Rather be fishing…

Sorry about the long time between posts, but Nick and I are now college graduates!  Grats us!

Anyway, WoW has become my main passtime for the summer time, since I spend most of my days home watching my little brother who is on summer vacation as well.  This has, of course, led to me falling back in love with fishing – it happens every school break, probably because breaks would be the only period when I would have the time needed to fish in game.

And the WoW gods definitely want me to fish.  On the first day, I got my fishing from 120 to 330 and did the fishing daily quest twice (once during the day and once at 3am when the dailies reset).  The first time I did it, I got the strand crawler pet:

Okay, so I thought I was already pretty lucky, since the drop rate of this pet is apparently a little more than 1%.  When I do the daily again, I get the Jeweled Fishing Pole!  This fishing pole adds 30 fishing skill, which basically makes it so I don’t have to grind Kalu’ak rep.  Yay!

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better…  I go try out my fishing pole in Skettis and fish up Mr. Pinchy on the first node!  AND I get the pet on the first use of the item!  (This is important because I’ve actually fished him up 2 times before and not gotten the pet.)

I’m starting to think that I really should have gone to northrend that night and tried to fish to get the mount, but I was too sleepy, haha.  Either way, that’s a lot of great stuff in one 24-hour period – a clear sign from Blizzard that I should continue fishing, haha!

Damn you Retribution Paladins!

Tonight I did my first battle grounds -EVER- on my mage.  Looking back on it, I’m not really sure why I never ran anything on her, but I think it’s because she was my last 70 in TBC and I was too busy doing stuff with other characters to ever bother with mage PvP.  Plus I’m not a big PvPer to begin with, so it’s an easy thing for me to overlook.

I got several random achievements throughout the night and, appropriately, got made fun of in the my guild for getting stuff like “100 honorable kills”.

We also started a 3v3 arena team tonight (Hover Cat Flies Low).  Though it is a rogue/mage/priest team (zomg op), we are 2-8.  Obviously, we are (1) not wearing any pvp gear, (2) have 0 resilience, (3) total noobs.  It’s okay though, I figure it’s better than 0-10!  Haha.  I changed my second spec to a frost arena/pvp spec and it feels very light and fun after casting those horribly long frostfire bolts for the past few months.

We won most of the battlegrounds tonight – amazing for Horde on our server – and all I have to say is this: why is it that every single retribution paladin that sees my mage has to tear off after me, stun me, and own me?  Just wondering.

Wrath of the Bitch King… Or How I Came to Hate World of Warcraft’s Second Expansion

I should have known something was wrong when I first saw the cinematic trailer for Wrath of the Lich King.  My first response: “Where the hell is the catch phrase?”  My second response: “There was not enough epic dragon roaring.”  It’s not that I hate how much talking the Lich King’s dad (the narrator) does, but damn!  Where is my “YOU ARE NOT PREPARED!“?

But it was okay, I let it go.  I let myself get excited for the expansion.  I went to the local mall for the midnight opening and even had a funny moment singing numetal in the car on the way back around 1am.  Installed the expansion.  Played a little that night.  Wasn’t really impressed with Howling Fjord, but I just accepted that as stemming from my dislike of forest-y zones in WoW.

It’s been a few months now and I still don’t like this expansion, especially when I compare it with The Burning Crusade.  First let me say a couple things that I like about the playing now, so I don’t sound like a complete psycho bitch:

1. Reputation grinding is less painful now with the Tabard system.

2. Heroics are easily pug-able and they are the correct difficulty.  There was nothing more irritating in TBC than the fact that you needed Karazhan+ gear in order to run heroics.  The rewards in WotLK heroics adequately prepare players for the first tier of raiding.

3. The phasing stuff allows for more interesting questing and more inclusion of lore.

Okay now that I sound fair and balanced (haha), let me complain about what sucks:

1. There are not enough aliens.  I love aliens and demons and I remember being totally amazed by new models in TBC like those weird ravagers.  A slightly reworked model of a wolf I saw in Silverpine Forest?  Not so impressive.

2. The zones all look the same.  In WotLK you can choose between a snowy zone (Dragonblight and Storm Peaks), a foresty zone (Howling Fjord and Grizzly Hills), or an lichy zone (Zul’Drak or Icecrown).  I know a lot of people hated the transitions between zones in Outland, and I admit that it seemed a little implausible that you could go from Hellfire Peninsula to Zangarmarsh in a few short steps, but at least I wasn’t bored to death!  And just an aside: I don’t play with game music on very often, and I blame the viking soundtrack in Northrend.

3. Dalaran sucks unless you have an awesome computer.  If you have an awesome computer, Dalaran still sucks, just a little less.  Making Dalaran such a clusterfuck (for lack of a better term) was a really bad move on Blizzard’s part.  I’m not even going to complain about feeling like I’m in a more glowy Stormwind when I’m there, because I can deal with that.  But why couldn’t the game designers make the city just 1.5 or 2 times its size right now so that I’m not having to load 100 characters every time I go over there?  When I first heard about this city, I was excited because people told me that Alliance and Horde would have their own separated areas.  This could have been much more present, I feel like we are barely separated at all, which just adds to my lag.

4. The gear is ugly and repetitive.  I’ve made posts about this in the past.  It’s enough to say that there are not enough unique models for gear, especially when you’re leveling.

5. The gear reset was too soft.  I will preface this point by acknowledging that 90% of people will disagree with me on this.  I loved when I stepped into Outland and suddenly the quest greens were better than the blues and purples I had been working so hard on before.  It was fun to replace all of your stuff, even if it was very colorful and admitedly a little ugly.  The feeling of being in a new world was totally awesome.  Arco (my hunter) came into Northrend wearing a mixture of gear from Zul’Aman, Hyjal, Black Temple, and some crafted items.  I did not get to replace one piece of gear on her until level 77, if I remember correctly (I might have replaced a trinket at 75, not sure).  Even Eau (my mage), who was wearing mostly crafted and Karazhan gear, didn’t really get to replace items until 73 or 74.  I know that some people are very attached to their tier gear that they worked so hard towards, blah blah blah.  I can only agree with those sentiments if I’m staying the same area.  If I got a whole new expansion, I want gear that looks good and new and fun in the first few levels!

6. The expansion was released with too few raids.  Let’s be honest: Blizzard didn’t even make a raid for the release of WotLK, they retooled a raid (Naxxramas) they had already made for vanilla WoW.  The other raids currently in the game are only encounters (Malygos, Vault, and Sartherion).  People had Naxx on farm within the first week of the expansion.  Within a month, less hardcore players were pugging both 10 and 25-man Naxx.  I was in a 25-man Naxx pug last night that had no trouble downing any of the bosses, even though many of the players were there for the first time.  I am not complaining about Naxx being too easy – Kara was frustrating and broke up a lot of the more casual guilds in early TBC that couldn’t get past Moroes or Curator – I’m just saying that, if Naxx is going to be this easy, there needs to be something else to move on to.  I know that Ulduar is coming out soon, and it’ll be interesting to see how well they tool the difficulty and gear jump.  A lot of people that aren’t in raiding guilds have been pugging Naxx 25-man and will (in theory) be geared for Ulduar.  Are we expecting to see a lot of Ulduar pugs too?  If so, is Blizzard coming out with new content soon after Ulduar?  I feel like they could have delayed the release of this expansion a few months and included a more fleshed out raiding environment.  In TBC, we started off the expansion with Karazhan, Gruul’s Lair, Magtheridon’s Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern, and Tempest Keep –  and people weren’t even progressing past Kara and Gruul’s that quickly!  Blizzard needed to realize that by making the entry-level raiding easier, they would need more content.

7. The achievement system is an excuse to make less raiding content.  This point also requires a preface: I like individual player-based achievements.  I like doing Loremaster because it shows me quests and zones that I had skipped.  What I don’t like is that people seem to think that Blizzard’s lack of content is excusable by the large amount of achievements associated with heroics and raids.  First of all, achievements are predictable.  I was joking around today with Nick that if there had been achievements for Kara, there would have been one to kill Curator without killing any sparks, or to kill Moroes and all of this guests within 5 seconds of each other.  This doesn’t bother me that much, but it is kind of annoying.  What bothers me more is that Blizzard is trying to just recycle content and make it seem newer and more challenging by just adding some small reward, like achievement points that get you nothing but bragging rights.  They are encouraging people to do content in the most stupidly difficult way for the same gear rewards (the exception to this is Sartherion with 1, 2, or 3 drakes up).  A solution to this would be to maybe make certain raid encounters “unlock” once people have done certain achievements, but even then I wouldn’t like it because it’s just giving a new name to attunements.

8. There are too many dailies.  Again, I am not interested in doing the same unchallenging and boring content over and over again.  There were too many dailies in TBC too, so this is just a general gripe with all of WoW.  Dailies are unecessary!  There I said it!  Once you have your flight skill, you don’t really need that much gold anymore.  Blizzard added so many money sinks into this game (like super expensive mounts, pets, spells) that people are focusing more on doing some rotation of the same 50 quests in order to get a toy train set.  I already do that in real life – I save money to buy things that are actually real.  Do I need to spend hours earning and saving virtual money so that I can have a mammoth in a game?  I don’t think so.  You’d be better off not doing dailies and working a part time job in real life.  Then you can buy your own real life mammoth and pile your low level friends on it.

9. Arena rewards are too good.  I don’t know that much about Arena or PvP, but why the hell would you ever give PvPers the first frost wyrm?!  Enough said.

Weapon Enchants, Ganking, Loremaster Achievement

I recently decided that I would try to get the loremaster achievement on Eau.  I have also continued leveling my rogue (Zaleria) and possibly a new shaman (Raio).  I am totally methodical when it comes to multiple things to do on WoW (actually I am super methodical about a lot of things in real life too).  So here is what I have been doing: every day that I can play, I burn off the rest XP on Zaleria, then Raio, then work on Loremaster for Eau.

I decided to start with Eastern Kingdoms.  I have been working from top to bottom and left to right, working on one zone at a time.  I am currently only at Searing Gorge and already 450/550 quests for the Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms achievement, so it doesn’t seem like it’ll be too hard to finish this up.  Questing in all these low level zones has brought up a question for me – to gank or not to gank?  When I first transfered to a pvp server, I was mildly against the practice of ganking just for the sake of ganking.  I have to say that the multiple gankings I have been a victim of while leveling my rogue in Starnglethorn Vale has started to shift my understanding of the matter.  Though I am still against the idea of “I am bored so I am going to sit in Wetlands and look for lowbie alliance to gank,” I have started to be more okay with the idea of “I’m in the zone and this lowbie just ran by, how hard would it be to just throw one frostfire bolt at them?”

I have found a happy medium, which is flexible dependent on how irritated I am from ganking on my rogue on any particular day (I can’t deny that after being ganked a few times by a gnome mage on Zaleria, I have parked Eau in Stranglethorn Vale to attempt to corpse camp him, but he was nowhere to be found… stupid little things).  Anyway, my happy medium consists of emoting at alliance.  If they have a sense of humor and dance/emote with me, I don’t do anything.  If they try to run, I either chain sheep them or kill them.  That makes me sound mean huh?  Well…  worse things have happened with my rogue, haha.

I also have noticed that something weird is happening with my rogue.  Because I am doing Loremaster on Eau, I have a lot of lowbie greens/blues, which I can disenchant into random mats.  I have been making whatever enchants I can to help level on my rogue and mailing them over using a weapon vellum.  It just so happens that one of the enchants I put on her weapons (+4 to damage I think) has a blue glow.  I swear that ever since I have had this enchant, I have been attracting so much more pvp/ganking!  I’m not sure why this is happening, but I think it might be that I’m more visible because of the glow or maybe a low level with enchants looks like they like pvp or they are twinked?  I’m not sure, but it’s really irritating!  I am not a huge pvper, I am just on Burning Blade because I want to play with my real life friends!

Also, because Nick says I don’t have enough pictures in my posts:

Isn’t she looking cute these days?

Achievements!

Evening everyone!

I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve been so busy getting achievements!  In patch 3.0.2, Blizz implemented the achievement system, and I have been working hard to get as many achievements as I possibly can.  This week was also the beginning of Hallow’s End, the Halloween holiday in the game, which gives more achievements to get!  I was able to collect all the candy in the game, which also gave me time to fill in all the zone maps.  It’s been a lot of work, but I find it satisfying =).

Look at those achievements!

It is a great new system for opening up single player content, and I enjoy it whole-heartedly.  Go out and get those achievement points!

~Nick Fox