Welcome to the End

Patch Day, ladies and gents. Welcome to the end.

It’s been a long run. I got Wrath of the Lich King on launch day back in November 2008, and it’s that game that I’ve been playing for the better part of two years now. While I’ll technically still be playing it for a couple months longer, that’s an extremely minor technicality. All the tech and all the systems will have been updated to what we’ll have to get used to using for at the next two years or so, if not much longer. But alas, the days of the 3.x patches are behind us, and now I get to fiddle around with all the juicy new stuffs 4.0.1 at long last.

I imagine the first order of business is to get everything together for the impending Cataclysm, well and truly. I’ve gradually been chipping away at achievements and rep grinds in the previous weeks, though now with the deadline less than two months away before the expansion drops, it might be time to set up a proper bucket list and see what I can get done before then. Zandalari rep is right at the top of the list, since I have so little time to get that capped to Exalted before it disappears forever, and then… well, there’s nothing terribly urgent, I guess. I’m an Explorer already, I’m a Loremaster already, I’m a Kingslayer already. Perhaps I’ll just tear up the battlegrounds as Arms for a while and see if I can get a Halion group together just to say I’ve done him.

So forget that long term stuff, then. What will I do when I get to log in tomorrow? Well… I’ll probably end up kicking and screaming and cursing at the lag of one of the more popular servers which is, sadly, the one I inhabit. Once I manage to get some stability and hope that there are no character destroying bugs lying around somewhere, first things first will be to get my characters in order. Atreika the DK I’ll probably not touch immediately, but Arisza the Warrior and Amelyra Delfeir the Paladin will need their specs sorted out. From there, a visit to the class trainer to get any new abilities that I might have found along the way, and then some time spent getting my glyphs and gems in order. I might tinker around with the Reforging systems as well to try and get my stats in a position that I’m comfortable with.

In short, I fiddle with the mechanics for a while. Once I’m satisfied, though, it’ll be time to retrain myself. Warrior Tanking has seen me build up a considerable amount of muscle memory – spam Heroic Strike as long as your rage is up, hit Shield Slam whenever it’s off cooldown or a proc goes off, hit Revenge whenever it procs, keep Shield Block up off CD, spam Devastate if you cannot do that, keep your Thunder Clap and Demo Shout buffs up, use your stuns and interrupts as is needed. Sounds like a lot, and it is – the main reason why I like Warrior tanking, given how involved they are – but even something as complicated as that becomes something you can do in your sleep given enough time.

As an aside, I spent some time today in my first raid since I killed the Lich King however many weeks ago. What was I doing? The exact same thing… invited to tank LK10 by a guildie and a few randoms, and out of boredom I decided to go along with it. We didn’t get it down and it wasn’t the most satisfying raid I’ve ever done, but hey. I did notice, however, that after about three attempts of Phase 1 once I was refamiliar with everything that was required and everyone else in the raid knew exactly what they were doing, that I was pretty much doing the entire thing while half asleep. I just tuned out, listened to my music and the calls in Vent, and just hit the buttons by sheer force of muscle memory. Kinda sad when you think about it. Is that a sign that I’ve gotten really good, really practiced, or just play the game too much? All of the above? Who knows.

Getting back to the point, it’ll be really interesting once I’ve got the mechanics all set up to launch myself back into content with renewed vigor and learn everything again. Arisza shouldn’t be too tricky to get back into habits with just by launching myself into Heroics and seeing what happens, but I’ll probably do the same thing again with the new Arms setup and see how that works out. From there, I’ll probably run through the prequel quest lines that they’ve added to the game and beat up all the event bosses. With luck, the old Fist of Reckoning crew will be around to join me in this, since I’d rather much be doing all this with friends and people I trust rather than randoms. I’ll probably end up consuming as much of the new stuff as I can over the next two or three days, then I’ll likely go ahead and repeat it with Delfeir before maybe doing the same with Atreika. If my friends haven’t joined me in it yet, I’ll likely drag them into seeing it all.

What will I do from there? Well, I’ll probably get back to you on that aforementioned bucket list and see if I come up with anything more interesting and definitive. Stay tuned.

Oh yeah. Finally, I’m probably going to start cataloguing the adventures of Arisza as I go in short story format as I’ve already started. Why? Because I like to get writing experience out of my gaming time, and also because I am a ridiculous dork with far too much affection for my fictional entity. You keep your hobbies, I have mine.

So, it’s all getting closer and closer to the big day. What are you guys going to be doing from now until then?

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