"Extreme Rules" and Other Stuff

Extreme Rules

Not going to spend a great deal of time on this. Went to watch this PPV last night with my brother-in-law. As part of the theme (which turned out to be a sponsor), we decided to chow down on some Double Downs from KFC.

Those aren't as large as I thought they'd be, but tasty nonetheless.

Mashed potatos, gravy, mac n' cheese, biscuits, double down and soda. If that wasn't enough, we also took down a huge portion of some home made chili-cheese dip and nachos over the course of the rest of the night.

Onto the PPV itself.

WWE has been in what's called the "PG Era". From a business standpoint, it's a lot easier for a company like the WWE to pick up investors if the product they're offering is family friendly. From a fan perspective, this waters down the product quite a bit, especially if you came into wrestling during their "Attitude Era" (Stone Cold, the Rock, etc).

The "PG Era" is also likely fueled by all the bad publicity the WWE picked up for wrestlers dying young and by Linda McMahon's quest for a Senate Seat.

A PPV named "Extreme Rules" leads one to believe that there will be a lot of weapons and violence used. Unfortunately, this didn't pan out and most people who are aware of the current "PG Era" probably expected it.

PPV definitely wasn't worth the price to view it. It had it's moments. Obviously things like this are meant to be viewed with company, and the company couldn't have been better. Just wish this was worth the price of admission. Orton vs. Swagger, Cena vs. Batista were good matches. Everything else was mostly forgettable. Probably won't do the PPV thing again until Summerslam.

VNMs

Obsidian took down Lord Ruthven Saturday.

Probably not something important to many shells out there, but to Obsidian, it's something completely out of the norm.

Most of our members don't do anything outside of Dynamis, Einherjar or Salvage, so it makes a lot of the practices outside of those areas that are common sense to most not so common to them. The idea of using terrain, for example, is rather foreign to them. The idea of a fight lasting longer than 20 seconds can be foreign to them at times as well.

Lord Ruthven is a dirty bastard. Actually most of the T3 VNMs that SE released back in march are dirty bastards. As time has worn on, more and more low man strats have become available. So one is naturally lead to believe that they can't possibly be super difficult.

Yeah well, put a bunch of people together who have very little experience dealing with things like that on jobs that are completely useless against it and you have a recipe for disaster.

The fight was going rather smoothly the first 10-20% or so. As most people know, Ruthven likes to spam drain moves as well as inflict "ST20" on people. The trick to him is primarily tanking him backwards and pelting him with ranged damage.

Yeah uh...we had no ranged damage. Just a bunch of melee subbin' THF.

We went with that for a bit and, it worked for the most part, but the primary noob factors here were A) People resting too close and B) Melee dragging TP mobs over to where the mages were resting. TP mobs that like...AoE.

We pretty much wiped. I called for a wipe to get him to depop, but as this was happening, we discovered that Ruthven was still running after people left and right and we discovered we could kite him around a cermet spine piece until we recovered. While the recovery was happening, I called upon some Obsidian members I found hiding in various places and got some ranged damage out there.

Inbred also discovered a slope we could abuse. Once recovered, we put everyone up on top of the slope and the tanks down below. Didn't take long for us to take him down after that. He still got off a few combo moves that took out one of the tanks from time to time, but aside from that, I don't think it could have gone any smoother once we were prepared correctly.

The reason this is worth noting is that it's a milestone for Obsidian in a sense. While any shell has members that are prone to making dumb mistakes from time to time, these mistakes are generally due to a lack of experience. As you build experience in dealing with various things, they become second nature obviously. It was important for the people there to see that they're perfectly capable of doing what's necessary to win as long as they listen (which is something most Obsidian members are really good about).

Einherjar

Had Odin and T3 last week. I picked up the P.Body from Odin. Probably won't uncurse it any time soon due to the cost of it, but it's a show piece more than anything else.

T3 was rather merciful on us too, which was nice. We had a horrible streak of "no lube" T3s there for a bit and since that rather epic 48-monster+King Behemoth combo it threw at us that we actually won, T3 has been nice to us.

Sky

Got reminded rather forcefully why I got burned out on Sky years and years ago. Spent 3 hours or so up there Friday night. First hour or so, we picked up 5 items. Only needing Zip, water and diorite to finish a set, we parked Glacian in Zip's spawn area, then split up to farm the other two.

Two hours later...

Zip gets insta-claimed by a pair of RDM/NINs.
No Water.
No Diorite.

Two hours, 1 minute later...

Water drops.

So a grand tally of 6/8 pop items. That's nothing to sneeze at, but most of them happening in the first hour just made the rest of the time slog by. More farming it would seem in the near future.

FFXIII

34/35 achievements done.

That 35th one?

"Treasure Hunter" - Obtain all the items in the game.

Yeah fuck that.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Holy hell what a great game. Yeah I know, that game is so 2009.

Started playing this Friday evening and the level of thought they put into it is rather amazing. Hoping to get more time in with it tonight...

Pet Troll

Rather bored today, so I'd like for my pet troll to come entertain me. It's ok there lil' fella, I won't bite, but I will laugh. :)