Just Like Starting Over

Post soundtrack: what else?

Almost three years? You’d think I’d been busy or something… So many games, birthdays, the discovery of an entire genre of music, more games, coffee, weight lost and regained, still more games, health issues, coffee, old love lost and new love found, and – to top it all off – yet more games. Oh, and coffee.

I’ve been contemplating getting back into writing for some time now, but I’ve just had my original WoW account unlocked (after some credit card annoyances at the time of the annual pass, which left me locked out unless I jumped through hoops which I refused to do at the time), which has brought me full circle, with Ringle, Pringle, Dingle and all my other alts playable yet again. And I’m looking at slowly easing my way back into my writing on here.

I still dabble – currently MMO-wise I have WoW, WildStar and STO installed on my just-upgraded pc, along with some single-player games from Steam and a handful of games on my mostly-wonderful iPad. I ran into some fairly crippling performance issues with WildStar after upgrading my pc (which left me unable to play enjoyably for the second half of my free 30 days – something I’m still feeling a little bitter about, as the game has a lot of potential), and reinstalled Neverwinter out of curiosity (it runs much better than it previously did - unlike WildStar).

Last week I finished a marathon paragon play through of Mass Effect 1 and 2, now I just have to finally buy #3 (and all the DLC) so I can put the series behind me. (I’m not sorry that I missed all the kerfuffle about the truncated ending, and hey, now I’ll be able to experience the complete DLC-inclusive experience!). I tried to start a second renegade play through, but I just couldn’t do it – I’d like to think it’s just that I’m that nice. Feel free not to disillusion me.

I’ve also playing through Fallout 3, with Skyrim and BioShock 1+2 installed and waiting for me to give them some time after I’m bored exploring the wastelands. Briefly dabbling in Landmark, but I’ve never been much of a builder – maybe when they add combat? Might give Rift a little play as well, as it should look a little better now I’ve upgraded.

But at least for now I think I’ll be spending the next few days updating addons and getting re-acclimatised to my much-loved old WoW characters, and making a start on levelling somebody up to 90. I actually invested in another copy of WoW after my old account was locked, and have levelled a few characters up to 90 horde-side, but I just haven’t had the emotional investment with them that I have with my dwarven family. Hmmm, with two active accounts I can even transfer all my old characters into my vanity guild – Lobsters, Ho!

It may be good to be the king, but it’s even better to be the dwarf. Again. Finally. (But ooooooh, that horrible gear…)

Rumours Of My Demise

…have been greatly mistaken.  Rumours of my laziness, however, have been right on target.

Post soundtrack: “Still Alive” from Portal

It was nice taking a break from writing and just levelling up my shiny new gnome rogue, but I guess enough is enough, time to get back to it.  So hello again, I’m back and…  well, still lazy.  But I’ve managed to level a character to 80 who isn’t a dwarf, which is something of an accomplishment.

Meet Pringle, mutilate rogue.  Although still under-geared (she’s only been 80 for a couple of days, after all), she’s well up to the task of taking names and kicking errant posteriors.  (Incidentally, I discovered this wonderful collection of rogue levelling tips after Pringle hit 80 – my timing is, as always, superb)

Today she managed to finagle her way into both VoA-10 and VoA-25, and performed to an admirable standard for someone who was (at the time) still wearing 7/8 pieces of crafted blue PvP gear.  In fact she managed 3.2k dps in 25-man, and 3.3k in 10-man.  Sure she was only in 16th place in the meters for the 25-man, but for such low-level gear I’d say she’s right on track to definitely not suck.  (On a side note, it’s the first time I’ve been in there since before Toravon joined the throng in there – that would have to be the most underwhelming boss fight I’ve seen)

I’ve also been doing a few battlegrounds (in between LFD heroics) and a couple of Wintergrasps, and Pringle’s now not only wearing two pieces of T9 (shoulders and gloves) but also has the relentless PvP boots (saving for a PvP cloak next).  It’s proving pleasantly fast to earn badges, and the honor from running random battleground is also not bad (apart from Strand of the Ancients, which I find to be even less fun than I remember WSG ever being – oddly enough, I’ve yet to have WSG come up so far).

I’m undecided about what to do next – continue gearing Pringle up as an intellectual exercise (with no idea of whether there any raids in her future), or move on to levelling my other priest or my shaman.  However, after the length of time I spent with Pringle, it’s a lot more tempting to put together the badges to buy heirloom gear before much levelling is likely to occur.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the lack of drama in the LFD dungeons I’ve run through – no loot drama, and players who are new to a dungeon have been open to explanations of fights and suggestions on how best to get to the end.  But then thanks to the way LFD assembles groups I suspect I’m the notional under-geared nub who’s supposed to get carried by the other, much better equipped and more experienced players.

I’m tempted to start looking for a guild to join, as I’ve been feeling nostalgic about raiding after remembering back to my old Tempest days after writing my previous post about the changes coming to Cataclysm raids, but the difficulty in finding a suitable guild along with the possible (probable?) cost of character transfers if it requires moving server are quite discouraging. 

But I guess at the root of it, I’m just afraid that Tempest was a case of the right group of people at the right time, and isn’t something that is likely to reoccur.  (Hopefully that’s just me being pessimistic)

On the off-chance that one of my readers know of a mature (I’m not looking for drama) yet easy-going guild (ideally professional in their approach to raiding) which is either looking for a disc priest (I’m only average as Shadow, and was pretty dire at holy for the brief period I was an involuntary holy priest in early ICC) or a rogue (currently Mutilate, but raided as combat-swords back in TBC from TK/SSC into early Sunwell) on Dath’Remar-US (where most of my older characters are) or Argent Dawn-US (where I’ve been lately), drop me an email.

For now, though, I’m just taking it easy.  Gearing up is (still) kind of fun, but I can’t help but wonder if somewhere out there is a group of people who need me but just don’t know it yet.

/wave

I Can Has More Dwarves?

I’m hoping the leaked information on MMO-Champion regarding the next expansion is accurate…  Goblins and Worgen are nifty and all, but I’m hanging on for the dwarf shamans and mages!  Yes!  More Dwarf classes!  (WTB more character slots – 10 might not be enough…)

And speaking of characters, meet my newest level 80.

Celebrating as Dwarves celebrate everything, with a mug in hand.

/wave

No raid tonight? What to do?

So far I’m enjoying 3.1.  Ulduar is great, fishing is fun, new dailies are something different to do.  They’ve even added a direct flight route from Dalaran to Sholazar Basin.

I’ve had a play with the new boss in the 10-man Vault of Archavon on Dingle, and I’m sure it’s more fun to dps than it was to tank - I was designated add-tank, and it really was a tough fight for me; keeping aggro on the mobs I had was easy, but a very restricted camera angle made targeting respawned adds something of a challenge.  But we did manage to down the boss, and one of the druid’s in the group became the first in the guild to pick up a piece of T8.

We had another bash at Razorscale last night, and between the hotfixes (increasing the enrage timer to 10 minutes, and making the iron dwarf casters only do their chain lightning when stationary) and our increasing competence, we managed to get the boss down to 9% on our best attempt.  Admittedly we were caught off-guard by the enrage several times, as it’s not in the Deadly Boss Mods timers just yet, but it’s nice to be able to consistently get that far.

Out of curiosity I decided to put the fishing changes to the test, and picked up the fishing daily on Dingle, who was a fishing virgin at the time (with 0 points of fishing skill).  It took about 50 minutes (not including travel time back to Dalaran to train), but she caught the Ghostfish and had leveled to 142 fishing in the process.

The changes to the tailoring mount, the flying carpet, have made it as useful as a traditional mount now (they’ve removed the mount and dismount animations), so it’s been set as Mingle’s default mount – I’ve been waiting for this change, as I loved the look of it but the delay in mounting/dismounting grew very annoying, very quickly.  On a related note, if I can ever save up enough I’d love to get the Chopper for Dingle – what better mount for an engineer, after all?

One change that has disappointed me is that the Dalaran cooking dailies are now only available for level 80 characters; bankrogue Pringle and hunter Kringle will have to finish leveling before they can continue doing them.  (Curiously enough, the jewelcrafting dailies are still available for Pringle, who’s only level 75)

So I guess it’s time to put a little effort into leveling those two – I’ve respecced Kringle (beastmaster again, my favourite spec), and replaced his pet gorilladin with a turtle (now that Thunderstomp, which made the gorilla so useful, has been made available to all Tenacity pets).  I’ll fire up Jame’s Leveling Guide later and see how we do – Kringle is level 74, and is about half-way through Howling Fjord so far.

No more raids until Sunday, so I’ve plenty of time to play with my alts.  Should gain access to the next tier of Tournament quests with Dingle and Mingle today as well, so I’m getting closer to the shiny new mounts.  For now, though?  ‘Tis dailies time!

/wave