I Hate People

Plans are a Crutch

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I had these plans yesterday of running the last part of Siege of Orgrimmar, but didn’t actually do that at all.  I queued for it at one point, but after seeing it would take an hour I bailed and gave up.  After being iced in for several days, we were out of a few things… not the least of which was toilet paper and paper towels.  The above picture is to show the extent of the icing… for years I have gotten in the habit of raising my wiper blades so they don’t get frozen to the window.  As you can see it is like everything had been sealed in plastic to preserve it for eternity.  If nothing else I knew I had to clear the vehicles so we could leave if we absolutely needed to. 

It actually did not take as long as I expected.  I went outside in my pajamas and started my jeep, then went back inside to take a shower and get ready for the morning.  When I got back out the heater inside and engine had managed to warm the ice up enough to where I could start breaking it off rather easily.  Roughly 20 minutes later I had cleared my Jeep and was headed back inside to let my wife’s vehicle warm up.  I could barely feel my fingers…  but it was at least clear.  When I cleared my wife’s vehicle I had the foresight to actually wear gloves.

We made it out of the house pretty easily, and I have to say this is the weirdest ice storm I have ever experienced.  Everything is absolutely coated in a layer of ice… the trees, the vehicles, the grass, anything elevated even slightly off the ground.  However the roads are almost completely dry.  It is like the perfect ice storm… all of the pretty with none of the consequences.  Granted some parts of the city are out of power as the ice snapped powerlines… so they would definitely question my assessment of no consequences.  All in all however it could be been and likely should have been much worse.

I Hate People

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I mean this in the nicest possible way… but I hate people.  When you put me in a room with more than a half a dozen people a severe fight or flight instinct triggers.  Now imagine how that instinct multiplies when you put me in a busy store during the holidays filled with hundreds of people.  I am generally pretty good at swallowing down that feeling, but the more stores you expose me to… the more of an asshole I become.  I am thankful that my wife realizes this because by the time we reached the last two stores of the day I am sure I was an absolute bear to be around.  We had several things still to pick up on our list, so while we were out and about… and since we were both going a little stir crazy we decided to try and knock as many things off the list as possible.

Target was both the worst and the best place we went all afternoon.  It was the worst because it was inanely busy and as I rounded the corner near the seasonal area… the instinct kicked in harder than it has in years.  There was this huge zombie-like shambling mass of people migrating back and forth between toys and electronics.  I gave up on any notion that I was going to go check the Lego isle and got out of there as soon as possible. It became a logistical exercise to even navigate my shopping cart through the narrow passages left by gawking customers.  I suddenly realized why a lost child just sits down and cries… because at that point I seriously did feel like surrendering to the hopelessness that was all of those people pressing in on me.

That was the worst part… the best part however is just how efficiently they were managing the checkouts.  They had roped off the area in front of the cash registers and while this caused the line to snake all the way down to the pharmacy area, it did make it move faster.  They had a worker acting like a traffic cop to funnel people down the little shoots and to the next waiting cashier.  Additionally they gave us a 10% discount as an apology for the whole credit card fiasco.  Since we were actually hit during that event…  I felt like we had more than earned it.  Last weekend my discover card was off in Oklahoma City and Norman making purchases without me… and we are assuming since we still have our credit cards… it is tied to the whole Target event.

I probably would have gone postal at some point during yesterday, but we went to eat at Monterry, a Mexican chain restaurant we go to regularly.  When I say regularly… I mean it, because the waitresses know our order by heart and often times fight over who is going to wait on us.  Yesterday we had Daisy, who is extremely awesome and has the same pen fetish that my wife does.  Over the time we have been going there, we have become rather social with them… and eating there act like a reset of my buffer.  It was a happy place that helped me cope with the madness that was stores like Old Navy.  Still by the time we ended our tour at Big Lots, I was so far past going that I am sure I was acting like an ass.

Relaxing with Friends

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Yesterday before the madness began, I noticed that my good friend Vernie had managed to hit 90 on his mage.  I did my normal song and dance about how awesome the Timeless Isle was for catching up, but as a very squishy class it seemed that soloing out there was just not something viable.  We made tentative plans for me to grab one of my characters and help him get some gear after I got back from the holiday craziness.  It was shortly after I got home that he logged back in and we did just that.  At first I tried to use Exeter my paladin, but I quickly realized that I already had gotten the weekly chests when I swam him out to get the chest in the pirate cave.  I grabbed Belgarou my druid, because I knew I had not really played him in a few weeks. 

It turns out that this was a great call as I ran out of leather some time ago and could greatly use a run to replenish it.  We faffed about the island for several hours and in the process we managed to get him Helm, Chest, Bracers, Belt, Gloves, Back, Legs, Ring and Trinket.  Which in itself was a pretty amazing haul for our first outing.  He had not really played since Cataclysm, so there are a ton of systems that simply did not exist back then.  The big one is the LFR system, so as we hunted for gear on the island we queued for Mogushan Vaults.  The queue was surprisingly short and we managed to make it through the three boss raid in extremely quick time.

I guess the game did not want him to have an unrealistic view of how the LFR system worked, because when we queued up for the second part of the raid… it went horribly.  Someone pulled the boss too quickly, the tanks had no clue what they were doing… and we wiped.  Moments after the wipe the raid just disintegrated in a matter of seconds.  I told him that sadly that was also extremely common.  While we waited for that raid to officially die we went out to Dinosaur Island… or more properly Isle of Giants.  We had zero luck in both pets and eggs, but we killed quite a few and I got some more leather.  I am not sure if it was in the first raid or the second… but at some point Vernie managed to pick up shoulders.

During the course of our faffing about he managed to go from 450 something to 474 and if we can get him a few more upgrades he should be able to start doing Throne of Thunder…. which I think is one of the more enjoyable instances of the expansion.  After we finished the second raid, that went surprisingly successfully.  Elegon managed to eat a half dozen people to the “floor boss”, but all in all we pulled out a win.  Will of the Emperor was a wipe at first, namely because the tanks didn’t really know what they were doing.  However someone luckily explained to them and we managed to pull that victory out as well.  All in all it was a really fun night, and I was happy that we got Vernie a ton of upgrades in the process.  Once again Faffing about pays off.

Quintessential Quintet

Farewell to Arts

 

I did another really quick video yesterday since we are supposed to have an impending server reset.  In the holiday weekend since the last restart folks have filled the server with all sorts of nifty stuff.  So I thought I would do a really quick video showcasing some of the cooler things.  The highlight for me is the alligator.  I am wondering who built it, because seriously it was perfect.  The server has essentially exploded with pixel art everywhere, some of it seeming to be freehand which is pretty amazing.  While this is all interesting I am hoping soon we get a bit more substance.

It was rumored that we would be seeing a new patch today or tomorrow and in it I am really hoping they introduce two things.  Firstly I want to see the crafting system and all the nifty things it can produce.  This is likely going to be a massive thing because this also means they will likely change they way the blocks work so that we actually harvest them instead of just destroying them.  Currently the game works a lot like Minecraft creative mode, where you have pretty much unlimited resources to place at your disposal.  While this is cool for free range building, the game however right now is lacking a “game”.  Wandering around and exploring, engaging in combat is fun but I feel like we need something to give us a sense of purpose.

The second thing I want badly is the cornerstone concept, aka your plot of lands that persists to each server you play on, and that no one else can disrupt.  Part of why I have not built much of anything yet is the fact that we still have way too many mad bombers on the server all to willing to destroy your hard work.  In fact I railed on Shawn Shuster of Massively a bit in the video as in his walkthrough that was posted yesterday… he was all too happy to blow up other peoples creations. 

There have already been some pretty epic works of art destroyed by some idiot who would not suppress their inner poo flinging monkey long enough to appreciate what had been created.  While I realize this is a side effect of having a game with no rules yet, it still depresses me to see the world as Swiss cheese.  I am sure once the new patch has gone life I will do another quick video showing off what it added.  So stay tuned to my channel and I will post something up there as soon as it is available.

Quintessential Quintet

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Also last night I managed to push my paladin Exeter to 90 and with it came an achievement that I was not expecting.  Apparently Quintessential Quintet is a thing?  I cut an odd path on this one, by the time I left Jade Forest I was already 87 thanks to all the mining nodes.  From there I made a beeline for Kun Lai, and critpathed my way through the zone until I reached the quest chain that lead to Townlong.  Similarly in Townlong I quested my way through the Shadopan chain until I reached the jumping point for Dread Wastes.  All of which was to set myself up perfectly to be able to start working on Klaxxi quests as quickly as possible.

Why you might ask?  This is my blacksmith, and all the nifty things you can create seem to be on the Klaxxi vendor.  Namely I wanted to be able to start creating masterwork weapons for all my other characters as I get them to 90.  That seems to be the big weakness as it comes to the Timeless Isle content.  You can gear your alts up with 496 extremely rapidly, but you have a few glaring holes…  namely your weapons.  Also I seem to have a much harder time getting Curios for trinkets, and the neck/ring slots to drop on the Timeless Isle.  So as a result I have ended up spending a fair amount of time trying to remediate their gear just so I can be able to queue for something.

Timeless Isle is nifty, but I really miss the equivalent of the Icecrown 5 mans.  I wish there were heroics that I could run that actually provided something viable for filling out a set of gear.  I feel as though they should really have put in a new 5 man that dropped 496 weapons to go with all the gear they are handing out like candy.  Even with epics…  a crappy weapon is still a crappy weapon.  Right now my paladin for example is using the treasures of pandaria BOA one handed sword that you find on the ground.  Which is better than anything he has gotten yet, but at least being able to create the masterwork hammer will be something slightly better.  I think those are 463 ilvl which is essentially what the heroic gear is.

What Next?

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I have to say getting Exeter to 90 was a pretty cool thing.  He technically was the very first character I created, and my intended main.  For years my internet handle was “Exeter” and quite honestly “Belghast” was my main over in DAoC, and it was not until late in Vanilla that I started to play that character as a main.  All the while through vanilla my main was Lodin the hunter, and it was an almost accidental occurrence.  I had a death in the family that pulled me away from Warcraft a few weeks after the release of the game.  As a result I got rapidly outpaced by the rest of the guild, and back then soloing a Paladin was a truly painful experience.

Hunters were the gods of soloing, so I started leveling Lodin just to be able to keep up with my friends.  Within a very short amount of time I had caught up, and when we hit 60… I got drafted into the raid group of a guild member as they wanted to replace a troublesome hunter.  I had no intent to actually play a hunter as my main, and in truth I am not terribly suited for the class… but I did for almost all of Vanilla because it was my “Raid main”.  Once you start playing a character in a raid group you are pretty much committed to always play that character until they no longer need it.  The positive effect however is that I met so many life long friends through raiding, and that the Late Night Raiders hunters were all such amazing people.

As soon as Burning Crusade was released, I saw this as my opportunity to leapfrog Lodin in gear and start playing Belghast as my main.  That is the awesome thing about expansions, the gear reset lets you change your focus.  From that point until the tail end of Wrath of the Lich King, I was a warrior main tank.  It was not until I needed a break from the hot seat that I switched focus to the Deathknight and fell in love with it.  All of this time I felt horrible for leaving Lodin abandoned in the dustbin.  It was not until Cataclysm that I actually managed to level him out of the outlands.  During one of my last sessions playing I pushed him up to Pandaria levels, so I feel as though it is probably his time to shine again.  I pretty much permanently run around in Giantstalker transmog in honor of the fun times I had with him raiding during those early days of Vanilla WoW.