Cairenn Tairisiu's Gaming Thoughts

At the point where I'm writing this post, I'm a member of Greythorne, originally founded as a role-play guild but expanded now to a "social" guild, but where roleplayers are welcome and much of the guild leadership are active roleplayers as well. Still, even as roleplayers, people seek to improve their characters over time. I often get criticized for not selling off gear but it's just not my style. As a consequence, I have two level 60 characters. Both of them are in full boss armor and full boss weapons. There are two "shorthand" ways to express the state of your character's gear in BDO. The first is to list the three main stats that show on your inventory page. These are attack power, awakened attack power, and defensive power, also known as AP/AAP/DP. The other way is to just give your renown score (called RS and sometimes intermixed with GS), which is a composite score based on the above three stats plus some formulaic tweaking. My Dark Knigh...

NOTE: This post is imported from Tumblr and has been slightly edited. It covers my return to Black Desert Online (BDO) in 2017, after a brief hiatus as the game went PK crazy shortly after the server merges for a few months. The hiatus ran from, late November 2016 to late February 2017. After a brief period, the wave of PK insanity did seem to subside. I spent two months after my last post mostly playing SWTOR, and towards the end a little GW2 (more than just the tea shop). That let me get through the new expansion content in SWTOR. I’m still active there imperial-side in a very busy RP guild. But this post is about BDO. I returned to BDO, focusing mostly on my financial empire. At the same time, I learned that the Dark Knight class would be coming over from Korea for NA and EU worlds. Now, BDO currently runs one huge game world with many “channels” (instances of each world). I think there are about 30 or so channels right now. They are organized in groups of six channels each, w...

NOTE: This post is imported from Tumblr and updated to reflect changes in game mechanics over the course of the 2018 calendar year. Enchanting gear is at the core of Black Desert Online. Learning how to maximize your chances of success, and minimize the chances of being left with unusable gear, will make the game more enjoyable for you and everyone else as well. With the addition of Blacksmith books, it’s easy to create a strategy to “win” at the enchanting game now. It does require a bit of money, and patience, but it can reward you well. The key to winning at enchanting is to build yourself large stockpiles of blackstones, both weapon and armor, but moreso armor, because that’s how you will build failstacks. So the first step in this process is identifying how to build reserves of blackstones reliably and quickly. The easiest way to do this is to do your daily Serendia boss scrolls. You can do them once a week. If you are level 56 and 150/150/200 or so in stats, you can solo ...

I've been playing Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) since 1997. I've played Meridian-59 (just dabbled), Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Asheron's Call 2, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest 2, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Rift, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy XIV, and since March 2016, Black Desert Online. No game does everything right though some have done more things right than wrong. Those sorts of games become winners and have staying power, unless the game is owned by Electronic Arts, who seems intent on killing and strangling any game that is not constantly growing. Consequently, I've got a lot of MMOG experience along the way. I plan to write about games generally and whatever MMOGs I am playing currently here. For a long time, I've collected various gaming thoughts on Tumblr, but that's not really an adequate platform for gathering such thoughts. I am planning to rehost many of those entries here, just fo...