Getting Lost in Black Desert

So now that I've been playing the game since the earliest of the early headstarts, and am still playing, spending soooooo many of my waking hours in-game, I can give a bit of a better perspective, deeper than just "it's awesome!". (I still think it's awesome, though.)

Black Desert Online isn't for people like my husband, although I guess it could be, depending on how you look at it. He wants games with goals, where you head straight for the finish line and get rewarded for it. He even plays MMORPGs like that: in WoW he wants to be a decent raider, and see all the end-game content. He's also tried PvPing with me in the past. The thing is, I want to get lost. Don't shove me through the world with blinders on. Let me take in the scenery. There's enough bullshit rushing in our day-to-day experiences. Let's take it easy in the game, and actually enjoy the journey. If you agree with my opinion, you may genuinely enjoy Black Desert as I have. Granted I'm still not max level, or even close, but I feel like I get a ton of enjoyment out of the game, and that it's worth the investments made.

My only real complaint in the game so far is the level of evil RNG we have to try to overcome. For example, I recently got a tier 3 hawk. This took me way longer than it did most people. I had one brown hawk I got as a reward from my pre-order, one brown hawk as a reward from the Maehwa event, and one sky hawk that I purchased separately. I followed a plan, believing that leveling your pets gets you a higher chance at a higher tier result of exchange. (It's exchanging, it's not actually breeding. You take two pets, combine them, and they turn into one new pet.) I took the two tier 1 level 10 brown hawks and exchanged them, and I even had my fingers crossed, but what did I get? A tier 2 brown hawk. Tier 2s are the most useless things ever. They start back at level 1, and they start off with one buff, but unlike the tier 1s, they don't gain a new one at level 10. They only have one buff. So I traded two looting and buffing pets, for one, and I didn't even get a new appearance as a result. I was pretty pissed, and of course I was directed to the "suggestion" forum to express my grievances. I took some time, regrouped, and leveled that tier 2 and my tier 1 sky hawk. Once they reached level 10, I took a deep breath and exchanged them. The result was a little bit underwhelming at first, but overall I like it.

This shows the buffs I ended up with, 3% karma regeneration and 3% hunting exp, neither of which I will use, at least for now. Thankfully Tuulikki kept the ability to find rare monsters, which is one of the things I really like about bird pets. Her name is the name of a Finnish goddess, and means "little wind".

Here are some pictures of her in-game.

As you can see, she's white and teal.  She's not what I had hoped for (a burgundy color that I've seen around), but she's fine the way she is.

The thing is though, that all over the web I've found all these people saying they mated two level one t1s and got a t3 right away, whereas I leveled all of mine to 10 each time and ended up only going up one tier. There doesn't seem to be any sense to it. At least when it comes to in-game horse breeding there are ways to calculate likelihood of results. This seems to be completely random.

I've gone a bit off-track, but it's little things like this that I find very frustrating. There is definitely a lot of RNG in this game, almost to the point of absurdity. I don't know much at all about the end-game, but - and this might drive off some people, too - it seems to be a lot of grinding, which may or may not be the fun part. Getting a group and endlessly slaying doesn't sound terrible.  There's also competitive or non-consensual PvP, depending on your goals. Some people are dead-set against PvP, and won't even fight back, and I think it's a little sad that that's okay. The really hardcore PvP crowd are so overgeared that there really isn't anything you can do to stop them from killing you... or your horse, which is way worse. Horses with death counts produce lower quality foals.

I 'made' my hubby buy Overwatch last weekend, so I may start playing that soon.
Our battle tag is Stormborn#11275 if you're interested in joining a noob on her first few matches.
I just have to peel myself away from BDO, first...

Oh Noes!

So, WoW is down for some reason (something involving them screwing up while doing rolling restarts and messing with the authentication servers) and in the meantime I thought I'd write a bit about hunter pets. One of my favorite aspects of being a hunter is being able to choose a [preferably] shiny companion to join me on my travels, and hunting the perfect pet. Yesterday I found a model of Quilen (some variety of a Chinese lion-dog guardian) that is very unique. The skin is a purple stone model and I found it after realizing that Quilen are the exotic version of a wolf (crit buff) with a battle res thrown in. After browsing for awhile on Petopia, I found this. It's a very rare model, at level 88 anyway, because you can only tame it while on a specific part of a specific quest-line, and I had not yet seen anyone else with one. Usually uniqueness is a key attribute I search for while researching pets. I also try to find pets that match with my character's color and personality scheme. In this case, her name has to do with the night and her coloring (as a Night Elf) is pink/purple and blue. Therefore I usually seek pets that are either pink, purple, blue, or black. 

During Cataclysm I decided to level her, raising her from her permanent-alt status to a level 85. During that time I had a lot of fun hunting and taming all of the pets I wanted, including Skoll, Skarr, and the oil-stained wolf. (Yes, I know two of those were from Wrath, but I listed them because they were part of the leveling experience, especially because she had been somewhere in the 40s or 50s prior to Cataclysm.)

With a new expac comes a variety of new skins and new families of pets. One such new family, the waterstrider, is very helpful to keep around while leveling in Pandaria, because it provides a water walking buff and we are all ground-ridden until level 90.

Alright, back to either real life or WoW, depending...

[As a final note, the links above are to either Petopia or Wowhead and both are trusted and widely-used sites.]