Even When Bad, Its Good

Misplaced Weather

It is currently in the teens here in the Tulsa area, and the wind-chill is pushing it into the single digits and in some places negative numbers.  Waking up this morning the entire world is covered in a blanket of white, albeit not a terribly thick blanket… but it is still coming down and shows no signs of stopping any time soon.  Dear Canada, I believe you misplaced your weather.  Can you please pick it up at the front office at your nearest convenience?  A friend from twitter suggested that maybe Canada was not home and the weather was left with their nearest neighbor…  which in that case seems to be the entire United States. 

Here in Tulsa the weather is a nuisance more than anything else, primarily since my wife and I both head back tomorrow after a two week vacation.  For us at least, knowing this was on the way we ran all of the errands we could think of yesterday so we could just hang out inside today in a blanket cocoon. I could go to the front door and take a picture of what is going on outside, but frankly I am just too damned lazy.  I am wrapped up in two blankets and have a loudly purring cat on my chest…  so yeah not moving.  Hopefully the snow itself will not last terribly long, and so long as it sticks to just snow I figure we will be fine.  It is always the ice storms that I am concerned about not the dustings of snow.

Had a Bad Day

20140105_083251[1] Yesterday was a bit of a frustrating mess.  Over the last several days I have been trying my best to make it through the Gates section of the Siege of Orgrimmar LFR on my Paladin.  Since you cannot progress to the next step until you have beaten all of the bosses in the previous one, I found myself hung up there trying to get the last two bosses.  Each and every group seemed to fall apart either during or directly before the Dark Shaman encounter.  Over the course of the last few days since Tuesday I have been in no less than 8 Gates groups, and this yesterday morning it seemed for a moment like I would get through the raid finally.

We had made it up to Nazgrim but after one wipe the group completely disintegrated leaving me stranded with only needing the final boss.  There are weeks that I cannot get the first bosses of a dungeon to save my life, however each and every one of the 8 attempts at Gates involved me starting over with the first encounter.  I am not sure if I set them down hard, but after the extremely frustrating close call in LFR I got up from my cocoon and while pulling off my headset it completely snapped, leaving the right earcuff danging.  The break was so close to the earcuff that I don’t think I could even attempt to bandage it along for a bit with duct tape.

It seems like I am extremely rough on headsets, as in the years of playing World of Warcraft I have gone through no less than eight that I can recall.  No single headset has lasted more than two years before either falling apart on me or starting to malfunction somehow.  Right now I am back to using a Logitech behind the head headset, but it itself has an issue with the left earcuff cutting out constantly and is only serving to infuriate me more.  Granted these are all first world problems… and I should simply be thankful that I can replace the headset at my leisure rather than having to wait to do so.  In fact as of writing this article I have already ordered a replacement.  I am going back to an older plantronics design that previously I had gotten 2 years out of, which is pretty much the most I can hope for.

Even When Bad, Its Good

People are constantly down on LFR because it represents the absolute worst of humanity.  The thing is… even at its worst I greatly appreciate its existence.  I tend to be an altaholic, at present count I have 6 characters at 90 and a large number of characters within range of getting there.  I have already begun raising my Discipline Priest Belglorian and within in the next few weeks it will likely join the ranks.  I get frustrated in these games when I can no longer progress my characters, and because of the structure of traditional raiding, this generally meant that I got to progress whatever my main was…. but no one else.  I have enough time to deal with carving out a block of time in my schedule for one stable raid group, but not multiple raid groups.

What LFR gives me is the ability to keep moving forward on all of my characters at my own leisure.  I don’t expect a lot from the process, and I don’t expect the players in LFR to be marginally functional.  I find it that I can compartmentalize LFR so that I only focus on my own role and ignore the fact that Rome is burning down around my shoulders.  In doing so this means each and every one of my alts can at least achieve a certain level of gear.  Granted I am not expecting them to be amazing, but I can keep moving slowly forward on all fronts… keeping me engaged in each character.  Now even with this on demand raiding, I still personally don’t have time to run every character through.  However I can get enough piecemeal progression to make me happy.

It is almost as though LFR was invented for someone like me, that likes to dabble in a lot of different things, but doesn’t so much care anymore about reaching the ultimate progression in any of them.  So while I might complain about LFR, and get supremely frustrated at times…  I am still very much thankful it exists.  Despite all of the frustrations and set backs, it eventually goes just fine.  Last night about 11 pm I finally managed to get a Gates group that was sitting on Nazgrim… the only boss I was missing.  After a wipe we got the determination buff and came back and beat him on the second attempt.  After all of the wait and all of the gold bags… I managed to pull the best possible drop I could hope for in the instances.  My paladin is now the proud owner of Gar’tok, Strength of the Faithful and one step closer to being as well geared as I can get him.