Aloha

Welcome to the blog of deltazed.


If you are an aspiring berserker looking for the secret to becoming uber... enjoy the artwork! I have no pretense of knowing this "uber" of which you seek. I can put you in touch with a couple good raiding guilds who let me tag along to some of the more interesting raid instances.

Thank you for visiting my site. All of its "goodness" is dedicated to my guildmates at "Shades of Destiny". All of the miztakes and errors are my own affairs and generally attributable to being evolved from lizards who liked to fly and fight in spaceships nick-named "green bricks".


I've uploaded some of my favorite screenshots to lend an EQ2 theme to the site. Feel free to click on them to see the full-size version. Be aware that some of these pictures exceed 1200x1000 . The full size version could be 5M. Be fore-warned.

Please be aware of the terms of use.
<1>All of the in-game artwork is copyright protected by Sony ( which is probably a legal trademark or something). I beg thier forgiveness of my transgressions in posting it here. What they may do to people who use it AGAIN or without attribution is completely up to them.

<2>As long as you can respect the sharing nature of this place, you are invited to post your opinions and participate in any of the discussions. Disrespect is subject to arbitrary invocation of the /ignore and delete sanction. Appeal is subject to 10% chance of critical hit.

Mahalo!

Audience with the Guardian

It's been a while since I had a chance to play. The scheduled run to BoneSnapper got re-targeted because of the good turn-out. Maybe we should have stuck with the seafood plans...
Check the raid window for the names of the folk who kept us in the zone so we could try this a couple times!!! It was an amazing bit of group effort.

I got a chance to get this panoramic view of the inside of the instance while I was knee deep in dragon snot and dead guildies. .Sorry I died in a bad spot to catch a good screenshot of the dragon. I guess we have to go back for another

driving deltazed

I often wonder how my friends have configured the EQ2gui. Over time I have swapped things around, rebuilt and re-learned hot-keys, and even used parts of alternate UIs. In passing moments of curiosity I've searched for screenshots that might give me hints about how to balance my display space between controls and eye-candy. Here's a post to start a discussion on that topic.

Before you click on that picture to see the detail I should warn you to expect a 4M+ download.

In case you are the same, here is a screenshot of driving deltazed during a 4x group raid. The raid layout is really only different from my regular play style in that the raid status box is up, and I have my persona window up in the corner so I can see my DPS mod status.

From the top left - The vertical hot-key bar is the one I use for buffs. One-timers on top, then group bufs, then personals. The top three horizontal expose all the melee related skills. Each of the blue gear boxes in the third row down is a social macro that triggers related attacks or a HO combo. The two icons above them represent the skills so I can see when they have reset.

Under that is a set of social macros I like to keep handy, and the double wide vertical bar on the bottom is where I keep my potions and charms for quick access.

Across the top I have my main status window. Directly below is my target. As you can see I have the main tank targetted so his target appears next to my health window. In non-raid situations, the target health is aligned with mine so I can see rrelative health easily.

The top right is my main chat window. The bottom left is where I keep my current buff display. it highlights one of the other tricks I've picked up to keep the action in high-resolution. I've shrunk the vertical resolution of my screen to provide 2 black band on the top and bottom of the screen. Not only does it reduce the amount of screen action to be refreshed, it provides a background that eliminates the clutter around the important buff status information.

I keep the 2 chat windows up most of the time, but route the damage spam to the one on the bottom left. If I'm not interested in tracking hits I will shrink or drop it altogether.

Here is an example on a smaller, guild-only raid. A real who's-who of Shades in this shot.

Keeping up with the Guildies

I started this post with the intent of ranting about how hard it is to be in a small guild when you are NOT at the same level as the most active group of mains. In the time before mentoring and all-access zones I would dread the next expansion. Most often I was too low-level to complete the required access quests, ensuring I would be solo while everyone else was exploring and exploiting the opportunities of the new zones.
While I was looking through my screenshots to find an "angy" deltazed I came across this picture from MajDul. It used to be one of my least-favorite places. It was the center of the you-cant-go-there expansion universe. It brought back memories of showing up on an empty EQ server so I could use the cross-server chat to keep in touch with my departed-to-EQ2 friends. I thought I'd found my PNG.

But that's not what is in this picture. When I look closer I see the armor from the quest that Ahren dragged me through because he knew all the places the silly pole would spawn. I see the tower we learned to storm up so we could put those daggers to use. I see the flag from the Court of Blades and remember the frantic hours while we pondered the implications of our guild decision to align with an unknown faction. I know the arena is just up the stairs, and I'm certain I could get Barrhopper to play a couple games if I asked nice. MajDul is now the center of the universe where I remember orchestrated efforts to get everyone a flying carpet. Yes, I HATED MajDul when I couldn't get there. No, I was not alone. There were others who shared my frustration. Some of them changed guilds, some spoke up and refused to leave. One of the things I enjoy about Shades of Destiny is that some of the people who were frustrated were folks who were NOT locked out. They form a core group of guild officers and members who pursue chances to help guild-mates advance.

Mahalo & /hug

Perspective

Every now and then it's nice to take a break and look around. That rule applies just as well in-game as in RL.

On the EQ2 "enjoyment" scale, the amazing environments rank a close second to the chance to build friendships. I know there are "players" whose happiness depends on them being in a non-instanced zone for as short as possible. I believe they are missing a significant part of the game. To remedy this I invite you to move that view around and take a look at something other than the butt of that level 74^^^.

Enjoy a couple minutes of just "looking around" (no blakk, looking in the mirror doesn't count)

Spend a hotbutton on a social that says "thank you" and push it a couple times to let others know who is helping you out.

It's not that hard to help others enjoy the game, even if THEY play to beat the game.

A Guild Meeting

Of course!

There is only one way to decorate for a June guild metting.... Bring out the snowmen! The decorators went all out to make sure we had something to look at while Blakk spoke to the group.


After the meeting we managed to get organized for a group photo. I managed to capture this before I went LD.

A new BOW!

Yea! Another fabled drop in LoLV. I like the STR and health bonuses. The 10% bonus on dragonic targets is pretty useful in those cases where the beasties are moving around and I want to avoid the AoEs. After flinging a couple arrows, the bow shows a flame effect. Thats a nice contrast to the frost effect on my axe.