Legion Lunch

For lunch today I'll be having some Legion. At 3AM. It's a new fad, like brunch. So, anyway.

Where have I been? Not playing WoW very much, that's for sure. I completely threw away any chance I had to get the Groove Warden and I didn't prepare. At all. Much contrast to how I was behaving at WoD launch.

credit where credit's due

Unfortunately, most of that energy probably would have been better conserved for this release. At least, I can hope that assessment is correct. We'll see!

I mentioned many times how I intentionally kept myself in the dark about the expac. I did get more hints and spoilers than I hoped I would, but that's okay, I still don't know what's going on in the zones and am pretty lost on the lore.

I wasn't going to play at launch, but due to being in a pretty rad socially active guild, I decided it might be the most fun launch to date. My hardcore guilds of the past were very competitive, everyone for themselves on release, and my other casual guilds were so particularly casual that they didn't do anything for launch. So it's looking like it could be a good one. If the servers cooperate.

Maybe I'll start writing WoW posts again! Gasp!

A Day in the Past: The TBC Story

While I started as feral and fought tooth and claw to succeed and have my ability be recognized, at the end of Vanilla, a friend convinced me to go balance.

just add moonfire

He wanted to play my character late at night in WSG (don't tell Blizzard), so I let him. He raved about how amazing balance was in PvP and sent me many screencaps of impressive scoreboards. I think he was just a very good PvPer, but he did get me exalted with the Warsong Outriders, so there's that.

Because I was "stuck" as balance, I got adjusted to it, to the point where I realized, hey, I kinda like this. I stayed balance into TBC where I kept it while leveling and for the first three or four months.

In terms of socially being a subhuman low life hybrid spec, I definitely took a step backward. Feral got a lot better in TBC, while already ahead of balance in the first place. If I had stayed feral, I'd have achieved being a "real spec" a lot sooner, but as I've said before, I never back down from being an underdog.

A Day in the Past: Hinterlands

The Hinterlands is a sort of random, out of the way little zone that actually contains a good chunk of pleasant memories.

it was hard to find an old map without words or farming paths on it

The Hinterlands has a lot of trolls, but it's also pretty dwarvish. Aerie Peak is right at the entrance, and the two guardian named gryphons at the entrance to the zone are only hostile to horde players.

they wouldn't stand a chance, now

Simply going into Hinterlands required that you could sneak past or kill these two tough level 40 guardians, and the path led you directly into the alliance town, where a patrolling dwarf guard may have very well found you if you didn't immediately step off the paved path, directly into the mobs and monsters of the zone.

what did I ever do to you dwarves anyways

As a horde player, it was an accomplishment to be able to get in to The Hinterlands, and when you did, you were rewarded with a very quest-dense area.

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'.

On The Other Side

ugh these are all YOUR friends

I primarily play horde, but I've attempted to level alliance characters before. I never had one at max until Mists, which was encouraged by the [Double Agent] achievement.

Even though my brother and I started playing World of Warcraft at the same time, we started out playing opposite factions on different servers. I tried to level an alliance character on his server but only got to level 44 before completely losing interest.

Not Everything Will Go Perfectly - and That's OK

A few days ago, I noticed that I hadn't killed Garrosh on flex mode. My guild is 11/14H and I've killed him on normal several times, so I thought it was silly that I hadn't killed him on flex.

I joined a group in oqueue for a flex Garrosh kill. The group was incredibly stacked and the fight went flawlessly, we one shot him with a few inconsequential deaths. That's when I got my first heirloom.

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.

Class Swapping Dos and Don'ts

When expansions are on the horizon, we look at our favorite classes and at everything that will be changing about our game. A lot of people make decisions about whether they will be changing specs, changing classes, or whether they will be quitting or returning to the game. The difficult part about this is that we never really know how the game will be until we actually play it.

I'm not saying I'm not guilty of jumping to conclusions along with everyone else, but I try to take a step back and just relax. I'm used to my specc being revamped - balance has been mechanically overhauled every expansion since patch 1.12. The changes to talents in mists and removal of the use of a lot of my spells was dramatic. However, the ability pruning and some other coming warlords changes will be the biggest change I've dealt with in all these years so far. It's hard not to think about it, and it's hard not to be upset about it. I'm also not saying the disapproval and skepticism is not okay - it's just that we won't really know how things are going to go down until we experience it.

Living with Altoholism

who's that pokemon?

There are a lot of ways to enjoy the experience of having alternative characters. Some people have just one or two alts that they dedicate a lot of love into, or they have tons of alts that they all tend to have a decent gear level. Some people can never manage to get an alt to max level, while others have more max level characters than I could even feasibly imagine leveling up.

Then there's me. I love leveling alts, but here's the thing - if I don't delete the alt before it hits max level, I'll gear it up for a week, farm it a transmog outfit, and move onto something else. It may be a little odd to level up alts just to delete them later, but I really enjoy the leveling experience with some classes, especially tanking low level dungeons.

As for the ones who were lucky enough to make it to max level before they got deleted, I log onto them periodically, but I can't figure out which one alt I really want to focus on. I thought it was my warlock, but not being able to heal or tank is frustrating.

I've had max level alts throughout every expansion, but usually not this many. Once I felt comfortable to start leveling alts during Mists, I leveled up my shaman, then my priest, then I leveled a warlock, which I had been trying to do for a long time. I really enjoyed the priest and warlock and those were my primary alts.

Then I leveled my hunter, then I leveled my paladin, then I leveled my warrior... and none of them really had an opportunity to flourish. Somewhere along the line I leveled up another druid - an alliance druid, primarily for [Double Agent], though also because I had never truly experienced the alliance side of leveling.

It's pretty weird playing a game for so long and then entering a city where you can't find the auction house, but moving on. I used my Warlords boost on a rogue, learned how to play him, ran LFR three times and now I just mail it all my lockboxes. I leveled a monk to 85 and couldn't bear to do Pandaria again, and now I have an 85 death knight with the same issue.