Bioware’s SWTOR panel at San Diego Comic-Con is on Thursday, July 21st at 3:30-4:30 (Pacific time, presumably) for you people lucky enough to be there. The summary sounds fun:

3:30-4:30 Star Wars: The Old Republic : Join Us, It Is Your Destiny– BioWare and LucasArts are creating the most immersive MMO experience you’ve ever played with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Hear from BioWare developers as they discuss development of a story-driven MMO, debut new gameplay footage, and perhaps spring a few surprises along the way. Exclusive reveals, giveaways, guests, and Q&A! Room 6BCF

There’s also, as Ask a Jedi points out (hat tip to them for this info), hands-on time with SWTOR at the Hilton near the convention center. The question is, I wonder if anyone who couldn’t get into SDCC is flying out anyway for some hands-on time with TOR?

Surely not.

Also have to wonder what the exclusive reveals and footage would consist of. I’m wagering on some hands-on time with a planet we haven’t seen at a con yet (Hoth?), maybe another flashpoint or two… personally, I’ll reserve my excitement for seeing if Stephen Reid shows up in his hat.

If I actually managed to get a beta key, I’d probably squeal hard enough to put this CAD comic to shame.

(Thanks to Kes for the pointer!)

Believe me, I almost did. But it lasted for all of two days. Barring some kind of radical change in the game that drags me back again, WoW and I are finished. It was an amicable breakup, at least. But now, I don’t even have any characters left - after a hacking attempt gone wrong because nothing seems to have vanished - and World of Warcraft and I are done with.

So is this a Rift blog? ‘Fraid not. I still haven’t reached max level even once, believe it or not. I’m probably going to get there first on my mage…but I said that about my warrior, too…and my cleric. Regardless, there’s another game that’s going to snatch my attention from Rift coming out later this year…

No, this is for something else. As Llanion pointed out to me, the name of this blog is at least still moderately appropriate for a Star Wars: The Old Republic blog. And while I still haven’t gotten into the beta - pretty standard state of affairs for me, all things considered - I can wildly speculate with the best of them, and gleefully snap up info as it’s tossed to us by Bioware.

So, without further ado, welcome to The Stoppable Force 2.0: a SWTOR blog!

The posts in this journal are what used to be at The Stoppable Force - which used to be a World of Warcraft blog. I quit a couple times, and the most popular blog post (in terms of traffic) that I ever wrote is actually in this blog.

However, for all intents and purposes, this blog is defunct. However, it represents nearly two years worth of blog writing for me, and I’d hate to let it completely disappear into the aether (or the Twisting Nether, as it were). So it is archived here for posterity, and for curiosity.

Usually when a blog goes silent, it’s pretty obvious why, isn’t it? In this case, I was at least still playing… sorta. I’d stopped logging on to level, or quest, or grind up rep, or really anything but raid, and my logging in started to feel less like fun and more like an obligation.

As much as I like my friends…

My WoW account’s time runs out on the 21st of March, and while I don’t regret the time I sank into the game, especially with the quirky BLU crew, I admit I feel a certain little sense of relief with letting it go.

You can find me elsewhere, still:

• Writing the weekly import news column, Hemispheres, on Polygamerous

• Twitter

• Steam

• Midboss, my other blog

• Still hanging out on the daily in BlogAzeroth chat

• Rift! You can find me on Shadefallen-US as part of Eye of the Manastorm; look for Rahm, Mura, Prishe, or Aldo and give me a holler.

So, adios for now, blogosphere. You can never truly get rid of me, but you won’t find me playing WoW.

So sorry I’ve been absent, my lovelies, but let’s face it - the gearing up process is really, really boring, and anything I could write about how to properly perform as a ret or holy paladin in a raid, Kurn and Antigen have already covered in-depth better than I ever could.

So instead I’ll just note that last night BLU, fresh off a learning attempt two weeks ago and a bunch of gearing up, swaggered back into Blackwing Descent and showed Magmaw what-for.

Photo is courtesy of Ratshag; I left my screenshot at home today, sadly. Click to embiggen. Fun facts: you can slow-fall and then swim through the lava to those stairs on the other side of Magmaw’s pit. Also, Magmaw’s head falls into the lava below him and just kinda sits there when he dies.

We also went and punched Argaloth to death, just so he didn’t think he was safe on account of not hanging out with Nefarian.

And last but not least, this one’s for Falren: look, Quek is 81! And here you didn’t believe Vander when he told you I was leveling him again.

A trio of things inspired this post: first, Jed suggested it; secondly, a while ago we had a guildie who came back into the game having missed everything after 3.2, and spent a while telling him what he’d missed; and thirdly, a hunter we had to pug in for the final spot in a heroic SFK run.

This hunter begged us for the leather agility boots that drop from Lord Ashbury; when asked whether he wouldn’t prefer a mail piece, so as to keep his Mail Specialization intact, he informed us that “no, he didn’t need armor.” We then proceeded to inform him of the benefits of Mail Specialization, which he did not, in fact, know existed. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was gone for the beginning of the expansion, because he was wearing about 3/4 heroic leather pieces.

So let’s kick this off - things you might have missed if you were gone a large chunk of the last expansion until this one. Leave comments, please!

And it’s done.

Last night at 11:52 PM EST, sometime around when Alexstrasza and Deathwing were pummeling each other to death, Anshul dinged 85. I am the 9th member of our raid team to do so, coming in just behind Ratshag and just ahead of Eldmann, who was the only person to start leveling during the Cataclysm at a lower level than me.

Staying ahead of Eld is something of an accomplishment; the man levels like a fiend. I wonder if he’s available to level my alts for me…

I can’t deny, it was fun. I really enjoyed questing in Cataclysm. Starting Anshul just prior to the Cataclysm means I really got to see all five major types of quest style - “old old world” quests, “new old world” quests, Outland, Northrend, and then the new Cataclysm zones. I can definitely say I like the new style of quests better - 2-3 quests at a time, generally all in the same area, with an obvious trail of breadcrumbs to your next questing site. You’re never stuck feeling like you’re never going to get out of the area - unless you choose to purposely stick around for some reason, like I did night before last, choosing to purposely complete Dragonmaw Tour of Duty instead of moving on to doing the next quest area.

With that now behind me, here’s a few lessons I learned.

Lessons garnered on the path to the cap

1. Vashj’ir: Not Even Once. I admit I was initially drawn to Vashj’ir for a few reasons. Seahorses. Smaller crowds. The Earthen Ring. Then, it all turned out to be a lie. Well, except for the seahorse, anyway.
   1. Melee in three dimensions? It sucks. It really sucks. And considering that jumping to an 81 zone at 80 means all the wildlife is aggroing me again - something I honestly wasn’t used to - it sucked more.

2. Input lag. For no reason, in Vashj'ir, I have a constant 2-3 second input lag at all times. It happens nowhere other than there, and it's lessened when I'm inside a cave or inside an Ancient, so I can only conclude my computer was choking rendering the water that I was actually swimming through, which baffles me, as it has no issues any other time. 

3. The Earthen Ring rep is a lie. I got more from Deepholm, thanks.            

When I finally get around to leveling more alts through this range, I think I’ll stick to Hyjal.

1. Don’t Get Attached. The gear, it’s everywhere, and it’s plentiful. I wasn’t quite running into the issues other people were describing (replacing a blue from the end of a questline almost immediately with a green at the start of the next quest or zone), but I certainly cycled through quite a lot. There were also clearly a lot of efforts to get people to try out mastery - it seemed to be on everything, which is a shame in my case, given how much mastery sucks for ret paladins right now.

2. Blizzard needs a copyeditor. I’ll preface this by saying that yes, this expansion honestly contains some of Blizzard’s best writing. I laughed out loud at some of the puns, I enjoyed the voiced dialogue, I even liked the metric f*ckton of cutscenes in Uldum. The eel quest from Vashj’ir, frankly, was hilarious. However, I’ll also add that this was some of Blizzard’s worst writing in terms of grammar, spelling, and even simple things like spelling an NPC’s name right in a quest description.

Hey Blizz: are you guys hiring?

A couple screenshots

‘Cause that’s just the kind of bull I am.

T’was the night before Cataclysmas, and all through the house… Stop was madly leveling to try to make it out of Outland before the xpac hits. :) Two levels to go and Anshul is off for a brief tour of duty in Northrend. Trying to figure out today which alts are going to make the race change to goblinhood - I know Malacrass is, but I’m unsure about Nocteria or Duskwalker. Have to think on it a bit.

Meanwhile, I’ll be out tonight doing the whole midnight launch thing. If you want to come see me or something, I’ll be at the Fort Wright Gamestop in Fort Wright, Kentucky. Map is below:

View Larger Map

Here’s who you should be looking for:

only I won’t be rocking the Polygamerous t-shirt because it’s COLD! Probably wearing a fleece-lined Bengals hoodie and freezing, or else over at White Castle drinking coffee because like hell am I standing outside. I’m going at 10 to pay off my CE, though.

So what are your plans? Digital download? Midnight launch somewhere? Waiting the next day for it to be delivered, like I did with Wrath?

Or, I sense a trend.

At the end of the last expansion, I switched mains - from my warlock to my death knight. While everyone else in my guild was plowing through Northrend and gleefully discovering its then-new wonders, I was in Outland, busy being overpowered. I remember soloing Arazzius the Cruel when the quest was still orange. I remember seeing lots and lots of other death knights, most of them with their pet ghouls while I used blood spec, which back then was DPS and had virtually no downtime thanks to eight million different kinds of self-heals. I think I was the last person in my guild to hit 80 - or close to it.

Now, here we are on the cusp of a new expansion, and it looks like it might happen again. My enthusiasm for my death knight has waned here at the end of Wrath of the Lich King - I no longer enjoy the feel of tanking, finding myself often unable to do much of anything, and the DPSing just seems lackluster. I’m good at it, but I don’t enjoy it anymore, so it’s time to let Duskwalker fade into the shadows and just become an achievement whore. Oh, he’s still going to be Duskwalker the Insane one of these days - but he’s not my top priority.

Pictured above, uncomfortably stuffed into a roflcopter, is Anshul the Ret Bull. Currently in Outland, with a nearly-full quest log. He’s capable of going through enemies lickety-split, and despite the many comparisons I’ve heard (and made!) comparing paladins to rogues now (“HoPo = combo points lawl”), I still log on to him first and foremost when I play these days… and, well, ret fits nicely into our raid comp. ;)

It looks like BLU has a nice lineup of players. We’re set to tackle the first round of raids late this year or early next year - yeah, all the world firsts will be out of the way, but so will the holidays. We’ve got a nice little community of fun folks over here, and if you’re interested in some Hordeside comraderie, we’ll certainly still welcome you.

I might just be doing so from Hellfire Peninsula or Northrend for a few weeks, that’s all. :)