I’m going to preface this by saying… I am melee.  I prefer melee, and I don’t bother with magic or ranged (unless I’m forced to), so we’ll see how all that goes.  Dual-wielding in light armour with most of the light armour perks and almost all the one-handed perks seems like a fun game for me, so I’m enjoying it.  My gear is also dual-enchanted now, as of last night, so that should make a lot of this easy mode, but we’ll see how things go, won’t we?

I’m also, apparently, doing this companion free, as Faendal decided he would fuck off after some guy attacked me and I killed that guy– for some reason that pissed Faendal off and he started trying to kill me and let my service and I don’t feel like waiting for him to get back to Riverwood to see if I can hire him again.  I’d just gotten him full dragonscale armour, as well, the asshat.  I mostly keep him around as a mule and a ranged bitch anyway.  Oh well, I’d be mad too if my face looked like this.

Oh my god, what the derp?

As you can see, he had to have been violated by my awesome and upset by it.  I’m going to take this time to mention that I found eighteen mods to change my dragon scale armour into a Nocturnal dress in which I’d look like a stupid ho, but I decided to stick with the armour that actually makes her look hot.  I’m just sayin’.

Anyways, onto the actual reason for this post.   Something bugs me about the fact that I had to fight through a slew of guys and up some weird ramps that I might have fallen off of at any point just to get inside where Karliah already was– honestly, did she just ninja to the top in a way that I couldn’t see? Wench.

I'll just avoid falling to my death, k?

Irkngthand already seems like it’s going to be a pain in my ass, like much of the places that are enclosed in Skyrim– stupid Simulation Sickness– but you know, I think I can handle it.   Dead bandits inside, but none outside? Dammit, Karliah, way to make me work harder than was really necessary.

You get the three inside, I'll get the thousand outside, k?

I hate it when you’re supposed to meet them inside and they fuck off to some other chamber and act like you’re made of directions and know exactly where they are.  If it weren’t for waypoints I’d probably miss half the people I’m supposed to talk to.   Of course it had to be Dwemer ruins, which means annoying little mechanical shits and weird blade traps that destroy me– I hate you so much, Mercer and Karliah.

Oh, look! Scrap metal.

Fire traps and mechano-spiders and I still haven’t found Karliah.  I don’t know if they realise that when you’re asked to meet somewhere you usually meet someone at the entrance.  Yes, technically, I’m a few weeks late, but I don’t remember them saying it was dire that we get there right away.  I managed to get to level 45 right as I entered this place so we’ll just see how important I am, if I ever find Karliah through all these stupid ass traps.

So I just avoid the fire, right?

Down a floor and I still haven’t found her? I’m really starting to wonder why I help anyone in this game anymore– maybe all the Daedric princes are getting to my sensibility and I’m just going evil, but that doesn’t seem wholly right because honestly, a lot of the game’s quest people are complete wangbags.  I still want to kill Maven, but that’s another story altogether.

Apparently, according to Karliah whom I just found, Mercer killed all the Bandits inside, which means she didn’t do shit for me at all.  I hate Mercer a whole hell of a lot because he’s a complete, cocky wangbag, but I’m not sure if I hate him more than these two or not.  I love Brynjolf but I’m not sure I can tolerate him with Karliah because he kind of does nothing and she ends up acting like a monotone little wench.  Let’s get this show on the road, Karliah, I don’t need to hear your disgust with death.

One of these things is not like the others...

Great, and now we’re going to have Mercer traps and enemies on top of annoying Dwarven stuff.  I’m already hating everything about this, but I’m hoping the reward at the end will be good enough, even though my shit is already tricked out to as good as it can be (except that I’m probably going to replace my Dragon Priest mask with a dragonscale helm soon since I can dual enchant it and make it worth my while.) Go through a door and get smacked in the face with a giant, spiked flail on a chain? That’s great, Mercer, I said I was going to replace my mask but you didn’t have to smash my face in.  It didn’t really hurt, per se, but it’s the principle of the matter.

Somehow, both Karliah and Bryn see Mercer down below but I don’t see jack– it’s possible it’s just my bad eyesight, but apparently he’s toying with us and wants us to follow him but we’re in a big ass cage.  Thanks for that, Karliah, I didn’t get that from the start.

Can you spot the Mercer in this picture?

Chaurus eggs don’t bode well for what I’m going to have to fight.  As wuss as they might be now their poison spit still messes up my camera and makes me a little dizzy, so here’s hoping I don’t end up passing out on the keyboard and drooling from some kind of seizure caused by simulation sickness– it’s never happened before, but there’s always a first time, right? Falmer and all that means that the ‘companions’ I do have are going to start getting in my way, so they’ll get the shit beat out of them– I’m hoping, for my sake, that they’re set to essential so I don’t end up killing one of them and having to start all over somehow.  I doubt that they lacked the foresight to have all that set, but it still makes me a little miffed that I’ve, more than once, accidentally killed someone who was hanging out with me.  It means I tend to leave mobs for them to finish off and it takes forever while they try to eat my face.  Douches.

“That’s what happens when you cross the guild.”  True, Bryn, but I’d like to think that it’s more I’m what happens when you cross the guild.  There’s really so little to write about when you’re digging your way through dwarven ruins to try and get to some mega-douche, so we might miss some points here and there, but who cares? A gate that  need to hit two levers and that’s pretty much the only thing that proves ‘challenging’.  Anyways, onward and upwards.

Through Falmer, traps, and other such shit I traverse to find Mercer Frey,  get some spiel about how it’s our destiny to fight, and how he’s better than I am.  Really, Mercer? That’s weird because you’re dead now and I’m going to eat your corpse– not because I need to, but because you pissed me off.  That was actually a quite lackluster fight, I was kind of hoping for more, but here we are again with me disappointed by a fight with a random guild head.

Omnomnom, delicious for a wangbag.

As it turns out, that’s all there is to Mercer’s Fall, go figure.  What a douche, and this was not as interesting as I thought it would be.  The nearly drowning in a room was kind of funny and terrifying, but in the end we got out so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  I’m not sure why I thought this quest would offer more, but I guess we’ll find out just what I have to do after this at some point, if I bother finishing it up at all anytime soon and writing about it.  Who knows.

Notable Loot: Falmer Eyes, Skeleton Key, Random potions, the rest is crap.

Notable Points: Mercer knew we’d fight and decided to draw it out for an entire damn quest line? If he’d killed me in my sleep at some point we wouldn’t have gotten there.  That’s what you get for thinking I’d be a piece of cake, non?

As much as I love playing Skyrim, it’s hard for me to actually be able to play it for any length of time because of a little condition called simulation sickness (which is basically motion sickness but in a simulate environment– your brain plays tricks, more or less) and let me tell you, being a gamer and having simulation sickness is not at all fun.

However, I do get to play sometimes, as long as I pace myself and allow ample time for breaks and adjustment for my eyes and nausea– music also helps here, for some reason, having it playing in the background instead of just game sounds somehow soothes me– I’m able to enjoy the game for a little bit, at the very least.

I’ve failed to complete the main story line so many times over just because I get distracted by side-quests and end up going down a path of another quest line and getting pulled into that one.   Today I finally got around to playing through part of the Thieve’s Guild quest that is actually interesting: the Nightingale initiation.

It’s kind of funny how it works out that you get to lead so many things in this game, but before all that happens, you usually get shunted into some new kind of power or position and get handed armour that will make you all the more powerful, well, if you haven’t already decked out in dragon or daedric armour, depending on your proficiency.   I honestly wish the Nightingale armour was better than my dragon armour, because though I love both of them, I find myself particularly in love with the Nightingale stuff (which my best friend predicted when I first started playing the game in the first place.)

I do love my dragon scale armour.

The story line itself involves you helping Karliah track down Mercer, who was a douche from the start and I was hoping I’d get the chance to kill him, and reclaim the glory of the Thieve’s Guild, since it had fallen down the tubes since the previous head had fallen in a ploy that had Karliah blamed for his murder, and Mercer taking his spot.   She’s pretty adamant about you needing to be at the head of things and find all this information for her to help clear her name and reclaim the guild, and it’s kind of annoying how you tend to get pushed forward into these things regardless of how you want to do them.  The good thing about Skyrim is that even if ‘time is a factor’ you can deviate off your quest path and do five weeks (in-game time) of stuff before coming back to a point you were meant to finish a day after you got it.

Before you know it, you uncover the plot and all is fine and dandy, you need to hunt Mercer down, which involves breaking into his house (this annoyed me since I had to use a bow and arrow to lower the ladder and I am a melee girl until the end– I won’t even use them to bring down dragons, I wait for them to land and fight me) and finding where he was planning on going.  Turns out he has some big heist planned, but no one really cares because Karliah is determined to get me into the Nightingale hold and indoctrinate me to her ‘religion’, all while forcing me to play dress up in armour that is less good than what I’m already wearing– what an edge!

It is pretty hot, I'm not going to lie (updated by mod)

She swears up and down that it has nothing to do with faith, but that we need the edge to take them on, so somehow Brynjolf and I end up in their little place and bowing before Nocturnal, who, as far as I can tell, just likes having people on her side.  I’m pretty sure if I were some kind of super power I wouldn’t tolerate a failure like Karliah‘s, no matter how many awesome people she brought to give themselves to me.   But apparently we’re so awesome that it’s okay, and Karliah is forgiven her sins for now and told not to screw up again, and then suddenly I’m a Nightingale and somehow I missed what all that means– I probably shouldn’t have been staring at my armour and pondering how to have it without sucking.

Sure, there's nothing cultish about this, carry on.

That’s all I know about how I got to this point.  The Nightingale are some kind of secret sect of the Thieve’s Guild that only had three people to begin with– with one being dead and the other being a traitor, that left my character and Brynjolf to take the place of the other two.  I suppose a trinity is more powerful than otherwise? I’ll see how this plays out with the next part of the quest, when I get to it.

Next up: Mercer’s Fall

Given how often I fall off the wagon around Outland level, it seemed best to start fresh in leveling something rather than working on past projects that still need finishing.  We chose to play Alliance– totally not my favourite side, but whatever– and make Human Warlocks.  I’m not sure why I chose human, I guess I just wanted to stare at their thighs, whatever, or perhaps it’s just because I hate the rest of the races that could be warlocks (I already have a gnome and I fucking loathe Worgen.)  Regardless, the first day was highly uneventful in most places– the usual grind through the beginning quests and the annoyance of having to deal without BoAs (I sent all mine to another server when I thought I was going to be playing there with some friends, but that’s another story altogether.)

Love the Gobnip! LOVE HIM!

However, we learned something important as well– Murlocs spawn like a bitch and do not afraid of anything.  They will spawn continuously on top of you until you’re standing over a pile of murlocs that are almost covering the ground below, while still more come spilling out of the water and spawning on you and trying to kill you.  You have no idea how fast we finished that stupid quest to get the Crystal Kelp because of this, but we also spent an extra five minutes laughing and killing murlocs as they continued to try to eat our face.

Oh the carnage!

Like I said, other than that incident, it was kind of uneventful to a fault.  I honestly don’t know why I bother trying sometimes, but I’m hoping that dual-affliction warlocks will make me happier.  Maybe we’ll slip into some BGs and fight some mans like that.   More on this tomorrow, after we finish today’s lengthy session before he has to go raid.

I sure do miss being excited to raid and all.

With new Heroic Instances and the option to now take down Deathwing (that’s right, Dragon Soul is here), it seems as if this patch should have something for everyone, but… I don’t know, I find myself completely detached from it.   I logged on, adjusted some things, and bought my shadow priest some better bracers, but before too long I found myself longing for the days of old when logging on to play WoW was something I treasured, instead of just something I felt I had to do.

While the patch notes themself explain in detail just what you can expect from the patch, the few things I was looking forward to the most were:

• Transmogrification – This new feature allows players to customize their gear like never before: copying the appearance of one magical item onto another.. You’ll find Transmogrification, Void Storage, and Reforging vendors in Cathedral Square, Stormwind and The Drag, Orgrimmar. (something that I was keen on for the idea of dressing my priest in Tier 6, finally)
• Improved Leveling through Outland and Northrend — They’ve decided to remove most of the group quests, making them soloable, and put all the dungeon quest givers inside the dungeon (finally) , as well as lowering the exp needed to get from 71-80, which to me is the best thing in the world because I loathe Northrend and Outland with a burning passion after having gone through them so many times.  They’re not challenging, they’re just obnoxious.

That’s it, really.  While the new dungeons and raid content have most people in a tizzy (and most of my friends list when I logged on consisted of people plowing their way through the content already), I find it lackluster because it’s going to end up the same miserable grind all new content is.  Not to mention the fact that it’s being released after only a year, leaving little doubt that they’re going to be stretched thin for the next year or so until they get Mists of Pandaria ready for release.  We’re going to be rehashing the same concepts and ideas until our fingers are bloody, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

They do have openings for things like they did with BC, opening up secondary raids that are almost more appealing than the main raids themselves, little bits of content that’ll pique everyone’s interest with niche lore and such (Karazhan, for example.) for when people were ready to blow their brains out doing Black Temple and Serpent Shrine Cavern  But somehow I still find myself struggling to get into the mood to do anything productive, including leveling my poor little gnome mage and dwarf hunter, both experiments into the idea that leveling something new on Alliance side might help make me interested again (once they hit roughly Outland level I lost interest and drifted off into the world of nothingness again.)

I want to be enthused about this game, I want to, but I’m finding myself just looking for something to take hold of me for a while until Mists of Pandaria drops, like somehow things will get better if I just distance myself from World of Warcraft and what it is for a while– in which the beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic was helpful, offering me a needed release, but not nearly long enough, and our lack of ability to afford it squashed most of that idea– and most of all I want to play Diablo III and immerse myself in that world and play style for a while.  I feel suffocated by my own gaming addiction and it’s not a fun thought.

The best part about this patch for me was the excitement of getting my Tyrael’s Charger, but even that was short lived and fell by the wayside after a few moments of play– besides, it’s not nearly as awesome as I thought it would be, but it’s still a pretty nice treat– and I found myself on my gnome mage, killing a couple of rares and setting up her new unit frames.  While these things are necessary and sometimes fun, the lack of add-ons being updated also left as our taste in my mouth, because Blizzard’s default anything is pretty horrendous (I also miss my Silver Dragon, boo.) It’s going to come to a point soon where I have to throw myself into the game again just to make sure I don’t lose complete taste for it, as we’re doing the year long subscription for it, and gear myself up to try out some of these new raids.  I skipped Firelands entirely, but after my boyfriend went once and was already bored of it, I didn’t see any reason to bust my hump to find a guild and gear to raid with.   But, it’s inevitable that I’ll find myself doing that with Hour of Twilight, because in the end, what the hell else am I going to do with my time?

I’m not planning on going on a tirade about being a female gamer, or the social aspects of online gaming as a female, or even ranting about my complete lack of feminism and my complete disregard for most of that movement.  I am a female, I game, but I’m not a gamer girl, I’m just a gamer.  As far as you should be concerned, I’m a eunuch writing about gaming from the perspective of someone who has been doing it forever and has been obsessed and in love since she was a child.  My boobs have no weight on this, I hope.

I’m not sure, to a degree, what all this will entail.  Whether I will dive right into the idea of full on reviews of somewhat current games as my money flow allows; or if I’ll go the route of randomly playing the Sims and letting them have their own little lives and documenting it; or maybe I’ll find a way to make my playing of Skyrim interesting enough to warrant its own little section.  As of right now, it’s just a dream– an idea forming in my head that seems almost too good to be true.  I’m hoping to make it into something amazing.

The name might seem a bit odd, but its become my go-to name as far as the MMORPG crowd goes, finding solace in something comforting that reminds me of my best friend and better times when RP was something I could do for hours on end and I sought out the servers that themselves seemed somewhat more RP friendly than others.  Nowadays my RPing seems few and far between, but I still have a small nook in my heart for it.

I expect not to make much sense sometimes, but I always want to be at least somewhat entertaining to read, otherwise why bother documenting anything like this online.  As introduction posts go, this one might not be the best, but I’m working towards something amazing here, guys, and I can’t wait to get started.