Pirate Gruul

Goodbye Monster

monsterpile Yesterday I realized I had a bit of a problem.  For some time I have been an Energy Drink junkie, but things have gotten a bit out of control.  Yesterday morning I drank what I am hoping will be my last monster for awhile.  I realized over the weekend that on some days, especially during the weekend I was drinking four to five of them per day.  It wasn’t because I needed one, or was even tired…  but simply because it was a handy pre-packaged size to carry with me upstairs.  White literally I was drinking energy drinks because I was being too damned lazy to fix anything else for me to drink.  I cleaned up my office a bit this morning, and nestled in amongst my coffee cup are tons of monster cans that were scattered throughout my office.  Granted the “Super Rooster Booster Lite” can is actually my wife’s…  but we won’t worry about that.  Essentially I realized that no good can come of drinking that many energy drinks, so I have by will alone decided to dial back.

This means more than likely over the next couple of days I will be grumpy as shit.  I have been mainlining a lot of caffeine and now I am cutting that consumption WAY back.  Granted I am largely switching back to Coffee, and going to be drinking that at any point I would normally reach for an energy drink.  I think I am going to need a bigger mug.  I noticed this problem during Pax South when my overarching goal each morning was to get to a gas station and purchase an energy drink so I could feel like I was able to start my day.  This ended up with me going to a pretty sketchy gas station to find my morning fix.  We had been buying Monster at Sam’s Club and in truth I was going through a flat of 24 each week.  It is not so much that I am worried about the caffeine… its all the other stuff in monster to make it zero calorie and still effective that concerns me to be honest.  It will take me a bit to adjust but I am hoping I will feel better as a result in the long run.

Pirate Gruul

Wow-64 2015-02-03 19-47-09-07 Last night was the opening of Blackrock Foundry in World of Warcraft, but thankfully unlike the night Highmaul opened… the servers were actually rather playable.  In fact I would say that other than the fact that we were delving into new content… things were exactly like normal.  I had been concerned that some jackass out there would decide to start up yet another DDoS against a game company, but thankfully that was not the case.  Firstly I have to say… Blizzard has found yet more ways to create annoying trash.  From mobs that drop whirling axes, to gorgers that drop acid puddles and come in packs of a dozen or so… the trash is full of new ways to frustrate the raid.  The biggest frustration of the night however was simply getting to the raid.  There are no flight paths really close to it, or at least not nearly as close as you could get in Highmaul.  The best route I was able to come up with was to fly into Everbloom Wilds… and then jump over the mountain to get to Grimrail Depot… and then walk the bridges around the corner to finally get to Blackrock Foundry.  I am one of those players who supports the notion of not having flying mounts…  but crap at least give us decent flight paths to get somewhat close to our destination.  As I was reminded by a friend… the run really is something akin to the bullshit we had to deal with back during the Blackwing Lair and Molten Core days.

Wow-64 2015-02-03 20-23-31-69 The raid is laid out in a hub and spoke design allowing you to reach multiple wings from the entrance area.  We opted to start on the Slagworks wing, which includes alternate universe Gruul, Oregorger and the Blast Furnace encounter.  Alternate reality Gruul is apparently a pirate, because he has a giant hook for an arm this time around.  Those silly Iron Horde and their lopping off appendages to graft impractical metal ones in their places…  one might almost think we are playing Warhammer 40k for a moment… and that the Iron Horde are Chaos Marines.  Gruul was a modified version of his previous self, and thankfully enough of us remembered the way Shatter worked to adequately explain it.  On our second pull we managed to take him down… albeit a bit rougher than any of us would have liked.  I spent a roll token and came up with two items out of the deal…  namely getting the item I needed the most… a new sword, as well as a slight bracer upgrade.  You can see a picture of the rather badass looking sword above… I think I am going to leave it exactly as it is.. without actually transmogging it to anything.

Wow-64 2015-02-03 20-28-18-59 From there we cleared down to Oregorger and spent the rest of the night working on him.  The fight is comprised of two phases.  The first involves melee stacking and avoiding bombs he places, while the range avoid puddles of death.  We managed to get that part of the fight down solidly and could reliably push him into the second phase each attempt.  The problem is that during the second phase utter chaos reigns and we all die slowly, or some of us… not so slowly.  You can somewhat get a grasp of this from the above picture, but Oregorgers room is one big Pacman style maze.  During the second phase he wanders around in search of Ore to gobble up, and in doing so spins down hallways crushing anyone that gets in his path.  I can survive a single one of these rolls…  but there is constant AOE damage going on while doing this.  Our goal as players is to break all of the crates of ore in the room, giving him nothing to gobble up, which ends up transitioning us to the next phase.  The problem is we almost all die during the Pacman phase right now.  We are going to have to sift through the logs and see if there is any sort of pattern to his movement, because right now it seems random.  All in all, one boss down and progress on a second… seems like a successful first night of Blackrock Foundry.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

image Yesterday was the last day for the Joystiq network, including the two sites I particularly cared about WoW Insider and Massively.  It looks however that someone managed to feign death a hunter…  because moments after the final posts were posted…  someone cast mass resurrection.  Firstly it looks like Joystiq is being gobbled up by Engadget one of the few AOL blogs that did not get the axe, so the name at least will live on as their new gaming section.  I have no idea if this means that any of the Joystiq staff go to keep their jobs or not… but in any case the name still exists in one form or another.  The two sites I do really care about however, are striking out on their own and becoming as someone put it “indie” sites, or actually just multi-author blogs.  Blizzard Watch is the new face of WoW Insider, featuring several of the same crew resurrecting a new twitter, blog and starting a Patreon to fund the site.  At the time of writing this, the Patreon is just shy of $10,000 a month which is pretty insane for less than 24 hours passing since it started.

On the other side Massively has resurrected as Massively OP,  creating the mascot of MO the shield wielding warrior.  While they do not have the blog up and running yet, they do have a placeholder site at massivelyop.com.  You can check out their exploits at the twitter account, facebook account, and even a new twitch stream.  In theory over the next couple of weeks we will see a new website appear that represents the sort of content Massively has always created in the past.  In both cases I wish them all the luck in the world.  The amount of support that the community has shown at the potential loss of these two sites has been pretty phenomenal.  I joked the other day with my “Save Ferris” title, but it seems similar.  Everyone has shifted what they are doing to being concerned about keeping these sites afloat.  My hope is that the supporters will stay supporters six months down the road… and that MMO players won’t be as fickle as they seem to be with the games they choose to play.

4 thoughts on “Pirate Gruul”

  1. I’m really glad I never got into energy drinks. Red Bull always tasted kinda gross to me so I didn’t venture into any of the others.

    I think the Joystiq crew are keeping their jobs, thankfully. And the Massively site now has something up with the message, “Coming next month.” with a mailing list sign up so that’s awesome. Good times! 🙂

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