The title was how my Maths lecturer described me when he caught me sleeping in his lecture in my final year in JC. This is related to the rest of this post.
Today I came clean with my mum. Well, it wasn't exactly I going out and coming clean but more like she confronted me. Now that I have told her, I see no reason to keep quiet over it.
I have given up on this semester and expecting to take an extra year to complete my course.
I have not been sitting for my exams and I am not planning to do so for this semester.
I am expecting my GPA to hit 1.5 after this and I am going to take at least 2 semesters to drag it back up to 2.0 which is the minimum to stay.
Copypasta from the NTU website:
Students with poor standing will be subjected to the following performance review:
a) Academic Warning – if the CGPA falls below 2.00 for any given semester.
b) Academic Probation – if the CGPA falls below 2.00 for the following semester.
c) Academic Termination – if the CGPA falls below 2.00 for the 3rd consecutive semester, or at the end of the final semester of study. A letter of termination will be issued.
I am expecting to push the limits of the rules because it is close to impossible to drag a GPA of 1.5 to 2.0 within a single semester. Honours will be out of the question, and has been for a long time.
Rough calculations tell me that it will take an average of B's in these 2 semesters to save my ass.
Meanwhile, I've been drowning myself with Runes of Magic. A free MMORPG.
It's just like WoW except everyone can play 2 classes. Players can only play one class each time and have the other as their "secondary". They can switch between these two in towns and they have to level them separately. Basically everyone is a 2-in-1 character. Each player can use all his primary class's skills and some of those from his secondary. So a Knight/Priest can take lots of damage AND heal himself.
It is also free to play, but you can pay to pwn. F2p and p2p at the same time. Mounts and other good stuff must be bought with diamonds, which can be bought with real cash. I am currently trading for diamonds but the price of diamonds vs gold is inflating like mad. It was 4k gold per diamond last week and 10k at the moment.
A permanent mount costs 199 diamondsat least. At last week's rate, that is 0.8 million gold. At today's rate, that is 2 million gold. I have only 8 diamonds and 500k so far.
With real cash, 10USD buys 200 diamonds. So a mount costs about 15 SGD and I currently own 60 Singapore cents worth of diamonds. However I'm still hoping against hope and trying to buy diamonds at 4k apiece in the Auction house (auctioning gold to buy diamonds).
Right now I'm only a level 30/28 Rogue/Priest (max is 50) on Artemis. Pretty slow, given that I could have easily made 5 levels a day before level 30. I just didn't do so because grinding is boring.
It's only fun when I run dungeons with groups. I just went though one of the worst runs ever in Forsaken Abbey, where I was the main healer and I ran out of mana and mana potions when the final boss was at its final 10%.
Epic.
Good thing there was another guy who was having a Priest as a secondary class. His Urgent Heal spam saved us all.
That was the first time I was a Priest in a group. Usually I play as a Rogue because it's easy. I can never get the aggro and everybody loves me for my Treasure Hunter skill. This skill increases the loot I and my party get and at the moment I have raised it to 12.5%.
That is an eighth more than normal. Happy happy joy joy. In fact Rogues have been so severely nerfed before I joined that no one expects me to do any good damage. I'm only needed to tag along and make them rich. Or at least get enough to pay their repair bills. Tanks need a lot of repairs after every run.
My secondary Priest serves as a backup healer in groups and as my personal healer when I solo. When I made this guy I had the "grind nonstop" concept in mind. A Rogue in any game is always low in HP. Combining a Priest with a Rogue logically gives you a Rogue that can fight forever.
This is not exactly the case now. I can't deny that the Priest skills have saved my ass countless times but I don't really need them normally. And I don't grind much.
The Priest is also difficult to level because it only has 1 good damage spell. Though the Rogue side helps by increasing the casting time by 4.4%, it is incredibly boring to spam only 2 buttons (1 for heal) for hours.
Rogue is fun when doing "errand-boy" quests that requires me to retrieve stuff. Rogues get the Hide skill which makes me invisible to any monster below my level. A monster of my level will need to almost touch me to see me. Anything lower will have to practically walk right into me (or vice versa) to detect me. Monsters of higher levels can see me, the higher the longer the distance it can see me from.
Once I was competing with this Warrior to complete the same quest, for which I have to dig up gnoll shit from their camp. I reached the place when he was fighting the gnoll to clear the vicinity so that he could dig. Actually I watched him dig for a second before a gnoll attacked him. I snuck right up to him, dug it right next to him while he was fighting and went on to the next mound of shit.
Halfway through my digging at the second mound, he reached me just in time to fight the gnoll next to it and see the mound disappear. He had to know I was there because I walked through him, but he couldn't do anything to stop me. I had a big smile on my face as I made 15 consecutive mounds disappear right under his nose while he was catching up. I killed not a single gnoll for that quest.
Doing stuff without killing a thing was challenging because it made me stay alert in every direction. I couldn't touch any of the monsters, I had to be aware of the levels of every monster in the area and I had to watch out for patrols. Yes some monsters have patrols which may walk slowly around the camp or just run in random directions. But it wasn't hard either because I killed 3 gnoll leaders (for quests) by sneaking pass all their guards.
That is what makes Rogues fun. Of course, not all quests are like this. At least half the quests requires me to kill a certain number of a certain type of monsters. I try to make it interesting by sneaking behind them and using an ability designed for that. "Sneak Attack" can only be used behind the monster and stuns it for 3 seconds. I can always just run to it hacking and slashing, but that would beat the purpose of being a Rogue. Then again, I do that when the monsters are too weak.
In parties, I can't sneak because the Knights would want to hit the monsters first to get their attention. Rogues are boring here. All I do is deal some token damage as the Mages kill everything while the Knights attract all the monsters to them. Priests, on the other hand, have an exciting job in groups. Healing is a difficult task because things often happen suddenly. Most of the time, only the main tank requires healing and this lulls the healers into complacency. Then all of a sudden a Mage may do so much damage that a boss wants to kill him instead of the Knight. A Priest has to be prepared to heal in such a situation.
OMG I just realized I can use my Phirius Tokens, tokens I get for completing repeatable daily quests, to buy stuff! I've been hoarding over a 1000 of them! Going to get some furniture for my house soon...
By the way the Starcraft games from GOMTV were pretty good. There was one day when all 4 matches involved players from the STX clan. The matches that day were epic and everyone from STX won.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/492477
Sonny 2. One of the best flash RPGs I've ever played. It's so good, they should port it to mobile phones and sell it. Simple system, great music, nice story and frequent humour. I first played on Easy and it took an hour because I was multitasking. I haven't completed my second run, which is on Heroic.
On Easy, battles are totally turn-based. Stats don't really matter much and pumping nothing but Strength and/or Instinct will win you the game.
On Heroic, Speed and Vitality actually matters. Battles are also much more difficult because you are given a short period of time to choose your action each turn. There is also an extra zone to go to.
In the first Sonny game, the protagonist is a zombie who found himself on a ship.
In this game, he has escaped from the ship and is searching for answers.
On my first run, I tried playing as the Psychological class. Many of the abilities are double-edged swords. For example, the one of the first two abilities I got damages the target's health but heals his Focus (aka mana). This skill is pretty handy because I can hit myself with it when I'm out of Focus.
A few of the abilities were rather useless though. One stuns the target but also heals it. Another heals me completely but reduces any further healing I get by 95% and reduces my HP by 10% every turn. These seem like very desperate moves and I didn't invest any of my precious skill points into them.
Now I'm playing on the sponsor's website as the Hydraulic class, which is only available there. It does have very strong skills and there are some good healing abilities too.
Armor Games always seems to get the best flash games.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are witren, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
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