Hunting Bookrocks

Deep Freeze

Last night was another prime example of the odd weather patterns here in Oklahoma.  When I got home from work it had managed to heat up enough to kick on our air conditioning.  Then over the course of one of the worst wind storms I can recall, that pretty much wrecked the gate to our backyard…  it dropped from a balmy 80 degrees to 33 degrees and still really windy this morning.  Being veterans day, and being that I am off work today… I had planned on having the Heating and Air guy out today to do our yearly “winter” inspection.  I am guessing that I picked the perfect day because tonight it is supposed to plummet even colder.  I realize that all of you northerners are thinking that the temperatures I am describing is nothing… but for someone raised to live in 70 degree to 115 degree climate this is pretty cold.

The problem with the heating and air folks coming out is the fact that my office was a mess.  I have a bad habit of just tossing empty boxes in the corner and over the course of a year the pile of boxes had gotten pretty epic.  It made me realize just how much stuff we order from Amazon.  While we do not have curbside recycling here, we do however have these little bins called “Mr Murf” that I can take the cardboard to.  So I have loaded the back of my jeep with the various assorted boxes, condensing them as best I could.  In addition I went out into the backyard and unhooked the hose from the house in preparation for a hard freeze. The last step was to gather up all the trash and put the bin out next to the curb, feed the cats, feed myself and sit down to blog.  All in all I have had a damned productive day and it is only 7:30 in the morning.

Hunting Bookrocks

I rushed around so much this morning so that, one it would actually get done, and two I could spend the rest of my day leisurely farming for bookrocks in Final Fantasy XIV.  Before I finished the night last night I managed to cap my Tomestones of Poetics, and similarly I am close to another piece of armor with my Tomestones of Soldiery.  Generally speaking running content on reset day yields some of the best results, so I will more than likely be hitting a mixture of Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower and Expert Roulette in an attempt to get the precious precious bookrocks.  At this point I really want to get my pants drop out of Syrcus Tower so I can stop running it as a dragoon.  Ultimately I would rather be running it as a class that has a higher likelihood of getting drops like my Bard.  However given my past luck with MMOs, I know the moment I take anything other than the class that can roll “need” on them… they will start dropping every single time.

In The Burning Crusade I raided Karazhan every single Sunday for over a year.  During this time tanking it, I managed to get Attumen’s mount, but never managed to get the tanking necklace that eluded me.  After a years time I got tired of dragging a character in there that only needed a single item, so I started healing it on my paladin… letting another up and coming  tank take my space.  The first time I was in there as a Paladin… the tanking neck dropped.  That has always been the case for me… I have exceptional luck early on and then there are one or two items that will not drop no matter how many times I attempt to get them.  Then there are super rare items that everyone seems to be able to get but just end up taunting me.  I am looking at you Headless Horseman mount.  When I was farming that regularly, almost every time someone in my instance would get their mount…  but I would not.  I guess it could be worse… I could be Rylacus or Tamrielo…  who simply don’t get drops at all.

Rapidly Backpedaling

I am still completely up in the air as to whether or not I will be playing Warlords of Draenor come Thursday.  Had you asked me two weeks ago I would have said an absolute and resounding “Nope”.  Then Blizzcon happened… and the extreme heartstring tugging of the Looking for Group documentary.  That thing crit me straight to the feels for 9999… yeah I am still thinking in Final Fantasy numbers here.  Unfortunately I felt things that I have not felt stirring in me about World of Warcraft since probably I last set foot on Draenor or at the very least last set foot in Northrend.  This started an unraveling of my resolve against playing World of Warcraft.  Basically there are two important pieces of data.  The first being that my subscription does not officially run out for another 19 days.  The second being that thanks to them opening preorders what seems like a year before the expansion actually launched…  I’ve already pre-purchased the game and used my boost to 90 to push up my Night Elf Mage.

So there you have it… I have both access to my account to play, and the expansion already sitting there waiting on me.  The problem is my problems with the expansion are still there.  There is an excellent video from Qelric condensing her views about the Death Knight class in the expansion, and while I have never been able to be that concise she sums it up nicely.  All that I have been able to say… is that they just felt wrong somehow.  Like I never could quantify exactly what that meant.  All of that said… if I do end up  coming back I will more than likely do so on Belghast my warrior, with a return to protection tanking.  I managed to get into Belghast a little bit right before I quit playing before the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and was having a reasonably good time with it.  The protection changes seem to be mostly good, and the feel is solid.  I would be kinda nice to set foot in Draenor on the character that came into its own during the Burning Crusade expansion.  BC was the era where I transitioned from Hunter main to Warrior Tank main, so there is a whole bundle of nostalgia wrapped up in that setting.

The one thing I know for certain…  I will never be leading the World of Warcraft House Stalwart again.  When I came back last year, I fought hard to try and mend the rift that had built up in the guild in my absence.  I tried desperately to get the two factions to talk to one another, but no amount of me acting as a bridge between… managed to actually help.  This broke my resolve, and eventually the problem child in the equation left…  and things apparently have been rather blissful in his absence.  World of Warcraft is not a game I can play seriously any more.  I tried to go back to raiding regularly with this last expansion and it just did not fit with the way I want to play the game.  So long as I was a damned dirty casual I seemed to be enjoying myself, but the moment people started relying on me for anything…  I was back in the position that I fought so hard to escape the first time.  If I do play again, it would be as a secondary game the same way that I continue to play Rift.  It is time for the Warcraft branch of House Stalwart to have a true leader, not just a figurehead that long ago stopped loving that position.

Given that it is Veterans Day here in the United States, I thought it fitting to show my thankfulness for the service of our men and women in the armed forces.  This actually means quite a bit to me, because while I have never served in the Military myself…  both of my grandfathers did.  We lose sight on just how hardcore World War 2 must have been.  The Grandfather on my fathers side was wounded during the D-Day invasion, and had a machine gun emplacement shoot down his back as he was trying to duck into a foxhole.  Had he not happened to quite literally fall on a medic, he would have died as the machine gun and sliced through his lung and it was collapsing.  They bandaged him up just enough to send him back out into battle, where he eventually participated in the Battle of the Bulge.  During that leg of the campaign it was so cold that he lost  half of his toes to frostbite.

My Grandfather on my Mother’s side was in the Tunisian front and captured during the Battle of Kasserine Pass, and spent time in a prison camp.  Eventually he joined in with others and staged and escape managing to eventually get back to Allied lines.  While on the run he was aided by various farming families in the Italian countryside.  My wife’s step father on the other hand was a veteran of the Korean Conflict.  He was a member of the Chosin Few, a group of service men trapped on a peninsula in the Chosin Reservoir that held off Chinese forces.  The thing that I found the most interesting is that all three men were completely stoic about their service.  Not a single one of them wanted any recognition for what they had done for our  country.  In fact none of them really wanted to talk about it at all.  It was only later in life that each was willing to give us little tidbits of information regarding what all they had been through.  I quite literally cannot imagine what they had to go through to survive, and I am thankful that I will never have to know.  So on this Veterans Day I am thankful for all of the men and women who have served our country so that I can have the life of safety and personal freedoms that I lead.

#FFXIV #WoW