Lovecraftian Grasping Sharpeyes

Daily Ramble 39: Lovecraftian Grasping Sharpeyes

Today’s rambling takes me from the wonderfully gothic world of Hellboy to the mushroom caves (again) of Albion and back to the ancient Egyptian god of Anubis in search of fun, and I find it. Hellboy is a great comic and it’s clear to me why this title has won awards over the years. In Albion somehow I’ve only been given the Mushroom Cave expedition even though they’ve added 2 new ones since the patch dropped on Wednesday – so frustrating. Finally, I started leveling up Anubis in SMITE and I’m getting close to the 18 mastered gods required for ranked play…I just may make it into ranked before the season is over.

I believe there are new Expeditions

Wow! 5 runs through Tier 6 Expeditions since the patch released on Wednesday and I have yet to be “randomly” assigned to one of the new expeditions. I’m thinking there might be a current preference to send people to the old expedition so they can test out if there are any bugs in the new dungeons. Otherwise, I can’t really see how a random feature that has 3 options ends up with the same result 5 times in a row. If there’s no weighting, I should head to Vegas with this luck.

In any case, I’ve gotten pretty good at dealing with the new features in the Mushroom Cave even though I haven’t tried running as a healer yet – I keep thinking I’ll get one of the new expeditions where I’m not familiar and I don’t want to have to learn a new dungeon AND heal at the same time. The main addition for the Mushroom Cave is the requirement to kill 3 Sharpeyes now. I’m pretty sure there are 3 places where these guys show up and before the patch, these areas were just avoided or moved through as quickly as possible.

Now people have to learn how to deal with their purple floating knockback spells. And so far, I’ve only seen one tank that actually stop to kill them along the way rather than getting near the end of the expedition and having to run the whole group back to the middle of the dungeon. I’m sure people will learn, but right now it’s a bit annoying.

Working on Anubis

Since I haven’t been getting Assault assignments lately when I’ve queued up for more than one mode, I decided to make the choice of mastering Anubis next (Randomness only works when the dice are thrown). He seems to be a pretty decent god and one that I’ve seen numerous times fighting against me.

One thing that concerns me with his kit, though, is I don’t see an escape.

Sure, he seems to be able to take a beating better than a lot of the mages I’ve seen, but most of them have some type of escape. Other than his 2 (Mummify) which stuns the opponent and his 3 (Grasping Hands) which slows down the bad guys, he doesn’t really have a “Get the F Outta here” button. That can be troublesome when facing jumpy gods and stealthy assassins. I supposed I’ll just have to master him up and see how best to work within his limitations.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction

This was my first entry into the comicbook world of Hellboy. Sure, I’ve seen the movies and even the photos of the new lead character for the next movie, but now, my Graphic Novel Reading Group is going through this volume for the month of October. It’s fairly appropriate due to it’s Lovecraftian influences, supernatural happenings, and occult villains so I dove right in…and loved it.

While the characterizations are a bit shallow the origin story is what I knew from the movies. Nazis, WWII, occult rites, steampunk, they’re all inside and the art really is distinct. I enjoyed how the narration would carry on as action was happening in the background – the two complimented each other even though the text might not be describing the events as they were drawn. And the gothic nature of the scenery really heightened the whole experience.

This is definitely one I’ll continue reading when I get a chance, and I’ve heard it only gets better.