Welcome to WoD

No introductory sentence, I’m just jumping right in. I love this expansion so far. I was kind of “meh” about this expansion coming and didn’t even do much of the pre-expansion/post-patch introductory quests thing-a-ma-bobs in the Blasted Lands.

So storywise I’m sure I was a little behind when everything started. We’re just going to jump into the Dark Portal? Ok, then, lead the way.

We’ve done the beginner storylines before and I’ve complained about them before. DK starting area, Worgen & Goblin starting area, Panda starting area. And this one doesn’t seem to start out much different. But yet it felt different.

It was pretty engaging, even for someone like me who isn’t up to speed on all the lore. I did like the whole beginning concept that you are helping lead a group of refugees to safety. It was much more satisfying than the similarly themed Goblin starting quests where it was basically every goblin for himself.

(Will I find the beginner quests as fun by the 8th alt? Ok, probably not, but I reserve the right to change my mind.)

And garrison. Oh, yes, hello garrison.

not that Garrison

I admit when I first heard the idea of garrisons I was double meh. I think i was one of the few people who wasn’t excited when this was announced. It just seemed like it would be a tedious sidequest.

I truly thought this would be another Panda farm: I unlocked it and that was it. I truly did nothing else with it and I figured garrisons would go the same way.

But I do like that the game uses it to acknowledge you as a hero. You’ve done so many things for Azeroth, your toon really should be held in higher esteem, and giving you a garrison and calling you commander is a nice touch.

I don’t get to play as much as I want, so it might be a while until I see 100, but I’m excited again to play and to see what else is coming up.

New patch, new you

All right, I was a couple of days late to get to the new patch. I hate, hate, hate that last patch before a new xpac that breaks everything and changes everything that I had grown used to. But since I hadn’t been playing as much lately, I was hoping this one wouldn’t annoy me as much.

But really I had to see what was going on with the new looks.

OMG. I love, love, love how the trolls came out. Here is the new Zarigar:

It’s hard to see in a static picture but I love his ears. They move slightly now as he breathes and it sounds kind of cheesy but it looks great. Even his mohawk seems to look better!

Older pic for reference:

Then, when I went over to Alliance, I saw that some of them weren’t quite so lucky. This was Khiaren previously:

This is an older pic. She was cute and proportioned ok, I thought. Then I got a look at new Khiaren:

Holy hell, what is this? Ugh she looks like she lost a ton of weight unhealthily and her head is now too tiny for her body. Yes, some of it is the armor she’s wearing but it’s like she lost some of her spark.

I immediately ran her to the barber shop to see if I could fix this monstrosity. Hilariously, I noticed that she could go from earring to no earrings for the small price of 12 gold. Yes, she could pay the barber for the privilege of removing her earrings.

I then changed hairstyles and facial features but couldn’t really find one that looked good. I think one of the issues is that dwarves don’t have a lot of full hairstyle options to compensate for their smaller heads. A lot of the hair was very short and close to the head.

This was what I left her looking like for now:

It’s not exactly where I want her to be, but I’ll keep playing around with options. (Yes, I will drop all of my gold into the barber shops!) It looks a little better in-game than it does on the loading screen and, of course, I only see her from the back of the head when I’m playing.

Maybe soon I’ll venture into actual content.

I can’t quit you

Last year I went shopping at Target. (Has there even been a more exciting opening sentence?) As you already know, Target decided to give out some credit card information, so a bunch of credit cards had to be reissued. Of course one was mine and I still don’t care, give out my information if you want, it’s still better than shopping at Wal-Mart.

Unfortunately the old card was used for several recurring payments, one of which was WoW. The notices would trickle in as the automatic payment attached to the old card would decline. “Aack, I need internet. Better update my information. Oh, no, I can’t live without Netflix. Let me fix that now.”

Eventually I got the email from Blizzard saying they couldn’t process my subscription and it was closed until I updated my payment information. Truthfully, I paused here and considered all my options.

My playing time had fallen off drastically and this dead blog was proof of it. Maybe those incompetent people at Target were doing me a favor; I could take this as a sign to walk away from the game now.

I was barely logging in, and when I did it was to play on random servers with low level toons. My broken headset was thrown into a random drawer somewhere. I wasn’t even keeping up with friends’ blogs, and I’m sad to say I don’t even know where many of them are playing or if they are even still playing anymore.

The most I was seeing of Azeroth were the random Hearthstone battles I would play before bed. I haven’t logged into Drak in months; I’m kind of scared to see what the state of Shadow Rising is. Pretty much everything was falling into the “Do Not Resub” column.

And yet, the next day, there I was updating my account information. I may not play a lot now but I am still looking forward to the expansion. I put a lot of work into my characters and I don’t want them to go out like this. One day I will be done, done, done with this game and then I will choose to cancel everything.

For now, I am back, and though that doesn’t necessarily mean I will be on more, I know that I’m not ready to give up on WoW yet.

Ni hao!

So, yeah, no post since Halloween? Whoops! Sorry about that, all 4 of my readers!

I’m actually kind of surprised I could still log in. I didn’t know if WordPress would take my blog away or the Chinese gold farmers would find a way to get their hands on it.

I still have my WoW account but I haven’t been playing that much lately. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere and I am very much looking forward to the new expansion. New expansion time is when I evaluate all my toons and play the “who is going to be my main now” game.

I haven’t even really left Blizz. Since they released Hearthstone for ipad I have been playing that a lot. I cheerfully admit I am pretty terrible at it, but it’s still a lot of fun. I even like playing as a rogue, a toon I despise in WoW proper.

Another game that has been taking up a lot of my time (and I am a bit ashamed to admit it) is a Facebook game called Avengers Alliance. It’s based on the Marvel universe and you go around recruiting heroes for your team and all that good stuff. It is exactly as nerdy as it sounds. If anyone is my friend on Facebook and you’ve gotten some kind of spam about it, I apologize. It’s cyber-crack and I can’t stop.

I think it’s about the time for Darkmoon Faire so I may log into the game and see what’s going on. Maybe I’ll even get another post out within 6 months.

Trick or treat

Smell my troll feet.

Long time no post. Going through my feed reader, I can see that others are kind of in the same shape. Usually even when I’m not posting I’m still playing. But this time I haven’t been playing all that much, either.

Brewfest came and went and I barely did anything with it. I looked at the trinkets, went “meh” and didn’t really go for the boss. Either my toons had better and the ones who didn’t I didn’t really feel like chasing for them. Headless Horseman. Meh. I don’t remember what he drops besides the mount, and I got that the year they had the glitch where it dropped like candy.

Sadly, the most I’ve played was for Darkmoon Faire. Why? I don’t know. I’m weird that way, I admit it.

I think the idea of Timeless Isle bored me but I can’t really explain why. My mage — the toon I swore up and down would NEVER get leveled — hit 90 and was in the perfect spot to take advantage of free epics. But the idea of going out there and farming gear was just…. meh.

I still haven’t even done the new LFR. I queued for it once when it came out, and got some random one in progress. I did a few fights but the group fell apart and I didn’t really feel like going back in. So…yeah…meh.

Am I done with WoW? Oh heavens, no. There’s still so much I haven’t done in game that I still want to do. I’m not bored with it, I’m just not very excited for it right now. (That probably made no sense. Meh.)

I’m sure all that will change pretty quickly.

Besides, you know, Darkmoon Faire is coming up soon.

Oh pally

I guess there is a big patch or something coming up. People are all preparing and capping and doing important stuff.

I am working on my alliance paladin.

I have an alliance paladin? Apparently. I thought I had even mentioned her a couple of times but the first time she went into an instance with Repgrind it took her a while to realize it was me.

Her role is basically to make me learn how to ret. So, needless to say, she isn’t leveled up very high and she doesn’t get a lot of play.

She is a human almost by default since my DK and priest are both dranei and my shaman and mage are both dwarves. The fact that humans get a spirit bonus that would be handy if she went holy was not a factor. No sirree…nothing to see here, move it along.

She is staying ret if it kills me. Or her. I won’t even buy the dual spec option for her because then it will all go downhill and I’ll have her decked out in INT plate 2 hours later.

So I don’t really play her. Sometimes I click on her log-in picture and stare at her screen. Eventually she sighs and knows it’s not going to happen and I laugh and go off to play shaman #7.

Then Slice and Lyssi got on a kick to leveling their tank/healer duo with Rep. Lyssi asked if I had any toon in their range and of course the only one was the pally.

I’m still not the biggest fan of being melee in instances but it’s less painful when it’s a mostly guild group. That Slice goes through the mobs like Zug on crack is nice, too.

Finally we hit BRD which is the MOST ANNOYING INSTANCE EVER DIE DIE DIE. Someone (Slice?) wanted to do all the bosses so deeper we went into the dungeon and prayed we would one day be able to find our way out.

Somewhere along the way I won some blue pants on a greed roll. I laughed because they were healer pants and I was probably just going to vendor them after the run. Then someone commented how pretty they were so I looked more closely at them.

Ooh, yes, they had a nifty flame effect. Ok, I wouldn’t sell them. I would just put them in the bank and save them for some future mog.

Later, in that same run, I realized that fail pally had hit Exalted with Stormwind and didn’t have any other tabards in her bag. Bah. I would have to go buy a new one. She was stationed in SW, so after the run, I made her go to the closest city to pick up a new tabard.

She ended up in Ironforge. where she then equipped her new tabard.

Her new orange tabard.

Hmmmmm….I just got some flamey pants. Maybe we should take another look at that mog now. A quick rummage through her bank and the AH for a missing piece and this was her end result:

Yes, I cheated and hid both the helm and cloak. There was a fiery axe on the AH that would have looked cool but not for 3500g.

And, yeah, when she hits Exalted with Ironforge and has to change the tabard it’s going to ruin the whole thing and I’ll have to start over. At least, for now, I like the way she looks and she may get to do more than hang out in the city and go to the Faire once a month.

One month later

Hmmmm…ok so it really has been a whole month since I posted last. I have to sweep up the dust and clear out some cobwebs before it starts getting all the tumbleweeds rolling through like Lyssi’s blog.

Lack of posting doesn’t mean I’ve wandered from the game. I’ve still been working on gearing and leveling my toons–yes, including the mage now. If anything, I’ve kind of run a bit ragged bouncing from server to server.

Since my last post, I’ve gotten my Alliance priest up to 90 and into LFR. I tried to leave her Pandaland looking clothes on but some of them are so funky and don’t really go together and I WANTS A PRETTY WAGGLE so I went back to her old mog:

Her staff is some kind of key thing that kind of went with it and didn’t cost a fortune on the AH. If she ever get a main hand/off hand combo I will have to scramble again to see what kind of mog magic I can work up.

Sarinde: 477 / 477 (previous: N/A)

Khiaren: 481 / 481 (previous: 476 / 475)

So in a month my priest has a higher ilevel than what my shaman had for the longest time and is close enough to overtake her. A few more points and the two of them can both get sent to kill trolls weekly. 😦

Horde-side:

Zarigar: 511 / 511 (previous: 508 / 508)

Jendora: 506 / 506 (no change from previous)

Zhari: 493 / 493 (no change from previous)

Lorethos: 509 / 509 (previous: 506 / 506)

Tenderloyne: 490 / 485 (previous: 475 / 474)

Sabryel: 484 / 482 (previous: 472 / 470)

So a little bit of movement on the Horde side, too. (Poor lock and druid.)

My pally on Drak has a weird disparity between her ilevel average and what she has equipped. She is pretty much my only toon whose dual specs use different gear. So when I get a boss that doesn’t drop anything for her holy set I just change the specialization to ret. She’s actually picked up several ret pieces that just sit in her bag. Because do I play her as ret ever? No. Apparently I just like to collect pretties. (Hey, they could be mog pieces one day!)

And as I mentioned before, the mage is actually on her way. She is sitting on level 89 and should be rested all the way through. Maybe when I make another post in a month it will be to show her off and her 515 ilevel. 😛

ilevel round-up

Last week was the first time I really took my alliance shaman out in a long time. Some of the folks in Crits have been running LFR together so Khiaren went out with them.

She has the ilevel to get through TOES but is still way too low for TOT, but I didn’t really think anything of it at first. But when we were in the LFR, it was pretty noticeable how she–for lack of a better word–sucked.

Some fights were better than others, but there were some where she was in the bottom half. I’m not even really that competitive but I found that unacceptable. Khiaren actually has a shield, she should be #1 always!

Ok, maybe it doesn’t help to compare her to Zarigar, who has like 30 ilevels on her. It’s so weird to be playing the same class but have them feel so different due to different gear levels. I later went and ran some TOT on Zarigar and it was noticeably smoother.

Ironically one thing that may be hurting Khiaren is that she is my only 90 on Winterhoof. In theory that should mean more playtime for her. What happens is I focus on capping the 90s on Drak and continually pass her over. There is no other 90 to benefit from the VP bonus so I don’t even attempt to valor cap her. (My priest is slowly working her way up, so it should help when I get a 2nd 90 there.)

So seeing the difference in ilevels between my shaman made me curious about how the rest of my toons stacked up with each other:

Khiaren: 476 / 475 equipped

She picked up some gloves and a belt from LFR so this is actually an increase from where she started.

Zarigar: 508 / 508

Ironically his weakest piece is the 496 gloves he got from doing a real raid in MSV.

Jendora: 506 / 506

She has the 4-piece tier from TOT and then kind of got set aside. Could use some new boots.

Lorethos: 506 / 506

My healers are twins! He benefits from a couple of big kid TOT pieces but he still has that ghetto Inscription fan!

Tenderloyne: 475 / 474 equipped

Ahhh, such a mess. Green shoulders and a terrible weapon. (Not to mention THE FAN!) Poor cow.

Sabryel: 472 / 470

Technically my worst geared 90, but I actually think she’s geared up ok for how much I dislike melee. Some blue pieces hold her back but there is no hurry to gear her.

Zhari: 493 / 493

Eek! I almost published this without including him. His ilevel should go up quite a bit with a new trinket and shoes. Oops. Does anyone do Sha anymore?

So, in summary, Khiaren sucks compared to Zarigar and most of my other Drak toons laugh at her. They can be such buttholes.

It froze over

Blame my weird obsession with the Darkmoon Faire quests. Blame that dumb quest where you have to collect 250 Grisly Trophies. Blame my selective OCD that makes me unable to NOT pick that quest, even though the only thing it rewards you is rep.

(I say selective OCD because I have no problem pretending that archeology quest doesn’t exist.)

I actually went and played each toon long enough for them to finish that quest and turn it in. Some, like my pally, had carried that quest over from the previous month and didn’t need extra playtime.

Eventually it was down to my druid and my mage. I avoid questing and doing dps with my druid unless I absolutely had to, so the only way she was going to collect her trophies was running instance and LFR and hoping she collected enough.

Then there was my mage, who I had taken a firm stance on not playing.

Can anyone remember why? I think I may have select amnesia to go with my select OCD.

Was it because they changed some of the play style, so it was now a 4-button rotation instead of 3? Was it because I had been converted to Team Warlock and it’s not possible to also be Team Mage? Was it just a random proclamation that mages were evil and I was just going to have nothing to do with them?

Yeah, I don’t remember, but I know that I made it a point to not play my mage, so since it looks like I was going to break that I knew I would have to come here and post about it.

So grisly trophy collecting. The tipping point was probably that my druid had just picked up the quest and had 0 and my mage had the quest from a previous month (possibly a previous year) had about 75. All right, I can take her out to the beginning hozen area and see how it goes.

First I cobbled together her frost spec. Every one else was frost so she would be, too. I randomly picked what talents looked helpful and reset my spellbars. She had some random gear that other toons had sent her in case she was ever sent out into the world.

First problem, equipping that new gear broke her mogged look.

/cry

One of the pieces was a blue helm that matched nothing. So I had to go into the Interface and turn off helm display. Then I decided I didn’t like her hair. So I had to take her to the barbershop for a new style.

Finally I was ready to step out into the world. After a few minutes of hozen dying quickly I got cocky enough to queue for something. Oh, the brewery. Not my favorite but you can rack up the trophies quickly there.

The experience was sad. It was just randomly hitting buttons. I forgot that I had frozen orb and time warp. TIME WARP!!!!! BWahahaha. Failmage is fail. I forgot about mirror image until the last boss. For serious.

And yet at the end of the run I was #1 in dps and overall damage. I can probably thank the blue pieces she had gotten from the other alts. I’m sure Blizzard put her in a group of similarly-geared people. But coming in not at the bottom with what was basically as much button-flailing as when my druid goes boomkin, it was a nice bit of encouragement.

So there you have it. My mage went out and actually did something. Now when people see me logged in to her and she’s not in Org they don’t have to worry that I have been hacked.

>.<

(Maybe I’ll actually read up on magey stuff now, too…)

The new Slice

It’s the rare Tuesday when I can be logged on and playing at a decent hour so I guess it was destiny for me to raid last night. I’m sure the fact that they were missing like half their raid and they took all 10 logged on people doesn’t take away from my special snowflake-ness. Actually I think they’ve been rotating people in and using more back-ups, but it was still odd not to see Slice and Lyssi and Wok and Shadeey.

I was finishing up a TOES LFR on Lorethos when the grumblings started about putting the raid together. I was able to go but not sure what they needed. Jendora and Tenderloyne would have been lesser geared duplicates to Zarm and Vanicus. Zarigar and Zhari were options for dps, but I was already logged onto Lorethos.

I could be the new Slice! How hard could it be? I mean, we both like being pretty.

Going in as a healer meant Sorak could dps. While I’m sure Sorak > Lorethos in healing, I was also sure that the difference in Sorak > Zarigar in dps would be much more beneficial. As an added bonus that made me the only clothie.

My MoP “real” raiding history is the first wing or so of MV on Jendora, the first couple of bosses in HoF on Jendora (gah Attunement!) and one night on Zarigar spent wiping on the council in ToT. So not really the most impressive.

The vast majority of my raiding has been LFR and it’s funny how noticeably lazier that apparently made me. In LFR I mostly just amuse myself by smiting all the things and healing through Atonement. Every once in a while I’ll cast Cascade just to see balls of light fly through the air.

Now they were asking me for “cooldowns” and to cast things like “barrier” and “pain suppression.”

Um, come again?

I thought my role here was to provide Zarm with Leap of Faith via Symbiosis so that he could make Sorak die a lot. It was very confusing to me to know when they wanted me to heal Sorak and when they wanted to just let him die.

There was so much dying just in the trash to the first boss. I don’t know if that is normal or just that I didn’t know what I was doing but then I was super nervous for the first boss. OMG pleasepleaseplease don’t let me kill the raid with a lightning ball.

Hilariously, the boss is a one-shot, and I am so relieved I don’t pay attention to where I am and I step into an electrified pool. Oh, oops. And now my corpse is on fire. Thanks, Van. I guess I am really raiding now if people are torching my dead body. But I do get a new healer cloak so that’s ok.

Horridon is also one-shotted, though it got kind of deathy at the end and I was OOM for the last 30 seconds or so. It’s crazy remembering the posts people had about him, and now they just kind of barrel through him. Being the only one who could equip wands worked in my favor when one dropped. (I was still using an upgraded blue wand. Even unsocketed it was a way better upgrade.)

The council fight was a little more tricky. This was where they wanted all those “cool..do…own” things. And they I started to flashback to spending an entire evening on just this fight. PTSD! Aaaaaaargh!

The first attempt was a wipe but I think we got it on the next try. I went OOM again, which was particularly scary when they say “your job is to keep Arv alive.” Aack! But Arv likes to jump in front of things and take damage.

They dropped the tier gloves, which I guess both pallies already had since I ended up with them. So, yes, 3 drops in 3 bosses. Ninja Lorethos is in your raid, taking all your loot. Like Van said, he is going to end up being my best geared toon. 😦

After that fight there is apparently a cutscene that I never knew about. Everyone was mocking it and I was just sitting there enjoying it. Ha! You do miss out on stuff if you only raid via LFR.

Next was Tortos and that’s where we got stuck. I think we wiped like 47 times. I hate this fight in LFR and not just because the little bitch never drops my shield. I don’t even try to dodge the shells and just eat them in LFR. They seem to be slower in the normal raid but I was still not able to dodge as many as I would have liked.

Eventually the raid got called there and I got to run off with all my preciouses to enchant and gem. Lorethos ended up increasing his ilevel by 10 points. He’s not quite caught up to Zarigar yet but he’s getting there.

My smites are going to hit so much harder in LFR now.