I feel like a backstabber but...

Mitternacht just wasn't really thinking when she got to Shattrath. She was in the crazed, shadow phase and was a bit rebellious. So, she turned her back on her own people and joined the Scryers. Ten months later, I'm standing in Shattrath with a bunch of Arcane Tomes in my bags, wondering why on earth I'm a Scryer. It's actually rather embarrassing to be walking around the other draenei, knowing they hate me.

Anyway, I was greatly ashamed as I turned in over a hundred Arcane Tomes and a bunch of signets. Then I hurried bought my tabard and proceeded to wear it everywhere.

Because it's not yet hot enough....

You can take that as you will, but it's Midsummer once again. It always brings me back to when I was just starting WoW (two years ago, can you imagine?), running Cucchiaio through Sentinel Hill and seeing the little red huts and the festival pole. Back then, there were no achievements and I really didn't know anything about holidays, so I just did the ones I came across while leveling (in Redridge and Duskwood) and that was about it.

This year is very much the opposite. I was poised and ready for Midsummer because it's my last holiday for the meta. Mouse has been asking, "So, you're done forever then? Like no more holidays ever, right?" There are some Brewfest costumes I want, etc etc. But, the point is that when I logged in on Monday this week I was all about honoring and desecrating flames. Rabidly so. Which is exactly why this is the week that a tornado comes, uprooting my power for a whole night (I was lucky, some people still don't have power).

I did this holiday last year on Cucchiaio. Like, all of it. Save for the torching tossing because, for the life of me, I couldn't do it. Anything that requires being coordinated I fail at (starting to get why I don't like first person shooters?).

Anyway, after a ridiculously long time and a lot of grief, plus some frantic whispering to Nevarcien about how to toss and catch and why-isn't-it-working, I got it. I finally got it.

Also, don't let Blizzard fool you; that's a pink proto drake.

Proudmoore Pride 6

World of Warcraft is a community-based game (this, I know, is a "duh" statement), and so a lot of its success has to do with the people that play it. For instance, I probably wouldn't play nearly as much if I didn't have the people I played with. It also mirrors our society and the things we find important, such as holidays like Winter Veil, Hallow's End, and that Love Fool one. Most of these things come from Blizzard to show that our characters have lives similar to our own, that even in a fantasy environment these things are still important to the life of the community and that, regardless of race or faction (and whatever differences we think we see), we still value the same ideals. World of Warcraft isn't as much a sandbox or as community-controlled as, say, Eve Online, but it does have its moments. For instance, June is Gay Pride Month, and what better way to celebrate it but to have a gay pride parade in World of Warcraft. This is a player-created holiday and the first time I'd ever heard of it.

It's called Proudmoore Pride, taking place on Proudmoore-US for both factions. When I read about it on wow.com I was floored. Although it is after the fact, here is the website if you care to take a look. It was for the entire player base on Proudmoore, hosted by Taint (Horde) and The Stonewall Family (Alliance). Horde characters met in Camp Turajo and Alliance in Theramore and they marched up to Crossroads to meet up, and then to Ratchet for the boat to Booty Bay for a night of dancing, flirting, and general merriment. Getting to the event was easy, with warlocks at each place summoning. Each guild had a sister guild for everyone coming with alts from other servers, which I joined on a tauren hunter I created for the event. She became a Tainter Tot.

The parade marched up to Crossroads, with a few different kinds of floats. There were guild that were represented in pink shirts and tabards, along with a bear mount float, a sparkle pony float, and a lumberjack float.

The Lumberjack one was funny, with tree druids and lots of plaid shirts. In Ratchet, it took a few boat rides to get everyone over to Booty Bay. I was there for one of the first ones, but waited behind to see more people. The Alliance were behind the Horde, and I was curious to see what they had. Truthfully, I wish I had stayed for more of the parade to see what floats the Alliance had, although I'm sure it'll be posted on the Pridemoore website soon enough.

All in all, the experience was amazing. The community was fantastic and it was very well planned, with a radio streaming dance music from the website and just this great collective of people celebrating the idea of just...loving who love and are proud of who they are. It's also a really impressive look at the World of Warcraft community as a whole and exactly what it means to the players. This is, regardless, a place where you can be exactly who you want to be, without limitations. There were no nay-sayers, just friendly players and a good time.

It makes me proud of be a WoW player. :D

The Return, along with a new UI

I've been around, doing mostly real life things, like finishing up school for the semester, doing seasonal work at Disney World, and starting my new internship at a ad agency. So, I went to log on today and discovered something really strange. My Blogger AND my Youtube accounts are both being moved over to associate with my Google account. So I had a helluva time getting back into this, so much so that I was contemplating just moving it and reposting everything somewhere else! Anyway, I'm here now.

Been working on Loremaster of Outland, did Zangarmarsh and Hellfire Peninsula yesterday. Working on Nagrand and something else today. Pretty standard stuff there.

A couple weeks ago I got fed up with my crazy old UI and started looking for something else. What encouraged me to do this was actually watching TankSpot's 10m Sindragosa strategy video with Mouse and he kept commenting how he really liked the girl's UI, which got me on the hunt to actually try to do it. With the help of Google, I actually found this addon pack at WoWInterface that contained everything you'd need to replicate Aliena's UI.

I spent about four hours just that night trying to make it look right, almost losing my WTF folder in the process. The next day weird shit wouldn't work. I couldn't get invited to groups, and my BGs wouldn't proc for me. I still can't Need/Greed/DE loot, which I just haven't had the energy to fix, although it looks great. There are a few things that need to be tidied up, like the Cooldowns v. DBM's warnings, all of which I will get to....eventually.

Why are images not working the way they did before? *sigh*

Loremaster

I've been quiet on the WoW front for the past couple weeks with all the final projects I'm working on for school. Not that I haven't, however, been playing WoW. In fact, I've been working on Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms, crawling through the 700 quests. I'm currently sitting in the Grim Guzzler, waiting for my hearthstone to be up, with 675 quests down (not including those I have completed in my questlog). I got all the way to the door two rooms outside the end boss for BRD and realized I needed the key. I will be skipping the rest of these unless I absolutely have to. I have a few left for the Lower and Upper Spires, which will be for tomorrow. I hope to coerce Ith into helping me. He owes me.

I haven't been logging very much on this, although I've spent a lot of time in the Plaguelands, which is an area I really like for the story. Very dark and sad.

I'm not sure I can take anymore Blackrock Depths quests.

Random Screenshot: The First Day of Epic Gems

On another note, I think I broke my blog. I have the organization set up to have comments, tags, etc at the bottom, and no matter how hard I try or how many times I redo it, the blog won't change. Wtf.

Moral of this story: Don't fuck around with your blog's settings. You will break it.

Children's Week, Or Why You're Not Allowed to Adopt a Child of Your Own

I like the message behind World of Warcraft's Children's Week: show the orphans and refugees from war around Azeroth to inspire them and help them in their dreams to become great adventurers like you or their parents (who coincidentally died adventuring). So, you take your little orphan to all the things they want to see, a spooky lighthouse, the Dark Portal, Jaina Proudmoore..(What I truly think is precious is that when you get to your orphan's idol, they're usually too shy to ask for an autograph themselves. Really sweet.)

When I got little Dornaa in Shattrath, all I wanted was to keep her. She was so cute, she had sweet little curious things to say. Being a Draenei also made Mitter want to keep her all the more. She even began to question her life as an adventurer, and wonder if, perhaps, she too should settle down soon. But then, here is this little Draenei child, without a family. Rather than procreate, shouldn't Mitter adopt this little girl? And raise her to be a priest? Or a hunter? (Anything but a paladin, really.)

It turns out that as geared-out max-level characters, we're not equipped to handle the rigors of raising a child. Certain things, like eating a ton of sweet in front of them, is just poor manners, where as things like the Hard Knocks achievement, are downright dangerous and negligent. (Although, I happen to think that out of all the classes, a priest is probably the safest one to leave a child with, except for a shadow priest. That's just scary right there.) Were I one of the matrons, I wouldn't lend out one of my charges to a death knight, for instance. Sworn to the Alliance or not, you still worked for the Lich King for a time. You deal out plagues and diseases, not exactly the kind of environment I see fit for a child.

Overall, I think the achievements for this holiday are far easier than most, with the exception of School of Hard Knocks, the PVP one. It's also the one that questions Mitter's parental potential the most. In order to get School of Hard Knocks, you must:

1. Capture the flag in Eye of the Storm
2. Assault a flag in Arathi Basin
3. Assault a tower in Alterac Valley
4. Return fallen flag in Warsong Gulch.

I made the mistake of doing these on the first day. So, Eye of the Storm was by far the hardest. I always avoid assaulting/capturing in BGs, so I really don't know even where to turn most of this stuff in at. When EoS started, all of the Alliance booked it to the flag. One person would get it, and half of the Alliance team would loiter around the flag spawn until the Horde capped everything. I did this with Mouse and a couple other guildies. Mouse hates achievements, and he hated this one far more than the others. I actually can't believe I finally got it, during the third EoS.

Arathi was easy, just needed to be fast, which I am when doing these achievements, like my own personal Crusader Aura. I anticipated Warsong Gulch being hard, too, with half the team loitering around the Alliance flag spawn. A Horde rogue entered and NO ONE touched her. Kindly, she picked up and dropped the flag repeatedly. I hadn't even thought of it! So, I went over to Horde side, waved, and did the same. This is truly the funniest thing I've ever seen.

It took two tries in Alterac Valley, but I finally got it. :D

Saturday Raid

This is my little guild's raid group for ICC10. It's our only raid, once a week, so we have to really churn it out to get through bosses. Our group is made up of a lot of RL friends, although a couple we've met along the way. I'm so proud of how far this little guild has come. I don't ever want to raid with anyone else.

It raises the question about the difference between 25m and 10m raids. 10 mans always seem easier, more like an alt run, whereas 25 mans are where the "good" players are, the hardcore players, and the better loot. It might be considered by some to be ridiculous that I put up screenshots for a ten man group. I like ten mans more. Each person is 2-3x more important. I like the intimacy, particularly as a GM that likes to really know my guildmates and the people I raid with. (And I always feel like just a number in a 25man.) I don't lead raids, that's Mouse's job. Anything outside the raid is my responsibility, but when we zone in it's up to Mouse.

Recently, Blizzard posted this about Cataclysm's raiding change.

"The first of the refinements being made is that we're combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn't apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.

We're designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we'll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They'll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today."

 I...don't mind this. At all. In a way, I'm going to miss the option to do both raids each week. However, I want 10m groups to have access to the same gear. This will put better, more serious emphasis (I think and hope) on 10 mans.

I know a lot of people are a bit upset about this. What do you think?

The Game Mechanics of Fishing

I have tried fishing in a lot of games. Hell, I remember Bass Hunter for the SNES. At least I think it was Bass Hunter. Either way, I remember being really bad at it and unable to afford a lot of the lures and staring at that really pixelated fish tracher on a thirteen-inch television screen. Kids have it great today. You don't even see thirteen inch computer monitors. My iMac has a 24 inch screen. Ridiculous.

At any rate, I remember fishing in Harvest Moon for the SNES. The kind of fishing where you stare at a blurry screen for the slightest wiggle on your fishing pole and praying that when you reel it in, you'll actually have something. The same goes with the other Harvest Moon games AND Animal Crossing.

World of Warcraft's fishing system also pisses me off. Not only do I have to cast and stare at the cast time, watch bobber, but I also have to CLICK the bobber to reel it in...I don't fish. It feels like a colossal waste of time for me.

Which is why I always stay away from fishing in most video games. Take, for example, the Sims 3 has a fishing aspect, including an 'Angler' personality trait which makes all angler Sims want to fish. A lot. I deny those Sims that right because I assumed it was going to be a giant waste of my time (although, isn't that what the Sims really is? A giant waste of time, with you running around getting Sims to the bathroom before they piss their pants and off to work on time so they don't get fired?) Anyway, I was at the graveyard with my goth teen Sim (who is a burial specialist) and there was a pond nearby. I noticed some large dark objects swimming around. Curious, I right clicked and got the option to fish. After months of playing the game, I had my first fishing Sim.

And it was fucking easy. In fact, I could just leave her alone for hours. I didn't have to click ANYTHING.

I love fishing now.

I went and created a brand new garden type Sim who fishes, gardens, and loves being outside. It's so easy!

Thank you, EA, because although you are a horrid, blood-sucking video game 'developer' who is out to destroy every video game you touch, you did make a nice fishing experience. (Although the fish tier system of 'Nice' 'Great' 'Very Nice' 'Excellent' 'Perfect' fish is a bit annoying. Nice try, though.)

Wild Night and Hide & Seek

After the dismal failure of Saturday's ICC10 raid, and being completely bummed out with everyone, I avoided WoW today, up until Nevarcien asked me to come fill in for this healer who'd just left ICC10 at Festergut. While we only downed Festergut until the group fell apart, we did retire to the inn in Dalaran for a little fun.

Nevarcien and I ducked away from Halidril when he went to buy the drinks. We giggled while he hunted for us...

When he found us, we retreated up to one of the bedrooms at the inn and began to drink just a bit.

And sometimes with alcohol, there are just a few things you regret...

I personally had a great time. :D

Arathi Basin

I very rarely PVP. I don't understand how scoring works in most battlegrounds and I use both my specs for raiding, so I always feel a bit gimped without a pvp spec. As I do more VoA, though, I get more and more PVP gear. My two best friends, Mouse and Ith, have an arena team and have lately been dragging me. This is what the scorecard always looks like when the rest of the BG team is good enough to win. The three of us stick together, Ith wrecking house, Mouse melting face, and Mitter keeping them alive.

This honor buff is great, too. I'll have all the Black War mounts in no time. :)

The Call of Spirits (and Heads)

I sat down and leveled my shaman today. Well, when I say leveled, I mean I queued her over and over for a random dungeon and got two levels hammered out. The shaman is one of those classes where you truly have to be thinking about what you're doing, your totems, your weapon buffs, your shield. I queue for both DPS and healing, and I always forget ONE of those, no matter how hard I try to remember. I've been running through Scarlet Monastery Library with the off feeling that I've forgotten something and perhaps if I tied a string to my finger I might remember what it was. Usually as I level, I have an idea of what I want to do the character when I get to 80. Ravindra will heal, Vigdís will tank, etc. This one...I don't know. I really don't know.

Curious thing that happened today. When it comes to Scarlet Monastery in the LFG system, you only have to suffer the Graveyard until level 31, whereupon they congratulate you on surviving the grind of hell and present to you the Library. Not today, however. I was inches from 33 and I STILL kept getting the Graveyard. Over and over. With others that were 31+. I wanted to cry each and every time. That is the problem with leveling six characters between 31-42: you become fucking sick of the four or five dungeons that are available.

Daze's Saturday night raid was a flop tonight. Both tanks afk, a mage MIA....It was one of those tragic nights where groups can't seem to form and even if they did, the regulars were already depressed about the number of absences. For a group that raids once a week, we really can't afford this.

Portals and Teleports

Does anyone else find it funny that a mage should get a portal to Theramore before anywhere else? The first teleports you get are at level 20 for Stormwind, Ironforge, and the Exodar. At thirty, you can collect one to Darnassus, and finally, at 35, you'll get a teleport to Theramore. Additionally, they give you the portal there as well, while you have to wait until level 40 for the others.

Of the cloth wearers, I like the mage the least. The portals, etc, are amazing, which is why I have her leveling out Desolace (which is truly a hell-hole and sings to me a reminder of the Doldrums in that one play with the kings of numbers and words...the Phantom Tollbooth! All it needs are those lethargic slugs.) When I first started in Desolace, it reminded me of leveling Mitternacht after she was bumped fifteen levels and couldn't kill anything. Although it's a level 30-40 zone, it seems like you can't possibly succeed there unless you're at least 34. 

That or I suck at mages :)

I think it might be dungeons for this character from here on out. She's not as fun (or easy) as a warlock nor do I love her the way I love a priest (and you know, when you love someone you are blind to their flaws). I don't think I can suffer her for very long.

Level 1

And this is the beginning, kinda like the introductory montage of game footage, explaining the history of the race you've just chosen and exactly what your role-playing mind should be thinking of as you roll this new character. Most of the time, you pay no mind to the plight of immortality (and what to do now that you no longer have it, bummer) or how your people are homeless and need to eventually get up and get their city back so they can stop mooching off the dwarves. Instead, you're already thinking of getting to 80, or whatever end level it is that you're working towards.

I guess I'm thinking of the ride to 80 (and what else you can do when you get there).

Well met.