The post today starts with a friendly service announcement. The Microsoft Strategic Commander does not (I repeat DOES NOT) work with Microsoft Vista operating system. (As far as we can tell). Our good friend Bligh upgraded his machine this week.. He used the MSC previously in XP and, as luck would have it, there are no Vista drivers, nor will there ever be. Searching around the web, we found some seemingly useful posts about workarounds, but to no avail. I think he is going to investigate alternatives today and hopefully we’ll get a comment post on his findings (Hint, Hint)…
Last night was a generally slow night. Took a while to get going and then we went to Arcatraz to pick up the last keyfrag for Osric and Turais. We then went galavanting off to Old Hillsbrad to get them setup to do BM. The group was an interesting one since Os and Turais are alts (or mains.. lol) of our 2 tanks we usually bring (Syne and Bligh). So…. our Druid friend that usually is a healer (and a great one at that) said he would try tanking the instance (since it really isn’t all that hard anyway). He did a pretty good job all in all and there were few (if any) deaths (Good healing helps too 🙂 ). My pet, Larry, tanked a few fights when he got disconnected and couldn’t get back in for a while (authentication server issues I think). I am very proud of Larry (considering I’m MM spec, he is a pretty good tank).
Oh… another warning! If you take the advice of the Heroic strategy for Durn of having a rogue go and set off all the bombs so the pats despawn.. Well, in normal, they didn’t despawn and…. one of the two that needed the quest (the other was the Rogue) didn’t complete it in this fashion. So we had to run out and reset the instance! (ugh..) I guess in Heroic you aren’t interested in finishing that quest.. Also, I would be skeptical that the pats despawn in Heroic anymore also. (Could be though, you never know)
Since we were all falling asleep (I think I slept through the Epoch Hunter fight) we called it a night and vowed to come back to run BM (twice probably, since we need one of our tanks each time) tonight. I won’t be able to play much (if at all) on Thursday – Monday, but we’ll see. I might be able to sneak in some play time. I probably won’t be posting much though. I know you will all miss me (Thanks for the one “I’m reading, dude!” comment I got. I appreciate it), but you’ll survive.
May your threat be good, your dps flow in abundance and/or your heals be plentiful. I’m out.
The official stance from Microsoft is that there will be no drivers updated for the strategic commander line. Sucks when a vendor refuses to support their own stuff eh?
That said, me being right handed and having extremely poor coordination with my left fingers (I can barely type at times) the WSAD option is out of the question for me and mele. Last night, I did a short sting on pil as a caster and that wasn’t too bad. Trying to mele fight with my rogue was a lesson in pure frustration. I probably would have done better standing back just throwing daggars at mobs.
Thus, the only option left was to begin reformatting my pc as soon as I logged off last night to transition back to XP 🙁
I will be researching other left hand type controllers in the coming weeks in an effort to perhaps wean myself off this now unsupported controller, but …….
Being a lefty, I have other issues 🙂
I use the keypad for all my movement and thus tend to be limited to the keypad buttons for hotkeys (since the rest of the keyboard is somewhat far away). I have been looking into the FANG Gamepad by Ideazon http://www.ideazon.com/us/products/fanggamepad.asp
I might pick it up today or tomorrow.. 🙂
I checked out the Fang as well and finally decided on the Cyber Snipa Game Pad http://www.cybersnipa.com/us/products/cyber_snipa_game_pad.php They are quite similar in style etc, but the Cyber Snipa is black with blue lighting and close matches my current components.
Unfortunately I cannot seem to find either one in town so I have to order it. Should have it by early next week.
According to UPS tracking, my new toy is in town. Should get to try it out tonight 🙂