Ahhhh! Sunday in The Wilds! 🙂 It’s a most confusing place – well, actually The Wilds themselves aren’t confusing, it’s the way that the quests are written or worded that’s confusing – you’re told “do this, that, and the other!”, but you’re given absolutely no information about what the “this” is, or where the “that” is, or what “the other” looks like. You’re simply shown a very large “approximation” circle on the map, where the “this, that, and the other” might be found – and left to do it! Just like that! At one stage, we had to find “eight good hiding places”, where a (cough!) “gentleman” could hide from a (cough! cough!) “lady” who was pursuing him with amorous intent – and we weren’t even given an “approximation” circle for the location of the hiding places! We ran around fruitlessly in all the wrong places for about ten minutes, until Julian gave up in disgust and searched the ‘net for clues… sure enough, we’d been looking in completely the wrong place! Really, you know – all we need to know is the approximate area, and given a hint of what to look for! A hiding place! It could have been a cave… a large crate… an out-of-the-way room… even a curtain to hide behind! Anything! It turned out that the hiding places were indicated by glowing blue circles on the floors of what appeared to have been alcoves in a ruined temple that looked a little bit like Angkor Wat! How were we supposed to find them in a very large and completely unmarked area? Still, we had a jolly good time, running around completing Carnage quests… This new area, The Wilds, is strictly for level 65 characters, and once you get to level 65, you stop earning experience points; you’ve reached the pinnacle, you can go no further, you are pretty much the king (or the queen) of the castle! But playing with no incentive isn’t very thrilling or exciting – Faction rewards? meh… Notoriety and reputation? nah… Better abilities and attributes, like extra running and swimming speed, extra intelligence or endurance? Yeah, sure – why not?! 🙂 So that’s what you work for after you reach level 65 – you get a little orange bar across the bottom of your screen so that you can measure the rate of your progress towards increasing your abilities – and what’s more, it seems to go up a lot more rapidly than your experience bar used to, which is very gratifying! 🙂 And the place where most of these points comes from is…. Carnage quests! The same way that they were the next quickest way to gain experience points besides handing in completed quests. The more things change, the more they stay the same… You know, after what I said in my blog the other night about everything being too much the same, etc.? I made a point of looking at all the mobs that we killed today, to see how they differed from the mobs we fought and killed back in the starting areas. Well, with very few exceptions, they looked pretty much exactly the same – not even very much bigger! Tougher, yes, and harder to bring down – certainly! But so were we! (tougher and harder to bring down) I was going to say that there’s really no reason why we should ever get killed in the game, apart from silly mistakes on your own part, like zigging left when you should have zagged right – that sort of thing – but… Julian managed to die about three or four times today, and I died once (but I did use a lot of “Feign Death” spells, to make the mob I’d been fighting think I was dead, so that it’d leave me alone!) When all’s said and done, the mobs might be pretty much the same, except for tougher and harder to kill, but believe me, level 65 Elites are not to be sneezed at! And level 65 Elite Specials (a “Boss” mob, particularly named Boss mobs!) are really, really hard to dispose of! I’m also very unhappy about the fact that my Pet seems to have been made a lot more fragile – where a Mage’s Pet used to be an invaluable part of the team, they’ve now become more of a liability! You remember that I explained what “shot rotation” was? well today I wasn’t able to use my normal shot rotation – I’d get off one round, and then spend the rest of the fight healing and trying to keep my ruddy Pet alive! The biggest mobs we had to get down today simply went through my Pet like a hot knife through room-temperature butter! Mages can revive their dead Pet almost instantaneously – once! Then it’s quite a lengthy period before you can get the Pet back again – time you can’t afford to waste when you’re being battered by a level 65 Elite Special! I’m afraid my Pet dying was probably the cause of at least two or three of Julian’s multiple deaths! I think Trion have a lot of “balancing” to do – in my opinion, Primalists are w-a-y too powerful – at least at the lower levels, and high-level Pets are stupidly fragile and – quite frankly – pretty much useless except as a distraction, for about the two seconds it has before it gets killed. I know I sound as though I’m grizzling about today – I’m not – it was a good day (Winter mutters through clenched teeth: though it would have been better if at times we’d had just a little more quest information!) and we both enjoyed ourselves! I’ll look into different Mage builds during the week, to see if I can work things so that I get a slightly tougher Pet… Elementals are supposed to be tougher, I think…

Weigh-in this morning. Was very disappointing – but at least I didn’t go up! I stayed the same, precisely on 70.0kg – though the scales did do a lot of dithering and dodging backwards and forwards between 69.something kg, 71.something kg, and at one silly stage, down to 68.something kg – but finally decided to settle on 70.0kg (again!) So as I said – disappointing, but at least I didn’t go up! I was quite pleased this morning, too, because when I got up my foot wasn’t as swollen as it’s been for the last few mornings – I could actually see bones in my toes and on the top of my foot! Even now, at almost 6.00pm, my left foot isn’t as bad as it’s been for a long time… (Winter crosses her fingers, and hopes that she hasn’t totally mozzed herself by saying that!)

Tomorrow is Monday (that’s what usually comes after a Sunday, anyway!) and I’ll be off for my x-rays, no matter what! I can’t get back to my treadmill until I talk to the Doctor after she gets the results, and every time I go into my bathroom I can hear the poor little treadmill crying to itself from loneliness in its little room next door Tuesday is going to be a bit of a problem – my favourite eldest daughter has a Periodontist appointment at noon, and I have a hairdressing appointment at one o’clock. Julian usually drives her to those appointments as it’s too awkward to get to by Public Transport – but I also need transport so that I can get the wheelchair to Doncaster. I have an idea! 🙂 (I can see Julian wincing in the background! 😉 ) If Julian takes me over to Doncaster early, he can drop me off there, whizz over to Glen Waverley, take Lee to her Periodontist appointment, drop her off home, and then come and pick me up! It’s a lot of driving though… and I don’t want to cancel or re-schedule my appointment because I got it on a cancellation, and it’s not fair to muck them around – still, we’ll work something out, I’m sure! 🙂 Hopefully, I should hear back from the Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages some time this week (I’m sooo nervous! ) If I’m not allowed the change (addition, really!) I don’t know what I’ll do! Cry first, and then appeal the decision? or Appeal the decision first, and then cry?! I wish it was this time next week…. We also need to visit a good nursery or hardware store, to talk to someone about what sort of sleepers would be best to get for our veggie garden(s), and what else we’ll need, so that we can get on with things! I’m really looking forward to some beautiful home-grown tomatoes when I get onto Maintenance! And lettuce… radishes… celery… snow peas… beans… potatoes, even! 🙂 Anyway, that’s about it from me again for tonight – do call in again tomorrow night, to find out what my weight has decided to do to me this time, and what happened about the x-rays, and whether we had time to go to a nursery or Bunnings, or whatever – but until then, please try very hard to bee good, don’t forget that if plan A doesn’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters (204 if you’re in Japan! 😉 ) and always remember to keep warm – or cool – depending on the weather, to drive carefully, and to look after yourselves… but most importantly, please remember to stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂