Taking a good look in the Mirrorworld in Runes of Magic

I've been jumping back into Runes of Magic lately. One, to say hello to my old guildmates and friends. Two, I wanted to play a bit more of the side activities that I never did. Honestly, more reason one than two, but man . . . I kind of fell hard for the Mirrorworld Instances in Runes of Magic.  

Mirrorworld debuted back in March of 2016 in Runes of Magic. It had a different UI and instance cadence back then, but in 2017 everything kind of changed to the way it is now in 2022.

Mirrorworld UI showing its plethora of dungeons

To get started, you just talk to a dude named Hagris Rya. He'll put you on the quest chain. Hagris then kicks you down the line to Aylin.  Once you have those quests from Aylin, you're good to go.

Up in the very left corner of your main screen, you'll find a button that opens up a pop up UI that will then allow you to teleport into a whole slew of daily "level 90" solo instances, but here's the thing, these things are going to be a little tough right at level 90.  That's when I first tried them and nope'd out of them.

I think the real reason most people don't play through these instances is that they overload your backpacks with an amazing amount of "stuff," and you're instantly like . . . "What the heck do I do with all this stuff? This is ridiculous!" That coupled with getting kind of owned right at level 90 probably left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths if they were anything like me.

"Moony" the wolf boss in Mirrorworld

Runes of Magic feels predatory ALREADY with the amount of stuff they cram into your rented inventory space, so getting a metric ton of drops from an instance feels . . . bad. You just know it was done on purpose this way, and that nagging feeling is a turn off. So, now that I've torn away the band-aid on every Runes of Magic player's boo boos, let's talk about why these instances are pretty cool.

Reason one: At level 100, these instances are kind of a cakewalk. As a returning level 100 player that needed to get his bearings for which buttons to click again, it was a perfect combat primer.

Reason two: The main yummy treat you get from doing these instances are called Mirror Shards. Look, you could delete all the other stuff these instances give you and be just fine because there's a vendor in Varanas named Forkas Garry who will trade you item shop potions for those Mirror Shards. One of the main things I used to buy in Runes of Magic was a potion called the "Big Angel's Sigh." Big Angel's Sigh is your 24 hour insurance policy against accruing XP/TP debt when you die.  Playing the game without a Big Angel's Sigh running is nerve wracking, and at high levels, that debt can be scary to work off. Forkas Garry sells these for 30 mirror shards. Done and DONE. 

For me the Big Angel's Sigh and the Golden Eggs to feed to my pet are reason alone to do these instances. Over just a few days I've already stockpiled 20 of these Big Angel Sigh. Outside of those, there's also luck potions for sale . . . if you're an item farmer, you'll want those.

Reason three: Every Mirrorworld dungeon hosts a boss at the end. Every creature in the dungeon drops a "heart" of the boss in the dungeon. If you get 50 of these hearts, you can "summon" that boss to give you stat bonuses while you play.  You don't actually summon them like a pet, which is unfortunate. It'd be kind of cool to have these dudes follow you around, but there is a whole UI built in the character screen to house your summoned Mirrorworld boss.  

You can summon two of these bosses at once. Each boss features different stats, but the real cool thing is that if you summon the correct two bosses that have synergy with each other, they give you an additional skill.

For me, I'm running Garsit and Tatuin. Garsit provides extra intelligence. Tatuin provides extra physical attack. So, while Tatuin doesn't really help me as a mage, the combination of the two gives me a new skill called Prayer of Destruction. Prayer of Destruction gives me a big boost to magical damage every 10 minutes.  Well, it will eventually give me a big boost to magical damage, but at its early levels, it's just kind of a nice little, um, barely noticeable, extra dps.

The laughable Prayer of Destruction Buff at level one

To improve your stats for your summons and your new skill you need to do two things.

Thing one: Evolve your summoned boss.  You do this by collecting hearts. By the end of this whole evolutionary nonsense, you're going to need about 6,600 hearts from each boss. considering you get anywhere from 10 to 25 hearts per run, it'll be anywhere from 600 to 300 runs to get all the hearts you need to fully evolve a boss. Since you can typically only run a boss 2 to 3 times a week, this could take a few years to complete.

Thing two: Level your summoned boss. Each evolutionary step of a boss allows you to then level your summoned boss by an additional 10 levels. To do this, you'll need a metric ton of 12 items, and THOSE ITEMS are what clog up your bags when you run Mirrorworld over and over: regular, good, and rare quality scrolls, shards, bottles of ink, and cards. 

BUT WAIT, IT GETS WORSE! There are three colors of each of those 12 items: red, green, and blue. Each boss likes one of those three, so if you plan on leveling all the bosses, well, that's 36 items. It's a lot and you'll end up having to dedicate an entire bank tab and a half to just Mirrorworld items if you really want to level these guys. 

Is it worth it?  Man, I don't know!  I'm only a week into this and my level 10 Garsit is really only giving me an additional 300 intelligence.  Unfortunately NO ONE has filled in how much intelligence you'd get for a max evolved and leveled Garsit on the wiki, so it's a bit of a mystery for me.

Really it sounds like there are a few ways to play this.

Gather 'em all up, and melt them down

Playstyle one: Collect all the things! Level all the things! Evolve all the things! Keep all the things!

Playstyle two: Collect only the things I need for the bosses I want . . . chuck the rest except for the mirrorshards.

Playstyle three: Trash it all. I ain't doing that.  Just keep the Mirrorshards.

Playstyle four: I'm not getting caught up in ANY of that. 

So there you go, that's basically the gist of Mirrorworld. Every day they give you 3-5 free tickets. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. The Wiki has a lot more detailed information on this game feature, and if this post has whetted your appetite, go give it a read.

Happy Dueling

About Me 2022

I haven't really written an about me on my blog since 2010, so in the spirit of the Introduce Yourself Week for Blaugust, I thought I'd lay it all out, again. So, lemme catch you up with the past 12 years!

Hi. TLDR: I'm Tom. I live in a suburb of Austin, TX, but I'm originally from Utah. After working for a contractor for the Air Force for 14 years as a Technical Editor, I moved to Austin to be in the video game industry. I've been writing ever since I could keep a journal, and I've been writing about games for years. It just comes naturally to me.

~~

Now for the nitty-gritty. My parents were pro-journaling. I have journals dating back when I was writing about jumping in piles of snow in my front yard and my cousin stepping on my toys and breaking them. One Christmas as a kid I asked for a typewriter, and my parents delivered!  It was a cheap plastic thing, but it was a legit typewriter. I loved that thing. Yes, I was a weird kid, and I like to think I was also destined to love to write.

360 photo of my old neighborhood in Brigham City

Eventually in my late high school years I took up songwriting and poetry and started down a lyrical path with my music. In my college years, I sensed that wasn't going to work as a career for me, and I opted to major in Communication with a minor in Technical Writing and took up a job as a Technical Editor to start and support a family, which it did for 14 years.

360 photo of our old neighborhood where my wife and I started our family

As it turns out, writing about video games was pretty natural to me. I was blogging as well, but it was a personal blog that was mostly about my kids and music (I've since hid that stuff from public view. It's not really worth reading anymore). Most of my writing about video games up until 2008 was done over e-mail or on guild forums. Typically I'd just write about my thoughts, wants, and goals for my Cleric and Beastlord characters on Everquest.

My Beastlord was named "Stingite" because he was an Iksar from a land where scorpions roamed in the newbie zone, and I had this little OC backstory about my mother naming my beastlord "Stingite" because she would feed him scorpion tails.  I know.  It's kind of dumb, but the handle stuck and I'm still naming myself Stingite in video games all these years later.

In 2008, I fell in love with a new game called Wizard101, and the words just started pouring out of me. I took up the mantle of blogger and started writing about the game and how I was playing it with my family. Wizard101 liked what I was writing and made me an official fan site and their featured blogger. 

This actually led to writing about Wizard101 for Beckett's Massive Online Gamer Magazine and Beckett's Fun Online Games Magazine. Kind of cool actually being paid to write for a magazine. That used to mean something, and I was incredibly proud of seeing my byline in those magazines.

During this timeframe I started to realize how cool the video game industry was while trading emails with Kiersten Samwell, Fred Howard, Nelson Everheart, and other people that worked at or with KingsIsle. It put a bug in me, and I applied for three different jobs at KingsIsle over the period of a couple years. It never worked out. Either the job didn't pay enough to support my family of five (wife and I with 3 kids) or I was always their second choice for the position. I figured three strikes and you're out, KingsIsle, and never applied for a job there again.

Then one day in 2012 I got a phone call from Fred Howard. He wanted me to play the alpha of Pirate101, which was an exclusive honor at the time.  No more than a handful of outside people even got to play in the Alpha of Pirate101, so it felt pretty great.  After a week of playing, he called me back and offered me a job as the Community Manager for Pirate101, no interview needed.  I was floored.

So after working it out with my family and working out salary with KingsIsle, I took the job . . . and the pay cut . . . to work in the video game industry. Living the dream! I spent six and a half years in Community Management / Public Relations / Social Media / Marketing / Management and then made the jump over to Game Design. 

Old designing buddies at KingsIsle

I've now been in Design for four years: at first working as a level designer, then transitioning to more formal game design and narrative design. The past year I've been working as a Senior Designer working with outsourcing groups at WIMO Games.

I have other loves of course, outside of games, and this is mostly a history of my life through the lens of video game writing, but since this is a game blog first and foremost, I'll talk mostly about games here.  If you'd like to hear about my forays into music, well, you could head on over to my music blog or my bandcamp page. For my personal life, I usually stick to Facebook or Twitter, but I'm typically a pretty private person. Suffice to say, I am a church-goer and feel like I've been led and guided to where I am today.

Thanks for reading the Friendly Necromancer!

Blaugust 2022 is upon us! I'm all in!

 . . . and as the great soothsayers have foretold, the time is finally upon us: Blaugustpocolypse! 

That's right, friends, fans, and fellow bloggers, the time has finally come to write a post a day for 31 days as a part of Belghast's annual blog-fest for NERDS like us. I've been thinking about this one a lot in advance for some reason -- I even prepped a list of possible topics! That's right, I take this blogging business seriously! I mean, at least during August.

As it turns out, my mind is still firmly on . . . work! So to those ends, I want to use Blaugust to write out a few things that could end up on a Game Designer portfolio site of sorts. I'll be refreshing my "About Me," which is woefully out of date currently, and I'll be writing a little bit about each of the games I've worked on the past 10 years.

Also, I have a solid Blaugust's worth of VR games in my steam library that I haven't played yet, so I'm hoping to play and discuss those with you all as well as talk about a few old favorites like Wizard101 and Pirate101. 

My hobbies have expanded a bit this past year, and I have a new 360 camera that I've been loving! It's something I can't wait to share with you all, so here's your first sneak peek.

Spin that picture left to right and up and down (and zoom in and out) to get a fun view of my friend's record shop from my recent trip to Utah. Or, if you're really up for the full VR experience, throw on your headset and take a look at it in full VR. Adam was in the process of setting up his new, closet-sized record shop inside a coffee joint, and I was left alone to guard it and catalog it. 360 photos of tight spaces that are chock full of interesting things to look at are fun!

So here we go! It's great to be participating in Blaugust again, and I hope you enjoy coming back daily.

Happy Dueling

The Need for Planet Crafter End Game

It's been a couple weeks now since my last post about Planet Crafter. Granted, I spent one of those weeks over in Pensacola Florida and completely away from my computer. (Man, those Quartz sand beaches are nice!) So, I thought I'd give a little update on how the end game is going.

Still haven't seen any insects in my world, but in my imagination they're everywhere.

As of this posting, I'm at 13 TTi of Terraformation. I believe the end goal here is to get to 175 TTi . . . at least I hope that's the goal because there really hasn't been much new in the game since I unlocked the last blueprint wayyyyy back at 360 GTi.  These days, generating 360 GTi is like 12 minutes of waiting around, but here's the thing . . . it's not fast enough. Just waiting around still means like 80+ hours of just waiting around until I win the game.

Which, btw, can we talk about the current anti-climactic nature of the final blueprint unlock in Planet Crafter?  You go through all this work to craft a fusion cell and slot it in the wrecked spaceship only to have it have the effect of 2 Double C batteries.  All it does is open a few doors in the spaceship.  That's it.  Sure the crates inside there are full of loot, but the loot is a little meaningless at this point.  I mean, I did get a type of tree I can't get anywhere else, but . . . that's it?

It takes a lot of nuclear energy to open 2 doors

My current time invested is a bit crazy considering I have 101 Terraformation Rockets circling the planet, 65 Tree Spreaders, and a gaggle of other technology just grinding away. Let's be honest though, the real heavy lifting is being done by the Tree Spreaders and the Seed Spreader Rockets currently . . . and the 9 Nuclear Fusion Generators supporting it all. The big problem?  I'm running out of plants to turn into trees. Where I once had a locker full of plants, I now have only three. 

NEED . . . MORE . . . ROCKETS!!!

The game really feels like it's missing a couple updates to the end game.  I really need a Tier 5 heater and a Tier 5 Drill to chase after.  The rate of return for building a Tier 4 heater and a Tier 4 drill just don't seem adequate at this point.  The inefficiency of building one of those instead of a tree spreader just doesn't seem to make sense.

It's not for trying of course. I have 3 tier 2 Ore Extractors focused solely on gathering Iridium, the main ingredient in making heaters. I feel like I need to build 3 more and just go into heater production mode for a couple days. The gains just seem meaningless, which makes the end game of Planet Crafter seem unnecessarily grindy. The game is in early access, which means there probably is more to come, and I could jump into their Discord server to talk strategy, but really I shouldn't have to -- it should just make sense. 

Drill my minions, DRILL!

Besides adding a Tier 5 heater and drill to chase . . . I'd love to see the option to head into space and build a space station above the planet where I could mix chemicals in anti-gravity to give me a super boost on the planet below. There's SO MUCH that could be done in the end game! I'm excited to see what the devs could come up with. Here's to hoping that a future update solves the problem and adds new fun to the end game!

On the plus side, bugging out the rockets by mass firing them into space is hilarious

Happy Dueling

Time to Terraform in Planet Crafter

Over the weekend I dropped hard into Planet Crafter and surrendered my life to Terraforming a planet. I'm going to be honest, it took a bit to get into this game at first. I'm used to having my survival game mixed with a bit of evil zombie, but that's just not the case in Planet Crafter. No, in this game there are only three major threats: Hunger, Thirst, and Oxygen Supply. As it turns out, that's enough . . . although a giant dune worm or two might be kind of fun.

No Dune Worms to run from here.

Stage one of the game involves simply stepping out of your space pod and getting to work collecting raw ingredients enough to expand all your essentials: backpack space, Oxygen tank, exoskeleton space, agility boots, jet packs, and tools.

Where it all started . . .

The next stage is all about making a quick home base and starting to work on the big five of Terraforming: 

• Oxygen
• Heat
• Pressure
• Biomass
• Power Supply

Watching it tick up . . . ever so slowly

Power Supply is king of that of course . . . you can't run equipment to build a planet's Oxygen, Heat, Pressure, and Biomass without it. A few wind turbines are enough to get you started, but eventually you'll be upgrading to solar panels and nuclear reactors--crafting every step of the way.

Eventually your efforts will bring moisture to the planet as puddles begin to form and the ice you've been using for a water supply begins to melt. Puddles then become Lakes. Lakes then lead to Moss. Moss then leads to flora. Flora then leads to trees . . . and on and on as you attempt to obtain the seemingly impossible goal of 175 Ti (I think that "T" stands for "Tera" as in Terabyte?).  You start small, and at the time of writing this article I've only crested over into 2 Gi (I think that "G" stands for "Giga" as in Gigabyte?) -- I've come a long way but I've got a long way to go.

That moment when you realize you need to move your base because it'll soon be underwater.

The whole game has a management aspect to it similar to how the goal of a clicker game is to eventually stop clicking and instead unlock passive features that click for you. Eventually you've built multiple Biodomes, Multiple Tier 4 heaters, Multiple Tier 4 Drills, Multiple Algae Generators, and now they just . . . work for you.

Also, much like clicker games, there are expendables that have an impact on your terraforming in various ways. One is simply informational: GPS Satellites. A couple others cause meteor showers to rain down upon you with rare ore. Others release seeds and nutrients into the air to help your terraforming with one time boosts to your ever-counting Terraforming index.

Sky rockets in flight! Afternoon Delight!

Along the way you begin to discover traces of a story to the game. At first, I didn't know what my motivations were. Once I built a radar tower and received an email, it became clear . . . I'm a convict and I've chose to commute my prison sentence into an extradition to this planet. If I fully terraform it, they'll come take my beautifully isolated planet away from me and give me my freedom.

As it turns out, I'm not the first to have arrived here as part of the fun in Planet Crafter is delving through downed space craft of those that came before me. You can even find underground bunkers from previous extradited convicts full of loot for the taking and a few scattered hints to their story. (It's unfortunate I haven't found any of their dead bodies yet)

This guy went a little crazy in his bunker . . .

So while the first part of the game was a bit slow, soon I got absorbed into the flow of the game and I was unlocking recipes and crafting all kinds of better and newer stuff. The mid-game has been really fun so far. Building a base of operations and exploring my planet was great. The ever present danger of oxygen is real and acts as a tether to the safety of indoors or a supply of oxygen reserves. Mid-game is the best game so far!

I would say that it feels like now I'm more in the tail end of the mid-game, and things are starting to slow down. I've kind of run out of my supply of Osmium until I can build a Tier 2 Ore Extractor, and really that's going to take some down time as I wait for my planet's pressure to reach a certain state.

Up until this point, I've been extremely addicted to this game, which is always a good thing.  It's too bad it's not a multiplayer game or I'd ask Lessah to start a new world with me. So far, it's been well worth the price of admission.

Here's a quick walkthrough of how my base is looking here so far.

Happy Dueling!

Oops. I won V Rising, What Comes Next? Covid?

A couple weeks ago, the server settings on the Team Spode V Rising server somehow got set to easy mode and I didn't know it.  All I knew is that suddenly I felt like an uncontrollable superhero in game. My scythe was mowing down mobs like a butter knife going through soft butter. In my mind I was thinking, what did I just upgrade in my kit, this is amazing!

So, because I was feeling so amazing, I was like, man, I bet I could try taking on one of those final three bosses. 2 hours later I had beaten the game.

Man, I bet that's tough when the server isn't on easy mode

Then I started thinking . . . hmmm . . . that seemed too easy, and then I looked at the server settings. Yeah, I was at 10x damage and .1x damage received. I alerted Tipa and she hit the reset the settings button, but I already had the pylons sitting safely in my castle.

They give awesome buffs!

Whoops.

Team Spode has still been playing on Sundays, but my motivation to log in and play outside of that has been minimal. I've got my full Bloodmoon set, sanguine reaper, and blood key, so I'm kind of done. I could find a random server to join and give it another go, but I'm not feeling that passionate about playing it again just yet.

. . . . and then I got COVID. For the past three weeks my family had been hosting visitors and treating ourselves to fun things to do around the greater Austin area. I think we narrowed it down to when we went to the Snake Farm Zoo and a lady there was sneezing and coughing a bunch, and we had dropped our guard by not wearing our masks. Yeah, that was probably when it happened. And if not then, we certainly spread it around to each other in the Escape room.

That Star Trek Discovery Escape Room was really tough!

The past week has really been about recovering and just sitting around watching TV. The Iron Chef Iron Legend series was great! Allez Cuisine! Needless to say, after all that, I'm feeling hungry . . . for a game to play! To those ends, I have a HUGE backlog of VR games that I want to play, but being sick and playing VR don't go together. No one wants to strap on a VR headset in that state.

I also noticed my buddy Lessah Ismorah was playing a lot of Planet Crafter on her Youtube channel and she talked me in to buying it. It was only 20 bucks. That's also when I saw, my old wish list, Legend of Keepers was on sale for 8 bucks. A checkout screen later, I had both.

Bringing back life to a dead planet . . . why am I here again?

Time to kill some adventurers!

Dear readers of The Friendly Necromancer. I'm on the mend, and I have a lot of games to write about here in the future. Expect more posts in the future.

Happy Dueling!

Hitting End Game in V Rising

The past few days have been extremely productive for me in V Rising. On Sunday, Team Spode played together and destroyed a few lower level bosses for Spodepire, which of course is Lord Spode's vampiric name on V Rising.  . . . and then everything after that during the week was a solo hunt for me . . . because I'm addicted . . . seriously.

On Monday I took out the Duke of Balaton, Foulrot the Soultaker, Wilfred the Werewolf Chief, and Azariel the Sunbringer. This allowed me to finally construct the Eye of Twilight. Also, with my new gold bar recipe I had from Azariel, I was able to upgrade my castle to its final full size. BAM!

I spy with my little little eye, something twilight 

On Tuesday I did another round of boss hunting and rounded out the bosses that I had skipped: Mairwyn the Elementalist and Terrorclaw the Ogre. They were difficult hunts, but nothing I couldn't overcome with time, patience, a healing potion, and a bit of skill swapping.  

Thanks for the Golden Jewellery, Mairwyn

On Wednesday, I brought down Morian the Stormwing Matriarch, Matka the Curse Weaver, and Nightmarshal Styx the Sunderer.  With that, I now had my bat form, and I basically rule the night skies. HISS! FLAP FLAP FLAP! (Just don't go trying to fly in the daytime or it's insta-barbecued bat after 5 seconds.)

Stingite and his Batform!

The next three bosses, nay THE FINAL THREE BOSSES, are special! Upon inspecting the Eye of Twilight that I had constructed on Monday, it revealed the location of the final three.  What's special about these bosses is that if you defeat them, you can obtain their soul shard. 

There is a server setting that can make these soul shards unique. Tipa currently has that turned on. (Maybe we should turn that off?) Basically, it's a setting to encourage pvp between vampires as they hunt for soul shards from other vampires. At least I think that's how it works? Probably no need to inspire that kind of competition on our PvE server.

The final three await!

Of other note, these bosses seem like a big jump in difficulty. Granted, I still need to craft my end game amulet and two pieces of endgame outfit.  To get those, I'm either going to have to discover their recipe while farming end game Silverlight Hills and Cursed Forest mobs or burn tons of schematics looking for them.  Either way and ultimately, I'm going to need a lot of reagents to craft them when I get them. I need gold necklaces, yo--a lot of them!

So here I am at end game. I'm staring down the final three and needing just a few more pieces of the final gear set. My castle is built. My animal forms unlocked. LET'S GO!

Happy Dueling!