Month: September 2019

I am reaching a point where I can say that I unabashedly love Bloodsail Buccaneers and the players who call it home. As someone who traditionally rolls characters on Roleplaying Servers but doesn’t actually roleplay at all in game… it can occasionally put me in an awkward space. However there are moments when role-players make the entire world a better place with impromptu zone events. Enter the Goldblood Caravan a roleplaying guild that focuses on being a trading caravan that rolls into a town and sets up shop offering goods to players and bartering for raw resources. What this meant in practice is that they offered really cheap bags, weapons and armor in trade for a smattering of whatever raw resources that players happened to have. Got a stack of linen? Awesome here is some gear for you. You a miner and gathered up some ore? Awesome here is some gear for you. I have an addon that lets me see what role characters are set to in a given guild and they have roles based on this them as well. One of the players was the Caravan leader, another a bodyguard, and then another couple something like artisan. I am so on board with this being an active presence on our server and will be interested to see how this shifts as we all level.

As far as the game goes I moved my way out to Desolace last night and started working on the Centaur tribal quests. Before logging for the night I managed to get friendly with Clan Gelkis and complete the 15 Centaur Ears quest. I am not exactly sure why but I have a soft spot in my heart for Desolace. I find it weirdly peaceful and I think I liked it back in Vanilla because I was a skinner… and there were so many things to skin. It would be a major challenge but that axe I picked up in Razorfen Kraul seems to really be helping me whittle through the mobs. The only negative of the zone is that everything is super spread out. I could in theory move to Stranglethorn Vale and have a much faster leveling experience. The problem there however is that I have done STV so many times as an Alliance player and am not super looking forward to going back and doing those quests. I mean the Nessingway quests are worth a ton of experience and just involve a ton of directed killing… which tend to be my favorite style of quests. However I do want to finish the Gelkis clan stuff before they start to drop in experience. Also last night I managed to get a couple of Mageweave that I sent to Grace for eventual bags.

I’ve still yet to pug anything, because I have not really had to. That is the benefit of being a tank in a world where being a tank is always going to be in need. I felt bad last night because Tam and Eli were trying to make a Gnomeregan run happen last night. The problem with that however is it was starting around 8:30 my time and I figure as big as Gnomer is, it would be at a minimum a two hour run. With me being sickly right now I really need not to stay up super late, and as a result I declined. I was up later than I should have been Monday night and while I don’t think it actually made me sicker, it definitely was probably not a thing I should have done for healing purposes. Timezones are the worst, and have been a constant problem since a significant chunk of my player group moved to the west. The two hour difference makes a bigger deal now that I am trying really hard to head to bed around 9:30 to begin my normal winding down process. Generally speaking I head to bed around 9:30/10 and then fiddle around on my tablet for another thirty minutes to an hour until I fall asleep. The wind down period really seems to help the quality of my sleep because it gives my brain time to shut down rather than laying down and feeling pressured to sleep quickly because 5 am is only “a few hours” away. Having a more structured plan towards sleep seems to have reduced my incidence of insomnia, which also makes my life better.

The year 2019 has been both the hottest year on record for Oklahoma and the wettest year on record. Generally speaking by this point in the season it is starting to calm down on the temperature front and I have a mostly brown lawn. However this year everything is lush and verdant and trying to kill me. Over the last few weeks my allergies and asthma have hit a critical mass and combined with the still 95 degree days and I feel like I am dying most of the time. I have my good days and my bad days, and the last two days have been bad days. I wasn’t entirely certain I would make it through the day yesterday but I somehow managed my way through it. Today however is a day for staying home in the AC and taking periodic breathing treatments and lots and lots of meds to try and kick this whole situation in the bum. Sure it is a fine day for dinking around in World of Warcraft, but I also feel supremely guilty for sticking my three supervisors with having to attend meetings that I would otherwise attend. Responsibility sucks but what is absolutely worse is the feeling of guilt when you know you are pushing your responsibilities off onto someone else.

Last night however was a mostly good night. We ultimately pulled together a Razorfen Kraul group when the FFXIV raid night didn’t make due to lack of healers. Grace is mostly busy this week so instead we grabbed Eliyon on his Shaman and worked our way through the instance. Living most of my Warcraft life Alliance side this is an instance I do not know terribly well. I mean I have run it a handful of times, but due to the extreme distance you have to travel to get there it just wasn’t something that happened regularly. I largely wanted the instance to finish out my Warrior specific Brutal Armor quest chain, as one of the drops came off a boss early in the instance. Past that Eliyon really wanted the Corpsemaker axe to drop, especially given that I am not interested in it as a warrior since I mostly level sword and board. What I wanted instead was to get the Pronged Reaver one handed axe seeing as it more closely fits my personal play style. Fortunately for me it did in fact drop… and unfortunately for Eli his axe did not. I am sure I will be back in there at some point and will try and snag him again so he has another shot and another person who might roll on it that wouldn’t.

Now I am in the awkward position of skilling up Axe from scratch, as I had never really used a one handed axe prior to winning this weapon. I am taking the opportunity however to farm cooking components and catch that skill up in the process. As a warrior I seem to go through an excessive amount of food and while Vernie keeps dropping his creations off on me, I feel like I should probably be more self sufficient. Right now I also largely treat his creations as a limited quantity and use them fairly sparingly. The negative of last night however is that I dinged 32 and with it… went literally all of my money. I am down to 10 silver at this point, so I am not exactly sure where that 100 gold for the mount is going to come from. Maybe I should have been playing the market this entire time, but I feel like I lack the financial fortitude to really do that in Warcraft. Instead I will probably find something to grind and vendor copious amounts of it to make my 100 gold. I wish “tank for hire” schemes were more viable because I would absolutely tank for cash.

This was the weekend of the “great” Denial of Service attack against classic. Starting at some point Saturday afternoon there was a rapid sequence of attacks targeting a specific set of PVP WoW Classic servers. This then expanded to ultimately target all of the Classic servers, and seemingly the live servers as well. At the time of taking this screenshot I was not able to see any Classic or Live realms as being “online”. A Twitter account spawned in the midst of this claiming credit and going by UKDrillas, seemingly starting as an attack on two WoW Streamers Asmongold and Sodapoppin. Asmongold was hosting an event on his Twitch stream for the final grind to 60, and seemingly whoever initiated the attack was attempting to stop that from happening. Things sorta get weird from there in that I also saw reports that folks from 4Chan doxxed the attacker, once the attack spread to a server that they were playing on. It was a pretty short time before the twitter account that was claiming credit had been banned and cut off that source of information.

Whatever actually happened, the servers were back up and playable by that evening and I spent the entirety of the Podcast on Saturday roaming around Thousand Needles knocking out quests and collecting much needed Iron ore. That is probably the biggest highlight of the weekend the fact that I am now sitting at 170 Blacksmithing, which is honestly way more tedious of a grind than I remembered the first time. I am slowly getting into the realm of being able to create things that are useful to me while leveling. Bronze was a hell level, and I am finally happy to mostly be on the other side of that mess. Also Thousand Needles is deeply confused as to what level it is because of the weird range of ore nodes that spawn there. In my travels I have seen: Copper, Tin, Silver, Iron, Gold, Mithril and Truesilver. I am hoping to be able to harvest at least Gold nodes the next time I happen across one. Unfortunately that means I need to find a lot more Iron nodes because I am currently sitting at 150 skill and reportedly Gold is 155.

There were three dungeons that were needed to be run this weekend and due to the DDoS we only managed to squeeze in two of them. The first was another jaunt into Shadowfang Keep because Thalen had reached the point where he needed to clean up all of the quests associated with it. Unfortunately on Friday night neither myself or Grace had the oomph in us to run two dungeons back to back after you consider the standing around time as everyone makes their way to the instance portal in Silverpine. The second was Blackfathom Deeps which we managed to knock out yesterday morning and offered up several upgrades for me personally, but additionally for the group as a whole. Unfortunately later in the evening we just lacked the critical mass of “almost 30” players required to do the third instance that was needed, aka Razorfen Kraul. In theory I should be hunting down the rest of the quests associated with that instance because it is my ultimate hope to be able to maybe run that night. If I can’t make a group materialize I might join on a PUG group because really at this point I just want to collect the component for the Warrior level 30 armor quest chain while it is still useful.

I close out weekend two of World of Warcraft Classic sitting a little ways into level 31. This is a reasonable speed I think and is way faster than I was leveling in Vanilla. I still feel like a reasonable and viable tank in instance… even though I have moments where I am just out of rage and things are going insane. Grace and her constant fearing doesn’t exactly help this because if I am going to try and lock things down they have to be sitting beside me. It however seems to bring her joy to grief me, and we haven’t died as a result yet… but we did come really close in BFD when her fear went off and grabbed another whole pack. I am also having to relearn how to play with a proper trapping hunter, because I kept griefing Thalen while he was desperately trying to make the traps work. Additionally we had a Warlock dotting everything up which served to further grief him when the traps didn’t last. We will get this shit sorted out by the time we hit 60. The more pressing concern however is that I have a mount to buy in 9 levels and I have zero clue how I am going to get anywhere near the money needed to purchase it. The riding skill is 20 gold and the mount itself is 80 gold.. which doesn’t include the honored discount but regardless… it is a lot of money. I am just worried that I am going to be that guy without a mount that everyone waits on to get to instances. I have no clue at all how I am going to see the 1000 gold needed for the epic mount.