Heading to Pandaria

Draynee, spending her last night in Stormwind before taking the airship to Pandaria!

Nagrand Slam

Nagrand is such a beautiful zone!  I'm really a fan of Outland, despite a long-standing hatred for Hellfire Peninsula.  After Cata came out, I came to the realization that leveling there maybe wasn't so bad after all.  Hellfire, Zangarmarsh and Nagrand are all the complete opposite of the questing zones in Cataclysm, which were strictly linear and featured a lot of, "Go here, do these two things, come back.  Go over there do these to things, come back."  In the 3 Outland zones, it is more like,"fill up your quest log, make a huge circle and do all those things, then come back".  I love it.  My favorite though is definitely Nagrand, 4 circles around and you've pretty much completed Nagrand Slam.  Nothing makes me cringe more than  people who say Outland should be updated to match the storyline.  Please no.  I love you Draenor, never change baby!

The Sha of 'U Mad Bro?'

While out on my leveling to 90 adventures in Kun-Lai Summit I ran across the world raid boss, Sha of Anger.  I understand why they chose to put the anger Sha as the outdoor boss instead of say, the Sha of Doubt or Sha of Despair.  No, I'm sure they chose Sha of Anger for the irony of how angry he would make the playerbase simply by being there.  I have no idea if I'll ever get the chance to be in a raid that kills him this expansion, I simply went over to watch the fight.  This does not bother me, but the thought of not killing him thatverysecond sure did bother everyone else in the zone who was not in that raid group.  I cannot even remember the comments from general chat as they were mostly buried by 'invite for sha raid' 'invite me!!!!' 'lvl 4092 tank invite sha' etc..., but I do know there was a lot of upset people.  The one behavior that I found the worst though, was the people who were advertising invites to the raid, and I can bet you anything they weren't even in the raid that tagged him.

Uh-oh, he Berserked

Didn't end well for me either...

The group I was watching ended up hitting the enrage timer, and completely wiped on their attempt.  To the grand disappointment of the gazillion other people starting up raids to hit him first when he reset, he de-spawned.  This demonstrates the saddest part of all it for me.  No one was routing for the team that was fighting the boss.  No one wanted to be invited to the raid to help kill the guy, they wanted in for themselves.  They wanted their achievement, or a piece of gear for themselves...

Amateur Azerothian (on his GW2 blog) and The Harpy's Nest have written excellent posts about the 'me-me-me' attitude that is so pervasive in WoW right now.  The three of us all played Guild Wars 2 in the month before Mists was released, and I think the bad attitude is being amplified for us by our time spent in Tyria.  Unlike in WoW, everything is shared in Guild Wars.  Farming nodes are collectible by anyone, they are basically phased for each person.  There is no mob-tagging, if you help someone kill a mob they aggroe'd, you get xp and possibly even loot.  This all leads into the multitude of World Bosses on Tyria, and how anyone who helps even the slightest amount gets kill credit.

A world dragon in Guild Wars 2

The amount of effort you put into 'helping' with the world boss determines your loot, not your luck in getting invited to the raid.  You can run around and rez people the whole time and still get a Gold package, in the form of currency, xp, and karma points.  All of the actual loot is a per-person system, much like Blizzard has implemented in LFR.  You might get a shiny new chest piece, or ya might get nothin', but it's up to RNG (random number generator), not Random Nerd Group who doesn't want your stinky shaman to come to the raid.

All of these systems in Guild Wars 2 definitely lead to a more friendly, relaxed environment.  I'm not saying WoW needs to go all hippy-love-fest on us to that extreme.  I do think they should have considered the 'Anger' this Sha of Anger would result in a little more carefully.

A few hours later I came across his corpse, I hope this group didn't have as much trouble.

The Real Horde vs. Alliance Conflict

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, senior software engineer Darren Williams reminded us once again that, "The conflict of this expansion is brought by the players, the two factions: Horde and Alliance".  The animosity and hatred between the two factions is shown very well in the opening quests for both Horde and Alliance in the Jade Forest.  As you progress further into the Jade Forest, you really get a sense for how the conflict between the two factions is bringing conflict to the land itself, climaxing in the face-off that destroys the Jade Serpent monument and unleashes Sha, the embodiement of emotion.

Bruised and bandaged, and still arguing with each other.

I think the quests do an amazing job telling the Horde vs. Alliance story, and I think it is great to bring the war back to Warcraft.  Unfortunately the conflict between the factions is hitting me a little personally.  While the story itself is asking us, "how do you put aside your faction conflict and clean up the mess you made by hating each other so much?", real life is asking me "how do you put aside the Draenei you love so much to play Horde with your friends?"  Not quite as serious, but a tough job either way.

I only have a handful a friends who play WoW.  Our Canadian buddy probably doesn't care which side we play on.  His main from Wrath is currently parked in Pretty Fly for a Draenei, as he had transfered to Alliance to raid back then.  A few of my other friends do play Alliance, but they are on another server.  But the two people Dey and I play with the most just refuse to budge!  I have tried to be a good Alliance ambassador, I even convinced them after much whining to roll Draenei.  They didn't make it much past lvl 30.  I seem to be the only Draenei enthusiast in my crowd.  To be fair, Dey has an 85 Draenei priest, but he isn't as into her as his 6 85's Horde-side.

I guess the answer to my question is to just suck it up!  I love my Blood Elves, I would never abandon them permanently.  Besides, I'm pretty sentimental about Lid.  It was just much easier during the pre-expansion lull to play every character I wanted to play.  All of my 85's (3 Blood Elves, and 3 Draenei) were geared from Dragon Soul LFR.  Both hunters had full PVP sets.  Lid and Draynee both exalted with Tol Barad!

And there in lies the real heart of the matter.  While there wasn't a whole lot do, picking who to play or what to do was simple and breezy.  I'm pretty overwhelmed by the amount of new things to do.  While I'm totally stoked about Pandaria, part of me longs for the relaxing days of taking Fly Draenei shots in Stormwind.  Also, my friends weren't really playing then, and Dey was off trying whatever was the MMO of the week.  So, I made do without them.  Now they want to pick what to do?  How rude!  But it's not really.  I'm grateful to have people who want to play this crazy game with me, so just for now:

FOR THE HORDE!

Good thing Garrosh doesn't know that I am looking forward everyday to my Double Agent Achievement :P

Icecrown Citadel - Laid Back Style

A few weeks ago I finally got the chance to attend one of Amateur Azerothian's world-famous Laid Back Raids.  I was pretty excited to meet some of the other blogging folks, in the pixels anyhow.

First up was a quick Black Temple Run.  I believe Mrs. Amateur is trying to get her second Warglave.  Neither dropped, but she did end up with the Cursed Vision of Sargeras, so that was pretty neat.

Drayney, the always fashionable Michelle, and Khizzara

Next up was the scheduled horde-side ICC run.  The night was littered with lag and horrible disconnects, but besides the technical difficulties, it was a lot of fun.  I had no idea who was going to be there, so I was totally shocked and starstruck when I zoned it to find Navimie and Cymre standing there!

Lid and Navi

JD - the Amateur himself, and Cymre

Navi made me feel like such a superstar.  She is so sweet, and was so excited to meet Draynee, even though it wasn't the real Draynee.  I hope one day she stops by for a Navispam!

As we were waiting to start the Lootship, I realized Cym and Lid had the same hairdo!  Cym mentioned how she wished you could change your characters face like you can hairstyles.  It wasn't until then that I noticed how angry-face Lid is.  I guess it's fitting for a death-knight?

Unfortunately we had to call the raid after finally making it to Arthas due to disconnects.  My server and JD's server that several other people in the raid are on were completely unstable.  We found out later it was some script hack that some angry child was passing around that spammed the servers and disconnected everyone.  How terrible is that?  The person that posted it on the unscrupulus forum stated 'Blizzard made them mad' so they were getting back at them.  Well, I'm sure the last laugh will be on Blizzard, but we may never know.  At the least, they banned everyone who was pushing the scripts through and causing havoc.

Pre-fight party

There is always an upside, however!  JD extended the lock-out on the raid and we were able to regroup the next weekend for the Arthas kill.  It turned into quite a party before we started the fight.  We ended up with a full raid group, and even Dey took a break from Guild Wars 2 to join us!  The fight went off without a hitch, and soon we were all staring at a dead Arthas!  For several people, it was there first time killing him, so it was really cool being there with super excited people.

Hopefully my scheduling lines up and I can attend another Laid Back Raid soon, I had an awesome time!