Tag Archives: World of Warcraft

I Return!

Posted on by
3

A second chance to carve your skull!

Can you tell I’m a Wrath baby?

After a few short weeks’ break, I have caved to my addiction and renewed my World of Warcraft subscription. I didn’t intend to be gone very long, but I wound up coming back even sooner than I intended. As I get back into the swing of things, I have a few thoughts to share on my break and what lies ahead for me in the game.My paladin takes in the sunset in StormwindAnatomy of a WoW withdrawal:

I found myself missing WoW much sooner and more intensely than I expected. What was even more bizarre was that there wasn’t really any particular aspect of the game that I seemed to be missing.

I didn’t miss the rape jokes in Trade. I didn’t miss being rejected by raid PUGs because the leader is the same class as me and doesn’t want competition for loot. I didn’t miss Venoxis screeching about how his blood is venom AND WE WILL BATHE IN THE GLORY OF THE SNAKE GOD. I did miss my guild, but I didn’t miss them that much.

It almost made me start to take seriously the idea of the game being a literal addiction, something I often joke about but rarely give credence to.

The only thing I could think of is what I’ve always known is what keeps me coming back: Azeroth is comfortable. I’ve been playing Warcraft games for roughly sixteen years, and it’s just sort of become my happy place. It relaxes me.

That, and I really did miss the music. More and more I begin to suspect that I just play this game for the music.

Or maybe I am just a hopeless addict…

The road ahead:

My plans for my next few weeks/months in WoW are not too far outside the ordinary. I’m going to try to worry less about my inability to get into raids and hope the Raid Finder fixes everything.

I want to spend a bit more time on my alts, especially my shaman. He’s just hit level 80, and I’m considering turning off his XP, at least temporarily, so I can bask in the awesomeness that is Northrend. I might get back to my warlock a bit, too.My shaman skydives in the Howling FjordI once again feel the urge to try a new class (this happens every couple weeks), but I’ve tried all of them now, so I don’t have much options there. I’m not likely to find a way to enjoy the ones I don’t like. I’d still like to start a priest — something I’ve done twice now — but I’m sure I won’t like it any better this time. It’s a shame, because I think I’d enjoy one at high levels — atonement healing sounds awesome — but I can’t get past the brutally dull early levels.

I’ll work on getting the last few pieces for my rogue’s transmogrification set, and try to start on my shaman’s.

I’m still not happy with the Horde on my server. I’d like to transfer to Moon Guard or another role-playing realm, but I find the cost of character transfers outrageous, so I guess I’m stuck. I’m feeling a little better about my newest Horde guild, so that offers some hope, but we’ll see. My luck to date doesn’t inspire me to great confidence.

In other news:

Weird Worm finally posted another of my articles, Five (Bad) Ways People Behave on the Web. I’m sure every WoW player will recognize at least one or two of the types.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go bathe in the glory of the snake god.

Keeping Up With WoW News: Tier 13, Glowy People, and More

Posted on by
Reply

Keeping Up with WoW News:

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this here yet or not, but I’m currently on a brief hiatus from World of Warcraft. It’s something I try to do every once in a while in a vain attempt to maintain my sanity, and I wanted to devote my attention fully to Dungeon Siege.

But in the meanwhile, I’m keeping up with the latest happenings in WoW, and reporting on them seemed like a good excuse for a blog post.

Hints of the new raid:Wyrmrest Temple, setting of the Deathwing raid

A recent IGN interview with some of Blizzard’s developers has provided some hints about the Deathwing raid. It is said to take place in multiple environments, starting with Wyrmrest Temple, and include multiple encounters with Deathwing–with breaks for loot in between–including one that takes place on his back as he flies toward toward the Maelstrom, with players “trying to wrestle him to the ground, basically.”

This sounds amazingly awesome, and it’s one of those moments where I really regret not getting many chances to raid. Maybe the Raid Finder tool will help, but I rather doubt it will even allow players to queue for recently released raids, and even if it does, I also doubt the ability of PUGs to succeed in them.

Tier 13:

Blizzard has also started releasing previews of the tier 13 sets, starting with warlock and warrior.Tier 13 set for warriors in World of WarcraftThe warrior is obviously inspired by Deathwing. Oddly, it’s getting a lot of love on the official forums, which is odd when you consider every other piece of tier feedback I’ve seen from that community this expansion has been in the vain of “ZONMG WORST TEER EVAR YOU SUCK SO MUCH BLIZZ WHY YOU HATES MY CLASS?!?!!” I have seen a lot of “Colossal Chinplate” jokes, though.

The faceless one-inspired warlock set is garnering more mixed reviews. Some love it; some hate it. Myself, I think the colours are a little too bright for a warlock set, but I absolutely adore the tentacle face hood. It’s one of the few tier sets in the history of the game where I can genuinely say it freaks me out a little bit, and that’s high praise for a warlock set. It’s grotesque and truly terrifying.

Blizzard is paring these announcements with retrospective looks at all previous tiers for these classes. This has solidified my belief that warlocks are the most ridiculously spoiled class when it comes to awesome-looking tier sets. I’ve also realized that T10 was better than I gave it credit for at the time, and that the absolute fugliest gear in WoW’s history came from Ahn’qiraj.

We can only speculate what the next classes tiers will be. I’m still crossing my fingers for a twilight dragonflight-themed rogue set, personally. Please share any hopes/speculation you might have in the comments.

The mystery of the glowing guys:

One bizarre topic of conversation on the forums lately has been the mystery of glowing, kneeling, untargetable people (Players? NPCs?) appearing in Orgrimmar, often in formation, on a few isolated servers. Untargetable people kneeling in OrgimmarA lot of theories surfaced to explain these. Some claimed it was an exploit involving the Vial of the Sands mount, deepstone oil, and a few other items, but the number of occurrences and the wide-spread nature of it made me doubt this. Some claimed it was a hack, but it didn’t seem malicious enough. If it were a hack, I’d have expected them to start spelling out SusanExpress.

My favourite theory is that it was a glitch from the High Prophet Barim fight in Lost City of the Tol’vir. The idea was the code would get crazy if one disconnected during the repentance phase (which makes your character kneel and glow) and make a copy of your character appear in Orgimmar. This would explain why Alliance characters were sometimes seen, but one flaw with the theory is that there were reports of glowing people in very out of date gear–Burning Crusade weapons or paladin T10, for instance–and it’s not likely they’d be wearing such things in a Cataclysm dungeon.

Blizzard says they’ve fixed the problem, so we may never know the truth, but it was fun speculation while it lasted.