Today after a very long time I did an Arena run on Hearthstone again. I picked up a Paladin deck and, with the help of Heartharena.com, managed to put together a fairly decent aggro deck.
I haven’t dabbled in Arena for a very long time. I’m still struggling to learn all the classes in Hearthstone (Paladin being one of few decks I have no experience with) and I’m still not very good at knowing what to do on what turn and when. I have a tendency to either go face too much or clear minions too much leaving me usually with an empty hand or an empty board. This results into many losses on my side.
It’s one of the reasons I choose to focus on Priest and Druid since those are the two decks I’ve been playing the most and feel the most comfortable on. I really wouldn’t know what a good draft is for any other deck, but this week I had no choice since all three champions were ones I wasn’t comfortable on. So I consulted a friend, picked Paladin and went through a pretty long draft phase while tabbing back and forth to Heartharena to see which cards I should pick up. I did that all on Wednesday evening after the raid so I could focus on actually playing the Arena tonight.
The same friend who helped me discover Heartharena has also guided me through this particular Arena run. He is a good player, albeit a little inexperienced with Paladin, and he has been helping me out here and there. With his guidance (and me making misplays here and there) I managed to get this deck to a 4-3 arena run, which is about a 200% improvement over anything I ever did on my own. I got a nice TGT card pack and 75 gold as rewards and overall I feel a bit more confident in playing Arena as a whole.
With my friend guiding me I’ve gained a bit more knowledge on when to trade, when to play certain cards, when to go for face and that brainfarts are seriously bad.
All in all I’m pretty happy with the result though and I think I might want to try my next Arena run on my own. With enough practice I should be able to get a good result eventually right?
Ongoing game issues
Being almost fulltime (and fullitme next week) at work has shown me how utter impossible it is to keep up with two MMO’s and a bunch of other games without some planning. Monday and Wednesday are my WoW nights since I raid then. Tuesday and Thursday should be my FF nights since I plan to coil then. This leaves me with only Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the rest of my games. Which is actually really sucky. It feels like my days and evenings fly by and I can’t get enough time into games for it to be really satisfying. It doesn’t really help that I go to bed at 23.00 every night, but I really can’t stay up longer or I’ll be a zombie at work.
It’s messing with me and making me slightly cranky. I used to have all the time and freedom in the world to do what I wanted and that is gone now. I guess I really need to start planning my nights better or give up on raiding in one of my MMO’s. And I really don’t want to do the second…
Yesterday evening I found myself once again in an awkward position. I seem to attract that a lot. Maybe because I can’t seem to keep my nose out of stuff that’s not entirely my business. I just really don’t like it when I’m a part of something that doesn’t work because of people being stupid.
We have basically two leaders in our guild at the moment and they can’t stand eachother. They are usually fighting and bitching and it influences the raid massively. One is a rager (he has a really bad temper) and will shout at everyone including himself. The other one is slightly autistic and not fit to be leader material in my opinion. I used to be the third leader, but due to circumstances I shed the officer mantle and just went back to being a raider.
Now, yesterday evening we had the usual attendance drama. People accept calendar invites and then either show very late without notice, or don’t show at all. This has been an ongoing issues in our guild and yesterday Leader number 2 was sick and tired off it and logged off. After a lot of talking back and forth I got him to log back on again, albeit very grumpy.
From that point I decided to take up the raidleader mantle again. Our guild just needs someone to speak up on Teamspeak, to coordinate the group and the invites and to just make sure raiding is being done in a decent atmosphere.
I think I succeeded in that last night where there was for once no drama or bitching. We downed the five bosses we are familiar with, even getting someone entirely new to four of them through. People got loot, we wiped a few times, there were some laughs and it was all fine. But only because I once again decided to step up and step in. No one else in the guild can be bothered to do so and I hate it when there are minor issues that would prevent a raid from happening.
Our GM (who is retired and no longer counted amongst leadership) was already mocking me for stepping up again. Saying “I never change” and he is probably right. However I wouldn’t have to step up if we had competent leaders who would do their job properly. But I guess I’m once again going to be the officer without an officer title. Simply because I just can’t sit idly by watching needless drama happen.
And because when I lead, there is no drama, no shouting, no crying and no grumpyness. I feel like I can make a raid fun to be in, even for myself, and I guess that’s what matters in the end. Right?
In today’s blog I want to talk about the Night Elves. There has been some discussion on my Twitter feed about Tyrande and Shandris and the roles they should play in the coming expansion… And it has rekindled my Night Elf fangirl lore fire.
The Night Elves have always been (and still are) my favourite race in World of Warcraft. I felt very much attracted to a society that seemed to be matriarchal and where the women were the warriors (sentinels in this case) and leaders. After reading Knaak’s War of the Ancients I fell in love even more with the race.
Not only are they the ancestors to the Blood Elves and consequently Sylvanas, they are also a big part of the reason Azeroth is shaped as it is today. And even dating back to the time of War of the Ancients it was a female dominated society, with the most respected members being the Priestesses of Elune next to Queen Azshara herself.
Their lore is rich, with them being among the oldest races on Azeroth, and their people used to be many, with long healthy lives and a society of relative peace.
With Legion I really hope to see Blizzard rekindle some of that Elven lore. They already revealed to us that we will be seeing Queen Azshara in the next expansion in one way or another. Personally I hope she will be getting her own big story arch, and a bossfight, since this is one badass lady. During her time as Queen of the Night Elves she was probably the most powerful being on Azeroth that wasn’t a God or a Demigod. Even Mannoroth did not dare to lift a finger to her when he was working on the invasion during War of the Ancients. Forming a pact with the Old Gods, which eventually turned her and her followers into the Naga, may have only made her more powerful. Powerful enough anyway to kidnap Neptulon, God of the Seas and doing god knows what to him while she has him captured. We can only assume she has been biding her time, plotting how to change Azeroth into her own private utopia.
With the reveal of the Broken Isles zones we already heard we will get a chance to explore Suramar, the ancient Night Elven capital, and see for ourselves how Night Elven society would have been if the War of the Ancients never happened.
Another big protagonist this expansion is Maiev Shadowsong. Ex head of the Watchers, Captor of Illidan Stormrage and Warden to the Night Elves since the times of the War of the Ancients. A lot of crazy things have happened to Maiev. She may have been a little too obsessed with capturing Illidan and she may have gone a little crazy after being betrayed by her own folk. But she is back now and we will see how much of a part she gets to play. I won’t be surprised when her story arch will mostly evolve around Illidan again, but I guess we will wait and see.
Tyrande
The one big Night Elf character we have essentially heard nothing about is Tyrande. Actually Tyrande has gone into a some sort of non-existant state ever since Blizzard reintroduced Malfurion to the game. Which, in my opinion, is a huge shame.
Not only has Tyrande led the Nightelves (against her will) for thousands of years, she is the chosen of Elune and a pretty badass fighter on top of it all. She is also responsible for murders on the Watchers so she could get Illidan out of jail, probably not her finest moment.
And yet she seems to be forgotten. Malfurion has been leading the Night Elves since Cataclysm came out, and has played a pretty peaceful role while doing so. Which comes as a bit of a surprise since the Horde is slowly chewing their way through Ashenvale, destroying much of his beloved forest.
Maybe it’s time that Tyrande had a fit and chose her people over her husband. Since really, she has been the one to lead them for thousands of years. She has seen them suffer, losing their immortality, getting pushed back by the Horde in Ashenvale and the Naga in Feralas. Especially now that Azshara might come to the forefront again, maybe it’s time Tyrande picked up some of that murderous intent again and turn it into something worthwile.
I would love to see her leading the charge for her kin. Travel to the Broken Isles and settle the score with Azshara once and for all. Make Night Elf women what they used to be and what they are supposed to be again: badass fighters.
So today I managed to stripe two goals of my August gaming to-do list! I finally finished off the last few Garrison campaign quests on my Priest and I levelled my newbie Hunter on Draenor to level 30.
I think the Garrison Campaign was one of the few lore bits that Blizzard did right this expansion. I loved being sent on new quests after I had dinged max level and how the story unfolded after I worked my way through all the zones. Luckily apparently Alliance got the better end of that trade as our Garrison campaign had a bit more depth to it than the Horde one did, but overall the experience and idea of it was good. I managed to complete the latest quests, the ones that came with 6.2, today and it showed some interesting stuff. Mostly how some of the bosses of the Hellfire Citadel raid came to be there. I liked the bit of extra lore and was also saddened that Blizzard didn’t do more of this throughout the expansion. Let’s hope they will make up for it with Legion ™.
The Hinterlands
So I had been levelling up my baby hunter Aylanna mostly on quests and had arrived in Arathi Highlands at level 25. Of all the zones left devastated by the Cataclysm, Arathi has been one of the few that has remained relatively untouched. It’s still green hills and farmland, crowded with Raptors and Spiders.
Running around here makes me think of the Scottish landscapes from Highlander.
The ruins of Stromgarde are also still left standing. It’s one of those quest hubs that you keep being sent back to. And again. And again… And again. I guess it’s one of the few things that are annoying to me when it comes to Warcraft questing. Just give me the follow up quests as I complete them, instead of making me run back and forth all the time!
Even the layout inside of Stromgarde hasn’t changed. One part is being occupied by the Syndicate. One part by Ogres and the last part by the Alliance, trying to hold on to one of the last remaining Human Castles in the North.
Ofcourse there has been a little adjustment to the zone. They have added a small Forsaken camp next to the wall separating the Highlands from Hillsbrad Foothills. But other than that Blizzard didn’t deem it necessary to fiddle around with this zone too much, for which I’m glad. Seeing as they did their best to completely destroy Hillsbrad and make it a Forsaken/Horde zone. (Really Blizzard, did you have to destroy Southshore like that?). I was a bit sad that the zone itself didn’t last that long for me. Due to having Heirlooms leveling just goes so fast. It makes you miss out on some interesting quests. Maybe I’ll go back to it when I’m max level, just to see what more is out there in the zone.
And ofcourse the little emo-themed Forsaken camp can’t be missing!
Final Fantasy
As I expected I’m having a hard time motivating myself to do my ex-roulette every day. On the other hand leveling my White Mage is going faster than I thought. Doing guildhest and low level roulette alone, coupled with some Hunting Logs, I’m now sitting well into level 40, which means I only have 10 levels to go for that goal! For now it seems doing my roulettes gives me a level a day, so if that keeps up I will be 50 in ten days. Yay for me! I will get to do more crossing on my to-do list AND I will have the healer of preference at the point I wanted it before the xpac came out. The only thing I need to decide then is if I want to keep on leveling that to 60 or aspire to bring all my classes up to 50 first. That would mean leveling my Warrior, Monk and Ninja… And the three new jobs: Dark Knight, Astrologian and Machinist. For now I’m leaning towards leveling my White Mage to 60 and use it as queue booster. But maybe I will change my mind. We shall see in the future!
Legion. The 6th expansion of the World of Warcraft. And most likely the final one?
A bold statement. I know. But I will go into detail as to why I think this is supposed to be the pinnacle of the World of Warcraft game.
Lore
From what the initial panel showed us, Blizzard is trying very hard to make up for the absence of lore in Warlords of Draenor. Not only are we continuing the fight against the Burning Legion, which will apparently be a bigger invasion than the War of Ancients was, we are also going to explore the Emerald Dream/Nightmare, have a run in with Azshara AND finally find out what happened to Alleria and Turalyon.
It’s almost like a lore overload. A tiered cake of lore. You want more lore you say? Here we shall add another tier, and another, and… another. It feels rather overwhelming to focus on that many “big” stories at once. May I remind people that there have been rumours of an entire Emerald Dream expansion instead of the “addon” we get right now?
And Aszhara. She has been surrounded with so many mystery. She made a short cameo in Cataclysm if you played through the Darkshore story quest. She was once the most powerful being on the planet. Anyone who has read R. Knaak’s “War of the Ancients” knows that even Mannoroth could not do anything against her. That makes for a pretty damn powerful woman. I had hoped she would get a bit more attention than just a sidezone in an xpac, but we don’t know what Blizzard has planned yet.
And then there’s the brief mention of Alleria and Turalyon. People have been wondering for ages what happened to them. They went into the Outlands only to disappear and never be heard from again. What has been their story? Can Blizzard do right by them?
And ofcourse there’s the Burning Legion arc, which is a direct continuation of the story so far in Warlords of Draenor. We will be dealing with the biggest invasion ever, and might even get to deal with Sargeras himself? Who knows!
So yeah. What I mostly see here is Blizzard’s attempt of knitting together a lot of loose ends that have been created throughout the years in the Warcraft universe. Lore that people have been yelling for, for years. The question is, will they succeed in doing this?
I see two scenario’s played out here:
1. The expansion is an utter piece of shit. Lore is treated badly. The new gimmicks of Artifact Weapon and Class Halls suffer the same fate as Garrisons do now and people are disappointed. Sub numbers keep dropping and Blizzard will eventually either pull the plug from the game or decide it to go f2p. After 10-12 years it has served it’s purpose, it’s time to look to the future and focus on a different project.
2. The expansion is amazing and truly the pinnacle of the World of Warcraft. We finally get a lot of answers, if not all, to all our lore questions. The newly implemented features are great. PvP is finally in a good place. Sub numbers rise again and people are happy. The question is WHAT THEN?! Since it looks like they are tieing all loose ends in this expansion will people be open to new stories? New adventures? Or is this the end to the Warcraft story, which is good, and will Blizzard make it like Final Fantasy XI, it will still be around but there won’t be any new content added. Instead we are groomed towards a new MMO, a better MMO. Warcraft 2.0?
So yeah. These were my first thoughts to make it to my blog on the newly announced expansion. I will probably write more about it when the dust has settled down a bit and more details are being brought out.
As parting words I will only say: OMFG DEMON HUNTERS! DIBS! ROLLING THAT!
After reinstalling Mickey’s Castle of Illusion on Steam I was happy to find out that Steam actually saved my progress in the cloud! Which means I didn’t have to work my way through the first world again and could immediatly dive into the second world (or act as it’s called in game).
Act 2-1: Angry toys everywhere!
It was a blast from the past. I have actually played my way through Mickey and Donald on my old Sega (which also included toy like levels) and Mickey Mania, but never got Castle of Illusion. I’m so happy I picked up the remastered version during the Steam Summer Sale this year! It’s taking me all the way back to when I first got my Sega Mega Drive when I was about 6 years old. Back then they had the better graphics compared to Nintendo and I remember a childhood filled with playing Sonic and Disney games. A feeling that this particular game brings back.
I love how they only remastered the sound and graphics and left the gameplay itself be. It’s still damn hard at some points, just how I remember the old platformers.
This is one of those games of my gaming-to-do list that I’m happily tackling, because honestly it’s just too much fun. I’ll keep you updated as I progress through the game, but to give a little more info (and a feel of what I’m doing in there) I have added the official launch trailer below. If you like what you see, go get it via Steam!
The Grind
One of the goals I have set for myself is to get my Esoterics cap on FFXIV every week. This means having to do ex-roulette every day. Which, honestly, I kind of hate. There are only two dungeons available for this roulette currently, Neverreap and Fractal Continuum, and I’m not a fan of either. Fractal takes a bit longer and has more trash. Neverreap has the most godawful endboss that I’ve seen in a dungeon so far. It’s safe to say I’m not really looking forward to doing this. Add in the horrible DPS queue times and you get a grumpy Sandy.
Next to this I’m rather frustrated with how my FFXIV raiding group has turned out. Ofcourse it’s summer and holidays are in the way. But still, we aren’t doing anything as group and grinding most content solo is boring as hell. It feels like a venture doomed to fail, especially since we have one more DPS spot to fill. Queue tremendous sigh.
I also wish I could show off more of the stuff I do from FF. But since I play on the PS4 it’s actually kind of a hassle to get decent screenshots. I wish I could just somehow connect and copy/paste stuff but I’m being forced to use a USB stick, not the most elegant way. I’ll try to add a bit more pictures, but don’t pin me on it!
The WoW Thing
By now most people have seen (Activision)Blizzard’s announcement about their financial Q2 and the tumble that the WoW subs took. Sitting on 5,6M currently it’s a number that we haven’t seen since Vanilla! All of which is due to the horrible lack of content that Blizzard provided with their latest expansion.
Queue some big names leaving in the past year or two aswell (Ghostcrawler and now Bashiok) and I wonder what is left of the old Blizzard core. Yes I do realize that those two had completely different roles within the organisation, but they were people that were out there in the community.
Everyone has had their opinions on WoW lately. I remember writing a post a few weeks ago that for me it was just done. I had my reasons. Cataclysm was the last really active expansion for me. I was an officer by the end of the xpac and the sole person keeping our tiny guild going, it drained me and the moment raiding didn’t happen in MoP I decided to take my leave of the game entirely. I did not like the setting of Mists of Pandaria, was not enamoured with the Panda’s as a playable race (I only made it to max level on a lvl 90 boosted Panda Monk) and the Daily grind for rep was… Horrible.
I came back every three to six months or so and started raiding again casually at the end of it, ready to come back fully for Warlords of Draenor which looked to be promising..
For the first few months it actually was. The leveling was much better in design than it had been since Wrath of the Lich King, there was enough content to keep you going for a while, the raids proved to be challenging enough. The only downsides for me were the horrible Garrison chores and the utter lack of decent PvP. Realizing that if I wanted to make gold or be self sufficient in any way would mean I had to run Garrisons on multiple characters was a nightmare and a huge turnoff in the end.
When patch 6.1 hit I was majorly disappointed. Instead of delivering more promising content we were stuck with a SELFIE camera, Twitter integration and a Garrison music box. Out of the three I think I’ve used the music box the most. I think I can count the amount of WoW selfies taken on one hand. Next to some newly added pets that was all the content we were going to get. And it sucked.
Queue 6.2 after barely logging in for a few weeks (we had killed Blackhand and had all done our Legendary quests) and again a huge disappointment. You got a second mission table, this time for ships, and an island that was even worse in design than the Timeless Isle. I hated doing the dailies the moment they appeared and haven’t touched a single one of them solo. The few times I did do them were with a gaming buddy, but we both quickly grew wary of them. What grinded my gears even more is that Blizzard locked the Legendary profession behind your little ships table. A whole world of frustration that I can’t even begin to describe right now. Let’s just say I’ve lost enough epic ships to more or less want to shove the whole idea through the throat of the devs who came up with it.
So yeah. Blizzard dropping sub numbers like no tomorrow has come as no surprise to me. Ask my guildies, but I’ve been complaining about the lack of content since January. And Blizzard has done nothing about it. If they want to keep their game going steady, or want to get people to come back to the game they really need to do something special with the next expansion. Pump out way better and way more content. Listen to your playerbase. Communicate with them again. Otherwise I predict the giant that was once World of Warcraft to plummet down to f2p status. And I’m not sure if the game will survive that.
So I’m finally done with reinstalling my PC from scratch. I think getting Windows 8.1 installed and fully updated has taken me a total of 6-7 hours, primarily due to having to go through the painful proces of installing Windows 8 first.
Anyway everything works again. My games are all reinstalled and I’m ready to rumble in the jungle. Or something.
Azeroth
Remember how I said in my 2nd day of Blaugust that gaming is a bit like crack? World of Warcraft is the biggest of them all for me. It’s my core game, my first MMO ever, the game I have been playing for the longest and where I’m the most comfortable. And it has drawn me in again.
I have to admit that the new expansion announcement has gotten me slightly excited. Especially if the new leaked class is true. So, like everyone else who’s still interested, I’m anxiously awaiting what Blizzard will bring us.
In the meantime I have been itching to pick up a Hunter again. Unfortunately for me I just really can’t be arsed to pick up the one on Dragonblight and my other two are on Darksorrow and Stormrage respectively, servers I don’t visit anymore. So I hopped into character selection and created a new Hunter on Draenor: Aylanna.
The name itself isn’t very original. My hunter on Dragonblight shares the same name. But don’t change a winning formula right? I have gotten into a real level frenzy and am currently level 20 after levelling my way through Ghostlands. I have just made the journey to Undercity to deliver a certain package to a certain someone..
Sylvanas… So we meet again.
After playing mostly FFXIV and GW2 over the past few weeks being back on Azeroth feels rather weird. I forgot how cartoonesque WoW is as a game and sometimes the bright colours, and awkward angles, kind of hurt my eyes. But I’m back on a Hunter and that usually makes me happy. For now.
Leveling her to 30 will be added to my bucket list. Seeing the fact that I’m kitted out in heirlooms, and leveled my way to 20 in about 2-3 hours, that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. For now I’m prioritizing stuff on Final Fantasy and Guild Wars, but it’s nice to fall back onto WoW. It’s like having a comfort blanket…
