Enter the Warlords

Home Warden

As I talked about at the beginning of the week, my wife the teacher has started her whirlwind summer tour of the country and she ping pongs between various mathematics related conferences.  As a result I am holding down the fort here at home, and at the same time having to take care of our neighbors pets.  In the past there has always been this mad dash the few days before my wife gets home to pick up and house and make sure everything is in proper working order.  However this time around I have been doing a much better job of picking things up as they happen.  Here is hoping there will be no 11th hour cleaning fest… which admittedly is mostly just picking up trash around the house that I have allowed to stack up when I reverted to full on bachelor mode.

The hardest thing about being home alone has been maintaining my walking regiment.  I am letting it split a bit, in that I am not walking a “three loop” around the neighborhood each night, but instead I am simply adding additional steps into my day so I don’t really have to.  Admittedly I should be pushing myself harder and doing the loops anyway, but without my walking buddy I have lost a good chunk of the reason why I walked past 10,000 steps in the first place.  So for now I am getting to 10,000 and then calling it good… even going so far as to walking loops around the living room one night to get the last couple of hundred steps in.  All in all I am pretty proud that I have survived thus far and not really let any balls hit the ground.  This weekend however…  who knows how well that is going to work since it will be hard to fight the desire to be sedentary.

Enter the Warlords

WowB-64 2014-06-13 06-20-50-964 Several days ago I apparently got into the Warlords of Draenor Alpha program.  Based on the time that passed between the launch of it and me getting in, I am guessing I was in the second wave of invites overall.  With all the excitement of my wife getting ready to go on her trip, I had stopped checking my inbox for such things… and it ended up getting filed away under “promotions”.  So I did not actually get in and attempt to play it until the night before last.  Since for some time I had settled on Blood Deathknight as my “favorite” wow class, I opted to create one of those.  Right now the only content available is the Horde content that centers around a campaign to build your Garrison in Frostfire Ridge.  As a result of this I created an Orc Deathknight given that generally this is my favorite Horde Race when I actually play that faction.

Wednesday night was our regularly schedule “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and as such I got over to actually booting up World of Warcraft pretty late in the evening.  So I was tired and probably a bit confused… so when they landed me in Frostfire Ridge with a toolbar full of abilities that made no sense… I had a very much “wtf is this shit” moment.  I knew going into the Alpha that they had removed Blood Boil and merged it with Pestilence.  I did not however know that they also removed Rune Strike and Heart Strike… and even Blood Strike.  So I could not for the life of me that night figure out how to set up a Deathknight Rotation.  After consulting the Sage Qelric, I managed to reason out a rotation once you filled in the missing bit of the information.  They are apparently expecting us to use Pestilence as our Blood Rune consumer now.

Getting Into Things

WowB-64 2014-06-13 06-43-46-714 Once I figured out the rotation and remembered how I normally set up the rest of my bar, things started to fall into place.  Its funny how many abilities I didn’t even remember using but where just muscle memory for playing a Deathknight.  Each time I used one of these… I had to track it down and put it on my bar in the “correct” place.  This would have likely been less jarring if I had essentially not been playing much wow for the last five months.  I made another attempt to play last night before our League of Legends night, and found it still pretty lousy feeling.  However afterwards I finally started to get back into the swing of things.  I still keep wanting to do things that wildstar allows me to do, and I keep trying to sprint… but overall I have managed to get through the first few quests and ding 91.

WowB-64 2014-06-13 06-46-32-375 I have an Inn and a Barracks in my Garrison and my very first follower that I can send away on missions.  So far I am digging the way Garrisons are just integrated into the storyline.  At first I was concerned that they might be this big mini-game that was entirely skippable.  However they have managed to integrate it into the storyline of building a base in this foreign land.  I managed to find an ogre merchant that I could bribe to come trade with me at my Garrison.  I am wondering if he will eventually show up there and become a merchant that I can buy and sell from.  For the time being as far as I know that has not actually happened.  I will probably play some more tonight and stream some of it.  The Deathknight rotation still seems off somehow… like there is way too much downtime waiting on my runes to recycle.  I guess it gives me plenty of time to weave in Soul Reaper and Death Siphon… which I am finding I like considerably more than Death Pact.

Warlords of Draenor

For at least some of tonight I will likely be playing some Warlords of Draenor.  Since I am one of the few people in Alpha Currently… I feel like I need to do my job as a tester and…  test content.  When I say few… that is a bit of a misnomer because it seems like everyone and their brother are in the friends and family alpha.  Blizzard has without a doubt the biggest family I have ever seen.  If you are also in Warlords Alpha, you should totally throw me a Battletag invite (Belghast#1752).  If you do so however please tell me how the hell I know you.  It would be nice to have some friendly faces on the alpha server until they hook it up to the “real” battle.net accounts.  Going to also start joining an “AofA” server channel if any of the other Alliance of Awesome community members happen to be playing.

#WoW #WorldOfWarcraft #WarlordsofDraenor

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