A Letter to a Friend

My dear friend,

Right now you are hurting. You ache. You are in a dark place where ugliness leers at you with no evidence of an exit in sight or even a possible path to pursue for an escape. You may even be feeling like your life doesn’t matter overly much to others, if it means anything at all to other people.

I would like to attempt to tell you why you mean so much to me.

You are a passionate person. Those passions not only run deep, but in many directions and touch people from different walks of life. You do not shun people based on anything other than how they conduct themselves as a person where some would push them away for merely existing. You are somebody that can be counted on to be there for others. You have an impact on others and when they stop to think on what you have to say they are generally better off for it. My life is better for having known you. Thank you for allowing me to be your friend.

Recently you did something that was nothing short of amazing. You took your stream of passion and gathered other streams about you. You then took the river that was formed to cut a path through a mountain. You then paved that path and made certain it was dry. There were contributors, but it was you directing your passion in a gracious cause that made it possible.

Because of you another Human Being’s life has changed drastically for the better. You took a twinkling of hope, and blew right past it to levels not even dreamed of. I know you experienced panic and anxiety during the process, and you are hurting now. I wish you also got to feel some of the joy and hope you brought to another.

It is times like this that I enjoy pointing you out to other people. “Look! That is my friend. She is a force for good to be reckoned with. She is witty and loving; brilliant and passionate. She is my friend, and she is beautiful.”

My sincerest love,

Nymie the Pooh

Roderick Neil Ball

Scout Formula

I shared this back in December of 2012 on some local forums. I'm stealing it from there to share here because I was checking on the colours I used as I am going to be working on my other Space marines that have been sitting here in their basecoats since some time in fifth edition. Long before I actually painted these Scouts. The main differences between the scheme on the scouts and the basecoated Space Marines so far is that the Space Marines were primed with white spray paint (not primer) and based painted with Apple Barrels where the Scouts were primed with black primer and painted with the listed paints.

Since the painting contest for the Squirrel is over I thought I would talk about the paint scheme I attempted for the Scouts.



I started with a black undercoat using Rustoleum sandable primer. My other space Marines are on a white primer, but I was trying to swap some paint colors around and the black would force me to try to create some higher contrast which is one area amongst many I feel I need to work on.

Key...
NGW: New Games Workshop
OGW: Old Games Worskhop
RMSHD: Reaper Master Series HD

The Black and White I used were both from P3, but any could easily be substituted.

Primary Armour
I left some black showing and layered up from there.
OGW Scaly Green/NGW Temple Guard Blue 1/1
OGW Scaly Green/NGW Temple Guard Blue/NGW Sybarite Green 1/1/1
OGW Scaly Green/NGW Temple Guard Blue/NGW Sybarite Green 1/1/2
NGW Sybarite Green
NGW Sybarite Green/OGW Rotting Flesh

I did the armour first then realized how messy I was being so laid in the base coats for all the rest after that. The armour required quite a bit of touch up at the end because of this.

Secondary Armour
OGW Tentacle Pink Basecoat
OGW Blazing Orange shade

Armour Trim
OGW Fiery Orange Basecoat
Shade down using OGW Blazing Orange
Further shade with RMSHD Rusty Red
Build back up using the colours already used and building up to RMSHD and a touch of white in spots.

Cloth
OGW Fiery Orange Basecoat
OGW Liche Purple
OGW Dark Flesh
OGW Bleached Bone

I based then shaded down then brought it back up... sort of. I had a pattern going, but painted over that as the pattern was similar to something I had planned for the cloaks and I was worried about making the textures too busy. These were the colors I used to paint on top of the first layers of paint so the paint is a bit thick in the pants.

Scaled Cloaks
OGW Liche Purple
OGW Liche Purple/NGW Genestealer Purple 2/1
OGW Liche Purple/NGW Genestealer Purple 1/1
NGW Genestealer Purple
NGW Genestealer Purple/OGW Space Wolves Grey 1/1

The plan was to paint scales on the back of the cloaks, but I simply am not fast enough. These were the colors I ended up using. All lenses were painted using the same colors but slightly different application.

Inner Cloaks
OGW Tentacle Pink basecoat
OGW Tentacle Pink/OGW Dark Flesh 2/1
OGW Tentacle Pink/OGW Dark Flesh 1/1
OGW Tentacle Pink/OGW Dark Flesh 1/2
P3 Carnation Pink

I was worried about going too dark which is the reason for so many mixes of OGW Tentacle Pink with OGW Dark Flesh.

Flesh
I was going for Brazillian, but I'm not happy with the results.

OGW Dark Flesh basecoat
Shade down using OGW Liche Purple
Build back up going into OGW Bronzed Flesh
Work in a little RMSHD Rusty Red to the cheeks and nose for a bit of color
Final highlights were OGW Bronzed Flesh with a bit of OGW Rotted Flesh

Leather
OGW Dark Flesh basecoat
OGW Liche Purple shade
OGW Dwarf Flesh
OGW Bleached Bone

I was originally working to make them a somewhat Caucasian skin tone so that people didn't think the actual skin tones were dark by accident. The leather was lacking color and didn't look right however so I went back and tinted and reworked it using the colors listed while mixing in RMSHD Rusty Red.

Hair
Black and RMSHD Rusty Red were the only colors used.

Chaper Emblem
OGW Liche Purple Base
Clean up using OGW Tentacle Pink
OGW Liche Purple/NGW Temple Guard Blue 1/1
NGW Temple Guard Blue
NGW Temple Guard Blue/NGW Sybarite Green 1/1
NGW Sybarite Green

I think that was all the colors used. I could be missing something.

A Wyrd September

I found out today that A Wyrd Place is holding a crew painting competition for September. This one is a little different from most. They wanted it to be accessible to painters of various skill levels so it's a raffle. Your entry earns you one ticket in the raffle. Extra tickets can be earned by doing extra or painting to a higher standard, but this gives all entrants a chance, including me.

Absolutely none of the models can be past the priming phase so the Viktorias were off limits to me since I painted Johan a couple of months ago and I'm not going to strip him for this. That leaves Perdita’s crew.

I don’t really have much to post as I literally finished assembling and washing the models earlier. They required a picture for verification that the models had no paint beyond primer upon starting so there is one picture.

This is the crew pretty much straight from the box. There are no conversions, but I am using some resin bases from Secret Weapon Miniatures.

As per usual, I have not figured out how I want to paint them yet so I should probably do that tonight. They will get primed tomorrow after they have completely dried from their bath. If there is time then I will also paint up Grandma later in the month as she will give me an extra ticket.

Prime Time

I started the Prime account today. I decided to create my new agent on the Playdom site instead of Facebook due to curiosity.

The most obvious differences between the two versions are the chat system and team tournaments. There's a scrolling chat to the side of the game window. Every hour you compete as a group against another group to see who can do the most tasks, leveling, research, and similar tasks within the span of an hour. A post is made in the side chat when you share an achievement. Players on your team can click on these links to boost your side's score. The more people that click on the link the higher your team's score becomes. The winning side gets a prize that seems to range from silver to command points and even gold. The leading contributor on the winning side gets a bonus two gold as well.

The other thing that works differently is gifting. I’m still trying to figure out all the particulars, but you can send one gift to each ally per hour and can have up to two hundred allies. There seems to be no limit on how much you can collect. An interesting tidbit is that they still have the Norton antivirus shield item, but it affects the whole team and not just a single ally.

Yet another difference is there doesn't seem to be any links for free items. This is covered by the hourly team tournaments.

Personal Standings

Agent Level: 10

Gold: 25

Command Points: 20

Silver: 19,296

S.H.I.E.L.D. Points: 31

Shadow Lockboxes: 12

PvP Rating: 740

PvP Percentage: 41.89%

Heroes Roster

Black Widow Lvl 5

Hawkeye Lvl 3

Iron Fist Lvl 4

Iron Man Lvl 4

I've pushed up into the early two hour long research ISOs. There's not a whole lot else to report other than PvP is tough without ISOs and an armoury. I put five Mystic Grenades in the armoury, and I still lost more assaults than I won.

I think a new player might be a bit overwhelmed if they stepped into the game right now. I have twelve active tasks right now. My Alpha account has nine by comparison, and two of those are old tasks that never cleared out properly.

Here is my referral link if anybody wants to ally themselves with me.

http://actiongames.playdom.com/games/avengers/play?ref_id=116032001589058&send_timestamp=1378285010&track=invite-link-avengers&referral_code=52f039838d17f5ea162e030d441ccf290b572b3a&referral_user=116032001589058

I can't say a lot after just one day. My initial judgement is that if you only want to get on once, maybe twice each day then Facebook might be the better option. The Playdom version really seems to favour the player that can sit there for an hour and do little tasks over time. If you can check your account every hour and have active allies then you could potentially have endless energy or other gifts.

What I've Been Painting

I recently got the camera back so took a couple of quick pictures. I need to take the time to learn how to take better pictures some time.

This is fifty four Night Goblins I painted for the local Warhammer Fantasy Battles escalation league. The break down is thirty three Night Goblins with spears, shields, and full command; twenty Night Goblins with short bows, boss, and musician; and a Night Goblin Shaman. It comes to 259 points if equipped at bare minimum.

I bought an Arachnarok Spider since painting the Night Goblins pictured above. I am in the middle of assembly, putty, and base work right now. I have taken a break however as I do not know how I want to paint her yet. In an attempt to push myself into figuring it out I have started painting my Forest Goblin Spider Riders. These as well have stalled out as I don’t know what I want to do with them either. They are magnetized to make transportation easier. I have yet to figure out where I am taking them. So far my plan has been to just throw paint at them and see what sticks. I’m posting pictures of the WIP shots in an attempt to shame myself into finishing them.

The flesh on the one is a simple combination of P3 Carnal Pink, P3 Morrow White, and GW Ogryn Flesh. I think I will continue that part across the rest of the spiders as I think it makes for a nice inhuman pale flesh without looking sickly. I might punch up the resources a little bit more. I'll decide after the rest of the body on each spider is done.

I painted this model up for a local painting competition. It won first in its category. I primed it two days before the entry date. I painted the skin and the base for the cloth and metal the first day working up the blue/green on the bottom with the off-white still on the top with the plan to paint it orange or purple the next day. There was so much of both of those colours worked into the skin and metal upon seeing the model the next day I decided to continue up the gradation started with the bottom.

This model is a good example of why I need to learn to take better pictures. I worked the cloth to pure white in some places and pure black in others and the pictures I am taking seem to average everything out.

Alpha Big Time

Instead of writing a new post with each update I will edit this blog post until the close of PvP Season 10. Spec Ops 12 is practically done for me. I’ll farm it a bit for gold and unique items, but I achieved two of my three primary objectives.

10 Sep 2013
It doesn't feel like a week since I have updated this post.
I have Doombringer. The final score with cancelling out some when I was at four stars is 486,236.
I have Five Stars in the second mission of Spec Ops 12.
I have Elektra.
I purchased Squirrel Girl.

I finished Gold in PvP as per my goal. I was in Diamond at 5.36% an hour and a half before the end. I left the computer because I was out of energy and had things to do. I finished at 15.60%.

The Spec Ops is still in operation for another six days. In that time I will continue to try to finish five starring it simply as a personal goal. If I get all the spec ops missions five starred then I may go back to the second and try for the gear again. I will also finish up Facing Facts which has thirteen days remaining. I am also going to shift focus to farming 6.6 for Momentum Generator to combine it with Dragon's Foot.

There most probably won't be any further updates to this post. Everything else is pretty much straightforward until the next Spec Ops or PvP season unless Playdom tosses something new at us.

03 Sep 2013
Four Stars in all missions for Spec Ops 12

01 Sep 2013

I purchased Cable

I have unlocked Squirrel Girl but have not bought her yet

I have four stars in the first two missions of Spec Ops 12

There was a new task to pop up today. Roundup, which I have started

Still have not earned Doombringer

PvP was a lot harder today. I ended at high gold. I may run a couple more later, but even with the five dailies I feel somewhat wrung out. I’m not sure what is going on. For instance, an opponent with a roughly equal armoury bonus and fewer heroes one-shotted my tanking general agent with a shield and full health. Their Cyclops was the first to go and paired with Wolverine. I never got a second action with any of my team. Their agent did have the Warbringer and Shepherd’s Staff affecting Cyclops at the time, but that was all the buffs aside from Agile and Combat Expertise. All of the guys on his side had almost half as many hit points as my heroes as well. I'm still trying to figure out how he did it as I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in his gear. Maybe all of his ISO-8 is slotted to health, attack, and accuracy with nothing to either of the defenses or stamina. Still, it was vicious.

He’s only level five, but I am thinking Cable might work well with Ares. Being able to use those strong single target L1 attacks of his without consuming vast amounts of stamina or hurting himself is nice so far. We’ll see how he shapes up after unlocking his L9.

31 Aug 2013

Current Goals in Order of Importance

1. Unlock Squirrel Girl.

2. Unlock Elektra.

3. Farm Spec Ops 12 for gold.

4. Get Gold in PvP.

5. Obtain Guided Repeater.

6a. Get five stars in all three missions for Spec Ops 12.

6b. Continue farming 3.5 for Doombringer.

7. Decide if I will bite the bullet on buying Dragon’s Foot or not. Luke Cage has a great attack that requires some set up and this weapon looks like it could do it in one step instead of taking a couple of turns. I’m curious how good the passive. The increase to crit chance might be enough to guarantee he crits. Throw in a Momentum Generator and he might be crushing things. It’s hard to theorycraft without solid numbers, but it has potential.

8. Build up my gold and command points reserve

9. Get the last star in 3.6 to unlock Golden Screaming Eagle.

Spec Ops 12

Spec Ops 12 is still running with fifteen days to go. I have already unlocked Ares and completed the score challenges.

Vindication Set

The Void Generator seems like it would be nice, but it requires a second piece of equipment which practically does nothing on its own. That being said, the shield effect is strong and the debuff denial is great. I’ve been testing it out against enemies that consistently stun me in PvE and not one stun stuck. I do not know if this is me being extremely lucky with the random number generator, or if this is working as intended. The basics for how it works is you activate the first item which is a quick action with a very minor heal, stamina gain, and a buff. The buff does nothing on its own.

When the Void Generator is activated it consumes that buff to activate a shield effect. Depending on which device you used to apply the triggering buff the shield either affects just the agent or your whole team. The shield removes and prevents harmful debuffs that don’t specifically destroy or prevent shields while removing a buff from the attacker. It could arguably be one of the best shield effects in the game. Without that buff it is an energy ranged weapon that removes buffs from the target of the attack with damage that will be quickly out leveled. Both items are on a two round cool down.

There are two other weapons in the set right now with the last probably hitting the store at the end of the Spec Ops. All of these consume the charge from that first device for extra effect. If you want the full effect you will be running two of these at most as you need two separate devices to get the buff which procs the extra goodies. In addition, the buff does not stack so there is probably no reason to ever run more than one weapon from this set on an away team as the AI might waste the charge and you are left with turns where you have no charge available. I could see using this on an AFK team paired up with Sudden Support and Phoenix Flare due to the cool downs making it harder for the computer to screw up the order in the first two turns. I have trouble picturing a scenario other than that where I might trust the computer to use these two items correctly in the first turn unless you take all quick items.

The biggest problem I have is that the trigger items don’t do anything on their own. The highest tier one will do damage to Venom when used, but other than that they are tying up a slot to make another item nice, but not worth the two slots. The set would work better if the weapons were boosted by the charge but didn’t consume it or if the trigger buff was a passive and the quick action was something like Subtle Halitosis. I’m interested to see what the final piece to the set will be and how it will finish off the set as that has the potential to make all the difference.

PVP Season 10

PVP Season 10 is also under way with eight days remaining. I am fluttering back and forth between Gold and Diamond right now. I do the five dailies for the lockboxes and roulette. My goal is to finish in Gold.

For the first half of the season I saw very little on defense outside of Rescue, Phoenix, Wolverine, Cyclops, Kitty Pryde, Omega Sentinel, and Magneto in that order. I would estimate roughly four in five matches had Rescue. This has diversified over the past couple of days as pretty much every attack team is running a reliable answer to Rescue now. Those names are still showing up, but with alternates and a few more characters showing up more such as Hulk for those not carrying a Warbringer as almost everybody seems to have and Union Jack is making the rounds. I have no clue what people are running on offense which is the downside to having two separate PvP setups now. Most people were too lazy to switch back and forth between attack and defense before so it was easier to know what people were running.

For most of the event my attack team has been an agent with Hoarfrost Mace, Girl’s Best Friend, Nanite Inductive Nailgun, and Signpost leading Nightcrawler’s Infiltrator Swashbuckler alt and Daimon Helstrom. Nightcrawler is the workhorse and can dish out the damage along with three of the basic four debuffs and a stun. Daimon is support that might do some damage after a couple of turns, especially if I need to prevent healing or resurrection. There are so many tacticians on defense that you don’t want him attacking all the time so it’s nice that he has so many options to do things other than hit people. My agent’s job on that team is to be a wall. Daemon helps prop the agent, and sometimes Nightcrawler up.  Most of my gear is out leveled as it’s all from events except for the Girl’s Best Friend which I got more recently as a random and it replaced my old one. It’s still pretty far below my level. I am not dropping gold on being any more viable in PvP for this event however. The item is a bit hard to tell it's usefulness just from reading the description, and while I've been in Vibranium league on the last day I was never able to be on at the end of the event to defend it so have yet to get a suit outside of a bug that affected many people last season and Playdom decided to let everybody keep the rewards that were handed out.

I tried Satana early on with different combos over a few days. Turn sequence matters way too much with her. She is extremely fragile. If she dies then she takes her ball with her and leaves you with the lovely debuffs she puts on your own team. Nobody can really protect her as she weakens them to where they can’t take much of a hit either. Maybe white suit Thing or Collosus, but the only alt I have for Colossus right now is the P5 bruiser and I tend to prefer him swinging if possible.

I was running Spider-Woman and Luke Cage with my agent having four useless items and the starting uniform equipped on defense to make the five dailies easier, but even fluctuating up into diamond I am winning my assaults so the five dailies isn’t really a grind. I’ve been experimenting with quite a few setups on defense and am nowhere near finding something I am happy with. I spent two days swapping gear around on my agent to try and make Daimon and Fantomex work. In theory the two of them should be giving me a 60% chance not to be hit before Evasion or anything like that enters the picture. Storm might have been a better choice than Fantomex for this, but his comes from a passive that can not be removed and I was trying a blaster agent for much of those two days. Problem is I have absolutely no clue how the computer would run those two together. I’ve never seen much of either of them before let alone together. They both have the potential to make the enemy attack their own people, but Daimon has to do it in a very specific way and I don't know how the computer runs him. The Luke Cage/Spider-Woman combo has won more defensive battles than some of the stuff that totally outclasses them. I can’t help but wonder if somebody saw them and had no clue what to do. The only characters more shocking to see in PVP are probably Thing and Mr Fantastic. Hmmm…

Covert Task

The Squirrel Girl unlock has seventeen days left and I am sitting at the last task as I am contemplating buying Cable before I do it as he means another roulette as I run the mission to unlock her. I could go unlock access to buy her right now, but I have a weakness for hitting as many roulettes as possible even though I know I can run it again later.