World of Warcraft

Pushing Away

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Lamentation

I posted the above statement, but I didn’t really have the strength to go into more detail last night.  Essentially I have been sifting through my blog in an attempt to summarize the year… which is one of those things that you feel like you SHOULD do at the end of a given year.  There are so many end of year traditions going on in the blogosphere, and I guess in some what I felt like I needed to do something.  The problem with this notion is it seems like the person that existed in the first half of the year, was one hell of a lot happier than the person for the last half of the year.  In January I had just attended my first gaming convention, and was super excited about Final Fantasy XIV and the raid…  and still pretty damned excited about the progress being made in World of Warcraft.  I was somehow juggling as many as four nights of raiding a week, streaming pretty regularly, along with a new column on MMOGames and a second podcast in the form of Bel Folks Stuff.  Now zooming back to today, both the FFXIV and WoW raids are dead in the water…  and I have backed almost completely out of MMOGames and essentially killed off the Bel Folks Stuff podcast… and it has been several months since I have even vaguely attempted to stream anything.

I know at some point I just got overwhelmed and started locking up… and I guess I never quite unlocked.  I am still in trauma mode where I am moving from day to day on mostly muscle memory.  There are a lot of things that I just don’t do anymore, not the least of which is read blogs on a regular basis.  During the “Bonanza” column I was reading roughly 450 blogs and every post on them all in preparation for my weekly column highlighting the posts contained within.  Once I handed that column off to another blogger… I quite literally stopped reading blogs all together for awhile.  I had turned this thing that I got a lot of enjoyment out of into a job, and that is the sure fire way to make me stop wanting to do something.  I now read blogs… but do so extremely infrequently…  and feel like a complete failure for allowing myself to get to that state.  I think as a result my own blog has suffered, because so often there would be a topic going around the blogosphere…  and reading the thoughts of another friend would end up sparking me to write my own take on it.  Now I sit down each morning and struggle to come up with anything to write about at all.

Cessation

There have been several points this year where I have contemplated just stopping all of it.  I’ve considered backing out of the podcast, and stopping with the daily posting.  It feels like I have been pushing away from all of the things I have cared about, one by one…  and each time I do it I just feel more of a failure for doing so.  I have been struggling greatly with just existing, let alone being happy and excited and engaging.  What makes this even harder is looking back and seeing that apparently I had whatever magical sauce there is at the beginning of the year, but it is almost completely gone now.  The frustrating part about it is…  I am not sure how to get it back.  I realize I have to start putting myself out there, a little bit at a time…  but even the thought of logging into voice chat on a nightly basis feels like the biggest possible hill to climb.  It has been at least three months since I have regularly logged into voice chat on a nightly basis, and maybe that is a good first step.  The problem being that the games that I am playing right now and not the games that the rest of the AggroChat and Stalwart crews are playing.  I really am enjoying World of Warcraft again, but even when I am logged in it feels like I am completely disconnected from everyone in it.

There were moments last night where I was asked to help out a few friends, and it felt like it took all of the effort in the world to accept.  I spent time with Giulietta doing the Pit daily quest, and I need to do this more often since I too need a bunch of them to complete the flying requirement.  I had fun while doing it, but it always requires so much effort to get over that hurdle to put myself out there… and actually do something with another human being.  Similarly I forced myself to go do stuff with Finni/Qav when I was hordeside because I knew once I got started I would enjoy myself, but it is entirely too easy to stay mired in my own oblivious world.  I realize what I am describing is depression, and I have battled it my entire life.  I am going through what I would term as a “down cycle” but this one seems to have been going on longer than most.  Generally I go through a few weeks of retreat and then that energizes me to the point of being able to engage again.  This time… it just seems to keep dragging on and no amount of “fake it until you make it” is working this time.  There just seems to always bee some external stress force bearing down on me, and I am hoping that being off for the Christmas break will help some of this.

Ashenvale

Pushing Away

As far as gaming goes…  I feel like I had a night without a lot of progress.  The focus of my evening was largely  the holiday event, where I complete all of the daily quests on the four characters that can do them…  mail all of the tokens to Belgrace… and then become crushed when I realize that yet again I have no mounts.  Lodur and I decided that we are going to create #Team360NoMount and the only requirement is that RNG and Blizzard hates you too.  I have this lengthy history of not getting holiday mounts to drop.  I have the two from Brew Fest, but other than that I have a perfect record of always participating… but never getting the mount.  The sorest point for me is always going to be the Headless Horseman mount, because it is probably the one I want the most…  but will never actually see.  I do admit though that this years Yeti mount is going to be a close second in the amount of pining I will do if I don’t get it to drop.  There are few cooler things than riding around on the back of a big damned Yeti.

As far as actual game progress I managed to push my Warlock to 21 and am now sitting in Ashenvale.  I took the start quest from the adventure guide, and happily cancelled all of the quests from the Northern Barrens.  I am wondering just how long I will actually be questing in Ashenvale before I do the same and move on to whatever zone comes after it.  The biggest positive of this of course is the fact that I can actually summon my Vendor Mammoth and sell things whenever I feel like it.  This is the toughest part of the sub 20 game in World of Warcraft, is being so insanely used to summoning a vendor whenever you want… but suddenly not having that ability.  I swear that mount is the single best item I have ever purchased in this game.  If I can ever get the cash to purchase the Yak from Pandaria, I am sure I will say the same about it….  since being able to Transmog my gear is just about of equal importance to me.  If I could summon a transmog vendor at any time I would never look fugly again!  Other than that I managed to knock out a few parts of the Hellfire LFR on the Cow, but didn’t really get anything worth writing home about other than a few more runes and some gold thanks to queuing as a partial group.

Re-Learning Tankadin

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Pretty Cow

Re-Learning Tankadin

One of the frustrations of playing Horde side is that as a boosted level 100 character, I am lacking a backlog of awesome gear to use for transmogging purposes.  I mean afterall the true “end game” of World of Warcraft is looking fabulous.  As a result my down time has been spent running a bunch of older raids so that I can have something in my void storage worth transmogging.  Yesterday I finally completed my set of Tier 10 heroic armor from Icecrown, and while I don’t really have a belt that matches it perfectly yet… I am thinking it works pretty well.  I am not sure why but I have always loved the “plate dress” look that a few of the sets have, and Judgement is probably my favorite set period.  The thing is…  a paladin running around in full judgement at this point is somewhat cliche’d so instead I started chasing either the tier 8 set from Ulduar or tier 10 from Icecrown.  The problem with Ulduar is that I have run it numerous times and have yet to get the correct arm piece to drop, leaving me with a glaring hole in my armor.  Similarly frustrating is that the Tier 8 set does not seem to have a belt that matches it terribly well.  The positive about playing a Cow/Worgen/Draenei is that the boot slot doesn’t matter quite so much since there are hooves/paws in the way.

As far as the weapon I really like this spear I picked up in Ulduar, the only problem there is that I just don’t care for the polearm animation.  I need to sort out a better two handed sword that matches this set… and honestly I think they are going to similarly come from Ulduar as well.  I remember there being some pretty cool blades from there as well.  There were cool swords in Alliance Crusader’s Coliseum, but unfortunately all of the horde variants are big axes.  I have this very specific style that I am going for with the MooCowAdin… which is polished and civilized.  Essentially I am going for the traditional Paladin vibe, not a tribal version of a Paladin.  The only thing I wish I had is a better pair of goggles, but alas this character is not an Engineer but instead a Blacksmith.  I figured Blacksmith would simply be more useful in the long run, since creating your own gear is pretty great.  It is my hope that by Legion I have managed to catch up his tradeskills to the point where I can actually create useful stuff.

The Deep End

Re-Learning Tankadin

Yesterday did not go exactly as planned, and we wound up going out shopping again in the afternoon.  The positive however is that I got Indian food…  which is always a good thing.  The negative is that I once again missed the Star Wars pen and paper game, and most of the Horde side raid in World of Warcraft.  I had been working on gearing to be a viable tank, and when we decided more healing was needed…  I said I was able.  The problem being… that not only have I not tanked in a really long time…  I have not tanked as a Paladin in an even longer time.  Part of me questions my  pushing the Paladin up, when I could have gone with a tank I was much more familiar with like the Deathknight or the Warrior.  But in part the Paladin was so that I would have access to dps, tanking and healing in one character… and I figured it might be cool to get some more tanking as one of the other classes under my belt.  Druid was also a possibility but honestly… I suck at healing with HoTs and after being so damned used to the Warrior…  playing a druid tank feels like a really trimmed down version of it.  Similarly… cat dps feels like a really confusing version of a rogue…  so honestly I think I made the right call as far as multi-function classes goes.

The challenge is that I did not join the raid until Kilrogg which seems to be one of the more complicated fights.  The person I was replacing… was the person who normally tanked the main boss so it was very much a sink or swim situation.  I had two big problems…  firstly holding aggro off our feral druid was a challenge… and one that I was largely failing.  Druids have always had the highest aggro, so holding off of them is a challenge in the best of situations.  The complicating factor here is the fact that in order to survive I had to keep from getting stacks of this debuff, and the ability that allows me to do that…  is essentially my highest threat attack.  So I would have to hold it in reserve just to make sure I had it available at all possible times and then hit it when the attack was incoming because the immunity only lasted three seconds.  This ability was essentially both a shield slam and an avoidance buff, and normally when I am tanking something I am spamming it every time it is available.  We survived only because Obi is overpowered and managed to solo tank the boss down after I died.  On Gorefiend however I was feeling much more in my element, and I think did a far more palatable job of tanking.  Nothing like being thrown into the lions den to sort out how to play a class!

Santa and Grumplings

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Santa Lives

I’ve been going through this strange set of emotions since getting out of the movies on Thursday night.  One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am in fact deeply susceptible to nostalgia.  Growing up I honestly thought I was not nostalgic at all, because the things I cared about never seemed to align with the things I was supposed to care about.  Photos for example are just not one of the things I care about that much, and the only time I take a photo of something is when I want to show it to someone else.  I have a pretty good memory when it comes to visual images, and I can always summon up images from the past when I want them… and as such I never placed much value in having a physical representation.  My mother on the other hand…  that is the thing she finds most important in the world and has taken volumes of photos that the world will likely never see… because she never does anything with them.  My nostalgia… seems to be firmly rooted in the things and places that gave me the most joy in the world.  The king of all of this will always be Star Wars, because it truly was my first love.  For so many years I doubted my memories, or at least doubted that I had as much fun with Star Wars as I seemed to remember.

Then Thursday night I watched Force Awakens and remembered just what it was like to experience that level of joy again.  Now I am just riding the giddy contact high of the experience, and looking forward to talking about it with anyone that has already been indoctrinated into the club.  Yesterday there was a sequence of tweets trying to decide when it was time to talk about the movie, and I guess personally… I am going to wait until January 18th.  I am going to give the world a full month to watch it before I start openly talking about spoilers and spreading the world with my theory crafting.  Spoilers are such a weird thing…. because for me personally they do not adversely effect my enjoyment of the movie.  I personally guessed at four or five of the plot points from the movie, and it was in no way tarnished for me when I saw them coming.  In fact there was a bit of strange excitement coursing through me when I realized that things were playing out in one of the ways I had imagined them.  For others though… once something is spoiled it ruins the experience, and as a result I am going to try my best not to ruin anyone else’s.

The “A” Team

Santa and Grumplings

I love the Star Wars universe, and while I was greatly disappointed for years…  shows like the Clone Wars and the current Rebels made me remember just how awesome the setting COULD be.  I think they were essentially the gateway to allowing myself to indulge in the hype leading up to Force Awakens.  The problem with Rebels is that as good as it is…  it isn’t the team of characters that I wanted to be engaged with.  Shows like it or Agents of Shield… no matter how amazing they might be… will always be stuck in the rut of being the “B” Team.  These are the characters that are ALSO in the universe…. but aren’t really the characters that you really want to be watching.  While shows like that might raise the excitement level a bit every now and then with a “special guest appearance” you know at the end of the day… you are never really going to get back the characters you care the most about.  While to some extent the new movie is setting up a brand new cast of heroes to take over the throne… in the form of Finn, Rey, Poe and Ren, it still very much feels that we are going on another adventure with the characters we grew up loving: Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, R2, and C-3PO.

There is a continuity that other derivative products lack, and in a way I am more okay knowing the cast of the original trilogy will always play a secondary role in this new trilogy of movies.  The Avengers are still an active team… and while they exist… Agents of Shield will always be the lesser product.  Similarly no matter how cool Rebels is… and how awesome it is for filling in the gap between the prequels and rebellion era movies…  it will always be the story of people we didn’t know existed until Disney told us they did.  So in the meantime I am going to embrace the joy I am feeling, because there were points yesterday where I wanted to take my hot-wheels Millennium Falcon and go running around the office making “space” noises.  There is a kid inside me that has woken up, that has not been awake since the 80s… and I am perfectly okay with hanging out with him again.  Part of my whole mission to limit the negativity in my life, and to be less cynical…  was to be able to truly feel unbridled joy again… and this movie has paid off in spades.  Sure I am almost forty years old… and sure I probably shouldn’t be enraptured by Star Wars.  To that I say “fuck it” I get to decide what sort of Adult I am going to be, and I choose to be the one that never really grew up inside.

Grumplings

Santa and Grumplings

The most annoying part of any in game holiday event… are the things you have to fight other players for to get spawns.  In the new Winter Veil garrison event, you have to fight players for patches of snow on the ground, in the hopes that instead of getting a snowball of various kids…  you get a Grumpling pet.  Last night after looting many piles of snow I managed to get one… and now I am done touching those piles of snow.  I am not going to be one of these players that tries to profit off this event, because it is my hope that by removing myself from the picture others will have an easier time getting their own Grumplings.  Now however I am still going to be completing the daily event… until I get the damned mount.  I’ve decided to send all of my packages to Belgrace my MooCowAdin, because he seems to be the closest to getting all of the appropriate factions for the flying mount.  So among the four characters I have that can do the daily, I am hoping ONE of them gets the stupid mount.

 

Predictions and Dots

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Star Wars Predictions

Predictions and Dots

It is in fact the day… and I have reached full on Kermit Flail status.  All day yesterday my brain kept going “Star Wars! Star Wars! Star Wars!” and I have zero clue how I am going to be a reasonably functional human being today.  The tickets are for 7 pm tonight at my local generally no frills theater…  in 2D… which is honestly the way I would prefer to watch this movie.  If it can blow me away without any frills, then it will have been a good day.  At this point I am largely in a Star Wars information black out other than occasionally checking what the Rotten Tomatoes “freshness” score happens to be.  For most of yesterday it was around the 98% but right now it is sitting at 95%.  I am super thankful that Google shows the score without having to actually click through into the  site, because really I am trying to avoid knowing much of anything about the actual plot.  That said… when the Legion announcement happened in WoW I did a few predictions that morning, some of which were serious… others very much not.  So I thought it might be fun to do my Star Wars: Force Awakens predictions.  Please note that any alignment between these and actual plot points is pure coincidence and based on sheer dumb luck.  I promise I know nothing… and these are not spoilers…  but “wouldn’t it be cools”.

  • Rey – I think it is probably a given at this point that Rey is the child of Luke and Han that somehow got stranded on Jakku, or at least that is my working theory.  There was a shot of Rey and Chewie flying the Millennium Falcon which kinda lead me down this line of thinking.
  • Han – Harrison Ford has long said that the only way he would ever return to the Star Wars franchise is if they were going to kill off his character.  So I think without a doubt Han Solo will die in this movie.  It will be an even bigger shock to me if he doesn’t… because I guess at the end of the day that means that Harrison Ford REALLY likes printing money.  It would be cool if he got used to the fandom, and approached it with less disdain… but I am not holding my breath.
  • Chewie – I think if and when Han dies… the Life Debt that Chewie owes Han…  will transfer to his daughter.  My biggest fear is that they jettisoned the Expanded Universe just so that Chewie would be alive…  only to kill him off again.  This movie should be all about passing the torch to the next generation… but you still need some aspect of the current generation to make that work, and I think Chewie continuing on would be a good callback.
  • Kylo Ren – This one… I am torn on.  For the longest period of time I thought maybe this was also Han and Leia’s kid… if for no reason other than in the Expanded Universe…  their son did in fact turn to the Dark Side.  Now I simply do not know.  I have a feeling he ties into the Skywalker lineage somehow… but at this point it makes me wonder if he will end up being Luke’s son.
  • Luke – One of the big mysteries is what exactly is up with Luke.  I think this one goes one of two ways… either he has turned to the Dark Side himself and becomes the new big baddie … the power behind the throne of sorts.  There are problems with this however… because if that were the case why would Kylo be on this hunt to collect all of these artifacts of Darth Vader… why wouldn’t he just worship the new embodiment of the Dark Side instead.  I think more likely he is going to play the role of Obi Wan from the first movie… where he has isolated himself from the world and we go on a hunt to find him, where he is slightly mad in an almost Jorus C’Baoth style.
  • Poe Dameron – I think a safe bet would be he somehow ties lineage back to a member of the Rogue Squadron that we will come to know during the Rogue Squadron breakout movie.  That said I am going to go down my “wouldn’t it be cool” line of thought…  and say… wouldn’t it be awesome if he turned out to be the child of Boba Fett?  I mean he bears a vague resemblance to both Jango and Boba as seen in the prequels, and I mean… vague… because its not like Boba looked exactly like Jango.
  • Finn – I really have no real guesses on this one.  My fear is that they will go with the simple answer and make him Lando’s kid.  I would love to think that he is tied into the original cast somehow.  I know in theory he could be the child of Han Solo and Sana Solo which was introduced as Han’s wife in the comics.  I’ve long thought that Han himself was a force sensitive… because his unnatural luck at times…  could just literally be latent force sensitivity.  I think Finn is going to play into the main story line in an important way, and we know he at least ends up wielding a light saber… so could he be also of the Skywalker lineage somehow?

Whatever the case any of these things might be… I am just hoping that I really and truly love the movie.  I need this to be awesome… because I am still so disappointed in the prequels.  I am even wearing my special Star Wars vans today…  in hopes that tonight will be a truly awesome experience.

Warlocking

Predictions and Dots

In theory Wednesday night is the night that I raid with Jed and crew, but I needed the night off.  It has been a pretty crazy week, and with something scheduled almost evening…  Wednesday night was really the only night I truly had to sit at home at chill.  So instead of raiding I ended up working on the new holiday quests.  The positive is that there is now a whole sequence of Winters Veil quests that start from your Garrison, the negative is that one of them is horrifically bugged and largely impossible to complete if you wish to retain your sanity.  I guess in theory if you caught the quest during off hours you would do just fine, but since this is the sort of thing you want to do on every character that can possibly do it…  it means that the area is pretty much constantly camped.  Realistically they should have had the Alliance event happen in Shadowmoon Valley and the Horde event happen in Frostfire Ridge…  because simply getting there is a bit of a pain in the ass for my Alliance characters.  The worst part about the new quests is that Christmas has now also become a mount chase… with these chests purchasable from the vendor in your garrison for essentially one days worth of tokens.  If you are insanely lucky like apparently Jaedia…  you can end up getting the Minion of Grumpus mount…  which I will be shooting for during this event.

After fiddling with holiday bits, I relaxed to an evening of working on my new Orc Warlock.  Essentially I am leveling just like I would an arcanist, which means running around like mad and dotting things up.  The end result seems to be a pretty rapid fire way to level… and I am already out leveling the content.  Granted I am fully decked out in heirlooms which is in part what is making that be a thing.  Mostly I am just trying to push my way into “dungeon” levels as fast as I can so that hopefully I can be queued for a dungeon the entire time I am leveling.  If nothing else I am enjoying myself which is a first when it comes to Warlocks.  I’ve always been interested in the class… because demons…  but always struggled with getting into the spirit.  However during the AggroChat podcast and through playing Final Fantasy XIV… I am learning that I basically tried playing all dot based classes wrong, and that the answer is in fact to run around like mad, dotting everything up and watching it just die before my eyes.  So upon leveling this Warlock that is absolutely my new MO, and so far … it seems to be working.  I needed a chill out class to play and this one is fitting the bill.