No king rules forever

Looking back over the last post, I think it could be easily misconstrued that I don’t play the game for the game, I play it for the people and the story. While those are, in fact, the primary reasons I play… something that’s all style and no substance is still relatively meaningless, especially in video games. No matter how important those things are and no matter how good they are, a bad game is still a bad game. World of Warcraft is not a bad game.

There are times where it feels like I’ve played it all before… and really, I have. I’ve done most of the raids in the game, I’ve seen all the dungeons, I’ve beaten most of the quests, I’ve earned most of the PvP achievements. I’ve taken most characters to decent levels and seen the level cap more times than I really needed to. If you wanted to dabble in semantics and play the whole Casual vs. Hardcore game, you’d be hard pressed to place me since I don’t play that much anymore but have still done quite a lot with my time.

Back in Burning Crusade, I didn’t have the kind of guild or social contacts I needed to really take me places. I didn’t see Karazhan until the day after Wrath launched, and I’d already hit Level 71 in that time. I barely did all the dungeons on normal, let alone Heroic. I never got to do a 25 man raid or partake in much high level PvP. For me, the story, the quests, the lore, and the roleplay really was all I had. But as I built up my contacts, settled into one character and one character role, and eventually helped build a guild shortly before Wrath that went on to raid until Ulduar, the gameplay and the lure of endgame finally began to draw my attention. I found one thing that changed the way I felt about the game, one thing that I started to crave.

I started to relish the thrill of a brand new boss kill.

It’s kind of a shame that gear has been made so easy to get in Wrath of the Lich King. Before this starts a flame war, I don’t think this because I don’t feel that people should have gear. Gear is just a means to an end, and not even a crucial means – gear narrows the margin for error, but it doesn’t remove it entirely, and that’s where skill and co-ordination take precedence. Gear might allow you to get a boss down a few seconds faster or live for a few seconds longer if you stand in the fire… but you’ll still lose if you don’t perform your role and DPS as hard as you can, or you’ll still die if you don’t move out of the fire pronto.

But the problem is that gear suddenly became so prevelant that everybody put it first and foremost. I’ve heard tales of vanilla raiding, and at the end of the day even having one epic was a sign of hard work and dedication. As such, they didn’t focus so much on getting them – if they did, it was largely incidental. People would get together in their 20s and 40s for one thing and one thing only – the boss kill. They worked together and fought as one to see that gigantic son of a bitch die, and that was what they played for.

The focus has shifted, now, and boss kills are a means to getting more gear. It’s easier to do, it’s faster to do, it takes less time and a lot less grinding to get to a point where you *can* do it. But it’s never been my way. Gear is always, for me, that slight method of improving my margin for error. But as a tank, I live or die due to my skills at minimising my damage, keeping the enemies on me, and trying to limit what the healers have to do to keep me going. And so now I raid because at the end of the day, I want to go home with a shiny new achievement and a theoretical boss skull in my backpack.

It’s been a long, long time since I felt that thrill. Getting Putricide and Sindragosa down did the trick for a while, but there was always the one boss that I wanted to kill. It felt, at times, that I would never get the opportunity to even fight the Lich King, let alone see him die. But that all changed yesterday.

Arisza the Kingslayer has a nice ring to it. I think I’ll keep it until Cataclysm drops.

Great job guys, you fought like absolute champions. It wasn’t easy and we spent a couple of hours working on it, and the final attempt for the night saw us down him with barely three seconds left on the berserk timer… but we got him.

I’ve completed my final wish for Wrath of the Lich King. The expansion is well and truly over for me now, and though I’ll continue to play here and there, raid for gear and for hard modes and social company… it’s time for a new challenge. Bring on the Cataclysm! I have a second Dragon Aspect to kill.

Lore and order

I first saw World of Warcraft over the shoulder of a friend, and was quite surprised because it didn’t match up with my mental image at all. I think that was likely because I hadn’t ever seen a paid MMO before – the ones I’d witnessed were produced on a smaller budget with a lot less quality than WoW. Additionally, I’d played Warcraft 2 and 3, so somehow just focusing on the one character didn’t match up with my images of it. I knew of the game, of course – I had friends talking about it from the beta to launch and onwards well before I ever saw so much as a screenshot of it. That first glimpse was a couple of days after battlegrounds first came out, since he was trying those out.

A long while later, I was staying at a friend’s place for the night when my second introduction to WoW occurred. He’d purchased one of the $2 trial CDs that you can find for sale everywhere (and which probably attribute to WoW’s accessibility quite a bit, since it’s rare to have an MMO with a demo) and had fired it up for a bit, saying that it was pretty neat and I might like it. He’d never played the Warcraft RTS games like I had, so it was all new to him, but I was keen to give it a second look. I ended up using his account to make my own character, my very first – his name was Thrudd, and he was an Orc Warrior. By the time I was Level 3, I knew I had to give the game a whirl myself.

So I did. I purchased my own trial CD and played the game a hell of a lot during that trial period. I was so enthralled with it that I bought a second trial CD since I didn’t have the funds needed at the time to buy the full game (and anyway, Burning Crusade was literally around the corner by a month or two away as a point of reference). Shortly after Burning Crusade launched, I finally bought the real game for myself along with the xpac and got stuck into it. The rest is history. I will also freely admit that my first character made on the full game was a Blood Elf, simply because I hadn’t tested those yet. RP servers hadn’t ruined them forever for me by this point.

Speaking of RP servers, that’s where I rolled those first few characters. And that really gets me to the point of why I started playing in the first place.

See, for me it wasn’t the allure of the MMO genre. I didn’t even like MMOs at this point (and I’d argue that I still don’t) since, again, WoW was the first real, paid for, non-Korean-grind-to-insanity kind of MMO. It wasn’t necessarily on the strength of the game, though it always has been fun. The two primary reasons that I played World of Warcraft were that I had enjoyed the RTS games immensely and really wanted to see how the story and the world continued, and because it was a new stomping ground for me to RP in.

At this point in my life, I was a rabid roleplayer. I’m still very much into it these days, though I’m not nearly as active in as numerous communities as I was then. I’m far more selective now about my roleplaying companions, although admittedly I’m not entirely content about how infrequent my RP is these days. Regardless, that’s for another time. The point remains: I was a big RPer, and when I saw that WoW had RP servers, I knew I had to be a part of it. I loved the games, loved Blizzard’s comparatively unique take on Orcs and Trolls, liked the Night Elves and the concept of playable Undead… and eventually came to adore the Draenei and their complete uniqueness.

So that’s why. I did it for the lore. And the more I came to play the game, the more I explored the world, the more quests I completed, the more characters I made and roleplayed… the more totally engrossed I became in the lore. It was a lot of fun for me to read up on the stories of the game, particularly the parts that I had missed by being a BC Baby, and being a big part of the action was very appealing. Every character I made from then on was designed from an RP standpoint before they were played, and I tinkered with their stories as time went on. To this day, I get writing practice by RPing and writing short stories regarding Arisza.

Arisza has a fairly fun story, really. I set her up as a librarian on Shattrath during the peaceful years of life on Draenor. You know the sort – the quiet, shy, bookworm kind of character who preferred to read about lives than live them. And she could have lived a lot of them – Draenei, you know, and Arisza has been around for well over a millenium at least. So she sat there for hundreds of years, keeping chronicles of Draenei history and culture and art from being lost in the Nether.

Then suddenly, Orcs. And her library *was* lost to the Nether, along with most of Shattrath and all its defenders… including her parents. That was something of a wake up call for her, and Arisza intended from then on to take more action in the world. She wanted to work to preserve history  rather than keep records of it that could be so easily lost and destroyed. So she learnt how to fight, and ended up going with the group that hijacked the Exodar from the Blood Elves and brought it to Azeroth. Soon enough she found herself exploring this new planet and getting very, very deeply attached. So she vowed that she’d do whatever she could to avoid a second Draenor and preserve Azeroth to the best of her ability… in both her new way, and her old way.

Arisza reads a lot of books and goes exploring as much as she can. She’s something of a Draenei Indiana Jones, and I’ve often tried to play up that aspect of her character. In a way, she represents my love of the Warcraft universe – she wants to learn it all and cherish it, just as I do. That’s one of the reasons I started this blog, and that’s the reason I’m playing Arisza as I do.

And for that reason, it was plainly obvious to me from the very outset just what kind of title I wanted Arisza to wear. Even as I levelled her and geared her up to replace the aging Paladin character, I began to work on the side at the real achievement of her character. Finally, a few months ago, I got what I wanted.

Cataclysm is going to change Warcraft forever, and much of the locations and the lore that I came to really respect and appreciate and love will disappear. So if nothing else, I’m glad I got to see it all before it went.

Like Arisza, I’m a preserver of history. A couple of years from now, I’ll be able to tell new players of World of Warcraft just how things have changed, what used to be interesting and cool. Maybe one day I’ll even be worthy of the title of Loremaster myself. We’ll see, I suppose. Either way, WoW grabbed my attention for the lore and the RP, and to this day the lore and RP keeps me here.

This fortress feeds on tears

Ahhh, Icecrown Citadel. Many people were waiting expectantly for this raid from the moment Wrath of the Lich King was announced. Many more of us were waiting even longer than that, our expectations fuelled by the somewhat cliffhanger ending of The Frozen Throne were Arthas is victorious as the new Lich King… and then he waits for the right time. Well, his waiting saw him build a pretty sweet palace in the middle of the frozen north, and so last year we finally gained access to it.

It’s a good instance, I’m not going to say otherwise. But it’s really hard for me to muster up a huge deal of enthusiasm for it now, since I’ve been in there months and months. Yes, I really only started raiding it properly in March/April, which meant I ended up considerably behind most of the people I knew and the people I’ve come to know since. Trying to find a group was not an easy thing at first, but after a time in the new guild of It Came From Behind generally making myself known as a pretty decent guy, I was pulled along to one of the 10-mans once a week as a secondary tank.

I was kind of lucky in that regard, because the main tank was the run leader and had already mostly outgeared the place. So I would hang around in his coat tails and try to steal aggro from his blasted Death and Decay, biding my time and picking up all the pieces of gear I could. It didn’t really take long before I’d ditched a good number of the old 232s I’d amassed in ToC for some much sexier pieces of loot, and by that point I think I was well known enough in the guild to be brought along to the 25s as the third tank. I’d imagine it was largely due to being good friends with one of the other tanks and the main tank healer (I know you’re reading this and I swear I’m not sucking up to you both) that got me in there, but I’d still like to think it was because they noticed me as well.

And I think I did a good job. I slid into the 25s without too much difficulty and quickly built up quite an impressive set of gear, which is now almost all 264s with a few leftover 251s. Gear has never been a big deal to me, though – sure, it makes you look better both as a player and as a character (I will never get rid of Warrior T10, it’s too awesome), but I’m always in raids for the social interaction and the thrill of the game more than any of the rewards. The best reward is a fun day and a few boss kills, gear is just a means to an end.

So life continued for a few months as I settled into this raiding pattern. It Came From Behind progressed, we expanded, we shifted our ranks a few, and I was there to witness a few of the big kills. Sadly, the 10 man group I was in was something of a stepping stone raid: the raid leader got really fed up that people would come to the raid, gear up, learn the fights, and then progress to the other groups in the guild or just only go to 25s from there on when all he wanted to do was get a steady group to take to the Lich King.

I understand his pain… and I still feel somewhat guilty that I used it in the same way.

Yeah, I wanted to see the Lich King too, but the group was not the best bunch of raiders we could have found. People wouldn’t learn the fights – they’d still need re-explanations or make the same mistakes attempt after attempt, week after week. They wouldn’t know how to play their class effectively, they wouldn’t know how to work as a team, they didn’t communicate well with the others… it just didn’t have the makings of greatness and progression. Now, I do my  best to be a patient guy, and so I was always trying to be friendly with the others and helping them out however I could. But it kinda boggled me. I tend to pick up the things I need to do in a fight pretty quickly – a visit to Tankspot, maybe reading on Wowhead for a minute or two, and then one wipe. Bam, I know the fight and I know everything I need to do. From then on I do my absolute utmost to avoid causing wipes or being deadweight, contributing as much as I can. I try to be a good raider.

This group… didn’t really have that consistency. And so we’d gear up and lose people, so we’d pull in new guys. Gear them up, they’d go. In the meantime, the other groups in the guild would generally progress further, and after a while the first group downed the Lich King and got Kingslayer. But we’d never really progressed that far, since we only worked on it one night a week. One of those weeks saw us with some really geared and really good raiders from the other raid groups joining us, and we saw some serious progression that night: Blood Queen Lanathel went down in a hurry, leaving us at 8/12 bosses for the first time in there in forever. But that was it. The next week saw us with the mooks of the guild again, and the raid leader just got more and more fed up.

It was about this time when my old guild buddies – still good friends of mine with about half of them already in It Came From Behind when I joined up – decided it was time to get the band back together and rock ICC10. So I let the raid leader know that I’d be out that week and that I was going with a group of friends. He… was not happy. I think there was mild drama about it in the officer’s chat where he basically exploded that his raid would go nowhere if people didn’t stick around and learn, something I had sadly figured out weeks before.

But hey. In the end, the band got back together… and in the first week we cleared 10/12 bosses. Not too shabby. Sadly, though, this didn’t get to be a regular thing – we did it a few more times and got 11/12, spending a few attempts wiping on the Lich King, but we just couldn’t get the scheduling down to maintain it. In the meantime, the other guild raid groups were having troubles of their own and eventually disintegrated, leaving myself and a few other friends to effectively rebuild the Fist of Reckoning raids… with the A-team of It Came From Behind to fill in the gaps. And that has worked out well. While we still haven’t downed the Lich King with this new configuration, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. Given that we’re spending extra time doing the Heroic modes anyway, I don’t think too many of us are in that much of a hurry.

As for the 25s, well, they continued for a while. I joined the guild when we were wiping on Blood Queen Lanathel, and we’d been stuck there for a few… weeks? Months? A while. It was a wall for the guild, but we managed to get her down two or three weeks after I joined the raid. (That’s not to say it was because of me – tanks have veeeery little input on that fight anyway. But I’m sure I improved raid morale or something. Yep.) I saw our first kill of Valithria Dreamwalker. I tanked Putricide when we killed him. And we were making steady progress against Sindragosa when… well, drama. Tensions. Problems. Once again, summed up in a single word:

Cataclysm.

We’d been in this raid for a long time, after all. Most of us were well and truly sick of it all by this point, and soon enough attendance just began to drop. We weren’t making progress, people weren’t showing up, so other people didn’t show up. As such, the guild hasn’t had a 25 in a fortnight. There’s an upcoming meeting to determine the guild’s fate, and as such I imagine I’ll have interesting times to blog about soon.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but really, that’s been the story of my Icecrown journey so far. I’ve always preferred the small group of friends rather than the big group of strangers setup of 10-mans, anyway, so it doesn’t really bother me that much if we cease the 25s. If I can stay with the 10-man group and finally get my Kingslayer title, I’ll be happy enough with that.

Icecrown is a good instance. I’m not sure I like it as much as Ulduar, overall – the bosses are probably more engaging to me in Icecrown since I was actually able to see them all, and the Lich King is one hell of a final boss. But overall, Ulduar probably attracts me more in terms of design and lore. It’s going to be interesting to see where the raids will go from here. I’ve had some fun times in Icecrown, and I hope that I get to wrap it up with a satisfying conclusion before the next expansion drops soon.

But really… given the way the guild is starting to break up and most of us are playing different games for a while anyway, I really hope Cataclysm isn’t too far off.

Next time, I think I’ll talk Loremaster, since that’s probably the biggest accomplishment I’ve earned since my return.

Back in black

*steps inside, looks around, tsks, and starts cleaning everything up before taking his customary seat*

Hello boys and girls. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

It’s funny how things go in the world. I had originally made plans to wrap up my World of Warcraft life in March this year, but due to boredom and inactivity that departure was hastened to January. The last post here was back in early February, half a year ago. I didn’t really expect that I’d be coming back, but things didn’t work out as I’d planned. March remained iconic to my WoW life for entirely the wrong reason: that was when I returned to WoW, rather than quitting.

When I first left the game, it was out of a desire to free up more time to try and get my life in order. Well, two months later, my life was somewhat more ordered than it had been when I began… yet I still found myself bored and with far too much time. That job hunt I mentioned way back when still continues unsuccessfully this late in the year, so I haven’t really had anything important demanding my attention. Eventually, I started to miss the social life I had in WoW, and so one day my boredom peaked and I logged back in to see what was happening.

A handful of my friends were online at the time and were thrilled to see me back. In no time at all, dwindling friendships were rekindled and restored, and things regained a semblance of normality. As a matter of fact, things went extremely well from there. My old guild was little more than a bank now, so I joined my friends in another much larger guild with numerous raid groups running through Icecrown Citadel. I didn’t really plan to get back into raiding, being more content to PvP and run dungeons and finally complete Loremaster.

Naturally, things didn’t stay that way. I ended up signing up for one of the 10-man raids that the guild was doing and cleared the first wing of Icecrown Citadel fairly easily. I quickly established myself as a decent tank, and so when the guild’s 25 man run was looking for a third, I happily raised my hand. Previous bad experiences with 25s left me not really anticipating it much, but I figured that an organised guild with a few of my friends would probably be more enjoyable than PuGs or other guilds.

I was right. I ended up tanking for them consistently, and I continued to run both sizes of ICC frequently. It’s kinda funny how I came back intending to be casual – and still am, really, playing a lot less than I did last year – but I’m now seeing far more content and progression than ever before. This continued for months to the current day, and while I had plenty of things I wanted to say or could have talked about regarding the game, I didn’t choose to restart this blog until recently.

The recap of recent events sounds like it’s all sunshine and rainbows, but it hasn’t been. There’s been drama and organisational hurdles and all sorts of craziness happening in both the real world and the Warcraft world, so it hasn’t been an easy run. You’ve got to keep in mind that I’ve been back for about five months now – a lot can happen in that time. And right now, there’s not a lot happening thanks to an up-and-coming event that I can sum up in one word:

Cataclysm.

Yes, ennui has struck hard when raiders have been running the same dungeon for about eight months with no end in sight. The game has been finished, everything has been done, and even though I *still* haven’t downed the Lich King in any difficulty setting, I’ve gotten to the point where I barely clock any hours at all. Nobody’s around, the guild has seen something of a slowdown due to mild drama and issues getting enough attendance to carry on the 25 mans, and me and my friends are off playing League of Legends or something else instead. We’re all waiting for the big expansion on the horizon, looking forward to all the cool new zones, the revamps, the lore, the class changes, the new races, the roleplaying potential… everything that Wrath has run out of.

So I came back, I lived it up, I saw the content, and now everything’s slowing down so I’m going even more casual as a result until the expansion drops. Why do I choose now to bring this blog back from the dead? Well, I could have talked about plenty of stuff in WoW even when I didn’t play it. I’ve been thinking of things I could have said here if I brought the blog back since the day I rejoined, but in the end I never did. Now… I’m just doing it because I can. I might as well say some things, have some fun, get some writing practice in like the blog was originally intended for and just see what happens.

For all intents and purposes, WoW With a K is back. Let’s see how long it stays that way, hmm? I’ll post again tomorrow, probably just to recap some of the exploits I’ve achieved in the last few months.