Or: Hey, Look, An Excuse To Post.

So the current fad sweeping WoW blogs is apparently posting the sixth picture in the sixth folder of either your screenshots folder or your blog, depending on what you read. I’m pretty sure I don’t have six pictures total on my blog, so that option is out. My sixth pic in my screenshot folder is amusing, though. Even if I don’t have any subfolders to pick from.

You'll probably want to click on the link for the full-sized version, everything's kinda dark and indistinct on this one.

It’s my priest, sitting on the (empty) throne in Ironforge!

And why is the throne empty, you ask? Well, contrary to what you might think, the Horde had nothing to do with it. You see, back during the word event leading up to the opening of the Dark Portal, Highlord Kruul would show up outside major cities, killing anyone who tried to leave or enter and generally making a nuisance of himself. Apparently, this wasn’t enough chaos for some players, though, as they managed to kite him through IF to King Magni, who unfortunately didn’t survive the experience.

This screenshot was actually part of a series of my priest sitting in various kings’ thrones. Unfortunately, I lost the rest of them, along with just about every picture from before patch 2.0, when I reinstalled WoW sortly before BC was released.

Or: Wait, Is This A Post-By-Request Blog Now?
Cait asked me to bring back the blog. Since I am fascinated by the concept of someone enjoying my writing to the extent that they’d actually ask me for more, I’m willing to give this another try.

Let me start by attempting to explain why I’ve ignored this blog for the past several months.  Quite simply, I’m getting kind of bored with WoW after four years of playing. I also haven’t felt any real motivation to raid regularly at 80.  You see, I am generally only interested in running something so see new content, which means I get bored with doing the same fights over an over again. With the limited number of raids available right now, and the lower difficulty of encounters compared to previous raids, I feel like I’ve already see everything there is to see in terms of endgame, despite the fact that I’ve only been to a handful of raids.

In addition, there isn’t a lot of “replay value” in the current raids. Malygos, Sarth, and Archavon are all “zone in, kill boss, get loots, go home” style fights, which are awesome in that they don’t take over your entire night, but also aren’t particularly engrossing for me as a player (although Maly is my favorite fight in Wrath.) Nax is the big “flagship” raid right now, and it was designed almost three years ago. After clearing my way through two expansions’ worth of new instances, along with Kara and ZA, I can’t help but feel like Nax is lacking in a lot of detail and fun.

Plus, am I the only player left scratching his head in puzzlement over the total and complete lack of quests involving raids? One of the coolest things about Working your way through Kara in BC was advancing the quest line there. Heck, even ZA had a pretty good quest chain there. And yet you walk into Nax-or any raid instance, for that matter-with absolutely no motivation other than getting loot.

At least Nax and Malygos at least get some buildup from quests outside their instances, though. The first time I attended an Obsidian Sanctum raid, I asked why we were killing Sarth in guild chat, and got a bunch of answers along the lines of, “Because he has loot, but I have no idea what the lore motivation is.”

And all this stands in contrast to the rest of pve content in Wrath. I’ve gone through some very engrossing quest lines while leveling (*cough*Wrathgate*cough*), and as a general rule non-raid instances have been incredibly fun to run (to the extent that I have on multiple occasions passed on raid slots in the hopes of running a heroic to two instead.) So I’m left wondering what happened when I hit 80?

Hopefully that shed some light on why I’ve haven’t written anything lately, even it was a big more negative than I wanted. I will try to write more regularly in the future, although considering my past record here, I will make no promises.

p.s. If I do end up not updating for sevaral months again, feel free to hassle me in a comment here, or email me, or check my twitter to make sure I haven’t dropped off the face of the internet.

I had an actual post half-written, when I somehow erased it switching between visual and html editing. A quick overview of what I was gonna say:

1) Zigy is 80. I’m staying enhancement for the concievable future, although I did go resto to heal a Halls of Lightning run.

2) Hatched an egg from the Oracles. No dragon mount, but I did get a tickbird. I was suprised to see that it wasn’t BoP, and sent it to my priest.

3) In preparation for the removal of racial restrictions on mechanostriders, I ground my rep up to exalted with the Gnomes, which also got me to exalted with Ironforge. Since I was already exalted with the Exodar and Stormwind, I spent an hour or so doing Night Elf quests, and got the Ambasador acheivement and title.

4) I am generally a fan of the championing system for rep. But I do wish all the factions had the Ebon Blade’s approach to dailies.

That’s it for now. I will hopefully have a real post ready at some point in the next week.

Or: Dealing With the Attention Span of a Gnat

Zigy still isn’t 80. I thought that being able to fly would speed up my leveling process (which was progressing quite quickly already), however, it turns out that being able to fly opens up a whole new world of distractions.

See, when you can fly, you suddenly don’t have to worry about agroing those fifteen elite mobs in an effort to discover that one last section of a zone. and since you’re already flying around instead of questing, why not go mining, there’s Saronite everywhere. So Zigy’s leveled twice in the past week an a half, while my Priest, who’s been recieving the fruits of my mining runs, is level 71 with 420 engineering. I’m tempted to try and get another 20 points before I hit 72, so I’ll have a brand new set of goggles waiting for me. I’m not sure if I can stay that focused right now, though. Especially since I’ve been taking my new BFF, Jaloot out to dig up shiny things every day now.

You said it, buddy.

(Again)

Or: Asshattery in the Amphitheater

In general, the vast majority of players I’ve encountered in Northrend have been nothing but courteous. In fact, I’m more likely to meet people who will go out of their way not to bother others while questing than not. Of course, to every rule there’s an exception, and I found that tonight.

Zigy’s been 75 for a couple days now–mostly because Grizzly Hills is annoying me to the point where I’d rather play an alt most of the time–which happens to be the minimum level to do the Amphitheater of Anguish chain. So when a guildie asked for people interested in taking down the new Ring of Blood, I jumped at the chance.

The event itself seems buggy. We had to repeat two encounters because someone didn’t get credit for the kill, even though other party members did get credit. The biggest problem, however, came from the number of people attempting the chain. Like the Ring of Blood, only one group of five can advance on the chain, and with three or four groups all trying to clear the event, there’s a lot of competition to start events. Generally speaking, the various groups had an informal rotation working, one group will kill their boss, then the next group would fight while the first was turning in their quest, and so on.

This was working fairly well, until a tool of a paladin got impatient and decided that it was faster to make the group in front of him fail than wait for them to kill their boss. See, he’d stand outside of the arena and taunt the boss we were fighting, who would then run off after him. But the encounter is set so that you fail if the mob you’re fighting leaves the arena floor. So the boss would run up to him and despawn, we’d get a failed quest, and his party would start their event before we could get back up to the quest giver.

Luckily, he only did it on one encounter (although it took him three attempts to pull it off), which I’m very thankful for, as otherwise the event could have quickly degenerated into each group purposely failing the others, and once we started down that path, I’m pretty sure there would have been a lot of reports sent to GM’s. All in all, then experience leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Although I’m enjoying my new hammer.

Or: Holy Crap, has it Really Been Almost Two Months?

(Kudus to Ayeba for leaving a comment that reminded me that, oh yeah, I still have a blog thing somewhere.) In the month or so between the past post here and Wrath’s release, I did pretty much nothing in WoW. Heck, I was so bored with the game that I put off buying Wrath for a week. Of course, once I did pick up a copy, I almost instantly remembered how much I loved actually being able to level again. Quests with a story! Gear upgrades that don’t require countless hours of running the same damn instance! Surfing on harpoons!

More to come soon, I might even ramp back up to my blistering pace of one post per week. In the mean time, Happy Thanksgiving to you Americans out there (and possibly a very belated Happy Thanksgiving to you Canadians.)

How many things worth celebrating can you find in this picture?

Or: Maybe It’s Time for Some Cleaning

So Pike posted a screenshot of her bank, and challenged everyone else to do the same.

No, I’m not gonna go through and list each item separately. I will point out some of the highlights, including 1 1/2 sets of enhancement gear, 1 set of elemental gear, 7/8ths of my dungeon set 0/.5, 5 tabbards, a set of pvp healing gear, a tuxedo, two different haliscan hats, 2 elekks, a gryphon, 2 baby crocolisks, far too many unused consumables, and 5 empty slots. Keep in mind that I have all seven bank slots opened, and two 18 slot bags in addition to five 16-slotters. And this isn’t including the stuff that I use often enough to keep in my backpack.

I consider ItemRack and Baggins to be “vital” addons now. That is, I stick them on the list of things I need to be an effective player, along with Omen and Yata.

Or: Hey, Look, I Still Have a Blog!

First off, apologies to anyone who happened to be following this blog over the last month or so. I really haven’t had anything worth commenting on happen to me as far as WoW goes. However, last night I once again ventured into Blackrock Spire in an attempt to claim my Elements vest. Not only did it drop, but we also killed Lord Valthalak, and got a guildie his Ony attunement (I’m pretty sure he had been holding on to the quest since before the Burning Crusade came out, meaning that took somewhere around two years to find a UBRS group for him.)

With the topic of Onyxia fresh on our minds, we agreed to head out to Dustwallow Marsh and take on the Dragon Lady herself. Unfortunately, the warlock in our group was not attuned, so we were left with four people–the aforementioned Hunter, a Mage, a prot Paladin, and myself. I can’t speak for my guildies, but I certainly wasn’t expecting great things from the attempt; we only had four people, two who had never set foot in Onyxia’s Lair before while the other two hadn’t in two years, it was too late for multiple attempts–meaning an unlucky deep breath or some funky agro issues could ruin our fun, and none of us had any fire resistance gear.

Nonetheless, the four of us ported the Theramore, and set out into the swamp (having leveled after the revamp there, I was the only one in the group who could fly to Mudsprocket, leaving everyone else to swim across the bay). We zoned in and made quick work of the trash, then swapped half-remembered tactics for the fight.

The actual fight was almost anticlimactic. We did loose our mage in the first deep breath–he said that he’s going to wear his tanking gear if we go back, but it was otherwise a fairly uneventful, albeit rather long, fight. Having killed Ony several times before the expansion, I was actually rather surprised at how simple the fight was with only four people. I think a lot of extra stress comes from dealing with healing 40 people worth of splash damage.

As luck would have it, two druid helms dropped, so none of us is sporting any fashionable tier 2 gear today. I did win the roll for the Onyxia Hide Backpack, though, making the third one I’ve gotten–the other two being on my priest. And the Hunter, who’s a leatherworker, got to turn in her head, meaning that he can now make Onyxia Scale Cloaks. Does this mean BWL is next?