Tread softly, Blizz, because you tread on my dreams

I was looking forward to the Anduin questline from the moment I saw his disguised model. I love Anduin. In my mage’s RP story, they’re a couple. He’s a very interesting character and I always look forward to seeing him in game. And last week, I even got to go out on an adventure with him! A heartbreaking adventure, but still. It was awesome. Until he picked up his father’s sword.

The reason why I love Anduin so much is that he’s not like Varian. I loved Varian too, very much, but Varian was a huge man with huge muscles and huge weapon/weapons.

I’m tired of huge men with huge muscles and huge weapons. Warlords was full of them. Just look at the art from Blizz site.  It’s all huge men with huge muscles and huge weapons.

I hoped Anduin would be different. He was a tiny disabled priest who was not good in close combat and he believed in peace. He didn’t swing his weapon first as his father would, he wanted to talk. I’m getting tired of unnecessary fighting. I know I play a game called World of Warcraft and sometimes we have to fight (I’m obviously not letting Legion kill us all) but why the hell are we still fighting againts the Horde? Lorewise, it barely makes sense. I share a class hall with undead so why am I killing them in WQs?

I’d like this to stop. And I don’t believe it will stop if we keep huge men with huge muscles and huge weapons in charge. I need Anduin to keep being tiny disabled priest who’s not good in close combat and who believes in peace. I don’t need strong, sexy “Manduin” or whatever people are calling him now. He’d be a man even if was short and skinny. There are different kinds of maskulinity and WoW mostly keeps to the warrior archetype. I want something different. Maybe a king who’s a blond priest in robes with a staff? Please, Blizz?

I understand that he feels like no one believes in him. He hasn’t had a chance to prove himself. And it can’t be easy to be Varian’s successor. People respected Varian because he was strong. Anduin has a different kind of strength. I hope he doesn’t try to change now. I don’t want him to be become a huge man with huge muscles and a huge sword. At least once in my WoW life, I want my king to be wise, diplomatic, sensible and patient. I feel that Anduin has a potential to be all of that. I’d be very disappointed if Blizz ruined my hopes.

I know it’s still early in his story and I’ve only seen a first few quests but I just needed to write this. If Anduin remains Anduin and won’t go all huge Manduin with huge muscles and a huge weapon, I’ll be happy to thanks Blizz for giving me what I wanted. If not, I’ll be disappointed. And probably play my Horde toon more because if all our leaders are bloodthirsty monsters, I might as well serve a Queen instead of a King.

 

 

 

 

The week with getting drunk and killing turkeys

In my last weekly update, I forgot to mention that I’d done all the Legion exploration achievements (killed all the rares and found all the treasures in all the zones). I’ve seen a lot of people doing them so I guess I’m not the only one who waited for flying to finish them.

I thought I would spend a lot of time doing Noblegarden this week but I got the Noble Gardener meta-achievement and all the pets in four hours so that was nice and easy. I bought the mount from the Auction House because I was lazy and egg hunting was starting to get boring (which was not surprising after two hours of standing in the same spot and clicking eggs in three spawn points in range). Here’s my new shiny mount:

I went through my achievements to find something fun to do and noticed I was only missing one pet for Pest Control. After that, I needed to fix my karma by showing some /love to cute critters so I got To All The Squirrels I’ve Loved Before, To All The Squirrels Who Shared My Life, To All the Squirrels Who Cared for Me and To All the Squirrels I Once Caressed?. I did the first three and then I got an idea. I wonder if you can do these by /loving your battle pets. And apparently you can! I don’t know how much help it would’ve been in the previous achievements but I got the last one in less than a minute, so probably a lot.. Well,  it was still nice to fly all around the world.

Another random achievements I completed were Drown Your Sorrows (I got terribly drunk during this one), Friend or Fowl? (being drunk helped because slaughtering innocent turkeys made me sad and also made me wonder what the hell am I doing with my life), Fish Tales for discovering each of the Jinyu lore objects in Pandaria (I don’t even know how that one happened but I got a quest out of it which I still need to do), Hot Couture for collecting a class armor set from Firelands and None Shall Pass for doing something (or not doing something, not idea) during a boss fight in Siege of Orgrimmar, which reminds me of another mount I got this week, Riddler’s Mind-Worm. It’s the secret one that you get by going all over the world and reading books with clues. It’s so ugly! I think I’ll use it on my horde toon, she’s undead and likes ugly things.

I also decided to spend some money I got from selling a crafted legendary and bought myself Champion’s Treadblade. I think I’m a cool kid now (I’m probably not..).

I got my sixth legendary, Mystic Kilt of the Rune Master. I still haven’t looked up which ones are best for me but this one seems to be great for mythics and raiding.

World Quest Bonus Event was this week so every day I did almost all WQs in at least two zones. I need all the rep for the paragon reputation mounts! It’s also nice for gold, order hall resourses and honor. I think I’ll do more PvP, I’ve been slacking since I got the mount and there are other nice rewards I want, especially the second mount!

And the best thing that happened this week was this:

The most amazing and lovely Sirius (@SuperSiriusXIII) made me this awesome art for this blog! I love it so much! She does gorgeous stuff so if you like it, check her out.

 

 

Why I love gaming

This was the first version of my Why I love WoW post but I realised it didn’t fit the instructions for the blog challenge. It’s about WoW but it could work for gaming in general, although WoW is my favourite game. 

I’m melancholic. My imagination runs wild. I dream of great adventures. I want to see new places, hear new stories, meet new people. I’m also a complete introvert so all these things need to happen without me having to leave my room.

My real life is stable, some people would (and do) say it’s boring (work, WoW/books/youtube/TV shows, sleep, repeat). I’m basically a hobbit. Not one of the famous ones who saved the world, I’m the one who always stays home because adventures are inconvenient and keep you from dinner and even if exciting things happen around them, they just make a cuppa and have a second breakfast. That’s what my life is and I love it.

In WoW, I can have amazing adventures and still be home for dinner. Actually, I can have dinner while I’m on an adventure! I always roll my eyes when I hear people say things like “why would you spend your time in front of a computer when you can go out and have an adventure?”. In my point of view, why would you go out when you can have an adventure in front of your computer? My room is the best place for adventures. (By the way, going out is healthy and also important, I just don’t need to do it very often and that’s okay.)

And WoW gives me a place where I can have my adventures. I don’t see it as just a game, it’s more of a platform for adventures and fun. I get to choose what I want to do and then do it. It doesn’t even matter if I kill Gul’dan, visit Anduin in Stormwind Keep, catch new pets, earn new mount or do enough for a faction they give me a reward. I’m having adventures and I love it.

And I get to do all of this with Anniy, my beloved mage. She’s my fantasy alter-ego with courage, magic and a creepy talking staff. What more could you want?

Why I love WoW

Lovely ladies Z and Cinder are doing a blog challenge and anyone can join! Topic of week 15 is “Why do you love WoW and what makes you keep coming back to it?”. You can find other people’s positive posts on their website.

I love WoW. I could probably write a book about this topic so I just chose three reasons why. I think these are somewhat universal. Another reason is mages, I love them and everything about them but not everyone plays a mage so they only get this little shout-out.

Stories and characters

There are so many stories! If you don’t like one, there’s another thousand you might like. When I’m in older zones, doing the side quests often give me more satisfaction than the main story of an expansion. Yes, Deathwing is evil and must be taken care of, but this lady’s veggies are threatened by a boar called Princess and we can’t have that!

Even in WoD, where the main storyline wasn’t the best in my opinion, there were still interesting character with great backstories. Remember Yrel? She was so cool!

My favourite characters (in no particular order) are Jaina Proudmoore, Varian Wrynn, Aegwynn, Anduin Wrynn, Sylvanas Windrunner, Medivh, Lady Liadrin, Khadgar, Yrel, Kalecgos and Aluneth. That’s 11 favourite, important characters which is more than a lot of stories have overall, including the characters I don’t like that much. If I can find so many awesome characters, I’m sure everyone else can find at least one.

There’s something for everyone

And not just characters. Wow is fun, serious, sad, happy, easy, hard, you can play with friends and/or on your own, you can quest, do raids and dungeons on multiple difficulty, collect pets, mounts, toys, achievements, you can explore, read and experience stories, you can battle pets, mobs or other players, you can just run/fly around and look at all the gorgeous pixels and listen to the awesome music. At least one of those things will be for you. And if you get bored with the thing, you can always try another and you might like it.

It keeps getting better

Devs listen to our feedback. There might be the infamous Blizzard pendulum but that just means they try new things and experiment and learn in the process. The game is getting better every patch.

Remember the times when we didn’t have the transmog wardrobe? My characters look much better now, I have fun collecting new pieces and still have some space in my bank. I’m sure all you veterans can name dozens other things that got better.

 

And do you know what? Let’s do it! Come up with at least 5 things devs made better, 3 different activities you enjoy in game and 5 favourite characters. If you want to, share them in the comments. Let’s remind ourselves and each other why we play this game and how awesome it is.

 

 

 

The week with post-flying laziness

I started writing a blog post about the arcane mage artifact weapon Aluneth and during my research, I found out that it’s voiced by Matthew Mercer who’s done other great stuff and also Critical Role, an amazing and funny D&D campaign and I ended up watching that instead of writing the blog post. Damn you, Matt! So I did that a lot during the week. And by “a lot” I mean first few episodes because they’re so long! But awesome! And I’m sure I’ll write the post about Aluneth one day but right now I have a huge crush on Matt and I need to obsess over him until it goes away and I can be productive again.

Now that I’m flying, doing world quests is very quick, even quicker than I expected. I was going to do only 4 Broken Shore WQs a day (basically treating it like getting a cache) but I usually do more anyway because the Shore is such a small place.

I finished Balance of Power questline! Nighthold on normal is quite easy now and I found a nice pug group. The last two quests (except for RP and story) are to collect stuff from Nighthold bosses, turn in the quest in Shal’aran and then kill Gul’dan which is stupid because you either do it in more weeks or leave during the raid and get ported back in. I was lucky to have an understanding leader and a warlock who agreed to port me back but it seemed like such an unnecessary stress. The appearence is quite nice and I’m very happy I got to do this even when I don’t have a raid team. When I heard that one artifact appearance would be from raids only and not LFR, I was sad. But it can be done now and that makes me happy 🙂

 By the way, why does my character looks so angry in these shots? Is that supposed to be serious face or what? It looks ridiculous.

I worked on some more pet battle achievements and got Taming Azeroth, Taming Pandaria, I Choose You, Fabled Pandaren Tamer and now I need to beat pandaren spirits. I tried the first one and it was hard so I’m keeping that for some other time.

I ran Emerald Nightmare normal for achievements and got all I needed for Glory of the Legion Raider from there. I’ll do the ones from Nighthold eventually too. I wonder, was is always this easy to go back to previous raids or are people running them just because artifact power is now a thing and they want more legendaries?

I got a new follower and parts of the questline were a bit shady and I don’t think I did the right thing but I guess I have to trust that I won’t cause the destruction of Dalaran and possibly the world. I really liked Marathal’s posts Something’s not right and Something’s not right cont. about the possibility of this huge conspiracy. I sort of wish that turned out to be truth but I’m not sure I want my character to deal with it.

I did invasions in all four parts of Broken Isles and earned Defender of Azeroth: Legion Invasions. They are fun and I quite enjoy doing them although I’m not very lucky to be playing when they’re up.

Noblegarden’s coming so I’ll be hunting for eggs and hopefully getting a lot of achievements and a new mount! I also crafted and sold a cloth legendary for a lot of gold so I’ll be buying at least one more mount next week. And I haven’t got the Riddler’s Mind-Worm. That will be nice 🙂

The week when I got flying

Armies of Legionfall reputation

Since the Broken Shore area came out, I’ve been doing every WQ and killing quite a lot of rares. Getting their rep to revered is the only requirement for flying (and Broken Shore Pathfinder 1 of course) and I wanted to get it as soon as possible. I missed flying so much! Darkmoon Faire was also up this week so I made sure I always had the WHEE! buff on me. I also got two missions for the rep tokens.

It was a lot of work and totally worth it. And this was something I wanted to do since Legion launched:

Originally. Defender of the Broken Isles was also part of the flying meta but with the invasions coming randomly and often in very inconvenient times, Blizz removed it as a requirement. I’m glad they did because with my schedule, I’ve only been able to finish two of them and getting the other two could take some time. RNG can suck and it usually does when it’s something I really want but that’s just my luck.. 🙂

Invasions

They are fun! And longer than I expected but not too long. The first one I did was in Highmountain. I was doing WQs there for a cache and just after I finished my third WQ, the invasion started. I wasn’t sure if the fourth one for a cache which was also first one for the invasion would count towards both but I think it did. I killed a few demons and even got to save puppies!

Balance of Power

I did the first three bosses in Emerald Nightmare heroic for remaining Corrupted Essences and got quests to run mythics, Court of Start, The Arcway and Vault of the Wardens. I hadn’t done those a lot so I barely remembered the strats but managed to get through it. And I even got some small upgrades. I’m not actively farming AP but I had enought for my 41st trait after this which was nice.

Next parts of the questline is Nighthold and I wasn’t sure I’ll be able to do it any time soon but I found a very nice group in the LFG tool and we cleared it on normal without much trouble. I was lucky and collected 12/20 Nightshards so I might be finishing this soon (maybe in two weeks, you need to collect the shards and then you get a quest to kill Gul’dan and this all might be tricky to do in one week).

Other random stuff

This week, I got angry at players and played with baby murlocs. I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that my most viewed post is a negative one but I’m glad it resonated with people and they shared their thoughts. And I guess no one feels this strong about cute murlocs. Although they were incredibly cute.

I’ve been using my class hall ability to instantly finish a pet battle WQ for Battle on the Broken Isles and I finally got it this week! I did some of those for the falcosaur mounts but the rest of them are too hard for me.

Burning Crusade timewalking was up so I ran that with my holy paladin alt, had a nice time, got gear and also bought The Consortium reputation tokens for my mage so now I have that on exalted and also got 55 Exalted Reputations. You get “The Beloved” title for 60, I’m looking forward to it. I’ll get 56th next week from Molten Core and eventually 57th from the Broken Shore so I need to find 3 more somewhere.

PvP brawls are finally here and the first one is Arathi Blizzard. It’s Arathi Basin with snow so you can’t see much. I’m only doing random battlegrounds so I didn’t notice if it changed the strats too much but it was gorgeous. Z wrote a great post about it with beautiful screenshots so if you want to know more or just look at pretty pictures, go read it.

I got my fourth legendary, Sephuz’s Secret. I won’t be using it much but it might be good for the mage tower challenge. I’ll need to do more research. The Activity Feed on battle.net website tells me I got it from LFR Grand Magistrix Elisande but I don’t even remember running Nighthold on LFR.. I’m tired.. But I’m flying!

This week was busy so next week, I’ll be playing less and sleeping more. And with the holidays coming up, I want to take is slow and enjoy the game even more 🙂

Cute march of the cutest cuties ever!

Yesterday was the March of the Tadpoles micro-holiday and it was the cutest, most precious thing ever! You go to the Winterfin area in Borean Tundra and find out that for one day in a year, baby murlocs take over the village and go on a rampage.

There’s a lot of them, different sizes and colours, they have hilarious names and you choose one to have a little adventure with.

This was the one I got:

His name was Berbert (I don’t know much about murlocs’ gender identities but Berbert sounds like a boy, so let’s go with that). I choose him because other murloc babies were walking or running around but Berbert was standing in one place with his friend Birbit. Judging by their size, they were murloc teenagers so maybe they were too cool to behave like children or they were dating and having a little moment. Who knows?

He gave me a quest to get 10 Winterfin Clams (they also work as currency for a vendor in the village) and I apparently had 8 somewhere in my bank so it was quick. Then he wanted me to kill Mrrga, evil orca who was scaring poor murloc babies. Well, not anymore, I took care of it. Someone has to keep those adorable misfits safe and it’s a task I’ll gladly accept any day. Berbert gave me a reward, Tadpole Gift containing Winterfin Pearl which is actually a very nice pearl. Different murloc babies give you a different gift (Half of a Fish, Wet Rock, Winterfin Mud Pie and other great stuff) and it seems like the pearl is the most valuable because you can vendor it for 10g. I’m never selling it though, I will treasure it forever.

After this, I spent about an hour just watching murloc babies and had a great time! Not only were they cute as hell, they were also doing pretty funny stuff.

My favourite was Flops who ran a short distance, very dramatically “died”, laid down for a few seconds, got up and then did the same thing again and again. I have no idea what the hell was that about but it was hilarious!

There was one in the water called Ariel.

And one had something on their head.

The adults didn’t look very happy about this. I can’t really blame them, imagine you’re trying to chop up dead orca and there’s a baby murloc running over it. That’s not a safe work environment!

I wanted to get last picture of us before leaving but I guess Berbert didn’t like selfies. Me neither actually, I just wanted to try different angle that the screenshots. Or he was camera shy.

I loved this micro-holiday. It was a great distraction from all the evil Legion stuff and world on green fire. It was cute and heartwarming.  Look at the adorable little footprints they leave!

I can’t wait to do this again next year and to see other micro-holidays. I’ve been enjoying them a lot so far. More cute babies, Blizz!

The funniest way I have died (multiple times)

Lovely ladies Z and Cinder are doing a blog challenge and anyone can join! Topic of week 14 is “The funniest way you have died”. You can find other people’s posts on their website. I suggested this topic during Reins of Azeroth episode with Z from Z is for Zeirah and later realised that I didn’t actually have a funny story, I just thought it would be great to read other players’ experiences. But I have a noob story and it does make me laugh sometimes.

Trees are evil. Trees with their crowns, branches and twigs. Trees are smart. Tress move and then laugh at you when they kill you. You might think trees are innocent but they hate me. Especially those near the Warden Tower world quests.

I’ve been doing Warden Towers WQs a lot. They’re easy, give nice honor and they’re mostly PvE. You need to kill some normal mobs and an elite which is on top of the tower. So I usually run through the normal mobs, become Invisible, get to the elite, kill it, jump down and when I’m near the ground, I cast slow fall and elegantly fly to the ground. I don’t slow fall from the top because gods know where I would end up and I still need to kill mobs near the tower.

And that’s where the murderous trees come in. I could swear that when I jump down, nothing’s there, but then, I’m suddenly dead, lying on a tree which wasn’t there a second ago. They’re secretly moving and enjoy killing me.

Or maybe I’m just a noob who dies from falling damage despite of having a spell that slows the fall. But it’s probably the trees. Evil trees.

And this rock is evil too. It probably made a pact with the trees and is also after me.

Beware of the trees and rocks, my dear readers. They can very easily murder you.

Maybe it’s not for you and that’s okay

Disclaimer: this post contains ranting and anger and my frustration over some players. If that’s not something you want to read, feel free to skip this, I understand. The next post will be happy again.

WoW community is usually amazing. I’ve met so many nice, welcoming, positive and smart people. And then there are the others. Those who criticize every single thing in the game without trying to understand the design intent behind it. I read blogs, watch youtube channels and listen to podcasts and the thing that bugs me the most is when people don’t understand that not everything is for them. I’ll give a few examples from recent months.

Pet Battle Dungeon

Not everyone likes pet battles and that’s okay. I do, so I appreciate that they did the dungeon. It’s new and exciting content and so many people enjoy it! If you’re not one of those people, just keep doing what you like doing in game and ignore the dungeon. Don’t say that it’s stupid or that no one asked for it and or that Blizz should do something else instead. The dungeon is not a bad idea, it’s just not for you. And if you change your mind about pet battling, it’s always there if you want to try it.

Developer Q&As

I love the developer Q&As. I found some of them more interesting than the others because not all of them cover the parts of game I’m interested in. The one about itemization was not my favourite because I don’t care about geat much. And that’s okay. But I realise other people want to know about itemization, that’s why they did the Q&A and answered players’ questions. I heard someone criticize it because it didn’t get them excited for the game. That’s not what it was supposed to do! Not every Q&A can have exciting news and gorgeous trailer, some are just information about itemization. If you don’t care about itemization, the Q&A wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t for you.

Mage Tower Challenge

Blizz said this would be hard, almost impossible to do at the start and you’d need great gear and great skill to beat it. It’s available now and people are complaining that it’s hard and they can’t beat it. I’ll give it a try but I know that I might never get the afrtifact appearence, the same way as I might never get the one from Balance of Power quest, because I don’t raid. It’s not for me.

They might change the difficulty or tweak it a bit but unless you’re super awesome at playing <insert your class> and you don’t have BiS gear, you are probably not able to finish it now. And that’s okay. You won’t be able to one-shot mythic Tomb of Sargeras when it comes out, so why do you expect to one-shot this? Maybe it’s not for you now. Maybe you need more gear and learn the strats better or maybe, you won’t ever beat it. And that’s okay. It’s designed that way

 

I understand when players want something that is a reward from part of the game they don’t play and they are frustrated (those PvP mounts I’ll never have because I’m not that good at PvP break my heart!). But you can’t have everything. And that’s okay. It’s also okay to just walk away from part of the game and don’t do it.

I’m definitely not saying you can’t talk about the game or give constructive feedback. Just think about what you’re saying. Is the challenge a bad design or is it something that is not for you right now? Because not everything is for you. And that’s okay.