City of Heroes Issue 19, Alpha Strike

So a week ago no Paragon Studios/NCSoft released Issue 19, Alpha Strike for City of Hereos.  A couple big deals came with this new content update.

First the Fitness pool (Swift, Hurdle, Health, Stamina) became an Inherent power set.  Meaning once a character hit level 2, they automatically got all 4 powers.  This essentially gave many characters in the game 3-4 extra powers to choose from depending on their build.  So instead of having to use one of your four allowed power pools on the Fitness Pool, much less one of your valued power selections in game you now have a lot more flexibility.  For existing characters, they'll need to Respec first to get Fitness as an Inherent set.  The downside is that characters do not get any additional slots ot enhance their powers.

Secondly the game finally introduced the Alpha Slot of the Incarnate system.  The Incarnate system is for level 50 heroes (the max level in the game) and allows them to further enhance/improve/customize their characters.  Originally slated to be released with Going Rogue! the Dev team pushed it back after getting feedback from Beta testers saying that without additional content to go with the slot it didn't feel right.  To get the Alpha Slot you need to talk to Mender Ramiel (new NPC in Ororoubos) and then go through a story arc that will unlock the Alpha Slot.  The arc is soloable, just barely.  The hardest mission is mission 4 (I think) where it seems like most people will get a team together to finish it off.  After you complete the last mission (5th) you do need to go back to Ramiel and talk to him to actually unlock the Alpha Slot.  If you're not sure that it's unlocked, check your Most Recent badges, you should have one related to the Alpha Slot.

After that you then need to collect shards that when you find them bond to you (think of WoW soul bound items).  These will drop from level 50+ mobs throughout the game, as well as some special/upgraded ones that are available as a reward for completing: Imperious Task Force, Statesman/Lord Recluse Task/Strike Force, Reichsman Task/Strike Force, Lady Grey Task Force, and the Hamidon Raid.  Once you have enough of the right shards you can then craft your first Alpha Slot enhancement.  Basically this allows you to further enhance aspects of a power, some of which is not affected by Enhancement Diversification (ED).

So beyond the power benefits why get an Alpha slot?  Simple it'll make the new Apex Task Force that much easier!  Apex is a new contact within the Vanguard base in the Ritki War Zone.  Basically you and your team are tasked to fight off an invasion from Praetoria within Paragon City.  If you do not have the Alpha Slot available AND slotted you suffer a penalty in terms of mob difficulty.  I've heard it's as high facing +8s in terms of level. 

There's also the new Tin Mage Mk II Task Force.  I don't know if it also has the penalty for not being Alpha Slotted but it's a lot of fun.  It's a companion to the Apex TF in that instead of defending Paraong, you and your team is a first strike back at Praetoria.

So yeah the new issue is sucking up my time.  Over the weekend I did 3 Hami Raids, 2 ITFs, 2 LGTFs, a LRSF, Apex, Tin Mage, tip missions, Patron arc, and followed that up with a LGTF on Monday.  Plus I've been respeccing characters.

Tech tip of the day

So I took a break for the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US.  Not that I did a whole, mostly played Borderlands and City of Heroes and got a lot of sleep.  Anyway I hope to get back to regular updates again.  Although fair warning that there won't be a whole lot of updates around Christmas and New Years.

Tech tip time:

When upgrading your CPU, remember to check with your motherboard manufacturer and see if there is an updated BIOS that is needed for the new CPU.  You will want to update the BIOS before you install the new chip.  While fairly rare it is possible that the system will not boot up/POST with the new processor without the proper BIOS.  The more common result is that the processor will be reported as 'Unknown" and default to 800mhz or a similar speed.  Usually that's a lot slower then what you wanted.

Herp Derp

Yawn.  Yeah that sums up the weekend.  Not that I've been bored, just that I really seem to want more sleep than I normally do.  Ok let's run down the recap.

Friday night:  I was a good boy and went to the gym and used the elliptical for 35 minutes.  Came home, made dinner (instead of going out) and watched some episodes of Tokujo Kabachi!!  Which I ended up finishing on Saturday night / early Sunday morning. 

Saturday:  grocery shopping and I started selling stuff off on Amazon.  So far I've sold 3 items out of 23 listed.  Not bad overall.  And while a little extra money is nice the other half of the point of selling stuff off is to get rid of stuff I don't need or want.  Played some City of Heroes, and even picked up a Ribosome exposure during the Hami raid on Virtue.  Went to a friend's birthday party for a bit and had Phillipino spaghetti for the first time and I've gotta say it was damn tasty.  Apparently they use banana ketchup in the sauce, all I know is sign me up for more.  Oh and reconfirmed that Beard Papa's are damn good too.  Then came back home to play more CoH and ran through an Lord Recluse's Strike Force with some friends in 52 minutes with only 2 deaths.  A shame I only got an Endoplasm Exposure (an ok one, not great, not crappy).  Then I finished off Tokujo Kabachi!!  Yay Maki-chan!

Sunday:  listening to Fantasy Football live on Yahoo at the moment.  I still need to get going for the day which includes picking up a couple smallish boxes to get my 2 outstanding Amazon orders packaged up and shipped off.  And man do I really need to reel off a few wins in a row in my fantasy football league.   Oh and suppossedly my friends that I play Borderlands with plan to get together tonight for some more gun toting, explosive mayhem.  8)  Beyond that I've planned to cook up some Trader Joe's Pesto mahi mahi for lunch as well as prep some chicken/cream of mushroom over rice for dinner.  One of these days I'll remember to take pictures/screenshots and actually post pictures to break up the wall of text.

More Borderlands

So last night I was able to play some Borderlands Co-op with a couple friends.  My roommate was getting frustrated trying to get 4 people together but we settled on 3 of us who all had characters around 10-12.  I had a Berserker, my roommate a Siren and our friend had a Soldier.  We started off in Fyrestone and just plowed through stuff at first.  As we got to Sledge's hideaway we started running into some problems.  Namely all of us kept running out of ammo.  None of us remembered having this much of an ammo problem in our previous play throughs, but then we hadn't really played low level characters in MONTHS.  Then we started dying a lot on the way back out of Sledge's place. 

Another friend joined us with his level 11 Soldier (by then the rest of us were around level 14).  We opted to go back and do some side quests instead of heading into the Mine which was rated at level 17.  So we went into the Shocking Caverns to pick up the crystals.  We loaded up on ammo and headed in.  And we still ran out of Ammo.  At several points we hit Corrosive or Fire Alpha Skags. 

All in all we ended up around level 17, and we all had a good time.  It looks like we're going to allocate these characters are our current team characters and set aside a specific night/time to have more co-op fun.  I'm really looking forward to it.

So far I've put in about 133or so hours into Borderlands according to Steam.  I'm guessing I'll push past 200 Christmas.

I probably need to pick up the 4th DLC one of these days too.  I really love games that I can come back to and really enjoy.  Borderlands is starting to rank up there with Diablo II, Serious Sam the Second Encounter, Starcraft, Age of Empires II, and City of Heroes.

I killed Dr. Ned

So awhile go I went and got a bunch of the Borderlands DLCs (Moxie and Knox) with the idea that some friends and I would rekindle some fun with some nice action.  Then the months rolled by and I didn't really play.  I got to thinking and realized that I  had never actually finished the Island of Dr. Ned expansion.  So this weekend I loaded Borderlands back up and revisited the Island. 

I gotta say, damn I missed this game.  Even though I was just playing solo the action was fun maybe not as intense as I remember but then most of those memories are based off of 4 player co-op.  Sadly my Hellfire SMG is still my favorite weapon for my now level 51 Soldier.  Although I did finally pick up an assault rifle that seems to work for me (I hate the 3 burst ones), the only drawbacks are that the magazine size is a little small and the reload times are a little long.  But overall I can live with those because it puts out pretty good damage along with being explosive. 

With that in mind I've emailed a few friends to get info on what characters/levels they have currently in Borderlands so we can get some co-op action going once again.

Yes I finished Boku no Imoto which was a pretty good series overall.  Interestingly enough I mostly pick Jdramas based off of who's in them, in this case for Nagaswa Masimi (http://wiki.d-addicts.com/Nagasawa_Masami) who I first saw in Proposal Daisakusen.  Now I'm on to watch Tokujo Kabachi! mostly for Horikita Maki (http://wiki.d-addicts.com/Horikita_Maki).  I'm starting to lose track of the series of hers that I've watched.  Yeah so I'm a dirty old man.  ;)

Oh and I finally finished watching Sora no Otoshimono (Heaven's Lost Property) and got caught up the second season.  So far a mostly harem like anime with some action and a pervy male lead. 

Wow I was a lazy bum this weekend, I need to change that.

Feeling naked

I forgot my phone at home today.  And even though I don't get all that many phone calls I really do feel naked without it.  Possibly it's not having the apps handy (sorry Words with Friends friends) or just the possibility of getting texts/calls that might be important.  Honestly I have no idea.  At the same time it's scary that I feel this way about a phone.   Ok and it's also my watch so now I  have to rely on my work computer to tell me the time which is fine when I'm at my desk.  Not so useful when I'm off to lunch though.

I almost drove home at lunch to get my phone, but then I figured it wasn't worth the gas to go home and get it.  Normally I'd have turned around on my way to work to pick up the phone, but since I'd already left a bit late, I didn't want to end up being 20+ minutes late for work. 

Ah well at least tonight I can look forward to watching a couple episodes of Boku no Imouto. http://wiki.d-addicts.com/Boku_no_Imoto

Tech tip time:

When downloading drivers from a website, I highly recommend saving the file to your desktop and the running the installer.  Sometimes Windows doesn't really work well when you run a driver off a site, in many cases it'll put the necessary files in a temp folder which can mess up the device later on.

Tech news sites

So I got a little bit of time so I'm just going to list a few tech news sites I like to go to when I can.


These two are almost like gossip rags of the tech world.  Although that's really selling them short.  Both offer some decent rumors, reviews and articles
http://www.theinquirer.net/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/

Mostly because I used to work with them at my previous job and I think I even know some people who are still there (sadly the ones I worked with the most have all moved on for various reasons)
http://www.maximumpc.com/

The old tech haunt, good for reviews, news and the site that originally convinced me to buy a Slot A Athlon processor back in the day.
http://arstechnica.com/

I mostly go here for power supply and video card reviews
http://www.hardocp.com/

Ok I should get back to work, there are more tech sites I visit so I'll be sure to post more later on.

Tech tip of the day

It's a slow day at work or my timing is all off but whatever. 

Those of you planning on changing  your Operating System (OS), please check with all your hardware manufacturers to be sure they have drivers for your new OS before you make the switch.  Laptop users will more then likely need to contact the system manufacturer to see if they have the right drivers.  Oh and don't forget you'll need those motherboard chipset drivers.

First Blog sort of

Ok so at varios times I've attempted to blog, or just write random bits of stuff on the internet.  Normally I get bored, or forget about them and that's that.  I'll see if I can keep this going this time around. 

I'm mostly going to center around things I like and do.  So computer hardware, computer games, Dungeons & Dragons, movies, books I'm reading, Bay Area Sports (w00t Giants!) and likely the random dream that I recall from the previous night.

In fact last night I dreamt that Felicia Day (watch The Guild) had joined my 3.5 D&D group.  Apparently she was filming something up here and was going to basically be living up here for a few months.  So she went through her bay area FB people to see if there was a gaming group she could join and elected to join us.  Of course in the dream we didn't actually play D&D, instead she talked with my DM's wife about the all the remodelling they've done in the house as well as play with their dog (I have no clue if Ms. Day even likes dogs). 

Ok I should actually go work now.