me to keep playing her. I don’t think she really needed buffs — I feel she’s simply difficult to play rather than underpowered — but I certainly won’t complain about some increased survivability. It’s good to see the game is still getting updates, even if they’re small.

I’ve also returned to playing Li-Ming on a semi-regular basis. Once a favourite, I struggled to relearn her after my long absence, at least in part due to balance changes since her early days. But I tweaked my talents on her (mostly swapping out some Magic Missiles talents for more Arcane Orb support), and I seem to have gotten back into the swing of things with her.

It soothes my disappointment over Diablo IV abandoning III’s story, somewhat. That’s one of the great things about Heroes: All my favourite characters are frozen in time at their moment of greatest coolness. WoW ruined Jaina’s character? She’s still a cool-headed badass in Heroes. D4 pretends Li-Ming never existed? She’s still kicking ass in the Nexus.

Epic Games freebies

Finally, I sampled several free games from the Epic Games Store, though unfortunately none of them quite stuck.

First there was Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. I loved hearing John Rhys-Davies as Gimli again, and it did seem to be made with some genuine love for the source material, but the gameplay didn’t particularly excite me. Is there some rule that survival games have to have the jankiest animations and combat imaginable? Once again it proves true that I enjoy survival mechanics, but not survival games.

Next up was Death Stranding, which I claimed a long time ago and never got around to playing until now. Based on its trailers and reputation, I was expecting it to be very strange, but it still managed to far more bizarre than I expected. At times I found the sheer surrealism coupled with the breathless seriousness with which it is delivered a bit unintentionally funny, but it’s so different I couldn’t help but be intrigued.

Again, though, the gameplay was the stumbling block. The vast majority of what I played was cutscenes, but when I actually controlled my character, the moment to moment mechanics were a bit dull. I wasn’t prepared to spend forty hours playing a mini-game to keep my backpack’s weight balanced.

I’m glad a game like this exists, though. It’s good to see developers taking chances. I might watch the rest of the story on YouTube at some point or something. Death Stranding may not be a game I enjoy playing, but I respect its originality.

Finally, there was Sifu. Like the original Mirror’s Edge, this is a game that I like, but which I simply suck too hard at to play. I’m pretty bad at this kind of combo-focused combat, and that coupled with an extremely punishing death mechanic was a deal-breaker. Definitely a skill issue on my part, but it is what it is.

The Secret Level episode based on it was quite cool, though.

Song of the Month: Lauren Mayberry, Anywhere But Dancing

Lauren Mayberry’s first solo album, Vicious Creature, is finally here. Overall I think I do enjoy her work with Chvrches more, but there’s definitely still plenty of good to be found here.

Has the Success of AoE2 Become a Self-fulfilling Prophecy?

While I also dipped my toes into New World and Heroes of the Storm, November ended up being a month almost entirely devoted to real time strategy for me. Aside from checking out the ZeroSpace demo, I also spent quite a lot of time on the Age of Empires franchise.

First, there was the release of the Arena of the Gods mode for Age of Mythology: Retold. As a reminder, this is the only new content for the remaster that isn’t paid DLC, and it was supposed to be a launch feature but got delayed.

It should have been delayed a lot more. The intention seems to have been to make something that combines the best of both skirmish and campaign play, but instead it’s the worst of both, with extra issues on top.

When we got the first preview, everyone took it to be a repeatable rogue-like style pseudo-campaign, but it’s actually exactly the same every time with no randomization or replay value at all. The “story” is paper-thin and a complete rehash of the original game’s story, and every mission is just a standard skirmish map with minor twists that rarely change how the game is played in any significant way.

The enemy AI is also woefully inadequate. It supposedly does get harder eventually, but the first dozen or so missions at least are incredibly easy, and the AI isn’t programmed to change its behaviour based on the “world twist” buffs, leading to lots of situations where you can just roll it effortlessly.

Oh, and you also can’t save mid-mission for some reason.

My expectations for Arena of the Gods were never that high, but I’m just shocked at the poor quality of it. I struggle to imagine how they could have done a worse job. I’d genuinely rather just play regular skirmishes because at least then you have full freedom to choose your civilization, opponent, and difficulty, and you can save your game if you get called away suddenly. I gave up out of sheer boredom before I even made it to the halfway point of the campaign.

Retold continues to be an incredible disappointment across the board. The Immortal Pillars expansion has now been delayed, and I can only hope the extra time pays off and they can finally deliver some quality content. So far Retold does not feel remotely worthy of the money I spent on it.

After that, my attention turned to Battle for Greece, the experimental new narrative-focused expansion for Age of Empires II.

I do think this one was a little over-hyped, especially by the community. There was so much talk about the quality of the story-telling being taken to another level, but it’s just like any other AoE2 campaign on that front. The voice acting is as hokey as ever, and the new cinematic mission intros are not meaningfully different from the old journal entries, still being mostly static images accompanied by a single narrator’s voice over.

I also think the animations themselves were pretty goofy, and it really took me out of the story. The exaggerated body proportions and limited motion kept making me think of the “virgin versus chad” memes.

The gameplay was a bit more interesting. Again, not quite as revolutionary as it was cracked up to be, but they did get a bit more creative with mission design, and there’s the naval revamp, which I think I liked. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it actually made me enjoy naval gameplay, but I did dislike it less. What was really fun was the super OP upgrades you got when playing as Themistocles, but I guess I grudgingly understand why those couldn’t be in every mission. I guess.

I did find consistency was an issue. The difficulty was all over the map, and I found some of the more “creative” missions could be more irritating than anything, especially those with limited economies. If you asked me to list my favourite AoE2 campaign missions, a lot would be from Battle for Greece, but the same would be true if you asked me to list my least favourite.

Still, it’s good to see them trying new things, and I mostly enjoyed it. I expect I’ll buy the Alexander the Great sequel they teased at the end.

Finally, the Sultans Ascend expansion for Age of Empires IV finally went on a deep enough discount that I decided to pull the trigger on it.

All the praise directed at Battle for Greece’s story-telling would have fit a lot better here. The animated cutscenes for the Sultans Ascend’s lone eight-mission campaign are absolutely gorgeous, and the narration is top notch. This was a real high water mark for story-telling in the Age of Empires franchise.

I did find the missions again suffered a bit from inconsistent difficulty and too many missions with limited economy or otherwise gimmicky design, but overall it’s a very strong campaign. I do, however, remain frustrated by its paltry size. Even at 30% off, I feel like I overpaid for what was ultimately an incredibly small amount of content.

I also tried the new civilizations, the Byzantines and the Japanese, which once again had me feeling that AoE4 is starting to repeat the mistakes of AoE3 by over-complicating its design.

The Byzantines in particular felt like they had enough unique gimmicks for at least two or three different civilizations. Between the aqueduct mechanic, olive oil and mercenaries, and a wealth of unique units that almost all have active abilities, it’s just too much. None of those are bad mechanics individually — aqueducts in particular are quite clever — but it’s too much for one civ. This level of asymmetry makes sense in a game with three or four factions, not a game with over ten factions.

The Japanese also felt intimidating at first due to have a roster comprised almost entirely of unique units, but it got a lot more manageable once I figured out most of them are effectively just buffed versions of standard units. I also enjoyed the bannerman mechanic and the choice of religion. It’s still a bit more complexity than I’d like in a single civilization, but it’s not too bad once you get the hang of it, and I ended up liking the Japanese overall.

It’s kind of a moot point, though, as they have no campaign content, and the skirmish AI in AoE4 remains FUBAR even after all these years. When I tried the Byzantines, the enemy seemed to keep most of its army next to its town centre for the entire game, sending out only small groups to apparently wander the map at random. Never once did my base actually get attacked. I can’t believe they still haven’t gotten the skirmish AI working at even a basic level.

I didn’t even bother with the variant civilizations. I still think the whole idea is dumb from top to bottom, and I wish the resources spent on them had gone to more campaign content instead.

And that brings me to the question in my headline. Age of Empires II remains the most popular AoE game, but I do wonder how much of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point as it’s clear the other games are suffering from a lack of development resources.

I feel like we’re caught in a feedback loop where AoE2 gets the most resources, so it produces the most content, so people play it more, so it gets more resources… Meanwhile the other games get neglected because they never got the resources they needed to equal AoE2’s momentum.

AoE2 is a great game, but at the end of the day it’s still over twenty years old, and after playing so much of it, it is starting to feel a bit tired for me. These days I would much rather play AoE4 or AoM: Retold, but the content just isn’t there. When AoE2 offers me twenty-one campaign missions for $20 and AoE4 offers me eight missions for the same price, it’s kind of a no-brainer where I’m going to prioritize spending my money. I like AoE4 better, but I don’t like it more than twice as much.

I’m worried that the powers that be are looking at the metrics and getting the wrong message. I’m worried they’ll see that no one is playing Arena of the Gods and people mostly bought Sultans Ascend for the multiplayer content and conclude that there isn’t a desire for versus AI content outside of AoE2, but I think there very much is. I would happily sink dozens of hours into those games if content of sufficient quality and quantity was there.

But right now AoE2 is the only Age game that consistently serves my playstyle, so I’ve got no choice but to keep slinking back to it until the other titles get their act together.

Unknown 9: Awakening Review

Unknown 9: Awakening first came to my attention when I saw the trailer at Summer Games Fest while waiting for the New World: Aeternum announcement. It looked interesting, but I would come to find the buzz around the game was very negative.

Because we live in the worst timeline, the overwhelming majority of this was people having meltdowns over the fact the protagonist is an Indian woman. But in amongst all the weirdos wetting their pants in terror over being reminded that brown people exist, there were some legitimate concerns about what seemed to be some fairly janky gameplay.

Overall, it seemed like the sort of ambitious yet messy double-A title that usually proves a commercial failure but which I often end up enjoying, and in the end, that’s more or less what it was.

Unknown 9: Awakening is a highly linear action game set in the early 20th century. You play as Haroona. Haroona is a quaestor, a kind of supernatural investigator who can access an alternate dimension known as the Fold. This grants her a variety of psychic and telekinetic powers that are crucial to both the story and the gameplay. Haroona finds herself caught up in a civil war between different factions of a secret society, and looming over it all is the legacy of the Unknown 9, a group of immortal once-humans who seek to halt the cycles of destruction that have dogged the human race since long before the history that we know.

Definitely there are problems with this game. My biggest disappointment with U9A was the story, despite a promising start. The voice acting is pretty solid, and I think the underlying backstory around the Unknown 9 and the cycles of history is very compelling. Fans of The Secret World will find much familiar here, though the horror and Lovecraftian elements aren’t as prominent.

However, the meat and potatoes of U9A’s plot are very tropey and predictable, and I found the ending quite eye-roll worthy. There seems to be a real trend in our media these days of trying to force big character moments without doing anything to justify them. Whatever happened to “show, don’t tell”?

There’s some other, small issues with the game as well. For one thing, I regularly encountered a bug where Haroona half-fell through the floor in cutscenes, leaving close-ups to only show the top of her head. This definitely has that janky AA feel I know and have learned to live with.

However, despite how it looked in the previews I did find the core gameplay quite a strength, and that carries the game despite its other flaws.

I was concerned going that the game was going to be very stealth-heavy, and it is, but I found it didn’t bother me. The stealth mechanics are quite forgiving, and you have a lot of fun tools to let you stay one step ahead of your foes, from on-demand invisibility to the ability to see through walls by “peeking” into the Fold.

What really makes this game special, though, is the stepping mechanic. Haroona has the ability to “step into” enemies, briefly possessing them. When you step into someone, the game’s action temporarily freezes, allowing you a moment to think through your next action. You can only make one attack before stepping out of an enemy, but with careful planning, that can still be devastating.

Early on, I found myself pinned down by two ranged enemies on a ledge. One was standing next to an explosive canister, but the other was a safe distance away from it. I stepped into the farther one, made him stand next to the canister, and had him fire his gun at it. When my step ended, the resulting explosion took both enemies out in an instant.

It was incredibly satisfying, and that barely scratches the surface of what you can do by stepping into enemies, especially later in the game when you can possess multiple enemies in a single stepping sequence.

It adds a very interesting new dynamic to the game because every new enemy type you encounter is not just a new challenge to overcome, but also potentially a new weapon in your arsenal. There’s nothing quite like walking into a room full of elite late game enemies and thinking, “All right, showtime!”

There’s lots of other cool things you can do, too, like telekinetically shoving enemies off ledges to their deaths, but in the majority of cases stepping is the best choice, in terms of both power level and fun factor.

My only major criticism on the gameplay front is that the boss fights are a total letdown. They’re simple 1v1 encounters where the stealth and stepping mechanics aren’t available, so you’re playing without most of your toolkit, and there’s nothing to do but very slowly chew your way through their massive health bars between spamming the dodge and heal buttons.

The good news is that there’s very few of these encounters in the game, but it is quite the unforced error. Why not simply include some respawning waves of mooks for you to step into? Why remove all the mechanics that make your game fun and unique during its most climactic moments?

I will also note that it is a fairly short game. It took me about thirteen hours to finish it, and I’m usually slower than most people. This didn’t bother me; I rather appreciate when games don’t overstay their welcome. But I know for some people it might make them think twice about buying.

Taken together, Unknown 9: Awakening is a game I would recommend, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for waiting until the next Steam sale to grab a copy. It’s got some very original and enjoyable game mechanics, but it also has some very significant stumbles.

Overall rating: 7/10 Worth the price of admission for the stepping mechanic alone.

I won’t factor it into my review, but one other thing I want to mention before I go is that the creators saw this game as helping to launch a vast multimedia franchise. Given its poor reception, that plan seems unlikely to continue, but there’s already a lot of tie-in material out there, including novels, comic books, an audio drama, and a web series.

I’m on the fence as to whether I want to check this stuff out. The premise of the setting is very good, so the potential is there, but the plot of the game itself was pretty weak, which doesn’t inspire optimism. The prospect of some actually good stories in this universe remains tempting, though.

WoW: War Within Roster Update

My World of Warcraft subscription ran out a bit over a week ago. Not because I am unhappy with the state of the game — despite my ambivalence going in, War Within is shaping up to be the best expansion in years, maybe ever — but simply because I’ve completed my main goals within the current content and would like to take a break and play some other things for a few weeks.

But now seems like a good time to provide another update on what characters I’ve been playing, as seems to have become my habit since coming back to the game following my long post-Legion absence. As is so often the case, what I planned to do and what I actually did ended up being very different.

My original thought was that I wanted to promote my new Dark Iron shaman to “main” for this expansion. Take her through the story first, focus on her when doing endgame content, and so forth. I also planned to play my rogue and my warlock to a lesser degree, and I thought about bringing my various other Elf characters to cap just to have them ready for Midnight if I’m still around then, but I didn’t plan to play them in any meaningful way.

Instead, I made the last minute decision to play through the story with my warlock. I regretted not spending more time on the character in Dragonflight, and it felt right to embark on the Worldsoul Saga with a more storied character.

Following that, I’ve gone full alt-crazy. I don’t yet have as many capped characters as I did by the end of Legion, but I have far more than I’ve had in any other expansion, and I think this is the fastest I’ve gotten this many characters to level cap.

The campaign was enough to get my lock to 80, so I decided to designate a character to cleaning up each zone’s side quests. My shaman took Isle of Dorn, my rogue Ringing Deeps, my new Timerunner paladin Hallowfall, and my mage Azj’Kahet. That wasn’t quite enough to get them capped, but a few delves, dungeons, and world quests easily made up the difference.

Alongside that, I got my demon hunter and monk to 80 mostly by doing Timewalking dungeons, for a total of seven level-capped characters. I’ve been splitting my attention between them evenly enough that I don’t think you could really call any of them a main. My monk, warlock, and demon hunter are currently the three characters with an average item level of 600 or higher, which is almost exactly what you’d expect based on my past history aside from the demon hunter taking Mai’s place.

I think part of the reason I’ve been so indecisive is that I like the current state of most classes, but none of them are quite a perfect match for what I’m looking for.

A real problem with the current class design in World of Warcraft, I think exacerbated by the bloated new talent trees, is that every spec has to juggle these fiddly short cooldown (10-60 seconds) abilities that interrupt the flow of your rotation. This has always been a part of the game for at least some classes, but it’s never been so omnipresent, and I really don’t enjoy it.

Rogue is suffering especially from this. Every rogue spec has these stupid little maintenance buttons you need to juggle, and they rarely if ever have any cool animations or fun interactions with your toolkit. They’re just “press this to not suck” buttons. Shiv, Symbols of Death, Roll the Bones, Between the Eyes, Secret Technique…

Whyyyyy is Between the Eyes a maintenance buff? How is shooting someone in the face a buff on myself? In what world does that make sense?

It’s especially frustrating because a key reason I got into playing a rogue back in the day is because they were a class that was about managing resources, not cooldowns. This is such a betrayal of the class fantasy.

Further salting the wound is that this is hardly the first time rogues have felt this bad to play, and it felt like we’d finally overcome these issues back in Legion. That version of the class was virtually perfect. I don’t understand how Blizzard forgot all those lessons. Making Slice and Dice a passive in 11.0.5 helped, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done before Rogues are fun again.

I tried switching to Assassination in Dragonflight, but now I’ve moved to Subtlety, my usual fallback when Combat/Outlaw has felt bad in the past. Unfortunately the current version of Outlaw is just unbearably clunky, a stark turnaround for what was one of the most fun specs in the game’s history back in Legion.

Once again, if I didn’t have such history with this character, I wouldn’t play her at all. The current state of rogues is dire.

In an attempt to deal with my frustration over all the cooldown juggling — not just for rogues but across the whole game — I downloaded the addon “Doom Cooldown Pulse,” which flashes an ability’s icon on your screen when it comes off cooldown. Despite the community’s insistence that WoW is unplayable without UI addons, I’ve largely avoided them throughout my time with the game, but something had to give.

I only played with it for a week before my sub ran out, so I was still making up my mind, but generally I found the addon to be an improvement, but an imperfect solution. It tracks every cooldown, including skyriding abilities and extra action buttons, which can be a bit obnoxious at times. You can tell it exclude specific abilities, but you have the manually input the name of every ability you want black-listed for every character (or switch it to a whitelist system and manually input every ability you do want tracked… for every character). It’s also an absolute mess if you’re playing a class that has cooldowns for every ability, like paladin, and using the addon really lays bare how much of WoW’s combat design is just about attention taxes rather than any kind of tactical decision-making.

Ironically, despite my antipathy for cooldowns, I’ve found I’ve been enjoying playing my new paladin quite a lot. I can only explain this as a result of the way the cooldowns refresh so fast you can pretty much just cycle through your abilities in a natural flow, coupled with my general love for the aesthetic of paladins in general and Blood Elf paladins in particular.

I believe she’s my most geared character after the top three I mentioned above, and she’s become my go-to for dungeons and raids, where I’ve mostly been healing. It’s been long enough that the hundreds of hours I spent as a holy paladin back in Cataclysm now trigger nostalgia rather than frustration toward the spec.

The current state of holy is pretty good, too. It’s more different from the Cata version than I took it to be at first glance, with a greater emphasis on weaving in damage abilities, but I enjoy the battle cleric feel, and it still has the things that attracted me to holy in the first place: a strong emphasis on instant and fast-casting abilities, the builder and spender mechanic of holy power, and high mana efficiency.

It is a bit weird how Holy Light is just directly worse than Flash of Light now. There are apparently some arcane combinations of procs and talents that make it worth casting, but I just took it off my bars. I can’t be bothered. If Blizzard wants to make my fast heal also my efficient heal, that’s fine by me.

My biggest struggle with this character has been settling on an outfit for her. There’s just some many amazing sets that fit the Blood Knight aesthetic. I also put together a nice simple green and brown set based on my backstory for her, which involves her being a ranger before she was a paladin.

One other factor skewing my choices this time is that delves have become my main endgame activity, and the mobility they require heavily favours melee classes. Considering how much dungeons and raids have tended to punish melee over the years, this seems only fair, but it definitely affects my choices on what to play. My shaman mostly uses Elemental spec, so this helps explain how my monk and demon hunter ended up lapping her despite my initial intentions.

One final surprise I’ll make note of is that I’ve had a lot more fun with my mage than I expected. Initially I didn’t even plan to finish getting him to cap once he finished the Azj’Kahet side quests, and I think he’ll still be a bit of a second-stringer, but this is definitely the most fun I’ve had with the class since he was my original main back in Wrath of the Lich King.

This is mostly down to the Frostfire hero talents, and mainly their aesthetics at that. Like most hero talents, their mechanical impact is minuscule. I just love the flavour of weaving together different elements like that. The visuals and the fantasy of it are so much more appealing than just flinging fire and nothing else. You’re such a powerful mage you literally broke the laws of physics and made something that’s both hot and cold. That’s just badass.

I also appreciate Living Bomb being made a bigger part of the spec again, and making it a passive saves a keybind, which is nice. The massive chain reaction Living Bomb explosions were one of my favourite things about playing Fire in Wrath, and it’s nice to see them again. Now if only it still triggered Hot Streak…

I’m not sure how many more characters I’m going to end up playing. I don’t plan to get every class to cap like I did in Legion, but I’m not sure I’m done yet. Despite failing to click with the class every time I’ve tried in the past, I want to level up my Timerunner hunter to try out the Dark Ranger talents, and I’m tempted to level up one of my death knights at some point.

But for now, it’s time for a break, and my eyes turn to other games…

Song of the Month: Dizzy, Open Up Wide

After listening to the same radio station for basically my entire adult life, I got sick of always hearing the same songs every day and decided to make the switch to Indie88. Since then I’ve gotten to hear quite a lot of new stuff, and my favourite so far is this delightfully chill bit of pop from Oshawa’s Dizzy.

TSW Fan Fiction: A Trio of Backstories

A long time ago, before The Secret World found itself in the half-light of maintenance mode, I shared some fan fiction written in the style of the in-game lore entries. One told the backstory of my Templar, and the other provided some lore justification for my at the time new Elf character.

But those weren’t the only pieces of this type I wrote. Way back when I also did similar lore entries depicting the backstories of my other three characters.

With Halloween upon us and my mind once again turning toward the Dark Days, I thought now would be a good time to finally share them. In hindsight, I’m not sure why I didn’t until now.

The Fangs of the Dragon:

Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT – initiate Papa Legba syntax – RECEIVE – initiate mambo frequency – VOODOO IS A VERY INTERESTING RELIGION FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY – initiate the fangs of the Dragon – WITNESS – Nicholas Rush.

A man leans against a wall in a darkened alley in the bad side of Ealdwic. A light flashes from an empty hand, and he puffs on a roll of dried cannabis.

“Call me Nick,” he says, smile brilliant white against dark skin. “Only my mom calls me Nicholas.”

Ghouls and vampires and sorcerers and immortals walk past, and somehow the man with the winning smile seems unfazed by it all. Amongst all the unrelenting weirdness of the Secret World, he seems to fit in.

He steps away from the wall and fades into the crowd, his passing marked only by the clatter of the bone fetishes and ritual items hanging around his neck and wrists. So many of those chosen by Gaia struggle to adjust to their new lives, yet this man navigates the crowd like one born to it. Why?

For the answer, we must crawl farther up the branches of his family tree.

Nicholas Rush was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, but his genetic material remembers a different homeland.

Decades ago, his maternal grandmother spent the first thirty years of her life in the land of the houngan and the bokor.

The line between the secret world and the world you have known is not always sharp. There are those who live on the border, glimpsing the secret and the invisible while keeping their feet planted in the mundane. The mother of Nicholas’ mother was one such.

She left her home to find a better life for her family, but she never quite forgot the dark truths she had glimpsed in those sticky Haitian nights. For the most part, she kept her knowledge to herself, content to live an ordinary life with her growing family.

But time passed, as it does, and age loosened her tongue. When Nicholas was a boy, every visit with her, every family gathering at the winter solstice and every celebration of the anniversary of his birth, would eventually lead to her expounding upon vodou, zombies, baka, and loa.

The boy never listened, dismissing her stories as the tall tales of a bored old woman. His grandmother shuffled off her mortal coil, the requisite tears were shed, and life continued apace.

Initiate the dark days.

The Dreaming Ones stir. The Immaculate Machine’s alarms sound, and new recruits are drafted into the ranks of Gaia’s chosen. Nicholas Rush is among them.

He finds himself awash in a world full of more strangeness than even his grandmother could have ever envisioned. And only then does he come to the terrible realization that every word she told him was true.

A desperate search through his bedroom closet reveals a dusty box full of dustier books. These were his grandmother’s journals, left to him by a small line in her will, kept out of some vague sentimentality but never before read. He leafs through the battered tomes, finding spells and wards, folklore and bestiaries, rituals and arcane lore. A survival guide for the secret world.

It is but a drop in the ocean of the surreal he now finds himself adrift in, but it is more than many receive.

Thus, he has a leg up in the Secret World. He has a base of occult knowledge to refer back to, and there is something in his blood that finds this all familiar. The line of the bokor runs true in his veins.

He fits in. Insomuch as anyone does in our carnival of the bizarre.

Yet what you cannot see is the worry hidden behind his ready smile. How thin the rope he clings to is.

You do not see the long hours spent poring over his ancestor’s notes in the middle of the night, the desperate wish that his grandmother had been more thorough, that she had known more.

We hear him now, whispering into the cold night air. “I wish I had listened more closely, Granny.

“I wish I had listened.”

Knowledge can be a burden, sweetling, but ignorance is not always bliss. Poor Nicholas must endure uncomfortable levels of both.

The Wannabe Gangsta:

Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT – initiate poser protocol – RECEIVE – initiate Narcissus nomenclature – BUT IF HE LOOKS TWICE THEY’RE GONNA KICK HIS LILY ASS – initiate the wannabe gangsta – WITNESS – Josh Nolan.

Among your kind, sweetling, it is believed that there is a hard line between dreams and reality.

This is a lie. One of the many pleasant fictions propping up the oh-so-fragile world you nest in, blissfully oblivious to the ocean of predatory impossibility all around you.

For your limited minds, it is difficult to perceive the connections between the real and the imagined. For us, it is but an unbroken continuum.

Yet this can blind us. For us, your dreams as real as the air you breathe, and we cannot always tell where they end and your three dimensional reality begins.

Let us tell you about a man.

This man is the envy of all he sees. He is handsome, talented, funny, and charming. He is destined for a life of limitless success and popularity. You will find him on a beach somewhere, knee deep in females and Franklins.

That man is not Josh Nolan.

That is the man Josh Nolan believes himself to be.

As we awaken your kind, we cannot cast too wide a net. Sweetlings are too fragile, too unpredictable, to have their illusions shattered en masse. We must therefore choose carefully.

But so little do we understand your limited minds. We look for a spark, for something special, but sometimes we do not understand what we are seeing.

We saw the dreams of Josh Nolan. We saw what he imagined himself to be. We did not see the disapproving calls from his mother every Saturday, the rolled eyes that followed him wherever he went, the empty bank account, the messy apartment.

We chose poorly. We granted immortality to a creature who could not even properly navigate your species’ crude mating rituals.

Often sweetlings are terrified when they confront the reality of the dark days. Not Josh Nolan. The immortal ignoramus is shielded against the horrors by his own continued delusions.

He is living in an action movie, in a video game. He vanquishes monsters with a smile and a quip, caring not at all for collateral damage, for subtlety, for following the orders of his masters under the eye and the pyramid.

And when he is done, he imbibes alcohol and other substances, he dances and vocalizes and takes advantage of Gaia’s gifts to push his body beyond mortal limits.

His illusions cannot last forever. Sooner or later he will find a terror his haphazard demonstrations of power cannot easily vanquish. He will encounter horrors his wilful ignorance cannot fully protect him from.

Or perhaps his superiors will tire of his antics. The illumined ones keep their agents on a long leash; one’s indiscretions must be truly extravagant to even gain the notice of the all-seeing eye. But even they have limits. Already the woman in the blue dress tires of his leering stares.

To us, dream and reality are not separate, but to you, there is a clear line between them. We fear Mister Nolan will never be able to cross this line, to make his dream self his real self.

What is time to us? We stand outside. All things have happened. All things are happening. We see all possible futures, and very few of them look hopeful for Josh Nolan.

Let his example stand as a lesson, sweetling. The gifts of the Immaculate Machine are not toys to be squandered.

The Flame of the Dragon:

Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.

TRANSMIT – initiate the yin and the yang – RECEIVE – initiate cauterization protocol – FIRST DO NO HARM – initiate the flame of the Dragon – WITNESS – Kamala Lakshmi.

There is a duality to all things. Darkness is the other side of light. Hate is the other side of love. Tenderness turns to violence at the flip of a coin.

Once upon a time, there was a girl, and she was kind. The people around her hurt, and she wanted to help them. She gave anything to them she could that would offer comfort, even if it was only simple vocal sounds.

She found she had gifts. A keen mind and steady hands. She saw the ways she could make the world better with her gifts.

She became a healer. Long, sleepless nights spent studying. Days spent swallowing bile as she cut into cadaver specimens.

It was never enough. She wept tears of sorrow for all those she could not save.

Once upon a time, there was a girl, and she was angry. The people around her hurt, and she asked, “Why?” Why does the world allow for such pain? Why does no one help?”

She found that the world did not value her as it should. She was told she was lesser because of the configuration of her sexual organs, because of who she chose to give access to those organs. She saw a world subdivided by arbitrary lines.

She became an activist. Long, sleepless nights spend scouring cyberspace for like-minded rebels. Days spent shouting slogans and dodging rubber bullets.

It was never enough. She wept tears of frustration for the injustices she could not right.

The girl who was kind and the girl was angry grew up to become the woman who is in conflict. Yin and yang are not always a blissful harmony. Sometimes they are a screaming tempest, each matching each other’s fury in an endless struggle.

For all the time recorded by her fragile mortal memory, she had wanted but one thing: to make the world better. That was the sole common thread between the half of her that wanted to heal the world, and the half that wanted to break it.

Then we found her.

We have observed many reactions from those sweetlings we select to stand against the dark days. Most commonly we observe fight or flight reactions. When our chosen cross paths with other sweetlings, these reactions can be messy.

Sometimes your kind are broken by our revelations. They become drooling vegetables. Do not ask what follows.

When the woman who is conflicted found her fingers breathing fire, she gave only a Cheshire cat smile.

She adjusted to her new reality with frightening swiftness. Into the night she ventured. She found the nests of those she deemed corrupt, and she gave voice to the fire within her.

Anger motivated her, yes, but something more. Something primal. Fire is your kind’s first technology, and it awakens something childlike, something joyful, in your meat minds. The smile never left her face all through that burning night.

A few hours of impulsive fury. A poke in the eye of the society that had tried to break her under its heel. A small act, but enough to send out ripples, echoes.

Those echoes reached the ears of something ancient, something vast and terrible. The Dragon’s coils shivered in time to them.

Enter the agents of chaos.

They find in her something familiar, something they can use. They bring her into their fold. They never ask her opinion, but it matters not in the end. She would have said yes if they had asked.

Revelation comes in the rainy streets of Seoul, and the woman who is a tempest feels she has come home. In the Dragon, she sees kindred spirits. What she is told of their philosophy sets her imagination aflame, and she happily fills in the blanks of what they leave out, painting herself a picture of beautiful and terrible freedom fighters.

No longer is there conflict within her. She can heal the world by breaking it. She has found the cure for that which ails civilization, and it is the Dragon. A cauterizing flame to burn away the rot. Radiation therapy for a sick society.

Now, she is unleashed. The Dragon roars, and its flame consumes anything unfortunate enough to cross its path.

Hippocrates’ post-mortem disapproval is no concern of hers. You cut off a limb to save a patient. You destroy a society to save a world.

The tempest rages on. Yin and yang see only the harsh contrast of black and white, not the shades of grey where they meet.

As the Dark Days fall, the flame of the Dragon burns ever brighter. But is it a bonfire to ward against the darkness, or merely an end in flame instead of shadow?

Be seeing you, sweetling. By the firelight.

Song of the Month: Lauren Mayberry, Something in the Air

Lauren’s latest. In theory the album isn’t far off now.

You can really hear how she’s grown as a vocalist compared to Chvrches’ early stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I loved her singing back then, too, but it’s interesting to see how much more power and confidence she has in her voice these days. I might have said this about previous songs as well… but it’s still true.