Category Archives: World of Warcraft

What I Have or Have Not Been Playing

It’s been over a month since I’ve made one of these posts, but I haven’t really been playing much. I guess I’ll base this post off the last one I made to point out what games I put down.
The first game I talked about last month Wrath of the Lich King. Yeah, I’m still playing that. Last month I was working on ToC5 gear. I finished all the gear from that and have been running heroics and doing battlegrounds. There’s still a wand and off-hands that are slightly better than what I have from some regular instances, but for the most part I need to run heroics. I bought my t8 chest piece with emblems, which is cool.

 
William, you can skip this next paragraph. You’ve heard it.
The game’s kind of discouraging now though. To progress I need to do heroics, but that requires a group of five. Getting a group is so difficult. There are a few things that annoy me. First, people leave the group while we’re still getting the last people without even saying anything. If they said “hey, this is taking too long so I’m gonna go. Sorry, but good luck” I wouldn’t be angry. But I find it very annoying that they just leave. If I met up with people to study at school, I wouldn’t just walk out of the room. Yes, yes, I know this is the Internet, but I guess that’s my point. Also, I hate that sometimes I ask a tank if they’d like to tank with out group, they say yes, I invite them, and they’re already in another group. I’m guessing what happens is that some other group sends them an invite, and they just assume it’s from my group. How about at least sending me a tell afterwards? I also find random group invites rude and don’t send invites without talking to the person first. Should I give up on that? Well, since the Looking For Group system sucks and sometimes marks people as tanks even though they didn’t select that, it seems like a bad idea. I’ve seen mages marked as tanks. Yesterday I saw two tanks in the LFG system for the heroic I needed – a level 1 Death Knight and a level 181 Death Knight, neither of which can exist. LFG is broken. Besides it being rude to send group invites randomly, I have no way of knowing that they REALLY can tank until I ask. Even when I get in a group, there’s a good chance it will have either idiots or assholes. It’s hard to find good people. It just doesn’t seem worth spending two hours and lots of stress to get a group to run one heroic.
Maybe everything will be better with Linh-Nam hits 80 with his hunter that he plans on using to play with us. Antonio and William already hit 80 with the characters they’re using with us, and gemma and I are 80. I’m still a little worried though because William and Linh-Nam already had 80s, and we didn’t run anything together. I think it’s because they were more progressed so it wouldn’t help them at all to help us. If that’s the case, as long as we stay at a similar progression, maybe things will go well when all five of us are together. It also just seems too good to be true. I’m going to play with a group of friends? No one’s going to leave and go do something else? Yeah, I’m not so sure. Playing with people on a regular basis kind of went away years and years ago, didn’t it?
Okay. Last time I posted I was in the ChEeSeaNaTers. Well, there were a lot of sexism and putting down homosexuality in guild chat, and I blew up on people multiple times, kicking out people I thought weren’t good to be around. Surprisingly the guild leaders were fine with it because they liked me and said I could kick anyone I didn’t like as long as I stayed, but the guild wasn’t so happy. I guess it just wasn’t a good fit. A lot of people seemed young and immature, like they were so excited and proud that they’ve had sex or can drink. Running raids was also frustrating because we’d run stuff low level raids, and people would constantly pull before everyone was even rez’ed. That was really minor though. My reason for leaving was really the personality mismatch with most of the guild. There were some people with whom I enjoyed running things, and I’ve played with them afterwards. I’ve even set aside my differences with some of the people that I was mad at and kicked in the past. I’ve run stuff with them since leaving and have done some bgs with them, and everything’s been fine. Anyways, I’m back in Playground Justice.
World of Warcraft is a lot of fun when I’m not stressing about heroics. Last night I did a bunch of battlegrounds, getting my last achievement (except for 100 wins and the meta of course) in Isle of Conquest. I also got a chance to do some real quests last night. I really enjoy Northrend questing! I feel like I get a lot more done when I forget about heroics, even if I’m not really progressing. Anyways, it’ll be a lot easier with the 3.3 system. The only real reason to worry about it now is to get the Proof of Demise achievement before it becomes at Feat of Strength in 3.3, but I’m not sure I can get that anyways. I’m really excited about last night though! Quests were so cool! For those who know, I did the chain in which you start to see a ghost in Icecrown. I don’t want to spoil. I also haven’t finished the chain, so don’t spoil the rest for me!
No more WoW talk.
I’m no longer playing Mafia Wars on my iPhone. I need more people in my mafia to do the new jobs, and I’ve been too lazy to go back to the JPAG thread to get more mafia members. I also stopped playing Sol Free Solitaire and A Quest Of Knights Onrush on my phone. I don’t know why.
inFamous! I haven’t really been playing it at all. I think the first time I played it since the last time I was posted was last night. I’m going to try to put some time into it more, even if it’s just a little. It’s a really fun game, although I think they should stop doing close ups of faces when the shadows are rendered all weird. The graphics are good, so why bother zooming close enough to show that they’re not good? I’m still on the second island and am playing through the hero campaign. Looking forward to finishing it.
I also mentioned last time a possible SelectButton Game Club of either a Donkey Kong Country game or Donkey Kong ’94. Guess what? Like all SBGCs, it didn’t materialize. Harvest Moon DS is another game I was playing that I stopped playing. Oh well. No real reason. But like I said in a previous post, I can’t seem to play Harvest Moon without William also playing Harvest Moon.
Well, that’s everything based on last month’s post. I have played a few other things a little. This morning I picked up Grand Theft Auto for PS1 a bit. Honestly I only played it for a half hour, so I’m not sure it counts. I also played FIFA 10 for the iPhone so I could review it. It was actually really cool, and I’m very impressed it, but it’s not really my type of game. At least the main modes aren’t. The mode where you just try to make/block goals is more my style.
I also started playing Warcraft III to get some of the story and background for World of Warcraft. So far I’ve enjoyed it, but I’m not very far. I just finished the intro in which you play as the Horde. Now I’m at the beginning of the human campaign.
And that’s everything I’ve been playing. Kind of sad. WoW takes up a lot of time. My plan is to finish inFamous, move on to Uncharted 2, and then hopefully play The Ballad of Gay Tony somehow. All of this would be squeezed between World of Warcraft of course, and maybe WC3 occasionally.

Attack of the Games I’ve Been Playing

Again I’ve mostly been playing World of Warcraft. My priest is now now level 77. I did my fourth raid – Karazhan. What a fantastic dungeon! It’s as if our party just showed up at a fancy ghost party. Each room was different and interesting, and the dialog was nice. Being on stage as part of Romeo and Juliet was awesome, and playing chess in WoW was a lot of fun. I also did For the Horde, got 25,000 honorable kills, and obtained my Brewmaster title. For Brewfest, I managed to get both pets, the goggles, a Brew of the Month membership, and the keg. The keg is fabulous! I’ll never have to buy in-game alcohol again!

 
I also started a druid to play with my friend, Pat. I named him Calamik in honor of William’s druid, Calabrand and his warrior, Amik. So far, I’m enjoying it. I’m not sure on professions yet. I picked up herbalism because it should be awesome with flight form. I was thinking about getting leatherworking, which would force me to purchase leather. I could also grab skinning instead of leatherworking and just have two gathering professions. Engineering is also an option, using Devee’s mining, but I think I’d rather have engineering on Devee so he could get the PVP advantages. Lastly, there’s alchemy. Alchemy would go well with my herbalism of course. I’m pretty torn between herbalism and leatherworking. I’m also not sure on what build to use yet – either moonkin or feral.
I’ve unlocked all songs from Samba de Amigo’s arcade mode and played all the ones I’ve unlocked. There are still two songs I can unlock from challenge mode, but I got stuck in challenge mode. I’ve been playing Jet Grind Radio as well, which is a lot of fun. It’s pretty hard though.
Mafia Wars has taken over my iPhone. I think it works really well as a phone game because it’s something I check often but spend little time actually playing. It’s basically a time management game with a ladder system. It reminds me of Battle Faeries a bit.
Harvest Moon DS has been fun so far. It still feels like class Harvest Moon, which is great! I don’t have any animals yet, but I have a good amount of plants in the ground!
Other than that, I played Monkey Island SE a little on my iPhone, inFamous on PS3 a bit, and some random Dr. Mario for DSiWare.

Battleground Queues

I’ve been queued for Eye of the Storm for 4 hours 14 minutes and Isle of Conquest for 6 hours 20 minutes. Isle of Conquest was my daily yesterday. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to actually play it. I was actually queued for more than 6 hours, but I logged off for a little bit, resetting my queue.
I’m not happy with this.

AV QQ

In every match of Alterac Valley, people bitch about the changes the patch brought. Their biggest problem is, of course, that we used to get twice as much XP. People complain about this a ton. Before the last patch, we didn’t even get XP in BGs at all! Blizzard tried giving us XP, realized we were getting too much, and tweaked it. On top of this, AV was giving ridiculous XP. Was it too much? Well, everyone was saying AV was the best way to level, and it always had a bunch of people AFK just for the XP. This seems like a problem to me. I don’t think Blizzard added XP to BGs as the new way to level. No matter their reasons for adding it, why would they want us to play only AV and not the other battlegrounds? This tweak puts AV more on par with the other BGs.
I’ve also seen complaints about increased queue time and reduced honor. I don’t know any details on the reduced honor. It does seem like I’m getting less, maybe 3/4 of what I used to get. I’m not sure on the reasoning for that, but it doesn’t seem so bad. The increase in queue time makes sense given that my bracket now excludes 80s and people aren’t here just to level any longer.
Overall, I think this is a great change. Yes, I’m sad that I can’t take advantage of the XP, but that was clearly a problem anyways.
I do have to say, only allowing players to queue for two battlegrounds rather than three really sucks. Both Strand of the Ancients and Isle of Conquest have really long queue times in my bracket. Previously I would queue for those two and a third that would pop more frequently. Now I get to participate in BGs much less frequently. When already inside another BG, you can accept a queue to another BG even when in combat or dead. This is pretty cool. But what about while in combat while outside of BGs? The amount of time you have to accept has been reduced significantly, and already I’ve found myself unable to get out of combat in time.

WoW Patch 3.2.2

Onyxia finally became a level 80! I’m happy about that because I already had the achievement, now a Feat of Strength! They also changed the 71-80 AV bracket to 71-79 and 80 brackets. At least, this is what’s being reported. Blizzard didn’t make note of it. They also dropped the XP gain in the 71-79 bracket by half. I think these are good adjustments. I’m sad I won’t get as much XP, but XP gain was ridiculous in AV anyways. The bracket changes are terrific also. Non-80s seemed pretty worthless in game with 80s.
You know what’s dumb about the patch? Whatever they did to make it take a half hour to send a letter, open a container, queue for a BG, or do anything else. This sucks.

Eight Hour Warsong Gulch Match



Eight Hour Warsong Gulch Match, originally uploaded by theuser.

I joined a match of Warsong Gulch around 11:10 PM last night. Somewhere
around 11:30 or 11:40, Koldstyle of Ner’zhul, the flag carrier, left the
battle. I don’t know if he meant to or if he got disconnected. Rather than
dropping, the flag simply disappeared. The game thought we had it, but no
one actually had it. We couldn’t cap, but neither could the Alliance. I
stayed in that match for eight hours. I talked with a lot of great people
too!

Quite the Night

Early this evening, I was bitching that I didn’t think anything would get done tonight. It was already about 8 or 9 o’clock, and I had accomplished nothing. But that changed! First, William, gem and I completed the third homing beacon quest and got our Mechanical Chicken! I was pretty thrilled =D During the quest, a ?? Paladin killed me and chased gem, finally killing her. Then Calabrand, our guild’s 80, caught up with him. It was fun watching the fight! Calabrand won!
Next I finally got the courage to give up skinning! I’ll miss all the presents 🙁 I feel kind of bad about it. But I did pick up enchanting! It’s at 72 right now. There are a lot of mats for it though. Luckily Calabrand bought me an enchanting bag and a mining bag.
Lastly, on the zep on the way from Orgrimmar to Undercity, the zep from Undercity to Northrend went past me, and I managed to jump on top of it. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but then the game loaded in Northrend. I was still on top of the zep and was kind of stuck. I kept hitting jump and eventually was able to jump down. Sadly there wasn’t a lot for me to do there, so I just hearthed away. It sure was fun though!