Shock and Awe

My boyfriend rolled a new toon this weekend, and since I’m the resident WoW expert (hah!), he asked me what profession he should pick. After excluding those which he already has and the ones in expansions that he doesn’t own, I suggested engineering. He ran up to Orgrimmar, trained, and was quiet for a few minutes while he was trying to figure out his new profession.

“I can blow things up! That’s so cool!”

And for a minute, I was jealous. My boyfriend has been playing WoW for a year, but he only plays occasionally. He is amazed by so many things that I take for granted–Zangarmarsh, Scholomance, my felguard.

I still have those moments occasionally (I saw Icecrown for the first time yesterday!), but they’re getting fewer and farther between. I’m still having fun, but I’m not amazed or awestruck by the different things I see anymore. Is this just because I’ve seen so much more of the game? I know it’s inevitable, but it makes me a little sad.

Wrathgate

Amazing! And, then, Meh.

Honestly, that was my impression at the end of the whole Wrathgate sequence. I thought the quests in Dragonblight were lots of fun. I especially enjoyed the final series of quests that lead to the cutscene, and the cutscene itself was fabulous.

But the battle for Undercity? Meh. Partway through a 77 Shaman caught up with me, and that was kind of cool, to have another player involved. I imagine the whole experience was completely different shortly after the release of the expansion, when it was you and Thrall and tons of other players slaying everything in sight. Instead, it was me and the shaman half heartedly swatting at things while Thrall walked really, really slowly and far too many adds kept popping up. It seemed that everything was moving at a glacial pace, and then the bit at the very end with the Alliance seemed to be over before it started.

The coolest part for me was after everything was over and I returned to Dragonblight–the part by Wrathgate had changed! That is amazing to me, that they can now make parts of the world change based on where you are in a quest. It’s kind of depressing to me that no matter how many times you save someone or fix something or kill all of the bears in the zone, everything is back to the way it was within 20 minutes. I love that something as huge as Wrathgate actually changed the world.

The Game Starts At 80

My guild, when first created, was a large leveling guild. We took anyone of any level.

Since then, we’ve changed the recruiting focus to higher levels, but we still have a lot of people who are newish and are more focused on exploring the game than leveling to 80 as fast as possible. They are welcome guild members, and we’re not trying to change anyone’s playstyle.

One new guy in our guild apparently felt that once he hit 80, he knew everything there was to know about WoW and how to play it correctly. He started constantly calling everyone noobs and ragging on us for doing something other than leveling superfast. Fishing achievement? A legitimate question about where to quest at a specific level? A group of guildies LFM Zul’Grub? All met by sneers.

Last weekend, someone asked in gchat if anyone was planning on going to that night’s scheduled Kara run. He, of course, had comments to make. Specifically, he berated a 73 lock for wanting to do something other than end game stuff. Her response? She just wants to raid with the guild. Sneering guy: “So, you’d rather waste your time and not play the game?” Sweet lock: “Yes, yes I would.” 

 

Sneering guy /gquits.

 

I /cheer.

Maybe someone who is 80 can help me understand this, but if I’m having fun doing my own thing, what is it to you? I know the saying, the game starts at 80, but if I’m not playing the game, what is loaded on my computer?
I see this problem as an 80 with some skewed expectations (don’t join a 200+ person leveling guild with no scheduled raid times on a low pop server if you want world firsts!), but I am annoyed by the idea that the game starts at 80. Yes, there is so much to do at 80 that you can’t do before it, but one could also say “the game starts when you’re geared for heroics” or “the game starts when you’re hit capped” or “the game starts when you’re running hard modes.”

Early Morning Fishing

I was woken up this morning by a call from work. After dealing with the issue, I realized it would be stupid to go back to sleep for 45 minutes, but I wasn’t really awake enough to do much. I was still in Shattrath from last night, so why not do the Outland fishing daily?

It was my lucky day because I got Chuck! He also put me at my 50 pet achievement, so Stinker arrived in the mail shortly afterwards.

It almost made up for the early morning.

My Favorite Patch Changes

A few quick favorites from the patch:

-Being able to create characters in both factions on PvP servers. I mainly play on a PvP server, and this has always seemed like a weird, nonsensical restriction. I honestly cannot think of any reason this would have been set up on only some servers. Alliance, here I come!

-More pets, and mounts. I’m not looking forward to getting the new Ravasaur mount (2000 poisionings, with dailies following it?) but I love pets and mounts, so more has to be better, right?

-A zeppelin from Thunder Bluff to Orgrimmar. You might only use it until you grab both flight points, but it beats the 30 minute run from one city to the other. Seriously, the Barrens is big. Really big. HUGE.

-Mounts/travel form/etc at a lower level. See: the Barrens is huge.

-More mailboxes. Handy for when someone parks their ultra gigantic mammoth on top of the mailbox and you’re out of baby spice.

-Portals to Outland from Orgrimmar/Stormwind. Some people are crying about how this ruins the epic-ness of Outland, but I’m just thinking about how much easier it’ll be to hop back to Azeroth to train, then jump back into leveling.

-New druid skins. This actually inspired me to pick up my level 15 druid and work towards getting her cat form. They’re so much prettier than before!

Mostly, I’m just happy that Blizzard threw in several changes that make the game less annoying and more enjoyable. I’m actually looking forward to my next time through Outland, since I can only imagine flying the whole time will make it so much more fun.

The Guild That Drains Souls Together Stays Together

This week’s Blog Azeroth shared topic is “Why so many/few blogs?” I thought for a minute about how there are a million and ten druid blogs that I follow, but only a handful of warlock ones. To me, the obvious answer of why there are no warlock blogs is because we are, by nature, some twisted toons. Some classes bang on people with large, sharp objects. We light people on fire, make them run away in terror, and can even implant a demon seed in a person.

Happy, well adjusted, and friendly we are not. I see blogging as a primarily social activity, so it doesn’t surprise me to see that warlocks aren’t taking over the blogging world. Ewww, other people.

What does surprise me is something that Kahleena of Fel Deeds Awake! mentioned in the comments on a post–why do we end up in such large clusters in guilds? I can pretty much count on at least 4 warlocks being on any time I log on, and it’s rarely the same 4. I’ll go days without seeing another warlock while out questing or running instances, but most guild runs I do involve me, a tank, a healer, and two other warlocks. My guild never specifically recruited any class, so how did we all end up together? I can’t say I have any answer as to why–it’s just a curious thought I wanted to throw out there.

Why My Rogue Never Got Past 40

This week’s Blog Azeroth topic is The Olden Days. Capitalization of The Olden Days is imperative, in order to emphasize just how cool you were when you one shotted everything back before it was all nerfed into the ground.

In The Olden Days, my main was a rogue. I don’t know exactally how far I got her, but it was at least 40. I only remember because I bought her mount a week before the patch that lowered the level and the gold required for mounts. 

I could launch into a “In My Day” spiel right here, but it would really only serve to point out that I (eventually) learned to read patch notes at least once before they come out. Also, it would highlight my ignorance about patches, since I didn’t know that people could find out about patches ahead of time. I thought they were big surprises that just suddenly appeared on random Tuesdays.

I eventually gave up on my rogue because I realized you had to be in stealth to be most effective. The problem with that is that I never realized you could actually put stuff on your stealth action bar. I thought taking away your action bar was a way to penalize you for using stealth,  just like how stealth makes you walk slowly. I got around this by putting all of my important abilities in the extra action bars on the right hand side of the screen. This eventually got annoying and I switched to some other forgotten toon.

Surprisingly enough, I don’t have a whole lot of nostalgia for the good old days! I’m sure vanilla WoW was a ton of fun, but I’m so wrapped up in what I’m currently doing, I rarely look back at what I used to do. Or maybe that’s just because I did such painfully crazy things…

Tornado Warning

My current TV and internet provider displays messages on my TV whenever there is a severe weather warning, along with that really annoying emergency broadcast signal. You know the one–the sound you only ever hear “as a test”? Sunday night, a tornado warning for the county popped up.

So, if you happen to live in a larger county, a normal reaction to this might be to check the local TV station to see if you’re anywhere near the tornado. You might check the radar online, to see where the worst of the storms are. You might even peek out the window to see if the sky is green yet.

Or, if you’re home alone in the middle of Kara, your first ever raid, you say “Screw it,” grab the laptop, thank god for wireless internet, and hide in your bathroom (the most secure spot in your apartment) while you finish the raid.

In my defense, we were in the middle of a boss fight! We were steamrolling everything, since half the group was 80 and the other half were low 70′s, but I’ll be damned if I miss out on a rare chance to see some old content.

I ended up having tons of fun, and getting a rather useless stack of Badges of Justice. I didn’t hit Outland for the first time until after 3.1, so I have only seen a small handful of regular 5 man instances from Burning Crusade. I’d like to eventually see more…at least I made it through Kara this time!