I don't know much about FFXI loot, but sound pretty godly.  Nice looks to boot.

It's nice for me to see things like "omedeto--" when someone loses loot to someone else.  i rarely, if ever, see that in wow.

Definitely worth picking up the game still mate.  Like someone else said, I personally did see that particular spoiler coming earlier through Ashe's words to Luke.

If you're like me, and hurting for a new RPG badly, I 100% still recommend picking up the title.  It's a long ass game, but it's worth it in the end.  Some of the major scenes of the game are just acted out very well and really got me into the moment.

This week has been fun.  Since we downed Kael'thas, guild attendance (well, we only have so many attuned) has been great and overall morale got a huge boost.

We went into hyjal and killed Rage Winterchill and then tried Anatheron.  We only was able to get one attempt on him before a healer had to go.  At that point we were already down one since they had to work that night, so we called it and went to BT instead to farm for epic gems.  We checked out the instance and it's pretty great.  The zone-in screen has an awesome picture of Illidan and the music is really sweet.  A lot of the models in the zone are pretty cool as well.  We fought a couple trash mob packs and ended up getting 2 epic gems.

Hopefully tonight people will show up and we'll kill Anatheron and maybe the next boss.

It's true.  Kael'thas is the last real cockblock.

Good luck with Kael.

edit:  Or more or less, if you can do kael, you can down the other bosses.  they are hard and require coordination (archimonde comes to mind), but compared to what's needed for kael, it's not as much.

EDIT:

FINALLY killed Kael'thas.  I don't know if we were using a bad strat or what (but i doubt that, since at about 10-15 of our guild is transfers from a bt guild that broke up).  But it feels good to finally down him.  We normally end our raids at 1am EST but we had two great attempts right around 12:45 with a perfect raid make-up, everyone stuck around even though some had things they had to do in real life.  Finally after reclearing trash with our new-found resolve, we killed him at like 1:45.  Couldn't be happier.

When I talk about raids, I'm talking about dungeon PvE raids.  City raids group make up isn't that big of a deal.  You just have to have a group of people who aren't fucktards and can listen.

Paladins are getting more flak than before because raids are now 25 man.  Out of the very limited healing spots, paladins were and still will get the spotlight while other classes are undesired.

That's the problem.

Rogues and dps warriors used to have the same problem as well.  They fixed it and I'm happy for them.

Not really.  I thought you couldn't raid yet?

Having blessings max at two would allow other classes to regain some footholding in the raiding scene.  When most fights need 6-7 healers (8 tops), 3-sometimes 4- of them being paladins, that doesn't leave much room for other classes -- maybe 1 druid, 1 priest, and 2 shaman.

All it's doing is leveling the playing field.  Even post 2.3, paladins are still going to be on-par with other healing classes on single target healing (since no one can take that away from shamans).  The only thing 2.3 is doing to paladins heal wise is nerfing their ability to downrank as easily.  It should have been this way from the beginning.  Now it's just that anymore they aren't so over-the-top God mode that they used to be.

Given blizzard's track record my suggestion is much more likely to happen than them actually fixing the problems of the other classes.  I don't have a problem with how blessings are right now, but I do get annoyed at seeing 2 out of the 4 healing classes being needed very minimally at one per raid.

Hmm, oddly enough I'm replaying BoFIII at the moment

Pros:

+Quirky side-missions make for an interesting gameplay experience (training Beyd, making shisu, etc)
+Fairly in depth character customization with the master system, but not too in depth that characters lose their individuality.
+Story is decent and is not insanely long (which is a plus to me, I'm a little tired of 70+ hour games)

Cons:
-Some characters are fairly bad and it takes work to make them worth using (I'm lookin' at you, Nina!)
-Game is too easy for the most part


I can't really think up too many complaints at the moment.

Next game: Valkyrie Profile 2

No.

The whole server is bad?  I doubt it.  You can try to explain how bad it is, but I really doubt it's that much worse than any other server.  Every server has their idiots, their elitist opposite faction that ganks the opposing faction anytime they can, and people who are just plain asshats.  You're going to have to group with them at some point to better gear yourself for karazhan.  Honestly even if your friends are in the guild, I don't think it's a good idea to be joining what sounds to be a raiding guild.  That's just how raiding guilds are in general with lower levels.

As for your trouble leveling, my sentiments are the same as Darkrider's.  I leveled a priest holy spec from 60-70.  That is far worse than any competent paladin spec for leveling.  I also did this as soon as BC came out, so there was no looking up thottbot or wowhead.  If you can't figure it out easily by reading the quest, skip it.  There are a ton of quests out there in Outlands.  Shit I dinged 70 without even TOUCHING Netherstorm, and I know a lot of others who have too.

So I'd look for another guild and worry less about finding a raiding guild until you're ready to raid.  I generally had more fun leveling up in guilds that had more people at my level.  Even smaller servers are bound to have a couple of these guilds.

PS:  Nobody likes grinding.  Paladin is the least fun class to level imo.  

Also I don't know if you saw the 2.3 PTR patch notes, but if you're planning on being a paladin healer because of how great they were/how much they're needed (which a lot of people rolled pallies because of), while they still do have good survivability and low threat heals, they are not the top dog anymore by a long shot like they used to be.  They're getting nerfed again and other healing classes are getting buffed.  I don't know if you enjoy playing a paladin or not, but it's not worth it to force yourself to play it if you don't like it.

edit:  paladins will still be needed of course.  until they nerf blessings, there will always be a minimum of 3 paladins per raid in an optimal setup.  honestly i think they need to nerf blessings so that each person can only have 2 blessings on him at any time.

yeah, the nerf is kind of lame imo.  the fight is really great how it is, but i guess the nerf isn't that big of a deal.  the execution still has to be right, it's just a little less reliant on hardcore dps than before.  we usually go in with 5-6 healers, this would let us have one more if needed, but that generally doesn't seem to be the problem.

it's about fucking time.  best news of the day.

edit:  I really like the graphics for some reason.  Not real sure why.

Yeah, I agree.  I remember trying to get attuned for tempest keep and trying to find a group for it that could do it in the quest time limit.  

Anyways, we've been working on Kael'thas for 4 days and we've got him to 60% in phase 4.  Just 10% more and we would have had loot and access to Mount Hyjal pretty much.  I'm pretty sure he'll go down before the server reset.  I'm also pretty sure that I've spent over 50g on repairs and I wear cloth.  This is what makes WoW entertaining PvE wise imo and other mmo's like ffxi can't compete with (can't really speak for EQ though).

Overall a pretty amazing fight.  Definitely one of the top notch encounters to date and requires a lot of coordination between players.

Dincrest - About your new game+ experience, I too was dissapointed when I first saw that too.  Though I guess it kind of makes sense since


As far as the student council S-link, yeah she's a pain.  Once you get her to level 6 or 7, she needs constant attention or she'll go reverse.  I wouldn't go for her until you can devote time to her when she's available and not another girl.  That's what I ended up doing, at least.

Lately I've been playing .hack//G.U Rebirth and I really want to like but one thing that annoys the fuck out of me is the arena battles.

Glad I'm not the only person who thought they were on a ps2 at first.  I'm pretty interested in this game now, mainly how they'd fit a tales like battle-system on the DS.  I've never played a game on the DS that required quick d-pad movements, so I'm curious how it would work (triggers involvement, perhaps?)

I was really happy when they announced it was coming out on XBL downloads.  I was hoping it would come out before I moved out (it was my roommate's 360), but it didn't.  I played the old version back on dreamcast with friends and absolutely loved it.  It's a really cool style of gameplay, even if we didn't have any idea on how to play it, due to it being in Japanese.

Hopefully the 360 since the FPS is supposedly a lot better than the Ps3's for some reason.

I'm really interested in playing this game.  I have some questions for you.

-My roommate said something about how the shooting, while similar to nhl 07, allows you to shank the shots if you don't pull back on the stick straight.  How does that play in the game?

-How many one-timer goals do you see?  I come from the old school games where one timers ruled the earth, yet when I played 07, I had a really hard time scoring like that even on really nice one-timers.

-Also, one of the biggest flaws in the 07 if you ask me was the ease of scoring with manual dekes even without a breakaway.  Even on the hardest goalie difficulty, my roommate was generally able to score on easily 50-65% of the manual deke/fake-outs that he was able to get.  Was this fixed?