Guild Leadership Archives - Page 43 of 108

Level 100

November 20, 2014 by Belghast

Feeling More Human

This morning I am still not feeling amazing, but I am doing sizably better than I was yesterday. At least I feel marginally human now instead of a walking malady. This is mostly due to my wife and her being able to tell me what to do… and actually have me do it. I have been feeling lousy for a bit over a week, and yesterday she exclaimed “you have to call the doctor” and then she relented and gave me a secondary line of action “or at least get some mucinex”. I called the doctors office and unsurprisingly (because I waited until like 9:30 to do so) they were already booked up for the day, and said that they would call me back if there were any openings. So in the meantime I got dressed and ready and went to Walgreens around the corner from the house. Mucinex is something that the doctor has suggested I take, so I was no stranger to it.

Actually there are many times I have had success taking a one two punch of Mucienx and Tylenol Cold and Flu to clear various issues up. It turns out that in the constantly rush to get more products to market, Mucinex has created just this thing. Granted you have to take it every four hours for optimal relief… but in any case the stuff is pretty miraculous. Within a few hours of taking it I was already feeling noticeably better and all the gunk in my chest clearing up. Granted it still has the nasty taste going down that Mucinex always does however the drug lives up to its claims, and I think I just found a new go to for these situations. This gentlemen is why we need wives… I was more than willing to muddle through without doing much to fix the root problem. My wife however got tired of me moping around and told me to do something about it. Apparently there are in fact times where I “don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain”.

Level 100

Yesterday I spoke about having a dilemma of whether or not to do Spires of Arak or just jump straight into Nagrand. Having done a little of both, I can clearly say that there are definitely some story elements and quests that make Spires of Arak worth the hassle. That said it is also the new Bladesedge Mountains, in that the terrain is a pain in the ass to move around and the quests are scattered all over the zone in small pockets. If you are wanting to jump straight into being dungeon ready however, I highly suggest going to Nagrand as soon as possible. While I was able to bump up my ilevel a bit in Spires, I did not actually hit the 600 normal mode dungeon target until I reached Nagrand and spent a bit of time questing there. As of last night I was able to push my ilevel to 603 inching me closer to the heroic starting point of 610. I completely bronze proving grounds and made it to round 7 of silver until I screwed up and did not actually pay attention to my own health. Hopefully tonight I can knock out silver proving grounds and maybe bump my ilevel a bit more with questing or dungeons.

Among the strangest quests that I completed was one for a little Goblin kid wanting you to retrieve his “treasure”. It turns out the kid is a perv and you are essentially recovering a calendar of goblin pin-up girls. I had to stop and take a screenshot when the big reveal happened. Sure I found it funny, but also at the same time super cringe worthy. I mean I get the humor in it, but just like the Granok bed in Wildstar… it feels a bit over the top for something so casually slipped in there. Throughout the night as various other members got to the quest you would see comments in guild chat like “Did I just retrieve a Goblin nudie mag?”. Yes… yes we did. What I found surprising is just how at home Nagrand still feels. This was my favorite zone in Burning Crusade, and for the most part they managed to get the look and feel just right… even without the floating rocks. Ultimately that has been the payoff with this expansion for me, being able to see things before everything fell apart. Burning Crusade was a really important expansion for me, and because of it I have so many fond memories that just keep getting refreshed as I do this content.

Nostalgia Bomb

I can’t really judge clearly how good the content in Warlords of Draenor actually is, because I cannot peel away the shiny coat of nostalgia long enough to actually evaluate it with a clear mind. We ultimate are an accumulation of our memories and emotions… and this expansion is managing to bring all of those down to bear upon me. Will the magic fade? Almost certainly it will, and probably quicker than it came on in the first place. At that point I will be able to see the flaws where they stand, but for the time being I am doing what I hope to do in any game… have fun. Ultimately this game was designed for me, and my play style specifically. There is tons of super dense content, and even though it is content with a little c… it is still cool objectives. There seems to be an endless array of little doodads to find in the world, and interesting named mobs to kill that drop interesting treasures. Thankfully I chose to level my disenchanter first, because this has been an amazing source of shards for my future enchanting endeavors.

Speaking of Enchanting… it seems exceptionally expensive this time around. Enchanting work orders give temporal shards… which you then turn around and use 10 of at a time to get a temporal crystal. I finally saved up enough daily tokens to purchase a “real” enchant, and I did so to grab the one that looks to be the new go to for tanking. As you can see it costs 15 Temporal Crystals and 10 Sorcerous Earth. Far as I know I have yet to actually get any Sorcerous Earth, but it seems to be a random drop when disenchanting or mining. Thankfully I do seem to be getting plenty of primal spirits that I can then trade for the materials I actually need with a vendor on my garrison. In any case folks will not be handing these enchants out willy nilly, because that is a lot of resources to pour into a single weapon enchant. For the time being I have the comparatively extremely cheap Mark of the Shattered Hand enchant, just to have something on my weapon.

Unfortunately engineering is an equally time consuming boondoggle, mostly because I was not really paying attention and didn’t realize that I had two daily cool downs this expansion instead of just the one. This means that I have gotten a slow start on getting my tanking helm. As of this morning I am 40 parts into my 100 total needed. That is in part because I only just started doing the more expensive 4 parts a day cooldown. I am running the maximum number of work orders allowable but unfortunately my engineer follower is not quite 100, so I can’t start getting double parts just yet. In any case it will still be awhile before I get my tanking helm, let along actually have the materials to seriously level engineering, though with the rank 2 mines I am starting to get enough spare bits to keep both cool downs and work orders in the black. I just forsee that I have a lot more daily cooldowns ahead of me before I can start doing interesting things with crafting.

Coffee

As a child one of the movies had a massive impact on me was Dune. I remember watching it in elementary school and being enthralled by the fact that the book was co complicated that it needed its own glossary of terms. I remember reading over the glossary, memorizing details of it… long before actually being able to struggle through the epic prose contained in the front part of the book. Since I watched the David Lynch movie first, before reading the book… I will always have certain visuals in my head associated with things. One of the things that stuck with me that was a complete fabrication of the Lynch movies… was the mantra that the Mentat Piter De Vries chants before taking Sapho juice.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

There is a little voice inside of me that says this every single time I drink a cup of coffee. I will always be enamored by the near instant quickening effect coffee has. I feel like a Mentat gaining focus when I sip a cup. Maybe this is the effect of the caffeine, or maybe this is just something I have built up for myself by making a little ritual of it in my head. In any case it is a magical thing. Energy drinks have a similar effect, because I think in part I have moved this same pseudo religious ritual over to them as well. Either by trick of my own mind, or by actual chemical effect… I am thankful that I live in a world where coffee exists and can do magical things.

A Tale of Three Games

November 18, 2014 by Belghast

Cold Snap

Our Final Fantasy XIV group has ended up taking about a month long break following the launch of the 2.4 patch. For various reasons we have not rallied the troops on Tuesday nights, and as such we have opted to move our group content night. Tuesday has turned out to be just as bad a day to do anything serious as it was in every other MMO. For some reason it seems that Final Fantasy XIV patches more often than not late Monday night leading into Tuesday morning. This means along with the normal weekly reset we are often times dealing with marginally unstable servers. Since Monday tends to be a night where most folks focus on getting the last poetics needed to cap for the week, we figured it was also a relatively low volume raid night. So going forward we are going to try and pull together 8 man group content Monday nights with whomever we can muster at the time.

Often times who we have available will dictate what we can do. Last night we started off with Shiva Hard Mode, since most of us had not actually completed it. I have to say the fight was rather enjoyable, and it was kinda like a strange mishmash of titan and ifrit. It took us a couple of tries to see all the mechanics and then we straight stomped her. Granted this is just a hard mode and we are used to mostly attempting extremes. After that we went back and did Garuda Extreme again, because there was at least one member of the party who had not completed it. Traditionally we would be working on Titan Extreme, but it was good to go back and see that we could in fact repeat our victory. Granted it had been well over a month since we had last done the fight, and as such all of us were a bit rusty. However after a few wipes we nailed it like we actually knew what we were doing. Hopefully by next week everyone will have unlocked Ultros so we can take that on as a group, and this should have keyed most everyone for Garuda… so we can make attempts on Titan Extreme again.

To Skip or Not to Skip

After our group broke apart in Final Fantasy XIV I opted to poke my head into World of Warcraft and see what mayhem I could cause. I apparently was significantly closer to 96 than I realized, because upon entering the game and beginning work again on the Gorgrond content… I dinged within doing a few of the bonus areas. I still have a handful of bonus content areas to complete, but now this gives me a dilemma. I am at an ideal point to transition to the new zone that unlocked at 96… Spires of Arak. The problem being I have yet to do anything at all in Talador other than set up my garrison outpost. It looks like a really cool zone… but I am wondering if doing it will basically screw me for getting into normal mode dungeons. The problem that I ran into with Pandaria is that I leveled significantly quicker than the content would normally allow… and this means that I ended up needing to skip entire zones in the process. Normally I would keep plugging on, but I would really like to be available for at least a normal mode tank when I reach 100. The gear level that I came into the expansion with is just not going to hold long enough for me to do meaningful content.

It was my experience in Pandaria that if you could get into Townlong Steppes and Dreadwastes at the level cap to enter them… you could end up getting enough gear upgrades from questing that you were more than ready to set foot into normals… and quite possibly you were within an upgrade or two away from being able to do heroics. I guess in theory I could keep plugging away at Talador and simply finish all the content in the game before worrying about doing dungeons. Ultimately I do want to finish the content, because this expansion actually has a storyline that I care about for once. I guess my only desire to rush to 100 is so that I can get in on the initial wave of folks needing to run dungeons. While tanking for strangers was not as bad of an experience as I had expected… I feel like once everyone hits cap that experience will degrade significantly. Ultimately I will need to make a decision and move forward. Right now I am leaning heavily towards just skipping Talador entirely for the moment and diving into the Spire of Arak for maximum upgrade potential.

A Tale of Three Games

At midnight of last night another game launched that will be fighting for my attention, or significantly earlier than midnight if you know how to use a VPN to cause yourself to show up as another region. This once again is proof positive that region lockouts are dumb, because they are so painfully easy to circumvent if you really want to. I however did not care enough to do this, and my Monday night was already pretty full so I just waited until 11pm my time to get in and play the game. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game with so many hopes wrapped up in it, that can either be booned or bashed within the first few hours of game play. Will this game return to Dragon Age: Origin style game play, or will it be more akin to Dragon Age 2. Quite honestly I don’t have an answer for you yet because I just have not seen enough of the game.

I am however already questioning my choices, and thinking that maybe I should not have gone sword and board tanky. The game unfortunately gives you a tank for your very first character, and while I have not even completely the introduction… I am already having flashbacks of trying to make two tanks work to keep Alistair in my party. The description mentions having proficiency with a two hander as well, so hopefully one of us can equip one of those and be done with it. Quite honestly the game felt a little sluggish, but I think maybe I had something installing in the background when I made my attempt to play it. For whatever reason it seemed to run silky smooth.. and then absolutely thrash the hard drive every so often without much rhyme or reason as to why. My hope was that it was just a background process thing… and not the game doing something dumb like trying to dial into the dragon age servers periodically. The game took a significant time to load… which I do think we can probably blame on busy servers as everyone was trying to launch the client at exactly midnight. Hopefully as the week goes on, I will have more to report on it… other than it exists.

My Cousin

No matter how smoothly this Thanksgiving goes… it was going to be a rough one regardless. This is going to be the first dinner without my grandmother, who has been such a fixed point and an anchor in our family. She represents that last in a long line of degrading family events that pretty much means all of the normality that I grew up with as far as family and holidays goes is gone. When my grandmother on my fathers side passed away, those meals just stopped in any semblance of order. We would say that we would try and get together, but ultimately we each made a quick visit in private to my grandfather… and that reason for maybe passing each other in the drive way even left when he passed away. Similarly with my wife’s family… when he step dad passed away the era of having big family meals went away… and folks opted to break apart into much smaller units. The last bastion of the big family get together was my Grandmother on my mothers side… and this past year she passed away. Predictably holiday plans have been non functional.

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, because it is one of the last pure ones. Sure the day after thanksgiving is this black mass to consumerism… but thanksgiving day itself has remained relatively pristine. It was a day about getting together and having a meal with your family, and that mission was just simple enough to stay pretty true to its original goal. There is something about sharing a meal with friends and family that is just special to me… and for years I tried to convince my family to turn Christmas into Thanksgiving 2.0… where we just got together and shared conversation and food… and forgot the presents. My grandmothers house was this focal point of all of the family activity. She was such a strong matriarch and she is as much a reason for why I am the person I am… as anyone in my life is. I spent the majority of my childhood at her house, with her as my companion and friend. So this Thanksgiving was always going to be a hard one, no matter what happened.

The interesting thing that I have noted as we have gone through a series of recent funerals is how well my generation seems to get along with one another. When my grandmother passed away, I stayed long after most of the folks had left just talking to my cousins. My generation just does not fit into our family as a whole… we went out into the world and for the most part all did something with our lives beyond the boundaries of the small town my family hails from. The other day my wife was lamenting how strange Thanksgiving would be without my grandmother on facebook, and at this one of my cousins announced that she was intending to invite us to have the meal with them. Apparently she had gone through the same malaise and similarly they had a few deaths in their family that pretty much ended up with the holiday decimated. So as such here we go trying to start our own new traditions. Hopefully Thanksgiving will go smoothly, but in any case it will be better than spending it without family.

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.