Priest + Not Playing + Heroic = Fail

Logging on last night and, in an obvious moment of inspired brilliance, thinking that I should mark my return with a run through Heroic CoS despite the fact that I haven’t touched my Priest in almost a year was possibly not the crowning glory of my WoW career.

I’d picked up a Disc spec a long time ago after leaving the Priest behind for my Shaman. Again, not the easiest of things to break back into considering the skills and rotations associated with it. Needless to say we failed the timed run, luckily these were nice people I told them to remove me and grab someone else as I wasn’t up to it.

To mark this utter failure I’ve transferred Bo to Horde. I have yet to log in and complete the transformation but now I have level 80’s on both sides of the faction divide and I’ll be starting off with something easier now I am back in a more comfortable Holy form.

Watch this space!

The URL won’t change but there is a possibility that the age may undergo a redesign. While WoW is still dead (even uninstalled it from my PC) and my focus is still very much on Church at the moment that doesn’t exclude me from being able to blog and over the past few weeks there have been a number of things that have come up that I thought about blogging about.

So, it may be way more sporadic than in the past and it’ll probably cover a wider number of topics (my PC hardly gets turned on these days) but if I have something to say, it may very well end up here. Maybe I can coax some old readers back and maybe even gain some new ones.

Watch this space indeed…

The Crossroads of Life (without Barrens chat)

Really it’s amazing how life can quickly change and make you sit up and take notice. Yes, this is one of those kind of posts.

First off I need to once more apologise to my readers out there that you haven’t had anything at all for the past couple of weeks. This post is going to be an explanation of just why that is and what the future holds.

I think I need to give you all some background so you know where I am coming from, so here is an insight into my real life outside of sitting in front of the PC playing WoW. Despite the world in which we live in I am a Christian, and I attend Church every week. This is not my attempt to divert my blog into a recruiting ground, nor to espouse the sinfulness and wickedness of all things, merely to say that I have a part of my life that is a really big deal to me and sits quietly behind the scenes of my online persona. The Church has a lay ministry, the officers tasked with the day to day running of the congregations are unpaid volunteers drawn from the units they attend. Ever since I joined the Church in 2004 I’ve had a calling (the term we use for officiating in a position within the Church) and all members are encouraged to serve. These callings have required varying amounts of commitment in terms of how much time should ideally be devoted to performing them.

Still with me? Awesome. For the past few years I’ve tried to balance the service I’ve been tasked with and sitting around playing WoW and to be honest WoW has been the one thing that for the most part has taken more priority. It’s taken up more of my thinking time as well as actual time than any of the callings I’ve had up to this point. Now, some of these callings ask a lot more of our time than others. For example a Sunday School teacher may spend a few hours during the week to prepare a lesson, but the Bishop (the leader of the unit) will devote much more of his time to fulfill his role.

A few weeks ago I was asked to fulfill a new role within our Ward (congregation) which involves working closely with the Bishop and helping him out with a lot of the various parts of our unit. This is the most meaty of all callings I’ve been asked to do and I was rather amazed that someone with as many flaws as I have would be called to such a position of responsibility. It’s times like these that cause us to (hopefully) take a step back and assess our lives and what we are spending our time doing. This is the reason that my WoW time over the past two weeks has been reduced to nothing. When we receive a calling we believe that it comes direct from the Lord, as we beleive that he sits at the head of the Church and directs it through his Prophet on the Earth (it’s all on the website). This adds more weight to the calls that we receive, I always accept callings and therefore accepted this one and have had an absolute blast so far in the two weeks I’ve been doing it.

Due to this calling coming at this time I did take a step back and assess what I was doing. Hence the large amount of time I was spending sat on the PC (even though I had reduced that time for Operation: Casual Horde) has been culled to the point of not even being noteworthy. I have even cancelled my WoW account with a month’s play time still on it. Doing that was probably the final nail in the MMO coffin as despite the fact that I have enjoyed my time in the game I realise that in order to do my best and really be doing the things that I should be doing WoW needs to be removed, yes it’s fun but it doesn’t really do anything for me and so I’ve been spending my time putting myself where I believe I need to be and doing the things I believe that I need to be doing. To be honest, I feel much better for doing this.

That’s not to say I now condemn people who spend time in WoW, quite the opposite, there are many merits to it, but for me the time has come to hang up my coat. Obviously as I won’t be playing WoW anymore that kind of spells the end for the blog too, I can’t really blog about a game I’m not playing and I won’t be keeping up with things. There are many blogs that have been retired recently and for me this has nothing to do with the game itself, more of me restructuring my life to better fit with how I feel it should be.

I joined the Ashen Rose Conspiracy with Greenborne around a month ago now, my only regret really is that I haven’t gotten to spend as much time with them as I would have liked. They are a really great bunch of people and have been the most friendly and welcoming guild that I have EVER been a part of out there in MMO land. I’ve played with guilds that normally start out from RL friends and have grown from there, but this guild, well, it’s been a great pleasure to be counted among their ranks even for such a short space of time. Is there a possibility that I may one day return, well, never say never but I just can’t see a space for it right now as I try to put my life on track in terms of the Church.

I’ve been way happier in myself since I have made this change and deep down know that it’s the right thing to do.

I wish everyone out there in WoW land the very best for the future and lots of epics and to my recent guildies, simply, you guys rock!

Nick (aka Bo, Lekktra, Greenborne)

Alliance Vs Horde

Anyone that has played WoW for a long time will be more than aware of the argument that has raged back and forth across the interwebs for some time. Which faction is better, Alliance or Horde?

When I first heard about WoW Tauren was the race I had picked out. When information started to get released about the factional divide the guild I was in at the time wanted to be Alliance and so I picked a Night Elf Hunter as the character I was going to play. I beta tested the game and didn’t like it, I was also massively into SWG at the time and therefore fell off the radar of WoW. Obviously I did eventually pick up the game and took a friend from SWG with me, he’d toyed with the idea of an all Orc guild and so my Orc Hunter Urdrek was created. I managed to get him into his 30’s before taking a break from the game, I came back and created a Tauren Shaman that I got to 41. Over the years I’ve started a number of Horde characters but as is noted elsewhere here my top level characters have come through the Alliance.

My own historical analysis of the Alliance is that they tend to fail at team PvP, Warsong Gulch would be loss after loss after loss for example. Overall there is a general idea that the Alliance side contains a lot of the younger demographic of players and that the Horde tends to attract the more mature. However, as we all are aware the asshat knows no boundaries and can be any age and from any background. However, I have never really come across anything that truly sticks out in my mind of Hordies doing anything towards my Alliance characters. Imagine my surprise then when over the last weekend I can no longer say that the reverse is true.

I’m not silly enough to try and tar everyone with the same brush here, I understand full well that over such a large number of players it is only the minor few I consider to be examples of asshattery and general impoliteness. Let me therefore recount to you my tales of woe, minor as they may be.

Firstly, I have been spending a fair amount of time in Stranglethorn Vale completing the quests there. I was doing the Singing Blue Shards quest and was sitting beside an Ore node, being an alt I have Mining and Skinning as a way to make my money while I level. So, I attack the mob to clear access to the node, up rides an Alliance Death Knight while I am fighting, grabs the node and runs off, I emoted a /no to him as all I could do during a fight, but off he ran never missing a step. In almost the same breath a Human Priest walks past me while I’m in Kitty form and does a /spit…

Now OK, it’s only an emote but still, would you spit on someone in real life like that? I doubt you would and all I was doing was sitting somewhere in stealth, I hadn’t seen him before, hadn’t stolen any of his mobs or interrupted his questing, had not stolen an ore node or anything of the sort, yet still, I get virtually spat upon. Later on in that very same day I was outside of Hammerfall and guess what, a Dwarf and his Gnome friend are in the same cave as I am, no problem,  I go one way and kill a mob in front of another node, again, while I’m killing the mob in walks the dwarf and grabs the node, I’d tried to tag it but the mob standing next to it just wasn’t giving me enough time so the Dwarf gets some ore. In the grand scheme of things 1 ore node isn’t the end of the world but seriously, where are the manners on these people? At the end of that character is a person, a person having feelings and thoughts of their own, you weren’t awesome in your amazingness by grabbing a node off someone of the opposite faction nor are you such when /spitting on people. Seriously guys, way to go on perpetuating the myth that the Alliance is filled with immature kiddies who have nothing better to do than wind up other players.

Luckily I have a crappy memory otherwise all of these people would be up here named and shamed for being examples of the poorer manners of some WoW players, I have never done this or experienced this when I have been playing on the Alliance and come across Hordies, I tend to /wave and /greet people from the opposite faction, even when a PvP flagged Night Elf Druid 10 levels lower than me decided to follow me from Darkshore all the way to the perimeter of Stonard, I have no idea why but still, nothing rude passed between us.

What I hope people would be mature enough to do in this day and age when we as a civilisation are so inter-connected through various mediums is that we’d be able to show humanity’s better side, have respect for other players and treat them as you would wish to be treated. There are many parts of the Internet where people from different nations, kindreds and cultures can intermix with none of the venom and hostility that our world shows in such marvellous abundance. Many years ago I thought that the Internet and its communities was a haven for showing the outside world about tolerance and equality, an example for the human race and its flawed relations with people with whom we share the same living space. However, as more and more people migrate to the online playground that we have it’s obvious that some of the worst may have come with us.

I am sure that those people I ran across over the weekend are nothing but frustrated pre-teens giving themselves an ego boost and am happy that the majority of people I’ve met have been friendly and respectful, I have tried to reciprocate that and if one of the many millions of kids out there reads this and decides to change his online behaviour to a more mature one then I’ll be happy, but being an idiot in a game will never ever seem to be a right course of action to me. So, if by some amazing happenstance one of the people that decided it would be fun to ninja a node from a Druid called Greenborne, or even to spit on him as he sat there minding his own business you might want to take a long hard look at what you’re doing, what goes around, comes around and while I’m certainly not going to stoop to low levels to get back at you I can guarantee that someone out there does not share the same values as I do!

Greenborne – Now with new “Hat” accessory!

First, a new screenshot and a quick update, then the meat starts.

Greenborne has hit 40! In days of yore this would be celebrated by the fact that you were still well short of being able to afford the basic mount unless you had some wealthy level 60 friends. Slowly but surely things were changed and now getting enough cash to fork out for your very own Kodo/Hawkstrider/Wolf/Raptor is easily accomplished and now they’ve moved the goalposts down another 10 levels it’s even easier. Apart from the achievement you get, 40 doesn’t really mean much other than a butt-load of new skills. Still, it’s technically halfway through the levelling and I suppose that’s reason enough to celebrate.

Oh, and yes, he still has those nightmarishly garish pants on!

This week I am off work, this will mean sporadic posting as I am going to be kidnapping various friends and forcing them to accompany me to different ends of the country, Nottingham tomorrow and then somewhere south towards the end of the week. I’m trying to collate some thoughts on gaming etiquette as this weekend provided some interesting experiences.

Greenborne the Noble

Noble Tauren indeed! I have to give a big shout out to my lovely Horde guildies who came out to help a pathetic level 30 nublet finish off the Hard-boiled achievement and thereby complete the Noblegarden events. I am now level 32 and have a title to display alongside my name and I couldn’t have done it without the support and assistance of one of the nicest bunch of people I’ve met online. These guys are way more friendly than people I’ve met on Alliance side.

Now I’ve finished the Noblegarden events I am not really going to be turning myself towards Children’s Week, I spent a lot of time doing Noblegarden and I cannot attain certain of the new World Event’s achievements due to my level, so I may as well spend that time questing then.

Last night I managed to pull together a group to run Razorfen Kraul with, being the Swiss army knife of WoW I stood back and healed this time rather than using my tanking persona, it was a good run and apart from our mage and Tankadin deciding to fall off various bridges it went off without a hitch. I got a new set of shoulders off the trash mobs but nothing Druid-worthy dropped off the bosses. I think Razorfen Downs is next on the list once I have a few more levels under me. I’ve healed two instances now and despite the fact I’m a Feral spec (more on that to come) I’ve been impressed with the abilities and mana efficiency I have, having raided as a Holy priest I’m not oblivious to WoW healing but still, things are good. While I’m sure this will change as I get higher the fact I can dip into anything at the moment is proving very useful, especially as tanks and healers are normally the hardest spots to fill and I can currently do either.

Today see’s me finish work for a week too. What this means is that I will set aside a day to have a complete WoW-fest. Not exactly a casual attitude I know but I’ll be spending at least 2 days at various ends of the country so a day of complete vegetating doing nothing other than seeing what I get through by the end of the day seems good enough. By spending time on Noblegarden that pesky Orc hunter Spuzz has been able to close to within a level of me, that’ll never do, clearly I need to seriously outpace him, bring on Scarlet Monestary!

The Borne Supremacy

Hot on the heels of my latest posts about new-found weekend satorial elegance and excessive time-wasting comes yet another tale of running around in circles fighting off hordes of purple bunnehs trying to get their hands on my lucky charms eggs. Yesterday as I was doing my perusing of the various WoW blogs out there (should probably update my blogroll) I found out that Mages have their own very special reward available from the nice Noblegarden Merchant.

As anyone who has followed Operation: Casual Horde will know I added a poll to a post asking what I should play. I’d already decided on giving the Druid a try and the top choice from the viewing public came out in favour of the Mage, specifically of the Blood Elf variety. I’d already created Bind, an Undead Mage (glowy Skello-horsies ftw) but following consensus I deleted this character a while ago and replaced it, just in case the Druid thing didn’t work out. Last night was the first time that this character had been logged in, after all, I can’t pass up an excuse for another alt especially when there is a reward I can’t possible get any use out of until level 60!

I got my 100 eggs for the book after grabbing level 4 in the noobie zone, I didn’t want to get ROFLstomped by Wretched as I made my way around. During those 100 eggs I picked up a few rewards, so say hello to my Blood Elf Mage, Snowborne *waves*

In short order she had managed to pick up all the stuff I was missing on Greenborne, shame that it’s all soulbound really.

After spending time removing eggs from right under guildies noses (there were a lot of us pretending to be Blood Elves it seems) I switched over to Greenborne in order to pick up the last of the rewards I needed. Another 100 eggs later and I had to buy the Spring Robes and Circlet. After already posting the eye-bleeding images of Greenborne in his Wailing Caverns gear I’ll refrain from showing you him in his Spring Robes, although he did don his Elegant Dress to dance with a Warlock and Hunter friend in the middle of the Square….. that’s right a Cow dancing in a Square, pun your heart out with that one.

I popped over to Razor Hill to complete Spring Fling and also found one of those elusive creatures, the Orc female. I just need to gesticulate my posies at Alliance ladies now, wtb port to Dalaran PST!

Greenborne now only needs ladies a trip to Un’goro for a spell in a Jacuzzi and a trip through the sands of a fe zones he shouldn’t have the right to be in yet. Hopefully I can get this all done before the event finishes and then I think I may be the lowest level person on the server with the “Noble” title… we shall see.

Blizzard – Making you feel good by wasting time while wasting time!

It’s no great secret that many of the gaming nay-sayers will be quite vocal about WoW being a complete time-sink and a waste of time. I’ve certainly seen my share of being part of the hardcore few, not as hardcore as some, but I don’t believe that you can pigeon hole the term in a set of hours played in a day, I’d claim being hardcore is more about playing all the hours where you’re not doing something else, or blowing something else off in order to play more hours. Been there, done that, actually have a couple t-shirts….

Now, there are those of us who are much more casual that can still admit that WoW can be a huge time-sink if you let it. Since switching to the Horde from Alliance I know that over the course of my new levelling I’ll have eventually invested a lot of hours to get up to 80 and then have another batch of content to do that I have started on my Alliance and not finished. After all, I love my Black War Mammoth and Black War Bear, I’ll be wanting to replicate both of those on the Horde, naturally.

The mere fact that I have an active subscription and blog regularly about exploits in the game means that I am comfortable with the amount of time that I spend playing, that’s kind of the main point of Operation: Casual Horde. It would be easy to get suckered in and play a lot more on my current 80’s, now I’m trying something different away from the pressures that are there. When I switched over from my Priest to the Shaman one of the biggest issues I had was all the stuff I’d accomplished already on my Priest that I’d have to go and potentially do over again, some of those are still outstanding but my Shaman has some stuff that the Priest doesn’t and that means I’m fine with both. Obviously there are now a whole host of achievements once more now I have my nublet Druid. I happen to be one of those people that likes grabbing achievements and World Events give a great opportunity to snag some more. These events tend to have some that will only be obtainable on a level 80, I don’t really have an issue with this, after all the game has been out a long time and you’d almost be expected to have a max level character after all this time. Titles are really just a way of showing who has spent a lot of time focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all others.

Now, I’m sure some of us can appreciate the irony in the Noblegarden events, if some people consider WoW a time-sink or, in some circumstances, a waste of time, then imagine having an event where you run round in a circle for hours trying to collect little coloured eggs hoping that they have certain treats inside. A waste of time within a waste of time, I could have gone to bed early or done some questing or something else entirely, but last night I logged into the game around 2230hrs with the sole purpose of collecting some damn eggs! You know what, I actually didn’t think it was that bad either…..

Blizzard have stumbled upon a holy grail here, you can waste time, while wasting time and feel perfectly happy that you’ve done it and then be happy to log in the following day for more of the same. I know that this simple formula could probably extrapolated out to sum up all of WoW, if that’s what you wanted to do, but I don’t feel that my general WoW playtime is wasted. It’s entertaining and keeps me at home with my wife rather than being anywhere else. Last night Greenborne spent almost 90 minutes collecting eggs from Bloodhoof Village, Brill and FalconpunchWing Square. I got over a hundred, picked up a dress, two Tuxedo shirts, a set of Tuxedo pants and two bunnehs. I ate a lot of choccies for the Chocoholic achievement (talk about art imitating life on this one…geez) and still have the desire to do more to pick up a couple more items and hope for the bunny ears to drop. I’d also like to think that I’ve blinded some people by continuing to wear my garish Viper set while moving out of travel form to renew buffs I don’t need while grabbing eggs hidden under trees.

As I expressed in Guild chat last night, there is no way in hell I am going to bother doing this on my Alliance characters. I’ve always wanted to be Horde rather than Alliance so I’m kind of “living the dream” at the moment. I know that some of my guildies have also been having fun charging round starter areas grabbing eggs, it’s on the strength of one of their comments that I ended up for a large period of time running round Falconwing as it’s small and has quick respawns on the eggs. The event finishes this weekend and there are a couple more bits and pieces I want, if I manage to do what I’m thinking of I’ll throw up a screenie or something for posterity (don’t get too excited about it). Either way I’ll be spending more time finding these things rather than spending my limited casual time doing something like actually levelling my character.

Grats to Blizzard on the hypnotism that means I feel like actually doing this for hours on end and really actually achieving little for the time investment!

Operation: Casual Horde – Weekend Update Part 2

Another weekend, another batch of levelling and just for a change, another world event whereby people are camping various points and get irate if you step into their perceived personal space.

I took a break on occasion this weekend away from TourGuide in order to run some instances, I can now tick off Wailing Caverns, Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deeps. I picked up some very fetching pieces from Wailing Caverns and now look like some reject from the 70’s!

I know, it’s just not right!

Overall I had but one goal that drove me over the weekend. I’ve been getting used to DPSing in kitty form as well as switching over to bear when things go a bit pearshaped. However, everything has gone swimmingly and I even got to try my hand at tanking in Blackfathom, I didn’t lose aggro, no-one died and it all went rather well feeding my impression that Horde > Alliance. I hope that this continues.

Without boring everyone to tears I’ll just say that I hit my goal, I can go back to being more casual now as I’ve really done a ton of levelling. My simple gather and sell has netted me over 100g so far and I’m happy at that. For what my goal is I’ll direct you to the picture below. I should have a more detailed post up when I can decide on its direction, it might involve players disguised as bunnehs frustrating me to hell!

Cow on Pig Action

TourGuide steered me through the wilds of Stonetalon last night seeing Greenborne through from being a paltry 21 to the dizzy heights of level 23. I will probably play a reasonable a mount on Saturday to try and get closer to getting a mount, I have a point in Feral Swiftness at the moment (it’ll be two points once I ding 24) but still it’s not what I’m used to having two level 80s both with epic flying, a little success on the Auction House has me at over 60 gold right now and I have some more items to throw up there.

My little “here’s what you do to level” add-on took me through some places and quests I haven’t done since the very early days of WoW back when I had a Hunter and then moved onto my Shaman. Windshear Crag and it’s horde of Goblins for instance, although having a stealth kitty gives me some options I’ve not had before.

Now, I may be getting confused, it’s certainly been a few years since I did much Hording, but the “Weapons of Choice” quest I always remember as being a nightmare due to the low drop rates of the weapons, I also seem to remember you had to collect 3 of each rather than one? Now I’ll admit that I may have this wrong as there are other quests I can think of where you have to go around picking up weapons so I may be getting some crossover, but now it’s just one of each things when a lot faster, also being able to stealth past mobs you don’t want to fight is awesome.

After I’d fought my way through that little area and the quests TourGuide pointed me in the direction of Gann’s Reclamation. I had bad memories of this quest and it’s nice to see that nothing has really changed, I hit my first death in around 4 levels in that place. It’s so cramped with the mobs quite close together and they have a seemingly huge aggro range and a reasonably short respawn timer to boot. I really hate that the standard mobs also have Sunder Armour. I need to kill things fast as a Kitty and have little to no armour to speak of in that form, I could go bear but then I do less damage and take longer to kill things and there are so many patrols in that little dig site that you can easily get mobbed. Swapping out of forms to heal yourself soon eats through mana as well. I finished the quest but it is still as awful as I remember from the first few times I ran through there. I’m not looking forward to the fact that my guide is showing me the Harpy quest in the Charred Vale, that’s another one I remember as frustrating, they’re all grouped up together and there are various patrols around to give added headache.

Still, despite these “setbacks” I must say that I am enjoying the Druid, my mage still has not even entered the game so I’m on target for keeping this character going. Although I am thinking that a Hunter/Mage Arena team could do an amazing amount of damage in 2v2. That’s a long way off however.

So, observations on levelling comparison between Horde and Alliance then;

I suppose the first few levels are all going to depend on your race. All my level 40+ characters are Draenei and I tend to take other races over to the Draenei starting zones as they give better rewards (and I know all the quests so can run through them pretty fast). Horde side I have a lot of Blood Elves and even though I do have a Tauren now once he finished Mulgore I hoofed it over to Ghostlands to run through that (this is partly because TourGuide gave me the option too and partly because I know the place gives better rewards than the early parts of the Barrens). You can almost discount 1-20 though as the real levelling starts after that.

With Alliance I tended to drop into Ashenvale in the early twenties, there is plenty to do there that sends you towards 30 with occasional forays into Stonetalon. I know that historically on the Horde side you didn’t hit Ashenvale until the late twenties, before TBC I always found a gap around 20-25 where you’d be all over the place trying to get to the point where you can go to Ashenvale. Now though I’ve been grabbing things across the Barrens and Stonetalon, as both zones are close to each other there are some nice paths for handing in things that keep you cycling around and the levelling is quick. I know this is going to lengthen out as I get higher and I’m looking forward to seeing how the higher end zones work Horde side. I’ll have to see where the guide takes me, it’s not boring me so far and I’m not really tempted into firing up my Alliance guys. I think it will be interesting at the point I can get into Dalaran seeing the people I know on Alliance with me on the opposite side.