A Day in the Past: Vanilla Feral

Back in the day, when Androgyn might have looked sorta like this...

rough estimate. this was awhile ago man.

 Or more accurately, usually like this...

(mouth breathing sounds)

Most of our enemies were dragons and undead, we didn't have flying mounts, and only 1% of the playerbase even saw our most difficult raids. It was a simpler time, when the world was new and
"of the Boar" was for some reason a stat combination that appeared on gear on purpose.

yeah we're doing this

I reminisce a lot. I can't help it. Nostalgia is one of my most frequent post tags. Well, I'm doing it again, and this time I'm going to do it with purpose. I've written about parts of the following personal history before - it was actually my ninth post on this blog. This time it has a little more of a narrowed focus and specific purpose. I'm going to do two things that I really like - I'm going to reminisce, and I'm going to tell stories about my reminiscences.

Welcome to A Day in the Past, my new series about Warcraft back in the day. Specifically, my Warcraft life. If you're a stick in the mud about that dreaded nostalgia, feel free to read my post about what it is and why it's totally normal and okay!

Now, on with the show!

Hallelujah Heirlooms

With 6.1 we saw a revamp of the heirloom system - MMOC has a short little video about it if you haven't seen it yet, or you can read the screencap summary below!

Previously, before Warlords, heirlooms were datamined to be available to purchased with gold at release, but they scrapped that and they were unable to be purchased at all for quite awhile, except with darkmoon faire tickets, with the promise of a future new heirloom system. I wrote a bit about my baseless theories on the impacts of removal of the valor point system, like months ago, but it looks like heirlooms are just about the only things that are able to be purchased with gold, and apexis crystals are the 'new valor points'.

Should Your Guild Use "Personal Loot"?

With the overhaul to the raid difficulty system, we saw the added loot option of "personal loot". Personal loot is how loot is distributed in the LFR difficulty, and was the unchangeable loot distribution method of flex. Now that "flex" is no longer a difficulty but rather both normal and heroic modes are flexible, personal loot has become a choosable option, just like group loot or master loot.

First, a bit of explanation:

Something Old and Something New, Something Green and Something Blue

they also came with mounts I'll never own

Currently on beta, it's possible to create level 100 characters for testing. They of course come equipped with gear - the lowest ilvl piece sits at 586 and the highest piece is 603, some items seem to be quest rewards with no level requirement, some of the pieces have a level 98 requirement, with an average ilvl of 591. 

If you've been raiding siege of orgrimmar for the last year, you'll notice how close that is in level to current gear. In fact, a fully upgraded piece of heroic warforged gear is 588. There are people who are a few points short of 590 on live, right this moment. On beta after completing a few quests on my copied level 90, I saw that the initial reward items really weren't even close to upgrades. What I'm getting at is, it looks like a lot of us may be using most of our current gear further into Draenor than we may have expected.

Transmogrification and Druids

I'm a big fan of transmog. One of the first things I did for each new alt I leveled was find them some gear for a good outfit. Finding a suitable transmog for my druid became an urgent situation when they introduced the [Glyph of Stars], finally allowing me to see my gear after so many years. I change my druid's transmog rather frequently, though gloves tend to always be a problem for me - I'm always struggling to find a matching pair of gloves. I've been collecting quite a lot of gear, so I'm really looking forward to the wardrobe function they said would be coming later on. Even with a full void storage, I'm looking at currently having three open bank slots out of 220, though I do have a good helping of other things that will be able to fit into the toy box.

I'm pretty happy about my current balance kit transmog...