December 2011

Changes to the Darkmoon Faire #WoW

stargrace December 12, 2011 1 Comment

The Darkmoon Faire is a topic I actually meant to write about last week, when it was around, but alas time slipped away from me as it so often does and so you’ll have to deal with this post being a few days late. Remember that festival that came at the start of every month and has for years but no one actually participated in? Well, the good folks over at Blizzard finally gave it an overhaul, and boy did they do a fantastic job. The Darkmoon Faire now actually feels like a festival. There is an entire zone dedicated to the happenings now, which you can access by being ported (there are NPC in the capitol cities) or by visiting the front gates:

•  Eastern Kingdoms, on the south side of Goldshire in Elwynn Forest
•  Kalimdor, in Mulgore at the base of Thunder Bluff

Christmas Cheer #WoW

stargrace December 9, 2011 1 Comment

While I’ve been wishing that people would simply be nicer to one another, some others have gone a different rout. I’ve been doing the new twilight dungeons quite a bit (for both gear upgrades and valor points) and have come across some folks that I think could use a little Christmas cheer.

Player 1: “Wow DPS sucks.” – a few things to note here. Number one, not a single thing went wrong with this group. We killed everything, there were no deaths, in fact the entire run was as close to perfect as I’ve ever seen. If there was DPS lacking I certainly didn’t see it. The person making the comments threw out a number of snide remarks while the rest of the group said nothing at all (well, O.K. that’s not true, I did mention that if they found the DPS lacking they could leave. Remember folks, it doesn’t matter what role you play in a group, you ARE replaceable).

Player 2: “Look at all my cool stuff I am the awesomesauce” – Do you REALLY need to link every piece of your gear into chat before we’ve even started the dungeon? Is this supposed to make me think that you are amazing? A better sign would be to move out of the gosh darned fire that spreads on the ground instead of dying.

Player 3: “LULZ TANK FAIL” – This actually comes from one of the Dragon Soul raids. They’ve been a great test in my patience and my skill of selective reading. The first four raids go incredibly well, there’s not really a lot to them. The next four raids I have had little to no luck with so far. People are either incredibly impatient and start the encounter before half the raid has arrived on the scene, or they decide explanations are not required for new players. Or something else happens like they ‘forget’ that the entire encounter is based on clicking on a single button in the center of your screen when the mob casts twilight. Whatever the case, the blame is NEVER theirs, and ALWAYS someone else’.

There are a few other types of players that I think could use a little Christmas cheer this year, hopefully I get my wish. If not, that’s what selective reading is for. I rarely ever let someones comment in game get to me, I can always change it to something pleasant in my mind.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

A Weekend of Dungeons #WoW

stargrace December 5, 2011 No Comments

As I do every year the week that NaNoWriMo finishes up, I took a week off and decided to do nothing but relax and game, and a LOT of gaming was done. It was basically my ‘calm before the storm’ as December gets under way with the hustle and bustle of Christmas holidays and everything that entails. I had a lot of time to spend working through the finer points of 4.3 which released last Tuesday, and this weekend was spent doing as much as I could with guild mates (a huge thank you to Toargo and Detch who put up with more PUG dungeons than anyone deserves to see in a single weekend).

I enjoy the latest WoW patch but there’s one small issue I have with one of the new features that was added. This probably comes as no surprise to those who are playing, but for those who are not, it’s void storage. See, void storage is supposed to be considered ‘long term’ storage. The problem I currently have with it is that you pay 100g to unlock the void storage slots – and then you pay 25g for every item you put into storage, whether or not you’ve put it there before or not. Also unique items can not be placed there (such as some tabards that you may actually wish to store long term). I’ve come to the conclusion that this is nothing more than an annoying money sink for those who have too much coin. Thankfully I don’t suffer from such an affliction.

The three new dungeons are fun but a little quick and quite simple. You need to do them in order the first time to unlock the next, and out of the three the first one is probably the hardest. ilevel 378 gear drops in abundance and I managed to boost all three of my 85 characters to raid-capable (ilevel 372 using the LFRaid tool) in short time. My favorite encounter is the hourglass fight on the first dungeon where one person in the group gets to re-set time (and you can do this up to five times in the encounter) and you watch everything roll back at hyper speed. It’s a great fight because you get to blow all of your cool downs at once and you don’t take any durability hits for dying because sooner or later someone is bound to die and time will be re-set. I also love the second dungeon, where you stealth around the zone avoiding demons and then eventually fight masses of them all at once while being protected by NPC. The third dungeon is also quite a lot of fun, you escort Thrall and he helps your group. In fact he managed to defeat encounters that my groups have some times wiped on. I think he should just solo the entire zone.

Thanks to all of these amazing dungeon runs the little guild of three managed to ding level 5! This was a huge accomplishment for us, it means we start earning cash for completing dungeon runs and we also earn a little for each mob that we kill and loot (5% goes to the guild bank). It has taken us quite a lot of work to get there, but I’m pleased.

I hope everyone had an amazing weekend, no matter where you found yourself! As always, happy gaming!