Shovel Cow

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I am in this really weird place because I am both disconnected and connected to World of Warcraft at the same time right now.  I am disconnected from the storyline because of the events of arsonist Sylvanas, but I am also finding myself enjoying the simple act of leveling.  On the alliance side I have one of every class up in the 100-110 range, but on the horde side I am severely lacking in a bunch of columns.  As of right now I have a stable of 110s on The Scryers in the form of my Warrior, Paladin, Demon Hunter and Warlock and then a 110 Deathknight over on Eonar.  That said there are a bunch of spots left in my roster to level something and with the introduction of the prestige races I thought it would be really funny to make a High Mountain Tauren Monk.

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So lately I have been spending most of my time in game rolling around…  figuratively and literally…  on the Monk.  The highlight of the weekend was when I found out that I had a one handed shovel graphic in my transmog collection and that if I turned both of my weapons into them…  they would sling across my back.  This only really works because monks don’t actually use weapons at all and they just sit there strapped across my back as I punch and kick things.  Now I am also just realizing that I can probably do a shovel knight transmog of some sort on a heavy armor character.

I’ve always found the leveling game to be one of the stronger points for World of Warcraft and as screwed up as the 60-80 leveling bracket seems to be right now…  I do feel like them slowing things down a bit and blunting the effect of heirlooms was probably a good idea.  Sure it means I can no longer solo world bosses, but it also means that I can have an experience that feels a little closer to what it actually felt like to level something originally.  I am still flying through the levels however, but the ability to sit down and finish an entire zone without the need to move on in order to satisfy the part of me that wants to be “optimal” is a good thing.

It had been years since I had finished the entire Hillsbrad>Arathi>Hinterlands crawl always dropping out of each zone at some point as soon as the next zone lit up as having a quest available.  Now I am doing the Plaguelands which honestly I feel like is one of the zones that benefits the most from Cataclysm.  However on the podcast this weekend we largely talked about the big problems with World of Warcraft storytelling… and eventually drew a conclusion that Cataclysm was the expansion that derailed what seemed to be an arc of really solid story.  If you are curious the above embedded video is that show… but be warned we bash Warcraft pretty hard.

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In other news… I appear to no longer be allergic to casters in video games.  I recently started playing my Warlock a lot and have even been considering maining it in Battle for Azeroth.  This weekend I started a brand new Nightborne Shadow Priest and spent a few hours really enjoying myself leveling it through the Ashenvale content.  I am not sure what snapped inside my head but I actually sorta find casters relaxing.  I’ve always said that “me and finger wigglers don’t get along”, and that was sort of my shtick.  The truth however is that I never really enjoyed that style of game-play and recently something changed.  I find myself enjoying this game of “can I kill it before it touches me” that I have never really gotten into before.

I think we can blame Final Fantasy XIV for this because that is really the game I first seemed to get into the caster thing, or at least the gameplay style of “dot all the things”.  I had a shockingly enjoyable time leveling Arcanist and then Summoner, and put quite a few levels into my Thaumaturge/Black Mage as well.  I went through this thing where I leveled every single class to 50 just to help get rid of a bunch of gear, and in doing that…  I arrived at a sort of truce with playing a caster.  Recently however that truce has turned into a comfort level that I have never really experienced before.  I don’t necessarily get it myself and my friend Grace thinks I must be ill… but whatever the case I had a lot of fun running around on the new babby Shadow Priest this weekend.

Lastly…  my friend Chestnut had this idea as part of Blaugust to do a bunch of mini podcasts asking some questions about how we got started.  It took me awhile but I sat down yesterday after editing AggroChat and before I editing the weekly sermon podcast from the church my wife attends.  I tried very hard to keep it under 10 minutes and managed to do so…  which is a miracle in itself since AggroChat is sort of known for long shows.  I thought I would share it here and I believe Chestnut has a master plan for some other use for these as well.  Hopefully you have an awesome week and I am sure I will get back on doing some Blaugust related topics tomorrow.