I keep promising to post and I keep failing. I blame myself for not having just stuck with what I should have stuck with the whole time.

Stuck with what you ask? My Rogue. It’s the only class I never tire of. I can play for days on end without even going “man I wonder what this other class is like”. It’s the class that I feel at home on, I just know how to do what and why and when and feel I do so pretty well.

If I do say so.

I was running around on a Ret Paladin before the expansion playing Mana Battery again. The first weeks of OP were fun but got boring fast and felt like it took virtually no skill to play in PvE content, again this is my personal feeling. Oh, I know not everyone will agree with that, but when your rotation is “First Come, First Serve” it seems a little bit silly. (FCFS means as soon as an ability comes off cooldown you use it.) And if you’ve taken offense to that I’m sorry just remember it’s my opinion, and not anyone elses. People were kind enough to let me switch back to my Rogue. For that I’m grateful.

I’ll be focusing more and more on the Rogue, trying to find that niche of a money making scheme in Northrend. Much like the days of Mana Tombs in Buring Crusade or further back yet farming the Arcanite Reaper Pattern in Blackrock Spire in the Vanilla WoW days…Oh yes I will makes me some cash!

Last time I found the cash cow (Mana Tombs) before I even stumbled across the idea of farming on the internet (yay me!). While everyone else was doing the Mechanar Chest Farming which Blizzard eventually fixed, I was in Mana Tombs having a blast. Once I find the new cash cow, I’ll be sure to share. And from the taste of the expansion so far, these past 6 days, it looks like we’ll need it.

Of the dailies I have seen or bothered to do this far, the max gold I’ve seen rewarded is 4g and 40s. Even the old Outland dalies have been fixed to that amount. Even the lovely “Gather Nether Residue” I could do via mining nodes which gave 18g and some odd silver has been removed completly from what I can tell. Maybe it’s bugged?

I dropped my Rogues Leatherworking in favor of Skinning. At first this was to make some cash off the AH, but it turned into funding my guilds Off Tank’s Leatherworking. He’s of course sharing the benifits with me and often tells me how awesome I am. I’ve also been dontating all my ore to fund Ego’s Jewelcrafting as she doesn’t have a miner either and threatened me with doom if I didn’t do it.(Mostly kidding, but not really. No kidding, but seriously. I need HALP, she’s after my SOUL!.)

I am now kicking myself in my ass for not doing my dailies on all 3 of my 70s like a diligent person and having close to 20,000g by the time expansion hit. While it would have been nice, I just didn’t feel like doing it at the time. To busy hanging out and goofing of to bother. Now I know I’m only 74 and things may change at level 80, but I haven’t seen anything about it. We shall see. Gold has never really been a problem for me, but I usually have a plot already started by now.

I will add that I have been mining Thorium in my free time. Seems as if a lot of people need the ore and are more than happy to pay the 40g a stack on the AH. And until they stop doing so I will gladly go to Silithus in my free time and continue to supply. Pro-Tip!:if you have a miner and are bored or leveling with friends and don’t wish to get to far ahead or just need the cash for those freaking expensive skills, go bum around in Silithus for a while. Assuming your server is like mine and Thorium is the most expensive ore on the AH, regardless it will sell.

My Rogue is 74 and as to my first impressions about the expansion? It sure is pretty. I can “see” why they didn’t want us flying past everything untill later in the levels, cause you’d miss a lot of cool looking stuff. And man oh man some of those instances are just stellar. My personal favorite, going of the whole instance would prolly be Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom. If I was just to pick a room it would have to be where you fight Grand Magus Telestra in The Nexus. All those Runes are sooo cool.

I give mad props to the Art Team this time around, I actually spend time looking at my surroundings rather then running past them at top speed. The armor so far has some pretty cool models but as usual soooo many of the new models are reused over and over agian. I know it’s not easy to make everything unique but they could mix it up a little bit.

So far I’m enjoying this expansion. I hope everyone else is too.

See ya next week.

I promise otherwise Ego has permission to “punish” me.

P.S. - Kwane pointed out all Rogues should be steller dancers as all we ever do is count “One, Two, Three. Four, Five, Finisher.” And for this I hate him, mostly because I can’t argue agianst it.

Tuesday again, eh?

I suppose I could do an insightful look at talent points (eGADs don’t look at my current spec. I’m…uh…experimenting. And by ‘experimenting’, I mean ‘too lazy to do the research yet’.).

Maybe I could do a comparison of holy versus disc healing? How holy will still play footsies with the FSR, but disc will scorn spirit on gear?

Or maybe I could do an in-depth review of stats at higher levels! I could discuss how spirit is getting nerfed but isn’t useless by a long shot. Or how int is actually one of our major regen stats now if we can depend on replenishment in our raids?

Nope.

No, today, I am going to talk about yarn balls.

In Dalaran, there is a little building with a bunch of new mounts displayed outside. It’s a pet store. Go inside and talk to the little gnome who runs the joint. She sells stuff for your vanity pets. Something to make it sparkle, something to make it happy (complete with little heart bubble of joy), a leash that’s more irritating than not….

….and yarn balls.

That’s right.

You can play fetch with your vanity pets.

And let me be the first to say that the smolderweb spider hatchling pet looks incredibly adorable chasing after a ball of yarn and bringing it back to you in its mandibles. All it’s missing is a cute little jump and spin excitement combo.

…what? There’ll be plenty of time for insightful and useful posts on playing a healing priest. Later. For now, I’m still giddy over the sea cows. And the walrus people. And my obsession with getting a little baby penguin pet. Have you SEEN the anvils for blacksmithing in the walrus villages? They look like sushi! They ride turtles! WE ride turtles - boats back and forth from their villages. Their moustaches twitch when they’re preparing to fight.

I swear, that entire race and faction was created just for me. Naxx will have to wait. There are walruses to save!!

(Right, so maybe the quest where you toss wolvar puppies into a sack and hand them over every day is a smiiiiiidge on the creepy side. And maybe killing the leader of the wolvar and then bathing in his blood is closer to psychotic than adorable. Seriously. That stain’s never going to come out of my robe. Just think of the penguin, just think of the penguin….)

I know it’s not a Tuesday or a Thursday, but this isn’t a real post anyway, it’s more of a compilation of impressions from my first day in the expansion.

1. Penguins on ice floes! *squee*
2. Holy crap, could the boats be any slower?
3. Comparing the population of players at the Menethil destination versus the Stormwind destination is like comparing the mall in February to the mall in December. If you’re Alliance, I highly recommend taking the boat from Menethil.
4. I did not get to do the Nexus instance - we spent too much time fighting people for mobs needed for the prereq quests on that side. Seriously, random male belf warlock, was it necessary to come up on our full group, set your pet on aggressive, and start AOEing the spawn point? Seriously? Your mother would be ashamed.
5. I am sadly not going to be getting one of the new wolves on my hunter. Their front legs look…odd.
6. I LOVE the mage-hunter frost demon dogs. Very cool.
7. Dragons as flight paths? Awesome.
8. For anyone who is a little grumpy about how they don’t have superawesome gear that’s going to last forever, let me be the first person to debunk that. Vonya has TWO upgrades already - a ring and (shocking, to me) a hat. The ring was from an instance quest turnin and the hat was a drop from the dual-boss in Utgarde Keep. The hat I was wearing was from Zul’Aman and was fully gemmed and enchanted. Granted, the new one looks like something a whip-weilding prison guard might wear, but it’s a definite upgrade. (The old one looked like I was being attacked by a dislexic face-hugger, so I can’t complain too much about a bit of bondage gear) And I’ve had more than one quest reward that was pretty gosh darned close to what I was wearing already.
9. For tips on healing Utgarde Keep, check out GLDC’s Guide. I used it. It works.  Notes from healing it myself would be - tell your tank to pull a bunch or make sure you’ve got your damage spells handy. It’s boring if you pull it one group at a time. Also, your meleers are going to HATE the last boss. He does a series of AOEs, and one of them is almost a guaranteed death for anyone nearby. It has a long cast time, but it’s still distressingly easy to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ranged players don’t need to worry. Ah, Blizz loves the meleers.
10. Check out my quick post from yesterday for what I believe to be the first time you can see the Lich King. If it weren’t so gosh-darned well done, I’d be tempted to shout “Aha! I caught you monologuing!”
11. Did I mention the penguins yet? Egads, that much cute shouldn’t be allowed.
12. The frost whelpling from the collector’s edition is giant. And by “giant”, I mean that mass-wise, he’s bigger than Vonya. If you rolled her up into a ball, she’d be smaller than him. (No, he’s not mine, but a guildie did get him. Very cute, in an “I can see your ribcage” sorta way.
13. It’s beautiful. So much attention to detail, the new models look fantastic, the world is gorgeous (and I need to get my zoom in and out fixed so I can start taking screenshots again). They really and truly did a fantastic job on it. Remember walking into Hellfire Peninsula and going “ugh, this is nasty” and then hitting Zangarmarsh and feeling like you’d been given a gift? Northrend is a gift from the start.
14. Seriously though, fix the boats. Add another boat on the rotation if needs be. Sightseeing is all well and good the first time, but I’m having serious issues trying to swap between Northrend and Classic continents. And by ’serious issues’, I mean falling asleep waiting. Get me some kind of albatross flight path that can just fly it. A portal. Anything, so long as this fifteen minute wait stuff is curtailed. (Yes, yes, I know Dalaran will have portals. I want my fix NOW! *stomps hoof*)
15. PENGUINS!

In Valgarde (reachable via Menethil Harbor) there is a quest to use an incense burner and enter the spirit world to overhear some ancient spirits talking.

I recommend completing that, and then committing suicide.

Out in the big central area, you’ll find…The Lich King.

He grabs you, slaps you in a bubble, then monologues fabulously and kills you.

It’s worth dying, just to watch him wax poetic about killing you.

If only it weren’t November…

If only it weren’t NaNoWriMo…

I would write a post answering Tomo’s excellent emails regarding what the new “no stacking” rules will do to the viability of the Divine Spirit buff. I’d give examples of the other spells that buff spell power, and show which ones are going to overwrite the DS buff. I’d give my opinion on how the dual speccing will lead to some priests speccing just for DS, and then swapping into a deep holy build for actual healing.

Or Tomo’s OTHER excellent email, wanting to discuss the details of the new talent trees, and the viability for certain builds depending on situation. I’d finish the post I started on how awesome Serendipity is as a Holy talent and why I believe it’s one of the best new priest talents available.

I’d give a shout out to the author of the Spot the Cat and Cuddles the Ravager Saga emails that I’ve been getting, because I’ve been incredibly amused by every single one of them even though I don’t have time to properly respond to them.

I’d talk about preparing for Wrath, making sure people knew that there were TWO starting zones - one accessible from Stormwind and one from Menethil (you’ll have to talk to someone else for the horde starters, but I’m guessing there’s one from Orgrimmar and one from Undercity) and how the one from Menethil will probably be less populated than the Stormwind one.

I’d talk about how excited I am to start new five mans, and how I’m at least a little bit disappointed that I’ll miss out on the fun of getting all new gear right off the bat (and how I realize that if the only thing I have to QQ about is that my current gear is too shiny, I should just shut up and play).

I’d talk about how Hanners has been changing the alt text on the sidebar image every week and nobody’s noticed yet.

I’d talk about rhinos and how irritating I think the knockback will be for me as a player, but how I’m going to try it anyway. I’d talk about how much I hate the gorilla butt-scratching animation. I’d talk about how I want them to put the flying vanity pets back at a higher flight path so my moth isn’t skittering willy-nilly across the floor like a slowly exploding cockroach.

BUT

But it IS November, and it is NaNoWriMo, and I don’t have time to do the research necessary for those posts. Instead, you get a big long list of post topics that I may or may not ever get around to writing, and I’m going to go try and knock out a few more sprints with Bre from GLDC to get my NaNoWriMo word count up.

I’m not one of those people that buys every scrap of Warcraft-related paraphanalia I can get my hands on.

But this book - The Art of the Trading Card Game - is incredible.

If you are at all interested in Warcraft art, this is for you. The art is simply gorgeous, and it’s absolutely massive. SO much art, so much to look at, to see, to notice a third time.

The quality of the book is very nice. Not shoddy or cheap. The pages are thick and glossy, the art is beautifully displayed.

It was $50 at the local Barnes & Noble, or $30 with free shipping from Amazon.

An early Christmas present to myself, I don’t regret it at all, and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the art of this game as much as I do.

Ah, NaNoWriMo, convincing me to type ridiculously long titles. Sadly, that still only counts as five words. Curse you, space bar!

Raiding QQ
Raids are now so easy they’re laughable, and by ‘laughable’, I mean ‘not really much fun to heal’. You know, because nobody actually needs healing. And nobody really needs the badges anymore, so there’s really not much point to sweeping Kara, even if we can do it with six (and a half) players.

If I wanted a game this easy, I’d play Putt Putt Saves the Zoo.

Altitis Malitosis
So we rolled another set of alts.

This is the first time we’ve ever actually leveled up with a full group, and I gotta tell you, it’s WEIRD.

Three dpsers? THREE? That’s ludicrous!

You have to understand, I’ve leveled up as a three man team so many times that having a full group of dpsers just…doesn’t make sense.

Things die too quickly. It’s simple to the point of being, much like raiding, just too damn easy.

I actually look forward to the times when our shaman can’t join us, so we log on his toon and put him on autofollow. One less dpser means the dots I’m cycling actually get a chance to tick off a little. The only way I’m even coming CLOSE to the dps of the rogue and shaman is to AOE any time we get more than two mobs at once.

Tanking Love
And that brings me to another point. Thank you, Blizz, for making AOE threat exist for beartanks. I was actually going to write “non-paladin tanks” but my resident warrior tank tells me that warriors are, as always, getting shafted so hard they’re wondering whether they owe someone money or whether Blizz could go ahead and check for colon cancer while they’re at it. Not that I know this personally…

Tank favoritism aside, the beartank our little babies are driving nuts is actually able to hold threat over my little warlock through my AOEs.

Granted, I don’t toss the thing up immediately upon the pull. I cycle a few dots, bite myself, check to make sure all the mobs are missing at least a little health, and THEN I open up the gates of hell (I’m polite, for a warlock), but I know for a fact that he couldn’t have pulled it of pre-patch.

AOE tanking is king, and I am thrilled that it is no longer JUST the pervue of paladins. I can almost hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the cries of “homogenization!” and “world of hybridcraft!”.

I’m not arguing for or against either of those, I’m just sayin that it’s nice that my tank can handle AOE threat, is all.

Trick or Treat
The halloween event is finally over, and I am happy to report that Vonya actually did manage to get a Sinister Squashling (she wanted it for the pet, not the title). After days and days of my characters getting TRICKED instead of treated, 4 times out of 5, my guild took pity and did a few horseman runs to get the adorable little gourdling for me. Much love!

UI Woes
My husband did some trick or treating on my characters when I had to work late or after I’d gone to bed. We found out the hard way that somehow, blizz is actually copying and pasting information from HIS characters and computer over to MINE. The files in my Warcraft folder are physically changing, which is overwriting not only all of my KEYBINDINGS, but also my MACROS.

I have rebuilt my characters exactly five times since the patch, and I am not pleased.

If it was my addons being bizarre, that’d be one thing. But why, exactly, are my macros being deleted? My macros are stored locally! Why are my keybindings getting removed?

I am not pleased.

Not pleased at. all.

*frownyface*

THANK YOU!
Last, but definitely not least, a big thank you to ZASP, who braved the (ick, ugh, blech, bleargh) PVP walls of Orgrimmar to get my hunter the fishing achievement requirements there. He did it because I hate PVP with a purple passion, and I am very much grateful. <3

Dear Blizz,
Fewer achievements that require me to do PVP stuff, please. Or give my character some kind of “writ of good faith” or something, so that if I attack anyone, I’m screwed, but I’m otherwise just eyeballed suspiciously. I only wanted to fish! Is that a crime?!
Love, Vonya

So this week was weird.Not zombie weird, or paladins nerfed to the ground weird, or even horseman disappearing RIGHT at 4am weird.

I mean weird as in, no one had a clue what to do kind of weird.

I was settling all comfortably into my role as emissary of doom from the cult of the shadow, pewpewing and face-melting as necessary in my attempt to maybe reach outlands properly. Then I thought, hey, it’d be kind of neat to go with a group into one of them thar dungeons again. I bet I’d be fine in BRD.

So I went to my trainer in Thunderbluff. Don’t ask me why I was in Thunderbluff. I think I slurred or something when talking to the flight master. It was a long, meandering flight, and I spent most of the time wondering why the stupid scorpio-cat-bat-thing was as drunk as someone with a year’s subscription to beer-in-your-mail. Which is not me.

Anyway, poof, there went all my spells, and I tapped into that magic looking-for-meatshields thing while I poked around at new healery type spells.

And I kept poking around, and kept watching people looking for tanks for this or that. All for places in outland. Or Wailing Caverns. Why those two extremes all the time? But only for tanks. One person was looking for heals, but he was also looking for tanks and three “good dps” for Kara. These days, I don’t even know what counts for good dps. Not dying? Dying in a spectacular manner? Finally I got tired of half-heartedly poking at my healing spells and started just picking talents willy nilly. I don’t think I know what half of these things do anymore, but anything that looked to increase my super-awesome priest healing abilities would be great.

And then the world ended.

When I logged back in, all that random point-clicking had come undone. Maybe I didn’t click hard enough? Anyway, I joined back up in the looking-for-meatshields and started scowling at my trainer again. Before clicking anything, I took a closer look at who was available to be my personal meatshield. I wasn’t picky about what dungeon we molested, so that made it both easy and difficult to find people.

“Healer looking for whatever” doesn’t encourage people to join your illustrious cause, it seems. Besides, I wasn’t technically a healer at the moment. I wasn’t technically anything, and my trainer was looking impatient. As impatient as someone can look when they have leather straps bolted in an X across their face. It can be done, trust me.

So, yeah. There was no one. I don’t mean there wasn’t anyone looking for a dungeon that I wanted to visit - like I said, I wasn’t picky. I mean, there wasn’t anyone. NO ONE. I did a quick scan using powerful magics of /who 54-58.

It was me and some druid in Tanaris.  And he logged off as I watched.

Picking out all those healing abilities seemed kind of silly at that point, but with all the changes that have come down the line, recently, I wasn’t really sure where to put my pewpew-facemelting points.

Maybe I’ll just wait for Northrend and something will happen to make people pop up around looking for healinators again. Yes, I’m still nervous about running around out there by myself after the whole zombie thing. I still can’t talk to the bankers in Undercity like I used to…

/shiver

ps: ASK ME KWESTCHUNS.  Maybe I will use your innane quandries to fuel my spite-filled anecdotes another time, while I wait for some meatshields to get big enough to be deserving of my leet heals.  Or … have me along for face melting.  I have no idea.

There are a million things to be excited about with regards to the Wrath of the Lich King.

Hunters, I think everyone will agree, must have been very very good this year. Santa’s giving them almost everything on their christmas list.

Most of the other classes are getting pretty nice buffs, and there are a few classes/specs that feel they’re getting hit with a great big nerf bat.

As for me? What I’m most excited about isn’t the hairstyles. It’s not the pending dragon mounts that don’t look like sad sharks. It’s not the hunter changes (although you can bet your sweet bippy my hunter is foaming the mouth about those). It’s not the priest changes, it’s not the changes to caster stats, or even the joy of new areas to explore and new instances to crush beneath my heals (see what I did there?).

Oh no, my friends. I am MOST excited about the surge in 10-man raiding for end-game. I know from previous comments that many of you feel exactly the same way. How many of us actually saw the old 40 man content? How many of us got to see the endgame 25 man content?

How many of us spent too much time trying desperately to gather together 20+ people for a raid? Hoping, praying that we could get key players with enough brain cells to rub together to get these bosses down? The days of “bodies” needed to raid are long gone, and now we actually need “players”.

Is it hard to find 25 competent players? No. Is it hard to find 25 competent players that aren’t already spread out through the many, many raiding guilds on every server? Oh yes.

When every fight is a dance - move here, don’t stand in the fire, when it gets to phase three, make sure you change your strategy to this, STOP DPS immediately at X point or we all wipe…

…a single Leroy Jenkins could ruin a raid. Over, and over, and over again.

Getting together 10 like-minded people is less difficult. Still not easy, but certainly more doable than 25. The key there is “like-minded”. People with similar goals and ideals when it comes to raiding. Where they stand on the Hardcore-o-meter, for example.

Karazhan’s popularity was absolutely unprecedented. For the first time, raiding content (and gear) was available to a wide range of guilds, not just larger guilds. Small groups of friends could take a shot at the same content as the “big dogs”. Could see things they never thought they’d see, experience things they never thought they’d be able to experience.

Zul’Aman was, I think, a test to see if Karazhan was a fluke. The problem with ZA, in my opinion, was that you really couldn’t waltz into the instance with Kara gear and pirouette your way through the encounters. With better badge gear and more badge drops from Karazhan, that soon equalized, however.

My favorite thing about ZA is that it’s a skill check. Eagle boss is unforgiving. Every fight tests your raiders in some way. Can they listen? Can the tanks coordinate aggro? Can the dpsers handle shifting targets and always being aware of their location? Can the healers handle scattered, unpredictable AOE damage? And, test of all tests, can you do it all in a given time period to get a totally frivolous status symbol? (and the chest loot, sure, but we all know it was all about the bear)

I am so excited about the trend toward making raiding content available to more players.

It is because of this excitement that I view many of the class nerfs and buffs and the much-maligned homogenization of the classes with a sorrowful but understanding eye.

When raids have only ten players, the developers have to try and create fun, interesting, and challenging encounters for almost any raid makeup. A raid encounter that is made trivial for any team that brings a warlock is not a well-balanced encounter. If a team bringing a shadow priest is capable of remaining at full mana while an equally skilled team with only a ret paladin’s Judgment of Wisdom for mana regen is floundering - what do you do? As a developer, what do you do?

You have to make some concessions, when the raiding encounters go from 25 unique classes (and a much broader class makeup possibility) to only having 10 slots - at least two healers and two tanks, so that leaves only 6 dps slots. What abilities can they bring, and how do you keep an unfortunate raid makeup from turning a difficult encounter into a nearly impossible one?

How many of you have done the PVP Delrissa fight in Magister’s Terrace? It sucks, it’s horrible, it’s incredibly chaotic, it’s nearly impossible. Oh, but bring a mage or two, or even a single warlock, and all the sudden it’s a cake walk.

Given the magnitude of the task set before the class designers and developers, I feel they’ve done a good job of trying to balance without totally removing the originality of the various classes. Note I said ‘good’, not ‘great’. Could they have done some things differently? Absolutely. Better? Almost certainly.

But I am excited about Wrath, incredibly so. I’m looking forward to every new experience, and I hope that, in the end, the hard work to get 10 man raids fair and viable reaps incredible rewards for both Blizzard and the player base.

Heroic Karazhan
So, last night we five-manned Kara.

Well, it was more of a five and a half man. There was a gnome.

(Okay, okay, the half wasn’t REALLY because she was a gnome, it was because she had just dinged 70 and wasn’t geared out like everyone else. C’mon, it was a pretty good gnome joke. You know it was.)

We started out with more people - I think we had eight when we downed the new boss (Congratulations to Aensu for a ridiculously hilarious axe drop), but we lost two people who’d made other arrangements for the rest of the night, and the rest of us decided to just keep on truckin through the raid instance. I have to admit, I was surprised. No interrupts on Aran, one newbie to gear (poor thing didn’t even get many drops. The gods of Karazhan were not in her favor), one healer, one offtank with a bear spec (and you poor feral druids know that since the patch, that means almost no cat talents to boost cat dps), and we did it anyway, in pretty good time.

It was a lot of fun - by undermanning it, we still had at least a LITTLE bit of a challenge.

Who Needs a Full Raid, Anyway?
So, if you’re bored, and tired of how easy the raid instances are nowadays, here’s a bit of advice. Take about half the people you’d normally take and go crazy. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But if you’ve already had the fun of tearing through instances and raids that used to be difficult, maybe you’re looking for the challenge that used to be there.

Sometimes it can be hard to pull an entire raid together, what with the expansion and burnout and various other reasons for not playing.

If you’ve got four dps, a tank, and a healer…go have some fun. Tell ‘em Ego sent ya.

28 Days Later
Also, I know the event is over, but just in case anyone wants to know my opinion on the whole Zombie Apocalypse event, it is thus :

Those who did not have a specific goal in mind that they wished to accomplish during this past weekend loved it. The zombie thing gave them something to do - whether fighting the zombies or being the zombies.

Those who actually wanted to level an alt, work an a profession, fly from one point to another, do ANYTHING or accomplish any specific goal during that time period hated it.

From my perspective, these past few days in game have been asshat heaven.

I actually stopped logging in by the time the weekend hit, and the days leading up to it were frustrating in the extreme, as my lowbie alt’s quest givers were more often trying to eat my face than allow me to do a turn in. Completely destroying a vital quest hub over and over and over again is griefing, not fun. If I hadn’t actually been trying to do something, I wouldn’t have cared. But since I was constantly thwarted in my attempts to play the game, I stopped playing it.

I don’t think it matters at this point - Blizzard has stated via blue posts that the event went off as planned, and that they wanted to try an event that would affect every single player, from lowbie to high level, and they succeeded.

However. Given the amount of complaints generated by the event, I don’t think we’ll ever see a free-for-all gankfest like this again.

Any game-wide event that keeps me from playing a game that I’m actually paying for is going to piss me off. I know a lot of people that enjoyed the event, and I’m happy for you, I truly am. (Those of you who weren’t griefing for the sake of griefing, that is. I AM aware that it was possible to enjoy the event without ruining the game for other people.) I just wish there had been some safeguards put in for the people attempting to get some goals done. And I believe that when something like this is implemented again, those safeguards will be in place.

Edit : I just thought of something that could work on that score, and would actually make it fun to be the person KILLING the zombies, instead of just the person being zombies. Remember the npcs that stood in the major cities? Why not make zombies lootable for little badges? For every…say…fifty badges that are turned in, another little camp of healer npcs would appear, further and further from the major cities. That way the players could actually affect how many healers there were - you could defend your city, and by doing so, you could actually make it easier for your fellow players. The healer npcs would keep the areas around them cleansed of zombies, but they would only spread out as the turnins were done, as proof of just how bad the zombie menace was in that area.

That way the griefers and mischiefmakers are happy - they still get to be zombies and wreak havok. The defender players are happy - their efforts to contain the zombie menace are actually rewarded by changes in-game (and lets face it, if you spent all weekend killing zombies, wouldn’t you LOVE to see the fruits of your labors?). The players just trying to get stuff done are happy because their areas are clear.

Win/Win/Win!

Chocolate
Plain, or with addatives such as coconut, berries, or nuts?

Discuss.

Postscript
Dear Blizzard,

Thanks for the new boss in Kara, that was a lot of fun. However, since the playerbase is getting (at best) only two shots at him, why did you make his neat axe drop (very cool hidden use effect on that, by the way. You totally win on that one) be a rare drop?

Rare…from a mob that people will only get to see twice?

Perhaps I’m missing something and he will be a permanent boss in Kara. But it seems kinda mean, is all I’m sayin’.

Oh, and thanks for the batling. Very cute.

Love,
Vonyari, the Egotistical Priest