Alright, well, this has been making the rounds in a different circle of friends, so I thought it’d be amusing to drag it over to the WoW blogging circle. Here goes:
Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with your picture.
Thanks to a tip from Bre, I took a look over at World of Raids today and found they’d added some info on build 8962 and its sweet, sweet new rides (and a few other things). Let’s take a look, shall we?
Well, first things first: I got my Shadoweave set finished! Barna sent my two shadowcloth, and was kind enough to toss in a couple more he found, and then Xoriah sent me the last two, so all I had to do was round up the primal waters and the netherweb and bam - robe!
That’s me, looking sassy, shadowy, and a little undergeared in a PUG Magtheridon group. How’d it go? Well, surprisingly, I felt I contributed a lot, and I certainly had fun in what I guess was my first raid ever in WoW, but it ended a bit like this:
That’s me, dead center, dead on the pedestal. The first time we actually got Mags down to 28%-ish when one of our major healers was knocked offline. Things went to pot after that. The second time, one of our cube-clickers went offline, but not in such a time that he could realize it and call out a backup clicker, so we got Blast Nova’d. The third time, something like 1/3 of the raid got knocked offline. I’m officially blaming network issues for this wipe! (The reason I’m on the pedestal to begin with is that I saw the clicker on this side go offline and ran to her cube. Too bad a guy on the other side got knocked offline at the same time.)
It was a pretty educational experience, and after that, I can definitely see I’m going to keep raiding on Queklain. It’s everything I loved about instances only ten times as good - more strategy, more teamwork, and more awesome bossfights.
And the last part of the title? I need cash. Like, severely. I think I have under 200g after hastily preparing for this raid.
Responding to a recent BA shared topic: “I was thinking maybe everyone could write a little about why you chose the class and why other players should/would choose your class (or even not choose it) and what aspects need to be taken into consideration.”
I feel I’m able to adequately sum this up in at least a few questions.
Do you like watching your foes bleed to death not from their wounds, but from their souls?
Do you enjoy slinging around the primal forces of fire and pure evil?
Ever wanted someone to order around, but without the messy responsibility of keeping them fed or happy?
Then sign up today for The Warlock! As a Warlock, you’ll find yourself an outcast from the society you choose to participate in, unless of course you’re one of the Forsaken, or a gnome. Gnomes are too curious to care, and the undead are too ruthless to care! Welcome to warlockery.
There’s nothing more satisfying than watching your foe think to himself, “hurr hurr hurr, a squishy clothy, ZOG SMASH!” and then dying halfway to you as he throws himself uselessly against your big blueberry and suffers from periodic damage, the affliction warlock’s bread and butter.
Or maybe direct damage is more your flavor! Warlocks also come in destruction, for when you just need to sling shadow bolts and incinerates aplenty. Sure you only have shadow and fire, but it’s enough to keep those big numbers popping up.
Want to pretend you’re a hunter? (I kid, I kid.) We may not have the huge variety of pets, but our demonologists have all the minions you can handle, including their own special bodyguard, the Felguard. Nothing says lovin’ like a demon that constantly threatens your life as he does your bidding!
There’s so much more to love about warlockery, but for me, it’s the visceral thrill of watching someone die as I laugh, surviving things I should have no right to survive simply on account of being able to constantly balance out my mana and health at will, and with more “oh sh*t!” buttons than you can shake a stick at.
So roll a warlock! You won’t regret it.
(My name is Queklain, and I approve this message.)
The next best thing to actually playing WoW is talking about it, and since I can’t play right now (thanks a lot, Duke Energy) I guess I’ll take a moment and answer a shared topic at Blog Azeroth, “Casuals, Players, and Raiders”:
I was thinking of a post basically on Raiding and raiders, or rather why a raider wants to raid, and why raiding guilds fall apart over summer when their members can’t raid, coupled with a comment on Anna’s site I realised that I went from the truly casual to a fairly hardcore raider, and yes when I was guildless for less than a week I got bored not being able to raid. I know it from my perspective, and its different to many others, what I call casual still wasn’t really casual, I was still top dps in instances or tanking stuff when I was online, I suppose my definition of casual is more “experienced gamer playing for a short time each week”.
This got me thinking, what are we, why are we, what does this mean and how do we relate to each other. One of the guys in my guild (a non-raider atm due to gear level) was surprised when I offered to run people through Stockades because I seem like a hardcore raider, so doing stuff like that isn’t really in the mandate.
So I think there are really three types of players, the casual, the players and the raiders, and I thought it would be interesting to hear what people think they are, what they were and how they got to be what they are and what they think of the other groups.
Any thoughts?
Why yes, I have a few.
All is quiet here at TSF HQ, because, well, the power’s been out since about noon (EST) yesterday. Which kind of sucks, because I need to farm primal waters. C’est la vie. There’s more exciting news: acting on a fairly reliable tip from a very reliable source, I’ve added a countdown to Wrath of the Lich King’s release on the right sidebar.
You heard it here first!
Maybe.
I said yesterday very early this morning that I was going to do this WHad Lib, and now I will.
“Really, Frank–can I call you Frank? You don’t even have to actually have any real information, Frank. Just point me toward someone who does and you get to stumble away from here…well, once your kneecaps heal, anyway.”
“M’name’s Edward,” the lieutenant slurred through his swollen, bleeding lips. I probably shouldn’t have punched him in the mouth so many times. He was having trouble speaking.
– excerpt from A Stab In the Dark, Part the Twelfth: Uncomfortable Compromises
There are only like 6 bloggers who aren’t in the beta. C’mon, Blizzard, you’re missing out here. Don’t make me write the article I want to write about Inscription for ‘locks.
WHad Libs! As in Wowhead. I’ll be doing that tomorrow, you can bet on it.
Joined a guild, so now I need to change my about page. Queklain is now a member of Fatalis.
And last but not least… well, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
Now I just need to catch up on enchanting!
A few days ago, I wrote some advice on using Recruit-a-Friend without screwing yourself over in the end. Runyarusco of Unbearably HoT has some more advice for you, including a few very practical tips I missed.
Power-leveling (quite literally, in fact) multiple toons to level 60 also requires an enormous sum of in-game gold, if only to train Class skills (nevermind professions).
One thing I definitely missed out on was weapon and armor skills (there’s a reason why my hunter is out front):
The usual process of leveling a character allows for the gradual increase in both Weapon and Defense skills. For casters this is less of an issue (since in an ideal world, you’re not getting the shit kicked out of you or hitting a mob with your weapon) than melee, but even as a caster, if you get to Outland with less than 300 Defense, relatively innocuous mobs will casually rip you apart and then go back to grazing (yes, the Helboar did surprise me). How can you circumvent this issue?
Those of you who have been reading along (hello, all 2 of you!) know I’ve only recently started running heroics. A disastrous (by which I mean ‘everyone wiped on the first pull, twice’) attempt at heroic Blood Furnace scared me off heroics for a while; please note this was my first heroic. Given some advice by Mishkar, and some new gear, I decided to try them again. Ran a successful heroic Ramps a day or two ago, and last night, bolstered by the fact that it was the daily (as well as the thought of new, if hideously ugly, pants) made me take a shot at heroic BF again.
Grabbed Vandersloot since he was already in my group due to an amusingly bad attempt to down the invisible undead magic ghost dragon of Shadowmoon Valley, and picked up some other people (a warrior, a pally, and a priest) and off we went. I knew we were in for something special when our priest’s last buff turned out to be, well, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
But no, seriously, it was fun. The first pull was shades of last time, and we still have no idea what happened there, but after that it was great. Granted, our warrior has an immense repair bill because he kept finding the rogues with his face. The actual boss encounters, though, were really quite easy (including, or perhaps especially, Kel’idan the Breaker), and at no point were any corpse runs made; no actual drops for me aside from the blood for the quest and the usual BoJs, except for, oh wait, the Eight of Blessings. Proceeds from the sale of the Eight of Blessings will be going straight to my epic flying training fund.
After we cleared it, there was some talk of a heroic SP run, but everyone kind of drifted off… I went to put things on the AH, and the pally reinvited me to a group, along with two warriors and a druid from his guild. Fun! We were running heroic Ramps, which I really needed for the reputation (getting Subtlety is going to make me really hate fel orcs), so off we went.
The trash pulls were really pretty smooth. We took down Watchmaster with little to no difficulty, then on Omor I made a boneheaded mistake (I blame the late hour): I didn’t realize the tree druid was right behind me, and so I didn’t move when I got hit with Bane of Treachery and thus blew up the druid. Whoops. We wiped. Still, we came back and actually won very handily!
Then we went over to fight Nazan and Vazruden, and when Vazruden landed he immediately went for the tree. Chop chop goes the axe, tree goes down before the pally even has a chance to react (though he did nearly have himself healed, to his credit). We regroup, run back, and notice one of our warriors is disconnected. But we can 4-man Vazruden, right? Well sure we can, if he doesn’t bug out. We got the Infinitely Respawning Sentry Bug, which we finally got around by blowing them up simultaneously, then fought Vazruden, who immediately aggroed the tree again (despite several valiant attempts by our paladin), while his dragon concentrated on breathing fire on me and only me. Turns out a single warrior and a paladin isn’t enough to take down Vaz! Go figure.
So we left, but it wasn’t all bad. I got invited to their Saturday alt-gearing Kara raids (led by the above paladin, who I promise is better than it sounds - two or three bad deaths in Ramparts counts against nothing, he’s actually the best prot pally I’ve grouped with), and a standing invite to their guild as well. What can I say? I’m thinking about it.
Oh - and I’m Affliction again.