Monday 30 June 2014

First steps into Beta

Spoilers ahead

Although I don't have much time ahead next weeks, something about a Guildmeet coming up, and the fact that I still raid (Sha-HC down, so now 7/14HC), I managed some time on the Beta...between servers disconnects, and world servers down.

First of, I needed to make a lvl90-template, the european transfer is not working, so what did I choose? One of my personal goals in beta is to figure out if I like the new Moonkin game-play, also, I didn't want to spoil the alliance side, so at least I have something new to look forward to, so Morshando, a Troll Boomk came onto the Beta.

Morshando had no idea what to do, really... there was no quest that pointed me somewhere, but I did find my way to Draenor, there is a portal at the cata-portals.

The first thing you do is to build your garrison, you run around doing some quests, and tada, your own town is there. There are some well know characters there, of which the next one made me shuckle.

I hope he tells it takes a while......
So far I encountered some loose quests, some rare spawns, some phased questhubs, and Thrall is running around.. Of course there is the quest where you have to release NPC's... with a spawn-time around 5 minutes...  and 500 people running around...

Considering the boomk-gameplay...  I don't know. 

The biggest problem I have is the eclipsebar. Starting a fight is not a problem, just go hit starfire, but if you are clearing mobs, you continually have to look out if you have to cast either SF or Wrath. Even the sleightest delay because of, say, moving, you have to rethink your whole plan.

But, at the moment, for levelling, that's not a real big problem, mobs die fast enough, and I sometimes see crits of 13k, wow.... but 3-sec Starfires being pushbacked because somethings hitting you... pfff, luckily my first perk was an increase of 20% to starfire.

Flying over Frostridge



Friday 27 June 2014

We are still in Pandaria

The amount of Alpha chatter is very high, people are excited, and it fills almost every channel. And after today, it will be even more.. Beta will start at 21:00 GMT+1.

This does bring us closer to patch 6.0 I hope. Innovation already is feeling the effects of the long wait. A few raids have been cancelled, a lot where undermanned. And that did slow us down, both the cancelling, and getting new members in the fold.

But, we did manage to down Nazgrim-HC. We did skip Shamans, and Sha is also not yet down, but having an unsure roster, we do need to have two targets, else more raids will not happen. Last night, on our first serious attempt on Sha-HC since I don't know-when, we reached P2, so no problem there.

One problem I do have is gear at the moment. As everyone knows, Blizzard ghost-nerfed the current content  by giving us the option to upgrade 4 times. Before that happened, I had almost all WF-normal gear two times upgraded towards Ilvl 567. In theory I can still upgrade those twice more (which I did with some like weapons/trinkets).

But I am not swimming in Valorpoints, and I now have three Heroic pieces of gear in my bags, their Ilvl is 566, one below the WF-normal-2/4. Because they are in my bags, they are from bosses we already downed, and apart from Nagrim, jave on farm, so a WF-HC version is waiting to drop for me. So, atm I am very reluctant to use the HC-gear, which I have to upgrade first to be better then the gear I am currently wearing. Which goes against the new Blizz-thingie, equip your new gear immediately.

Further personal news, is that both my Paladins are past the PvP-part of the legendary, and are now collecting some coins before the buff works off... it seems my 4th and 5th legendary cloak are not far off.... but...

I did get an e-mail today, so I am going to test this new sinus-eclipse curve for Boomk's this weekend.. if the servers are not down or whatever else happens on Beta.

Tuesday 3 June 2014

The Day I Rage Quit XII

I was wondering if any of you were Nozdormu and could control time, what would you change in your WoW history? Did you leave a guild you wish you had stayed for, did you transfer servers or faction but regretted it later? Have you lost an item you can never get back or deleted something that is now gone forever?

What have you regretted?

Dragonray from Azerothian Life
This is this biweekly shared topic from Blog Azeroth, and here in lies more a philosophical question. Regretting something is normal for humans, but are you really regretting something that happened years ago, because if you could change that, wouldn't your current life change?

Of course there are things I did in World of Warcraft that I regret doing. Not doing Classic is one. But now that I am in 2014, an look back, I am happy I didn't do it, I would not be where I am now... especially concerning meeting my girlfriend in my current guild. If I would have done a different thing somewhere, I probably wouldn't be here.

Saying that, let's talk about the time I rage-quit a guild...yes, I did that stupid thing. And I don't think I actually wrote this down on this blog, that probably says something about how I felt about it back then, now lets' go back to the late summer of 2008 (insert Wayne's World sound here).

I was playing the maintankadin Gowron back then. I also did a lot more, like raid leading, loot master, class leader, and the voice of XII on the realm-forums, but starting september, I was moving, so I had to let go of a lot of those functions. Biggest thing I gave up was raid leading, I had no idea how long it would take for me to get back, so I handed that task to a co-tank-officer.

At this moment we had about 5 tanks, remember you needed a lot of tanks on some fights. By far the best where the now raidleader, another warrior, and me. The other two where lesser geared, and not that good. Further more, the other warrior was on a one-week-raid for a few weeks because of his work. That gave him a certain spot the day he was on.

Myself had missed one week, but I was able to sign up for a raid, and probably not the next few ones. At this moment XII had been wiping on Vashj for a few weeks, sofar that I even went in hours before the raid to actually figure out new tactics. Now you probably can see whats's coming.

For this evening, all 5 tanks signed up, and you only needed 2. The raid leader being one, I was expecting either me or the warrior to be the second tank. I think we actually talked about it that one of us was missing the raid. Considering how much we two did together, even being in Retribution, that would not be a problem, we where both good. But the new RL opted for going in with the same team as last two days, and bench the two well geared good tanks over the newer lesser geared one.

In /o I tried to discuss with the RL, be his was 'not to be swayed'. What really hurt me was that I actually didn't get that much support from fellow officers. Between all this, the other Tank went into a guild channel and starting arguing, and now it gets hazy, but I suppose it got to a wild discussion with me and the other tank leaving the guild.

As far as I know, if one of us would have been taken, which would have been logical considering all things, that is gear, experience, and seniority...  and us not being in the raids before (we had a rotation in XII at that moment), nothing would have happened.

But trying to remember that moment, I really regretted giving up the reigns, to someone who apparently was doing something I found against what the raid stood for. I did rejoin, but XII would never be the same for me again.

In hindsight I was partially to blame. I could have seen this coming, and the way XII was going, becoming a more hardcore mindset then I always wanted, was probably because how I lead raids, and who I left the reigns to.

But if I could go back, I wouldn't do it. Because of this I stopped raiding somewhere early 2009, started levelling a druid called Mardah, and joined Innovation late 2009, but yeah, this was the day I rage quit a raiding guild called XII