warlords of draenor Archives - Page 2 of 3

Yrel Is Awesome

November 17, 2014 by Belghast

The Weather Outside…

This morning I am going to try really hard to keep my blog post somewhat brief because I have weather to deal with outside. Throughout the day yesterday it kept snowing and while the ground temperature was too warm to cause it to stick permanently to the ground, it has managed to coat every other surface… like our vehicles. So before this morning is up, after I finish up my blog post I am going to have to go out there and deal with the mess. I am not looking forward to it, because last I checked the temperature and the wind were both still insane. As a denizen of Oklahoma I find it far easier to deal with warm temperatures in excess of 110 than freezing temperatures. So yesterday when it was in the 20s with an insane windchill… I was not a happy camper.

In fact I got out yesterday morning to get breakfast, and then did not leave the house at all once the weather started in more insanely. I had a grand old time hibernating either in my office under a blanket or downstairs on the new laptop… under and even larger fuzzier blanket. This combined with the fact that I seemed to have at least one cat on me at any given time kept me fairly toasty warm, or at least toasty in the ways that counted. Unfortunately today I will have to brave the cold and head out into the world. I am absolutely not looking forward to the commute now that there is “ice” on the road ways… because even the potential mention of it causes folks to drive insane. The biggest thing I am not looking forward to is waiting on my jeep to thaw out this morning and melt some of the snow.

Yrel Is Awesome

So far one of my favorite parts about the Warlords of Draenor expansion is the character of Yrel. In part because she evolves along with your hero through the course of the game. For an alliance player she is the person driving the narrative forward, and many times your partner in the thick of the battle. What makes the character interesting is you watch her evolve over the course of the content from a very frightened Draenei who does not believe in herself and her abilities. Over the course of the storyline there is a key moment where you try and bolster her spirit, and from that point onwards she evolves. With each trip into battle she becomes more and more of a badass. So while in the above screenshot she looks a bit doe eyed… that quickly changes into a woman of determination and strength.

I don’t think the experience of exploring Draenor would be nearly as interesting to me were it not constantly moved forward by interactions with Yrel. When the early cinematics were released I assumed this game from an alliance players perspective would be all about Maraad and his returning to his home land. While I like the character of Maraad just fine, I feel like they made the right choice to switch focus and center the story on the much more interesting Yrel. The thing the Warcraft universe needs more than anything are some strong female characters that play center stage, and not supporting characters. Yrel so far does a really good job of being that sort of character. Terran Gregory and team have done an amazing job with the in game cinematics, in making this entire experience feel so much more movie like.

Taking it Slow

At this point I am trying to stop and smell the roses whenever I have the chance. While the list of level 100 characters keeps increasing in guild, and the call of high level content is there… I am trying to take it slowly. That said the game seems to be conspiring against me, in that I am level 95 and have yet to make it out of Gorgrond. There are just so many things to see and do in the landscape and my compulsion to completely every quest, kill every rare mob and gather every treasure… is ending up leveling me more swiftly than I had expected. I remember having the same basic feeling when I was leveling in Pandaria the first time as well. The only negative is that my desire not to skip content means I am going to have to do a lot of questing at maximum level to attempt to gear myself. The problem I ran into with Pandaria is that in order to get into the dungeons you really needed that quest gear from Townlong Steppes and Dreadwastes. At this point I will ding 100 well before I have set foot in any of the later zones, so I am likely setting myself up for the same issues.

Thanks to Final Fantasy XIV… I did something I never thought I would do in World of Warcraft. Yesterday afternoon I queued as a tank for a random dungeon… in fact I ran two of them back to back. Overall the experience was not nearly as bad as I would have expected it. Sure I had one jackass in the first run that laughed at us as we wiped to something… but the majority of the time it went nice and smoothly. Equally shocking was the fact that apparently Warrior tanking is a muscle memory task because I could still do it instinctively. Granted I set up my hot bars much the same way as I have always set them up for years. My fingers seemed to know precisely what to do at the right time, and honestly I found it an easier experience than tanking with a Deathknight. It felt natural, and as the dungeons ran on I started doing things a lot more confidently. Maybe the warrior tank inside of me really still is there, and was just waiting to come out again. I look forward to ping ponging around dungeons with charge as the role begins to feel more natural. Essentially Belghast Warrior tanking is open for business… and if you need a tank holler.

House Stalwart

This morning I am thankful that House Stalwart in World of Warcraft on the Argent Dawn server… continues to exist in spite of me. While I founded the guild back in 2004, it has been years since I have controlled the destiny of this plucky guild. In fact there are many times that I have actively tried to recruit players away from World of Warcraft into other games. In spite of my constant attempts and my white panel van full of candy… the guild still exists as strong as it ever was. Over the last few nights we have had almost 30 people online, which is pretty damned good for a guild in a game that had been in a state of decline. While I set the motions into action that started the guild and gathered people there… it is the people themselves that keep it going. Every so often I will take back the reigns of the guild, and do a few tweaks here and there, but largely it is the people themselves that have kept the ship moving forward.

I also want to thank my good friend Rylacus. He claims that he is just a “Bel Proxy”, but he has been all too gracious about wearing the crown when I am not around. He provides the guild a sense of stability that I have not been able to since the launch of Cataclysm. He is as much guild mascot as he is guild leader, and I appreciate the effort he has put into it. He is also really damned good at denying my candy, as I have only ever gotten him to follow me into one other game. He is all about his characters in World of Warcraft and the progress he has made with them. Since both he and his kids play the game, he is as firmly rooted in it as anyone I know. He still keeps trying to give me back the crown, but his willingness to wear it means so much to me. He keeps things moving forward and makes sure the train never completely derails. It has taken me awhile to reach a point of accepting that the House Stalwart that exists today is not the House Stalwart I created… but is in no way less awesome or less interesting. The guild has evolved beyond being a cult of personality dedicated to its leader, and has become a chain reaction that sustains itself. I am thankful to no longer be needed to keep the fire going.

Sell Me on Warlords

November 16, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat 31 – Endless Legend of Draenor

Last night we recorded yet another episode of AggroChat, and I was joined by Ashgar, Kodra and Tam. Still no signs of Rae, but she has been absent in a lot of things lately. I think she is just going through one of those periods of seclusion, that I occasionally find myself in. I went into last night not thinking we had a whole lot to talk about, but once again we managed to ramble on for an entire show. This week Ashgar, Kodra and Tam have been spending some time playing Endless Legend a relatively new 4X game that spawned from a rather steam early access program. From what it sounds like it is a really interesting take on the traditional civilization game model. Throughout the discussion it reminded me in no small part to Age of Wonders but with more original fantasy race combinations.

Thanks to a sale on Steam Tam delved into the rather critically acclaimed Shadows of Mordor. When I originally saw the trailer I thought… “man this is a Tam game”. He loves all things stealthy, and by the same token I thought “man this is not a Bel game”. At least the second part of that statement might have been wrong. It sounds like there is plenty of carnage and mayhem, and a super interesting nemesis system to keep players busy. Essentially if I could manage to struggle through the stealthy bits, there is probably a really enjoyable game there waiting. One of the cooler ideas is that apparently your friends nemesis characters… will join your game and hunt you down too. So in theory you could unleash some living nightmares on your friends if you end up letting them level up too much.

Finally I delve into the topic of Warlords of Draenor and my return to the game. I still stand by my original statement that if you have no interest in World of Warcraft, this expansion will do little to change that. However if you are like me and still have at least a passing interesting in the game, or have a huge vault of nostalgia towards the Burning Crusade era… this is going to be like crack. Right now I am finding the game extremely interesting, and we ramble on talking about it at length. So while I thought we didn’t have a whole lot to talk about, it turned out as the night went on that we still managed to fill up a show full of verbal faffing.

Burning Crusade Nostalgia

One of the points we landed on last night that I find extremely interesting might also be the reason why I am enjoying this expansion, but I don’t feel like someone like Tam would. Ultimately I think it depends on how you felt about your experience in Burning Crusade as a whole. For me Burning Crusade was really the expansion where I came into my own as a player, and became “Belghast”. I started my WoW raiding life as a Hunter, but that was a class I had never actually intended on playing. Originally I wanted to play a tanky paladin, but the bait and switch when they replaced the strike system with the seal system… and the fact that at low levels paladins were frustratingly slow to level solo caused some problems. I had a death in the family shortly after the launch of the game, and when I came back most of my friends had shot far ahead of me, leaving me to have to solo almost entirely.

At that point the Hunter was the king of soloing all things, and as such I picked it up and caught up to my friends rather quickly. I can’t say I disliked playing Lodin my hunter, but it just wasn’t the class I had ever intended or imagined myself playing. Then one thing lead to another, and a good friend needed a hunter for his raid… and bam I ended up becoming a raiding hunter. I loved the Late Night Raiders group of hunters, and many of them I am still close with even today. However i never really excelled as a hunter, because my heart was not fully into it. I could do better than average damage, and had decent enough reflexes and was reliable as part of a rotation… but I had no passion for it, at least not the way the other hunters did. However as I started accepting gear from the raid, I felt bound by loyalty to keep playing that character as long as they needed me.

The Raid Crash

With the launch of Burning Crusade it was this great reset button, and I seized the opportunity with both hands. I half heartedly tried to level Lodin at first, but quickly found myself exclusively playing Belghast my protection warrior, and became a much needed tank as we all leveled up. The Burning Crusade could be thought of as the great raid killer, because all of the changes… all of the moving characters around and dropping the standard raid size from 40 to 25 man ultimately was the final blow to many raids on our server that had only been limping along for some time. Here is where the perspective comes in because while I was just an admittedly well liked member of the raid… Tam was one of the leaders of it. So while I viewed everything as this grand opportunity to do the things I had always wanted to be doing… his viewpoint had to be decidedly different. I know when my second raid “No Such Raid” fell apart around me it took a lot of our me personally. I had that raid dumped in my lap, and with the figurehead in its cult of personality gone… there was really no amount of duct tape to keep the ship afloat.

So while I personally view Burning Crusade as this expansion where I got to finally move into the role that I had been designed for… others might not have quite the hopefulness that I did. I remember when the expansion hit, there were a lot of raid members that were frustrated by the gear reset. In fact they were down right mad that all of this work that they went through and effort they put into getting just the right items… was to be immediately erased the moment they stepped foot into Hellfire Peninsula. Expansion are the great equalizers… they give players the opportunity to shift focus, and pick up something that they had always wanted to play but were never given the chance to. With the launch of Warlords of Draenor I am doing just that myself. I felt it was fitting for me to be setting aside my Deathknight and once again taking up the mantle of Protection Warrior.

Sell Me on Warlords

Last night during the course of the podcast, Tam uttered the words above.. “Sell Me on Warlords”. In truth I couldn’t nor would I really want to. Warlords of Draenor is more of the same, with a prettier coat of paint and some nifty casual friendly features like the Garrison. I feel this is an expansion that only those who still begrudgingly feel love for World of Warcraft in their hearts should ever try and play. The game has some serious shortcomings still as compared to more modern MMOs. It pisses me off on an almost nightly basis that it doesn’t have a mentoring system, nor does it have a content scaling system for dungeon runs. I greatly prefer that Final Fantasy XIV sizes down the players to fit the dungeon, so that there is never a case where you straight up roflstomp the content. This came up the other night when Zeli and Jabberant started characters and used their boost to 90 to create them on Argent Dawn. Jab asked if there was a way to go back and experience the old dungeon content… and sadly unless you mean by soloing with great ease… the answer is a resounding no.

So I can’t really sell Warlords as the next best thing since sliced bread. I still think that functionally Final Fantasy XIV is a better game. That said I am happy that I don’t really have to make the choice between them, In fact I have been extremely thankful to have FFXIV that I am still deeply connected to as Argent Dawn has burned down around me. What Warlords represents is a game with the charm and grace of any Blizzard title. The recent performance issues still do not degrade the fact that the game is extremely well crafted. At the end of the day it is an old game, with a fresh coat of paint… but it is a very enjoyable game still. The content itself I am finding more enjoyable, because they took the lessoned learned with the Timeless Isle and extended them out to the world as a whole. There is so much to see and find, and so many neat rare mobs to take out along the way. It is like they gave me carefully crafted crack just for me… because I love getting interesting loot and killing interesting things. If you hold a special place in your heart for Draenor… it might be a worthwhile time to return as well. At this point I still have not actually renewed my account… but signs are pointing to that I will be doing so.

Supporting Wife

One of the recent sagas in my life that has somehow managed to stay mostly out of my blog is the ongoing issues I have had with my laptop. I feel like at this point I deserve an honorific of “laptop killer” because I seem to be exceptionally hard on them. My Asus Republic of Gamers laptop lasted about two years, and I loved it dearly… until something went wonky with the motherboard and kept it from charging the battery. Then I got the SLI configuration Lenovo y500 laptop… and I too adored it. Ultimately I think it was pretty much my perfectly laptop, until a few weeks ago I went downstairs to boot it up… and it refused to go past the Lenovo splash screen. I realized unfortunately that it was out of warranty, so I ended up posting on the Lenovo support forums.. and as of yet have not received a response.

So over the last few weeks at my wife’s urging we have been watching craigslist to see if we could find something interesting. In the past when I have been without my laptop, I have been in a state of utter panic… however this time around I have tried extremely hard to be zen about it. We saw a few interesting things but either the poster wanted more than I was willing to pay for it, or after some exchanges of texts I found out that the video card would be too underpowered for my purposes. All of this while I did not realize that my wife had also been searching craigslist on a daily basis. Thursday night she happened across a post on the Oklahoma City craigslist, for someone selling a Lenovo y580 a model slightly newer than mine… for a ridiculously cheap price.

My wife did not even bat an eye at the thought of us making a trip to Oklahoma City, entirely for the purpose of getting me a laptop from some random seller on Craigslist. I am exceptionally lucky and thankful that I have a wife that is so supportive of all of the random otherwise meaningless activities I engage in on a daily basis. She knows all of this is important to me… and while she doesn’t always grasp the reason why… she constantly surprises me at just how much she is willing to do in support of my madness. So yesterday went took a two hour trek to Oklahoma City, looked over the laptop… and today it is sitting beside me downloading various things. Of course we made a trip through all of the Half Priced Books stores in the area, since we don’t have those in Tulsa… so it was not entirely about the laptop. Still I am extremely thankful to have a partner willing to jump through so many hoops for my happiness.

Hunting Bookrocks

November 11, 2014 by Belghast

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

We Have The Date

August 15, 2014 by Belghast

That’s a Lot of Fish

Last night I did something a bit different than my normal fare and actually hung out with several of my coworkers. While I hang out with Rae at least in the virtual sense almost every night, this was a bit different. For my boss’s birthday his brother took him to a thing called Rifftrax put on by the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000. They do the same basic thing, but they do it live and stream it to theaters all over the country. Since he had such a great time he decided it would make an excellent group activity. So last night we met for dinner and then continued on to the nearby theater to watch the Matthew Broderick version of Godzilla ripped apart by the MST3K guys.

First off this is a much bigger deal than any of us realized, as we spent probably a bit too long at the restaurant and had maybe 20 minutes before the start of the film. By the time we all got to the theater and inside the place was absolutely packed. Apparently if you want to get seats together you have to arrive well ahead of time, and it almost has a tail gating mentality. Instead we all split up mostly into groups of two to find a place to sit. So this ended up with me being down on the front row leaning back in my seat and trying to watch the movie. Thankfully we didn’t really CARE about the movie… but instead the commentary. Afterwards they said that it was a bit hard to hear the dub over as you got further back in the theater so I guess the awkward angle was worth it.

This is totally something I would do again, and it has been a long while since I have laughed this hard. I guess I had completely put large sections of the Broderick film out of my memory. I mean I remember it being bad at the time, but I didn’t remember it being THIS bad. If you have the chance to see Rifftrax in a nearby theater I suggest you take up that opportunity. They do this apparently as a semi regular thing here, so I will have to follow the schedule and see what is next. It seems like the next showing is November 4th where they do that campy classic Anaconda. I will have to see what is going on but I would really like to maybe try and go.

We Have the Date

Yesterday was the big announcement for the Warlords of Draenor release date and now we know exactly when to expect it to land. Some time ago Godmother ran a contest to see who could guess the date, and I apparently came the closest along with River. I remember at the time River saying something to the effect that I looked lonely on the spreadsheet so he decided my guess was as good as any. Now that said I did have some logic behind my guess, I was not just randomly picking numbers. My general theory was that we would not see a World of Warcraft expansion until after Blizzcon. So knowing the Blizzcon dates I figured they would want to take advantage of the Blizzcon-Bump but get product out there before Thanksgiving and the holiday madness begins. I apparently was right but Blizzard threw everyone for a loop by making the release a Thursday. I don’t think anyone was expecting that.

Once again the good folks at Blizzard have managed to craft together a really awesome cinematic. Were I a horde player I would probably be cheering the awesome orc action. Instead it just seems like another really awesomely animated feature explaining the premise of the expansion. The events play out a little different than I would have thought. All along I thought that Garrosh would actually stop Grommash from drinking the blood, but it seems like good ole Grom was already making that decision. Garrosh however just gave him the backup he needed to defeat Mannorath. I feel like the events of this expansion will serve to set up for the long fabled Burning Legion expansion, since we obviously screw with the way things were supposed to work out. I figure you can’t kill a demon like Mannorath without having some pretty negative repercussions.

Overwhelming Meh

Like I said, were I a horde player I would likely be heralding in yet another overwhelmingly horde focused expansion. Thing is I am not, and I have never cared a single bit about any of the horde lore. It was just that faction filled with monstrous humanoids and a handful of people that I cared enough about to roll alts to be able to play with. Nothing about the horde is really my thing, apart from the whole “everything has spikes” aspect. I expected yesterdays event and subsequent trailer to pump me up and prepare me for what was inevitable, my temporary return to World of Warcraft. The thing is it seems to have had the opposite effect. I am even less interested in the expansion than I was going into the day, and I can’t really put my finger on the why.

I have been in Alpha/Beta for some time now, and all in total I have played somewhere between six and eight hours. During that time I have just felt like I was forcing myself to play the game. I felt obligated to test the content since friends had gotten me into it. Nothing I was doing however really did it for me, and even with the existence of some interesting ideas like the Garrisons, it all felt rehashed. The Burning Crusade was one of the most exciting expansions for me, and it was the era of so many cool things for me as a raider. I expected to be wrapped up in this whirlwind of nostalgia upon returning to it… albeit in a pre-destruction state. While Draenor is gorgeous and I can see the underpinnings of the areas I used to love… it all just feels really old at this point.

This expansion is going to be amazing for those players that are currently enthralled with the game. There are going to be a handful of other players that maybe quit wow but didn’t really play other games in the meantime… that will return and fall back in love again. However I fear for those of us who have gone nomadic and played every game that has come down the pipe… the overall game is just starting to feel its age. The systems don’t quite work as well as other games on the market, it isn’t the culmination of the best ideas any longer. Instead it is a combination of what they could get to work within the existing framework of the game. It will definitely breathe new life into the game a whole and introduce a bunch of new doodads for the players to get involved with, but so far it has all felt very hollow to me. As much as I want to be excited, I am wondering if I have actually truly outgrown the game. I had more fun doing Godmother’s survey than I have had actually playing the game in a very long time… so that tells me I was pretty much living off nostalgia to this point, and maybe that font has been exhausted.