Runes of Magic Diary: Still 49/36

Mobly’s been switching things up, as of late.  I decided to run my own personal social experiment and begin buying small chunks of diamonds, regularly, to speed up his progress.  As many of you may know, I spend a large amount of my out-of-game time over at MMOvoices these days.  I feel very welcome over there.  It’s a terrific community of MMORPG bloggers and players.  I highly recommend checking it out, if you haven’t yet.  If you do follow my shouts and posts over there, you’ll notice that I make short term in-game goals and then constantly change them.  Force of habit, I guess.  On one hand, I try to stay open for anything fun that just pops up in front of me, on the other, I don’t get a whole lot done because I’m always spreading myself out too much in-game.

One thing I plan to rectify, with diamond purchases, is my level and gear progression.  Runes of Magic’s Item Mall has plenty of stuff for housing, pets, mounts, and other fun fluff items, but they also provide a means to get in-game tokens, and tools faster, which can be immediately used to craft better gear.  I also hope to pay attention to how it affects my behavior, thoughts, player reactions, and overall social impact for me as a whole.  Many things can be gleaned from reading other blogs, forums, and in-game player chat that yield answers to questions like “How will other players treat me?”, “How will I start spending most of my time?”, and the like.  Everything can’t be surmised, however.  Some things may surprise me, and it will be interesting to at least experience it first hand.

I will also get an opportunity, I think, to delve into all the instances I’ve never even stepped foot in yet, and see most of the game in its current state.

Mobly has been 49/36 for the better half of 2009, but that will change shortly.  I’ll initially use some diamonds to trade for gold, in turn just buying my dailies to zip through some leveling.  I’ll also use some quickly gained gold to update armor as best I can from just buying it.  I can buy upgrade jewels from the Item Shop that have a higher success chance than the in-game version to raise all the items to +6, and then tier all those items up.  I don’t know yet how high I’ll be tiering as I’ve never really done anything past 3, and don’t know how long it will take.  You can see how buying diamonds can translate into an instant stream of gold, and some purchasable items have a higher success rating, but you still have to actually make the items.  I’ll just be doing it faster than someone who has to earn the daily tokens and gold through in-game endeavors.  After that, I’ll start venturing into the unexplored portions of the newer zones and feeling out what kind of gear I’ll need to look for next in order to start doing the high level instances.  I have heard than Knight/Priests are very welcome in groups because there’s so few of us(It’s one of the least popular/longest to level class combinations).  It’s going to take some brain power by this step.  I’m pretty sure people do one instance to get certain weapons and armor, not for the items themselves, but for the nice stats they have which they can strip from the item(s) and enchant other items with.  They essentially collect a bunch of items with certain stats, strip them all(destroying those items) then take all those stats, combine them, and put them onto one new piece of nice gear.  I’ve never done stripping(or “disenchanting”) before, and have no idea where to start with what good stats, and items to put them on, to move up the chain of uber-geared-ness.  It will all be fun new experiences(I hope).

It will be interesting to see if I experience any sense of having “accomplished it all” and get bored.  I highly doubt it, but at least I may be able to recognize it for how others experience it.