State of affairs

I Raid

I am raiding four times a week for about four hours, although most of the time a little less. Three times I am on Mardah, one night on Gwaednerth. And that is what I have been doing last months. I am not even that bothered anymore to do all the garrison-stuff every day. I am swimming in raw materials for gems, enchants, potions and flasks. So I have reduced my WoW-time a lot last 2 months, including the blogging.

But some 'big' things have happened last month, and looking at my blogroll, a lot of it disagrees with 'veteran' players, but let us start where I left off almost two months ago, the token.

I was actually expecting myself to buy one token on the Horde-side. After getting to 100, Gwaednerth was broke. Just enough to get a level 3 garrison. And when the tokens where first announced, I was really thinking I would buy one to get some gold on the Horde. But then the gold-scavengers came along. Even without prioritizing gold-missions, or doing them every day, Gwaednerth now sits on 50k gold, more than enough for him.

Mardah's alliance army is even better of, I breached the 200k-mark not long ago. Most of the gold is coming from missions. either directly from gold-missions, or indirectly from whatever is in the crates I get. I don't even bother to list greenies anymore, just sell them, takes less time. Although having the WoW-app on my phone does make putting stuff on the AH a lot easier.

I do wonder, with gold being this easily obtainable...is Blizzard not making this game free-to-play-through-effort? And won't that actually hurt in the long term, when to many people want to buy game-tokens, but not enough people buy gold-tokens?

And then there is this flying stuff, or actually non-flying stuff. I am firmly in the camp that supports flying for max-levels. I wouldn't mind to the suggestion it should be gated. Either through an achievement for doing enough quests, or by becoming available next patch. In both cases Blizz statement of immersion would have been satisfied.

There is no satisfaction in mindlessy slaying minions just because it takes time..there is no immersion. Most of the time I just get annoyed by them, especially because they can knock me of my mount. After which I shadowmeld to drop aggro..and continue...or kill the poor sod in 10 seconds. It is just time-consuming, I am max-level, have a goal to reach, and want to be there asap. I will not look around.

But ingame at the moment, it does actually not matter that much. I do not have to get out to gather raid-consumables. My army of alts provide that for me with their garrisons. There are some exclusions of course. If I need that bloody stuff for gear upgrades, I have to get out of my garrison. Which means I take a flightpath to a certain goblin, and I am in the middle of the mobs.

Fishing is the same, flightpath to Yrel in Nagrand, walk a few yards, and start fishing. So I actually do not need flying at the moment..well..almost. There are two thing that irk me... one a little bit, another one a lot.

The fact that neither of the raids have a flightpath at their gates annoys me a little bit. It takes a 1-2 minute drive to get there from their closest flight masters. But that's it, a minor annoyance. There are not that many mobs you aggro when driving to the entrance, and you have the speed to outrun them anyway.

The real problem comes when you want to do two of the alternative fun-things to do in WoW. Battle-pets and Archaeology. The amount of times I stood before a steep unclimbable hill, with the pet atop or the survey pointing there was too much. I basically don't do those two things anymore because I do not have flying. It is just not fun to find your way around, it is just annoying.

Blizzard keeps stating they want to immerse us on the ground, but the fact is, that after I reach max-level, I prefer to stay at home, unless I can do something quickly, which makes flying almost mandatory. In all previous expansion, I went outside Shat/Dal/SW/Vale and did stuff, now, I am only sitting in my garriosn, because it annoys me to look for ancient artefacts.

And there is the news about the increasing Ilvl in the next raid. My opinion about this has been written down before, I do not like it. I would actually have no problem with an end-boss dropping higher Ilvl stuff, but the rest of the raid should be the same. It makes all those long-standing DKP-systems very quirky if different Ilvl is dropping all over the place. And I don't think Innovation is ready for a loot-council.

But to top it off....

Apparently warlock pets will be getting updated character models.

Their pets.

All their pets.

Of which only one is out.

Patch 1.8.0 (2005-10-10): Added.

And still not getting an updated model...