Ding 90!

I'll preface this with a nod to truth written by Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club:

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.

In other words, I know I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. Despite that knowledge I'm chuffed to say... "Ding!"

Yippe kai-yay, Mother Clucker!

I'm very happy to finally ding 90. It took me much longer than I would have imagined. In both Wrath and Cataclysm, I was not a server-first kinda guy, but I was still max level PDQ. In MoP, I totally got sidetracked in the leveling process. First, it was a case of the "lookits",  Look-it that!  Look-it this!

Next, duh duh DUH.. Pet Battles.  I did not get an iota of leveling or questing done while the frenzy of pet battles was upon my brain. So damn addictive.  So damn fun!

Finally, quests.  I love what Blizzard has done with the quests in MoP. I can pop about like a cracked up bunny rabbit should I so choose, and in fact I did, which resulted in several un-finished quest lines. Again, this was a case of the "lookits".  Each subsequent quest line looked so cool I just had to get there.

Now that I'm 90?  It sure isn't gonna get any easier.  So many blue question marks! Cooking... reputation farming, some poser prince that claims to be Deathwing's kid... All very interesting and totally distracting.

What to do next?

MoP: Mists of "Preoccupation"

I haven't accomplished diddly-squat in the game since Mists launched.  And you know what?  I'm totally cool with that fact.

One of the aspects of this expansion is the seeming departure from a focus on the "end game". Not that it's not there anymore, but that there are other things to do besides the end game.  My guild mates are in LFR, but I'm not.  I'm a freshly dinged 87 hunter.  Or a freshly dinged 21 pandaren monk rolling his way through leveling.

Unlike the Wrath and Cataclysm expansions where it felt to me that nothing good happened until you hit max level, in Mists I have so many choices of stuff to do that I am perfectly content dabbling in each area a bit at a time.

Simply stated: I have ample choices on just what the heck I wanna do in the game.

The impact?  Well, I missed Brewfest and I'm gonna miss Hallow's Eve.  Meh, been there, done that, gotten the mount. The recycled holiday content is not compelling to me. Sure, it's been updated a bit, and it has shiny new  uber-high-item-level drops, but that's not alluring for me.

What is alluring, however, is the totally new stuff:

• Pet Battles
• Farming
• Food Network (Pandaria)
• Archaeology (two BoA blues so far)
• Progression Questing

I'm completely preoccupied with the inane yet entertaining aspects of the game. I have no focus on leveling as quick as possible, getting a iLevel up for LFR, or getting any kind of server first. I'm simply enjoying playing the game for the game's sake.

The real fun?  It's been simply discovering all of this content and possibility. I feel like a newbie again.

The game has completely captured me and it has yet again become this alternative universe that I can immerse myself into and simply disappear into that world for brief interludes. Contrast that to Wrath: during non-raid time I farmed for gold and mats to supply raiding needs.  Cata: log in and PVP on my way to 25,000 kills.  Mists?  Choices, baby! Choices! And I totally friggin' love it.

Relearning the Game: Limited AddOns

First things first: I need to jump on the internet bandwagon and just simply give a shout out to the folks in Irvine. Blizzard just crushed with this expansion.

I feel like a new player all over again. I can quest with some amazingly detailed and entertaining quest lines as a former end-game player, or (as I have been) wander over the zones dabbling in the pet battle mini-game.

In the spirit of "freshness", I'm also giving a go of playing without AddOns. Well, how about mostly without AddOns. How about dropping from a peak of over 100 AddOns (back in TBC) to a recent average of 20 in Cataclysm.

My obsession with AddOns began during the Burning Crusade and started with Titan Panel, and has evolved over the years. In Cataclysm, I had 'pared' the list down to ElvUI (which replaced so many of my other smaller AddOns), raid encounter helpers like DBM and GTFO, and gold-making essentials like TSM.

Now?  The only AddOns I'm running in Mists are the pet battle related ones highlighted over the weekend, TSM for auctioning, and utilities like Postal and Bank Stack.

So "mostly without AddOns" really means "with only six AddOns". I'm back to the basics in my game play, and aside from a few helpers, I'm really enjoying myself. The base UI is truly functional for my needs at this point, and the extras I'm running enhance the game as opposed to modify existing functionality to a cleaner view.

To borrow my favorite Australian expression:

Good on ya, Blizzard!

Pet Battles and Addons

Hi, I'm Chris.  I'm a Pet Battle Junky

The addition on the Pet Battles was something I scoffed at when it was announced. I was one of the seemingly few folks that wanted Pandas. Yet, pet battles?  I was never going to get into that!  I don't get Pokemon, and I assumed pet battles would be lame.

Boy, was I wrong!

I'm going to be hard pressed to get any leveling or questing or achievement hunting done because I'm spending all of my time battling critters.

Addons make this even better.  Three that I'm totally hooked on:

• Pet Battle Quality Glow: Tells you in the battle if the pet is poor, common, uncommon or rare. Oh yes!
• BattlePetCount: Mouse-over tooltip will now tell you how many pets of that kind you already have (or don't)! Oh my!
• Pet Journal Enhanced: Sort and filter your Pet Journal. Yay!

Can you pet battle without these?  Absolutely.  But, why wouldn't you?

Tuesday Highlight

So far... hell yeah! Very much digging Mists!

I've rolled a Pandaren Monk called Foomanchoo, and I'm loving the starting area and the quests. I thought it was really cool when I learned how to Roll! Stop and consider that -- a pudgy character learning to roll! Too great!

So here I am rolling through the newbie area and I get a quest to burn some scrolls.  Maybe they gave bad advice or somehing?

I was floored by the 'wisdom' contained in my first scroll.

#Truth

Where's my monkey pet?!?

Shared Topic: Flavors of WoW

The weekly Blog Azeroth Shared Topic comes from Cymre:

It would not be uncommon to hear about the initial release of World of Warcraft as Vanilla or Classic. In terms of ice cream or gelato (which is my preference), Vanilla was once considered the most popular flavour of it’s time. So if Vanilla represents Classic WoW, what flavours could represent the following expansions?

Really?!? A post topic combining ice cream and Warcraft? Epic win!

Original

Flavor: Vanilla

Vanilla

First of all, I have to admit I'm partial to vanilla. Both in WoW and in ice cream. And, if I'm buying ice cream, I'm partial to Breyer's brand, so shameless liberation of images from breyers.com.

I really enjoyed the vanilla expansion set before it got 'remodeled' in Cataclysm. I leveled both Horde and Alliance characters, and I hung out in the Plaguelands all through my late 50's because that lore with the Argent Crusade was so cool.

My point?  There's absolutely nothing wrong with vanilla. It's perfect all by itself.

Burning Crusade

Flavor: Chocolate Chip

Chocolate Chip

So what happens next? Well, there's a new threat of the Burning Legion and a long lost space continent of the Outland.

Blizzard added some new races: Dranei and Blood Elves. These races led to additional enemies (Sunwell in particular for the Elves).

In my frozen dessert analogy, we've got a baseline of vanilla, and now we're adding some chunks to it.

Who doesn't like chunks in their ice cream?

Wrath of the Lich King

Flavor: Mint Chocolate Chip

Mint Chocolate Chip

That formula of Burning Crusade worked; you could level up in Azeroth and then hit the Outland for end game. Well, why not do it again?

I view Wrath as the same formula: Blizzard took the existing game, and mixed it up some more by adding a frozen continent back in Azeroth and a repackaging of the Plaguelands factions to battle the scourge.

This isn't a bad thing.  If I'm not picking up Vanilla at the market, I'm grabbing Mint Chocolate Chip. It's still damn tasty.

Wrath was FUN! I like the factions based on tabards. I liked daily raid and instance quests. There was a lot of good stuff to do in Wrath.

It's like Chocolate Chip, cooled with Mint. Get it?

Cataclysm

Flavor: French Vanilla

French Vanilla

For whatever reason, someone thinks vanilla is boring. So Blizzard tries to reinvent vanilla. We get a new talent structure. We get flooding of old zones. We remodel some capital cities.

It's vanilla, repackaged, but the final product isn't any better than the original.

Think back to the eighties (those of you around then).  Remember "New Coke"?  What a flop that was?  The back-pedaling the Coca-Cola company had to do once they realized that New Coke sucked?

That's Cata in a nutshell for me.

So let's get back to basics and add to the elements that work.

Mists of Pandaria

Flavor: Neopolitan (Vanilla, Chocolate and Strawberry)

Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry

Enter MoP.

If I'm a marketing guy at Breyers, I know that French vanilla bombed. Back to the old drawing board.

So what do people like?

They like vanilla. Well, lets add in both chocolate and strawberry to that mix.  We have always had Alliance and Horde. The've fought.

Put them back into confrontation on those classic lines; Chocolate is flavored vanilla. It's still a simple flavor, but it's a new twist.

Now, add some Pandas that don't know which side they're going to take and offer a disinterested position (the Strawberry).

We have an upheaval. A cleansing. (Seriously - take a bite of vanilla or chocolate, and then take a bite of strawberry.  The berry washes away the others!)

Now, here's where it gets fun...  When I eat a bowl of mixed flavor ice cream, sometimes I'll eat up all the vanilla, then the chocolate, then the strawberry. Other times, I'll mix 'em all up into one flavor and enjoy the soup.  MoP will give me that option! It looks to have flexibility to essentially do what you want to do.

Conclusion

Not only can't I wait for MoP, I need to make a run to the store for some frozen desserts.

Shared Topic: Are you playing in the WoW Beta?

This week’s Blog Azeroth shared topic post comes from Frinka from Warcraft Street:

Are you playing the MoP Beta? Why or why not? How much time are you spending there vs. the "live" servers.

When I subscribed to the annual pass option, I was guaranteed a MoP Beta key. That wasn't why I fired off the annual pass, however. I was going to be playing in some form or other, so why not get a free copy of Diablo 3 to muck about with at the same time. The account wide mount was okay too for up and coming alts. The beta key? Worthless to me. Absolute rubbish.

Paying for the Privilege to Beta

In my professional role ( switch talent spec to Project Manager), I find myself constantly beta testing either base software code or integrated data solutions within a standard software code base. In any event, I spend a substantial chunk of my waking hours ensuring things work as expected and advertised.

When I get free time, the last thing I want to do is ensure a game I'm paying a fee to not only purchase but also play on a monthly basis is also working as expected and advertised. I'm shelling out dollars to a company to develop that software, after all. I expect Blizzard to pay staff to perform that role.

Now, now! Don't get me wrong! The more exposure and the more people that are testing something, the better the final product becomes. Beta testing from a general public polishes the product into something better than Blizzard could have imagined or marketed in the first place. It's an open exchange of not only "can I log in and not blow up?" but also "the lore here doesn't jibe... what if...". I'm indebted to those folks that are beta testing! They are helping make my eventual play experience all that more seamless, magical and satisfying.

But, if I only have a few hours to play, I'm going to play the final polished product (even Cata in the doldrums of a pre-expansion period). I'm not going to pay Blizzard for the privilege of testing their software for them as well as purchase a copy of the same game I would have tested. It's a stand on principle.

Surprise Me

The other main factor on why I never activated my beta key? Surprise! When Wrath was being released, I was an avid reader of Big Red Kitty's hunter blog (c'mon, who wasn't?). BRK was communicating tidbits of the beta pets, gear, zones, etc. When Wrath hit, I felt like in all the focus of pre-expansion TBC on Wrath content, I missed  out of an element of discovery in Wrath of that same content for myself. In other words, I got so worked up on researching Wrath that I missed out on experiencing a part of Wrath. Part of the fun for me in a new expansion is exploring the new content. Learning (and failing) make it more fun.

You may notice in my reading list, however, there are blogs that cover the MoP beta. I am reading, but as posts get into the details and mechanics, my reading becomes a skim. I don't understand in the least, for example, how a pet battle works. I just know that there are pets that will now go all Pokemon as needed.

I also know there will be Pandaren, and they will start neutral, and somehow that Pandaren will choose to align with either the Alliance or the Horde.  I know there is a new class, the Monk, and that the class will be like a druid only in that it can be played as any of the three main roles: Tank, Heals or DPS.  Although there are sites covering this information, I'm not actively reading them -- again I want to experience this for myself.

By the same token, I know the talents are totally being revamped. I will review the class sites for my characters after I've messed around with talents on my own. By merely applying someone else's experiences to a new spec, I'm losing the ability to experience that on my own.
My favorite part of Wrath, hands down?  The Death Knight character experience from birth to graduation at 58. In Cata?  The starting zones for the Goblin and Worgen races. I don't want to risk spoiling any of the freshness MoP will add for the Pandaren or the Monk class with previews or guides.

So, no... you won't find me on the beta realm. To those that are there, kudos and thank you very much for your contribution! It's just not something I'm willing to do.

Illidan was right: I'm not prepared

and so it begins...

Patch 4.3.4 ...

and I had all these grand plans, absolutely none of which got done.

Occupying my Time before Mists with Blog Tinkering

Lately, I have been neglecting my characters. I think I've been able to get online and actually play for about an hour since Friday what with vacations, work and the rest. That's not to say I haven't had any free time; I have. However, I've not spent that free time in the game world but rather in the Matrix behind the game.... Yeah, minus 50 DKP for mixing in a Keanu Reeves movie reference, despite the fact that it's one of my favorite films.

 Anyways... What have I been doing? Tinkering with the blog! I have added a characters page to the navigation bar. It's still undergoing some additional tweaks, but I've gotten myself indoctrinated in the language of the Armory and now I'm feeling comfortable in pulling character data to display on my own little corner of the world. If you check it out, I'd love feedback on what works and doesn't work (the whole detail section is to be coded). In designing something like this, I asked myself what do I care about when I hit Blizzard's Armory or Wowhead? And from that, I get current equipped items, current title, total achievement points, recent achievements, PVP stats and reputations. Cool! But, you can also retrieve all of you hunter pets. Oh that's sharp. And each companion and mount. Ummm... schwing! Progression? Cool!

So now I have entirely too many things I want to do out of game and in game before the expansion drops!

In game, my list is really only two things (though one is a two-parter):

• I want to ding my mage and my rogue to 85. That will leave me with only a warrior and the eventual monk on my server. 
• Apparently, I also need to make friends with a wealthy goblin because I have just learned about the Grand Expedition Yak (an upgrade to the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth or Repair Cow as I call it). Last I heard, this sucker was gonna be a 60,000 gold sink! Definitely need to multiply my gold base. Maybe I could place it all on a roulette wheel.... Yeah, if WoW had a casino, I'd never log off. In reading AH blogs, a few folks have pondered stocking up on bags.  With all the questing I'm doing in Outlands, Northrend and Cata zones, I should have plenty of cloth... perhaps it will work! 

 Hope your week's are treating you well!

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck

Unless you're oblivious, Blizzard made a small official announcement last week that the new expansion, Mists of Pandaria, will be released on September 25, 2012. With that announcement, Deathwing is officially a Lame Duck, joining other has-beens like Arthas - The Lich King and Illidan Stormrage. According to Wikipedia, a Lame Duck is:

... an elected official who is approaching the end of his or her tenure, and especially an official whose successor has already been elected.

Cyron on Flickr via everystockphoto

Well, almost a lame duck. Deathwing wasn't really elected; he sort of proclaimed himself as the new bad ass on the block and melted a few towers in Stormwind to prove his superiority. The comparison falters further when you consider that his successor is not really known, either. With MoP, we know that Deathwing will fade into past-expansion obscurity, but what we don't know is who (or what) will replace him as the end-game bad guy. The character development of that end-game bad guy will dramatically impact my enjoyment of the game during MoP.

Bosses are Goals

When I started my addiction playing WoW, it was just after the release of TBC. I leveled up in Vanilla zones when most of the veterans were already going after 60+ content. Sadly, by the time I dinged 60, nobody was running older instances. I had heard all about Ragnaros and C'Thun, but I never got to fight them. As a result, my experience in Vanilla zones has just been about leveling.

Instead, I jumped into the Outland kept on chugging. But, with all the lore that I saw in Outland, it all pointed to Illidan. The trailers told me I wasn't worthy. The majority of Shadowmoon Valley quests pointed me towards an ultimate encounter with him in the Black Temple. Sure, there were other raid bosses, but Illidan was the star. After I finally dinged 70, the goal became to get into a raid group to actually work towards the final progression of fighting Illidan. There was a clear end goal to reach with the expansion, and that goal was reinforced as the primary story line.

Fast forward to November of 2008 and Wrath is released. I loved how in Wrath, every single Northrend zone had an element of foreshadowing the ultimate encounter with Arthas. Not only was he the star in the trailer, but you saw him as a character element to quests everywhere in Northrend.  Arthas' fall from grace even had an instance dedicated to it (The Culling of Stratholme). Similar to the BC expansion, in Wrath you knew exactly who the end boss was. But unlike BC, you actually saw that end boss in your leveling experience before raiding was even a possibility.

Part of my ambivalence in Cata has been that it lacked, in my view, that in your face reinforcement of Deathwing's superiority and why he's the end dude. Cataclysm totally changed the environment of the old world, and you know that Deathwing is the end boss because he's on your login screen and the star of some cool trailers. Also, you can get crispified if you're lucky and get an achievement for your death at his 'hands', but other than that the only time I really saw Deathwing was by going back and leveling alts. The quests in the Badlands with Rhea and the hysterical variations of The Day that Deathwing Came are awesome. But I never saw Deathwing on my level 80 as he was going through the 'newer' level appropriate content except on a brief tour of Mount Hyjal when Ragnaros rose.
In cata, I did know that Deathwing was the boss, but I rarely saw him the way I did with Arthas in Wrath. It lessend his importance to me as an end boss.By the time LFR was introduced and the final encounter with Deathwing released, I just didn't care.

Hopes for MoP

So I'm looking forward to MoP and a new end game target. I'm really hoping to see Blizzard develop a worthy villain and that my questing experience introduces me to that villain's rise to power -- as well as provides justification on why he needs to be dealt with. I'm taking encouragement from the direction of zone-based questing -- I won't have to complete an single quest line story within the zone, but I'll complete multiple (smaller) quest line stories within the zones.

I'm really hoping that Mists expands the best elements of Wrath; questlines and lore that diverge but yet all lead up to a worthy villain. As far as possibilities at this point on who (or what) the end boss will be? From teasers and press, it looks like Garrosh Hellscream will fill at least a minor role, and I can't wait to see how that develops. I've never liked Garrosh. He's a bit over the top, even for an Orc.