Update

Wow...it's been over a month since my last post.

Well, the last time I posted, my warlock was at level 30. Today (about 5 minutes ago actually) he hit 58 and is headed for the Outlands. :-) Of course, I'll have to hit Dire Maul at level 60 to get my Dreadsteed.

I'm also cruising along on his enchanting and tailoring, but I kinda stalled at 263 for enchanting. I'm just not getting the drops to DE for mats like I was.

As for my rogue...well, Kara group 2 hasn't been doing well. We're either short 2-3 people for our runs or we end up burning 3+ hours taking down Attumen and wiping on Morose. This past Monday though was a different story. Instead of rehashing it here, here's a link to a post I made in our guild forums:

http://www.clanbbf.com/viewtopic.php?t=53605

If you read that entire thread, it looks like I'll be running with Group 1 starting next week. ;-) Woohoo!

Playing a warlock

Due to level 70 boredom and no kara last week, I've been spending quite a bit of time playing my warlock. In the past week, I've taken him from level 22 up to 30.

Warlocks are cool and I'm trying to figure out which is more fun: a hunter or the lock. Playing ranged is a nice break from the in-your-face DPS or a rogue. Send in blueberry, dot, dot, dot, shadow bolt, rinse and repeat. Oh, and it's nice to be on the giving end of "fear". ;-)

And, OMG, I love soulstoning myself. ;-) I've been in some tough situations where I'm a long way from the graveyard and I've already sacrificed my blueberry...having that soulstone is a beautiful thing.

My lock is also a tailor and enchanter. I've really focused on progressing these skills so I start making some $$$. I'm finding enchanting a bit tougher to level than the tailoring, but both are still right where they need to be.

So...to sum up: ranged + fear + pet + dots + soulstone = AWESOME. ;-)

Kara

For the last couple of weeks, my guild has been able to get a second group into Kara. Unfortunately, we've always been 2-3 players short and have had to rely on pick-ups.

Our first outing actually started on a Saturday after our Friday run got cancelled because the raid leader had ISP issues. The Saturday run was ok even though we couldn't down Attumen. Our pally off-tank doesn't have the gear and kept dying. On one attempt, after Attumen mounted Midnight, I screwed up by hitting him before the tank got agro. He turned around and pretty much one-shotted me. ;-) Lesson learned.

I scored Grips of Deftness, but haven't worn them because my Fel Leather Gloves with gems are better. The group learned a lot on this first run and it helped on our second run the following week.

Last Friday we ended up pickin' up a fill-in warrior off-tank since our was unavailable. This really helped. We downed Attumen pretty easily, although I ended up dead for most of the fight. :-( I'm not even sure what hit me...

We moved on to Moroes and tried him 5 or 6 times. On our 5th attempt, the group got him down to 1% before wiping. The 6th ended up as a wipe. Again, we learned a lot from this run.

Our Saturday night run started out looking for a damn healer again. We found a pick-up healer, but he bailed on us after the 3rd Moroes attempt. Asshole. :-\ Jesus...it's not like every single group that goes into Kara kicks ass from the start. Grrr...

Anyway, after a futile attempt to find a replacement, we decided to help a guildie (holy pally) run BM so she could join us this week. :-) During the BM run, I scored the Hourglass of the Unraveler. :-) :-) :-) hell yea! That thing freakin' rocks.

Hopefully this week goes better and we actually down Moroes and move on.

Kara, here I come!

After helping a guildie run Old Hillsbrad tonight (totally kicking ass along the way), we hit Black Morass with me, a pally tank, a pally healer, a shadow priest and a lock.

On our first attempt (yes, meaning it took more than once) I ended up pulling agro on the fourth portal that came up. I didn't realize how large the agro range was on the Rift Lords, but I learned pretty quickly. Even after vanishing and pulling out all the stops, the stinkin' dragon would NOT leave me alone and eventually killed me. The group managed to take care of that particular portal, but the 1st boss was already out and no one had time to rez me, so the group ended up taking the wipe.

Second attempt was better. We actually got to the final boss, but for some reason, the healer ended up pulling agro and was almost killed right off the bat. While he was busy healing himself, the tank got killed and we ended up wiping.

Attempts 3 and 4 were pretty much the same kind of thing. Always close, but never quite close enough.

Attempt 5 - the group changed slightly -- we lost one priest and the pally healer, but gained a mage and a holy priest. It was smooooothhh. Not a single death the entire run. :-)

Good stuff! I ran to Kara to finish the quest line and now I'm ready baby and I can't wait!

Buying my way to Exalted with The Aldor

Starting a couple weeks ago, i decided I was going to grind my way to exalted with The Aldor so I could replace my nasty main hand sword (mine had +15 Agility, +23 Stamina) with something better.

Grinding Marks of Sargeras and Fel Armaments sucks. It sucks bad. I think i'd rather be stuck fighting the Inciter than burning hour upon hour for extremely low drop-rate items. I farmed in all the best places, but it was still going to take way too long to get the rep I needed to get the sword. For what it's worth, I was only part way through honored, so I needed a ton of rep.

This is where my perpetually level 37 mage comes into play. BigSissy sits in Stormwind to post stuff from my rogue on the auction house or to purchase items for my rogue. Every now and then I take him out into the world to quest, but he soon returns after getting his cloth-covered ass kicked. In fact, he's only about 9,000 XP from level 38.

As luck would have it, he had about 500 gold on him so I used him to buy Marks and Fel Armaments from the AH when the prices were low enough. On my server, stacks of Marks start at around 10 gold and Fel Armaments typically run around 17 gold each. Whenever I saw Marks or Armaments lower than those prices, I'd scoop them up and send them along to my rogue. During this time, I was also using my rogue to farm those same items in both Shadowmoon Valley and Netherstorm. Within a couple of days I had worked my way up to revered and within a few more days had gotten myself within a few thousand rep of being exalted. All in all, I think I spent around 500-600 gold, but I saved a ton of time. It was also nice in that most of that gold came from auctions of leather, metal bars and the occasional arcane tome or green/blue item.

Once I got within a few thousand rep, I figured I'd stop buying the armaments and marks and complete some Aldor-related quests. Unfortunately, most of the quests are group quests and I HATE pick-up groups. I did get some help from a friend, but finally bought the last few marks needed to take me over the top and into exalted!

So, after dropping 186 gold with the Aldor quartermaster, I'm now packing Vindicators Brand. As lame as it is, I'm still packing a green OH sword. Everything I've read says the best OH sword is Latro's, but I doubt I'll be getting that anytime soon. My current plan is to get my new MH sword enchanted with Mongoose as soon as I find out what the mats are.

I can't wait to get out and lay some smack down. :-)

Good SL (and Shattered Halls) run

Well, tonight I hopped on my rogue and before I knew it some guildies invited me on another SL run. The group consisted of a prot warrior, a resto druid, a shadow priest, a mage and me. We ripped through the first couple of rooms (again) and burned down the first boss with no problems.

Once again we ran into issues with Blackheart the Inciter and wiped a couple times. This time it was due to the druid only being level 68 and not having very good armor (mostly cloth items). After the second wipe the warrior and druid had to leave (husband and wife) so we brought in another druid to tank for us and another priest to handle healing. this time we cruised right through Blackheart and then had NO issues at all with Vorpil. Murmur was pretty easy except he hit me with Murmur's touch about 5 times during the fight. :-\

I did win the roll for the Wrathfire Hand-Cannon that drops off Vorpil. Not sure that I'll ever use it, but since noone could DE, we all greeded and I won.

Ater totally kicking ass with this new group we all decided to hit another instance. ths time it was The Shattered Halls. This was my first time in this instance and I thought it was pretty damn fun.

We absolutely kicked ass all the way to the final boss. The pace was quick and I think only our mage died once or twice. I scored the Cloak of Malice off the second boss. :-) mmm....good stuff.

Unfortunately we had a hell of a time controlling the adds on the final boss and ended up quitting after the second wipe. bummer.

Bad SL run

There's a reason I hate pick up groups (pugs), so I always try to run instances with good friends or guild mates. Of course, there are times when even a group of guildies perform as well as a pug and a recent Shadow Labs run proved that.

I dislike SL for several reasons, but the foremost is that fear absolutely, positively pisses me off. I get angry when I get feared. I get even angrier when I get feared multiple times in a single fight. It'd be one thing if the PVP trinket was on a 1 or 2 minute cooldown, but at 5 minutes, it's pretty damn pointless in a place like Shadow Labs. BTW, another reason I hate the instance is the fact that I've never been with a group that's cleared it. I know...that's pitiful...after all, it's not like it's a super-tough instance, but that's neither here nor there. ;-)

Anyway, I was playing an alt last night when I got a whisper from Tiff on her priest alt (pretty much her main now since she can't get her warlock into Kara) asking if I wanted to run an instance. Without getting any details I said "sure". The group itself was filled with people I've played with and they all know what they're doing. We had 2 priests, a mage, me and a pally. The first couple of rooms were cleared without incident, although we did wipe once on the first boss. I can do no DPS if I'm fuckin' feared all over the goddamn place. :-\

The mobs before the second boss were cleared pretty easily, although the pally running the show absolutely refused to take advantage of any freakin' crowd control. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Ok, I can see not using a sap...fine. It is a relatively risky proposition and once the mob is up, they can't be re-sapped. Fine. But if you have a mage (which we did), then use the damn sheep! I am of the opinion that the fewer mobs you have to fight at any given time, the smoother things will go. Ugh. To be honest, I did get a couple of saps in and they did help. :-)

Ok, if the second boss was a real person, he'd be a f***in' c**ksmoking piece of sh*t. ;-) GRRR...his constant "let's have some fun / incite chaos" bullshit causes me to go into fits of cursing. :-) The biggest problem in this fight is that the boss wipes agro so much of the time was spent chasing after the stupid boss and maybe getting one or two hits in before we were all hacking away at each other. More than once I ended up killing a healer or the mage during his "fun". Ugh. Not cool. I will say though that since were all in vent, we had a fun time with healers yelling (pleading) "don't kill me!" and me responding "there's not much I can do about it" and my toon got the killing blow in.

Yea, so we wiped a good 5 times trying to take this boss down. Everytime the tank and I got into a good position (backs against the wall so we wouldn't get knocked back too far and take a bunch of damage), the tank lost agro. Once again...ugh. It was a very disappointing run.
I will say though that we did get him down to like single digit % in health, but we just couldn't sustain the fight for the last few seconds we needed. By the time I left, my durability was at 2%. Thank God I don't have any epic gear because my repair cost with my blues was just a touch under 10 gold.

Since we were only there for reputation, it was no huge deal, but still...it's frustrating to go into an instance and get totally owned.

Progression

Geesh, in the very short time I've been back with BBF, I've gotten my last 2 key frags and run Old Hillsbrad. :-) Of course, guild drama is still there, but I've been staying as far away from it all as I can.

Hopefully I'll be doing a Black Morass run soon so I can be Kara-attuned, but everyone I've talked to says BM sucks ass so I'm not sure when it'll happen.

BBF isn't the most well-geared guild, so it may not be that big of a deal, but I'm happy to say I was #2 in damage (after a fire mage) during our short Steam Vaults run and #1 during our Old Hillsbrad run.

I re-spec'd before taking my vacation from the game and am pretty happy being a combat rogue, but I do miss some of the talents in the subtlety tree.

Back in the game

After taking close to two months off from playing, I renewed my account last night. I also rejoined BBF.

After SI disintegrated a few months back, a group of fomer SI guildies tried to keep things going, and they've actually had quite a bit of success in Kara, but it never felt like a guild for me. These guys, while all really cool, were focused on end-game stuff and not really helping others (unless it was killing horde).

So, before I left the game for my break, I was pretty damn bored. All I'd do when I played was farm for gold and rep. That gets pretty boring after awhile. Anyway, at the end of June, beginning of July, I went to visit a friend in Chicago and didn't really even think about playing until just recently.

I've kept in touch with Tiff and finally told her that when i started playing again, i'd join BBF (she's now a guild officer). So, after renewing last night and jumping in-game, she invited me. it was kinda strange. I wasn't sure how people would react to me coming back. I was happily surprised at the reception I got and so far, don't regret my decision to re-join.

I played for a couple hours last night. Almost all of that time was spent helping Tiff run some quests on her "new" toon -- a lvl 69 priest. God, I can remember helping her when she was in the 20s and 30s on that toon. At one point, we had some horde trouble, and after a quick call for help in vent, about 5 other BBF members showed (bringing our total to 8) and we laid waste to the horde. ;-) Good times.

Having fun

While I'm still guildless, I've been having fun lately. Besides the frequent trips to STV or Southshore to gank lowbies, I've been running a lot of the new quests and trying to gain rep and gold. A couple days ago, one of my friends decided to level his tailoring and needed some rugged leather so we both hopped over to Winterspring to kill yetis. Lots of fun until some dumbass 60 hunter decided to send his pet after me. :-

Yea...he died pretty quickly. Not sure WTF he was thinking. ;-) I think he was made because I "stole" one of his yetis.

Saturday night I played way too long (started at 9p and ended at 4:30a). Tiff asked me to join a BBF run to Shadow Labs...it was lots of fun, but no good rogue gear dropped and we had a lot of trouble on the final boss. I do have to say...the second boss sucks...sucks bad. Really bad. I did achieve my goal of that run by getting the first key frag for Kara (yea. finally).

I'm kicking around the idea of a re-spec, especially if I'm gonna be running more instances, but haven't done it yet. Tiff really wants me to re-join BBF and after the run I told her I'd talk to the GM when he gets back from vacation.

70 is just as boring as 60 was

Pre-BC, I described level 60 as the most boring experience. Well, now that I'm 70, I'm saying the same thing. Since the disintegration of SI, my time is spent either grinding for gold (which, BTW, is MUCH easier with a flying mount), ganking lowbie horde or playing an alt.

Granted, I enjoy playing one of my many alts, but I have to say I'm getting pretty fired up about playing a warlock. Geesh, even at level 12, I can still kick ass. ;-)

My old guild, BBF, continues to let me know the door is open if I want to come back. The fact is, I'm still hanging out with SI, mainly because I'm not playing that much and I'm still truly not sure I could go back. My buddy Trez joined up with a new guild, but that's only because he has both a prot-spec'd 70 warrior and a 70 priest that he's probably already re-spec'd to holy.

They said I could come along to, but that was just a pity invite. ;-) I turned them down because the guild master is a rogue, so that pretty much means I'd be screwed on instance runs, especially the big K.

Ding! Level 70!

Well, it didn't go quite as expected, but yesterday afternoon around 5pm, I finally hit level 70!



I was on my way to turn in a quest (which would have taken me over the edge), but decided I wanted to be fighting when I leveled (it'd make a much better screenshot than me standing at an NPC) Anyway, so I stealthed and was within a second of hitting the elemental when I leveled due to discovering a new area! D'oh! So much for my action shot.

My pockets were overflowing with about 1950 gold, so I immediately dropped 900 of it for flying mount.

69!

I just dinged 69 about 5 minutes ago. Only another 778k XP to get to 70. The cool thing is that I have over 1600 gold so as soon as I hit 70, I'll have my flying mount!

Anyway, here's my toon from the armory.

Regarding the SI drama, there's still a few people sticking around. I'm kinda hoping it'll keep going because I do like the people, and to be honest, I hate the idea of being guildless, mainly because that means 10 freakin' random guild invites per day until I join another one.

The guild master of BBF said I could come back. :-) I'll have to really, really think about that one before I decide. I didn't exactly leave on the best terms, but to be honest, maybe it would be different as a normal player and not as an officer. That's one of the great things I've enjoyed about being in SI -- I've managed to stay away from the drama...

And it's over

Nope...I haven't hit 70 yet, although I am close.

Tonight the guildmaster of Spanish Inquisition told us all that he was done playing WoW. He's not taking a break -- he's done. I totally understand his reasons....there's more to life than WoW and him and his wife want to spend time doing other things.

What sucks is that SI was a great guild and I really enjoyed the people in it. Unfortunately, with him leaving, the guild has pretty much disintegrated. It looks like I'll be guildless again. :-(

There is some talk about joining another guild that some former SI people are in, but I'm just not sure if it's gonna be worth it. My play time has slowly gone down to an hour ever couple of days, if that and I really hate to commit to a guild and then not be available when they need someone.

A long road to 68

Wow, 19 days later I hit level 68. :-)

Tiff helped me with some quests in Netherstorm earlier today and that put me over the top. After leveling I hit Stormwind to train....god, it's sooo strange going back there. I sure wish they'd put some trainers in the Outland. :-) Anyway, 20g later, I headed back to the Outland to quest some more.

I'm hoping to start running some more instances with SI soon.

Let's hope I can hit 69 sooner than 19 days.

Finally hit 67

Yea...it's been weeks since my last post and I'm only 67 (literally just hit 67 tonight).

Been working way too much and playing way too little.

My friends Tiff and Squig helped me tonight and I really appreciate it. They both hit 70 yesterday, so a big congrats goes out to both of them.I may hit 70 this year. :-)

Leveling

Well, I hit 63 sometime last week and after another 8 hours of playing, I hit 64 (that was yesterday). Most of that was solo'ing the quests, but I did have some help for a couple quests. The gear keeps getting better and better, although having to drop over 30 gold for training kinda sucked.

A few guys in my guild hit 70 over the last few days. A few more weeks and I hope to be there as well. I've kept my play time down to one-two hours most days of the week, but it all depends on what else I have going on.

The Burning Crusade (part 3 of many)

It's been a couple weeks and I'm only at level 62, but I've cut back on my playing time. The new guild and the game are fun, but I've been doing some other stuff.

Anyway, I was playing a couple nights ago over in Terrorkar Forest. I think I was killing some stupid giant moth or something when I see this level 68 horde warrior walk past me. I continued to fight, but repositioned the camera so I could see him. GRRR...I was literally within a second or two of hitting my vanish when this jackass charged me. GRRRR....it wouldn't have pissed me off so much if I hadn't been down to...oh I don't know...20% health maybe. He stunned me and then got a rend down which meant I had no way to escape. I couldn't vanish so I got some shots in, but yea....68 > 62 so he kicked my ass.

One of my guildies was saying he was out questing when some level 70 hunter came swooping down on his flying mount, dismounted and then shot him "in the face". :-) The way he described it was funny as hell.

I'm hoping to hit 63 sometime this week, but we'll see how it goes.

Not letting WoW get the better of me - revisited

As I've said in previous posts, I'm doing my hardest to keep a level head about the game and the time I spend in it. I'm not worried that 3 of the 4 that left BBF with me are now at level 62 (almost to 63) and I'm only 61. I'm not worried that my buddy Squig (another rogue) outgears me or that his wife Tiff (warlock) consistently outperforms me in damage because in the end, it really doesn't matter. We're all having fun and that's all that counts.

I also mentioned that I went to a tech conference last week. As luck would have it, I had an interview while I was there and it looks like I may be scoring a nice sub-contracting gig. If I do, that means my WoW time will be reduced even more, but that's ok. :-)

Guilds

Things have changed for me in the past week. Not only did I (and several others) leave our guild (Baptized by Fire), we ended up joining another, more laid-back guild.

My reasons for leaving Baptized by Fire centered around the higher level clan, not anyone that was actually in the guild. I was tired of people that didn't even play WoW try to set policy within our game. I was tired of the "good ol' boy" network they had. When we left BBF this past Tuesday, we all said, "all we want to do is have fun". We were fully prepared to either remain guildless OR start a small guild with just a few close friends.

Sometime last year, Baptized by Fire started running Molten Core with a guild called "Spanish Inquisition". The SI people are great! Not only are they really good at playing, but they're a really close-knit group that really just wants to have fun. Anyway, pre-expansion, but after Christmas, we started running PVP battlegrounds with them.

When we left BBF, some of their members started asking us to join them. Originally, when the 4 of us discussed it, we decided to create our own guild, mainly because we figured we'd be leaving BBF "drama" only to find SI "drama". Well, as the expansion came out, we (the 4 of us that left BBF) kept running with SI to do quests, etc. Finally, there came a point when the 4 of us decided to give SI a shot. They matched our goals, the people are great and there isn't some higher level organization watching us.

I'm relieved to NOT be a guild officer anymore. Even though it's "just a game", being a guild officer is still tough. I don't have that stress anymore. What I have is a supportive guild, my old friends and a great group of new ones. Yea, there was/is some bad blood between those of us that left and the "clan", but oh well. As they've put it, we "weren't really BBF'ers anyway". :-\

Will SI be my last guild in WoW? Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless, I'll come out of SI with some great friends.

The Burning Crusade (part 2 of many)

Being the impatient person that I am, I ended up running out last Tuesday to buy The Burning Crusade even though I had one showing up via UPS the following day.

In the last week, I haven't really played all that much, but did manage to get to level 61 with the help of some friends.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the expansion, except I don't think Blizzard was prepared for the number of people that would swarm to a particular area in the Outland. The lag was really, really, really bad for the first couple of days. You'd have 50 alliance and 50 horde all vying for the same mobs. Luckily the respawn rate was really fast (almost too fast in some cases), but sometimes you'd have small alliance vs. horde fights pop up.

All in all, the ganking didn't really start until people started hitting 62+. :-\

I've been doing quests in Hellfire Peninsula and the marsh area. Pretty cool stuff. I've upgraded much of my Tier 0 gear with really kick ass green items.

The Burning Crusade (part 1 of many)

I received notification from Amazon that my copy of The Burning Crusade shipped and will be here on the 17th. Unlike many of my friends and guild-mates, I decided NOT to run out to the store at midnight tonight (Monday) and pick up a copy.

While I'm really looking forward to playing some new content, I've got other things to worry about besides the game this week. Hell, I know some of my guild-mates are actually taking Tuesday off from work so they can play! Seems kinda crazy to me, but as I've said before....we're all adults, so they've gotta decide what's right for them. :-)

One decision some of us have already made is to create a new toon on the alliance side: shaman. Shaman, as I've mentioned in a previous post, are one of the most overpowered Horde classes, so it'll be nice to have on. Of course, the Horde are getting Paladin's, but whatever. Pallies are nice, but they are the true "jack of all trades, master of none".

As a quick aside, I'm headed out of town starting Wednesday afternoon and won't be back until Friday night / Saturday morning. My play time will be pretty limited (which is another reason I'm not in a big yank to run out at midnight) and I'm not even sure I'll have BC before I leave.

Not letting WoW get the better of me.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I never thought I'd like WoW. After all, I was a huge fan of first person shooters like Doom, Unreal Tournament, Half Life and Halo. I liked nothing more than to blast away at stuff and not really have to think about it.

Over the past year of playing WoW I've gone through several stages of game play. The first, which lasted the longest, was spent exploring and figuring out how to play, where to go and what to do. I didn't really have anyone guiding me -- I just played the way I thought I should play. I didn't care about gear, I didn't care about stats -- I just played.

Once I realized what better gear and better stats meant, I entered the second phase - gear whore. ;-) I was all about finding / buying the best gear I could get. I was getting much better at the game play and wanted to crush whatever was in my way. I dreamed about the game. All I wanted to do was play. It got so bad at one point that I actually had my wife lock down my account using the parental controls found on the Blizzard website. She had it locked down to where I could only play at certain times during the day (and for pretty short periods of time too).

Since I was essentially locked out of the game, I had to do other stuff. In the whole scheme of things, this was definitely a good thing, but at the point I was addicted and I knew it. As silly as it sounds, but the withdrawals were a bitch. I would find myself surfing WoW websites and doing "WoW" stuff when not playing.

After a few weeks, I got over it and entered another stage; playing just to have fun. I stopped worrying about the game so much. I stopped dreaming about it. I played a little bit here and there, but stopped putting in the hours I had been. Granted, I'll occassionally pull the 8-hour session, but that doesn't happen very often anymore.

I think I'm transitioning to another stage now. With all the drama in the guild (more about that later), I find myself wanting to play less. I also have a tough time with how much time people in the guild play. Yea, one guy is retired and he plays 14-16 hours a day. Whatever. If that's how he wants to spend his retirement, so be it. :-) What I struggle with is hearing other people talk about how they dream about the game and the game is all they look forward to (even though they're married and have kids).

I know everyone makes their own choices, but I know the struggle I had with the game and I see other people going through the same stuff. We're all adults, so I don't really feel like I can tell them they need to stop. The most I've said is, "dude, go outside and take a nice, deep breath of fresh air. it's just a game." ;-) They'll have to come to the realization themselves that the game is taking over and do something about it.

I doubt I'll give it up anytime soon, but I've got other things I want/need to do. I have a struggling consulting business that really needs some focus and I have a great family that needs / wants a dad and husband, not a level 60 human rogue with the best gear and an epic mount. :-)

World PVP - the worst shaman on Stormscale

A few nights ago, I was helping a couple of guildies run through some quests in the Arathi Highlands. Specifically, they needed to kill a couple of bosses in Stromgarde Keep.

I logged onto my 60 rogue and met them outside of the keep. We cleared the path and went into the keep. Just as we were about to kill the two bosses (we had our backs to the wall and I was explaining to them what I was going to do), 3 horde came crashing into the room and "stole" the kills.

Needless to say I was not happy. As luck would have it, it was only a 60 shaman, a 38 shaman and a 38 priest. I had a couple of mid-30s with me (a lock and a rogue). While the 60 shaman was killing the bosses, I snuck up behind him (I was stealthed before they came into the room) and laid the smack down. He went down like a cheap whore. :-D We then proceeded to kill the other two.

After the bosses respawned, we killed them. Instead of hearthing out, we decided to go back outside to see what was there. The horde had called in some of their buddies because we now had 2 level 60 shaman (note: shaman are among the most overpowered classes in the game. They are not to be taken lightly because, for the most part, they'll tear apart anyone that gets in their way), a 38 shaman, a 38 priest and maybe one other.

By this time, one of our other locks (high 50s) joined us. When I saw we were up against 2 level 60 shaman, I said, "I'm outta here", but before I could leave, the 50'ish lock that showed up (Areso) said that we could take them.

I was skeptical, but decided to stay. Let me just say that the shaman must have been the worst on the server because I was able to kill both of them with very little help. The typical encounter with a shaman is: DoT, DoT, Deathcoil, dead or something close to that. :-) These guys truly sucked. They didn't put up an DoTs (death over time -- spells that will kill you over a period of time), they didn't try to heal themselves or anything else you'd expect from a shaman.

After wiping out their group, we stuck around for a few. They res'd and started putting up totems (essentially, totems give shaman and the groups they're in special "buffs" or other nastiness). We waited for the totems to go down and as soon as they did, we hit them.

So, not only did we find the worst shaman on the server, they came back for more! :-D

Good times. The only regret I have is that I can't recall the names of the shaman we killed. :-(

When is a guild not just a guild?

When is a guild not just a guild? When they belong to a larger gaming "clan". Baptized by Fire (the WoW guild) is part of the "PC division" of the Baptizedby Fire gaming clan. Basically, the clan provides servers and a supportinfrastructure for other types of games (mostly war-type games) such asBattlefield 2, Renegade, etc. The people that play those games don't pay amonthly fee to the gaming company like WoW players do. Instead, they buy thegame and then the "clan" pays for servers on which they play.

First, let me say that I have a huge amount of respect for the men and womenwho have served and are currently serving our country and who have rightfullyearned their ranks and awards.

The clan has a military-like structure, which to be totally honest, really bugsme. Each person in the clan is given a "military rank". Based on what you do,you may also be given medals. The "wannabe" bullshit the clan forces on usreally irritates me. Unfortunately, there's not much I can do about it. Ibelieve it's truly disrespectful to the brave men and women who put themselvesin harms way every day.

Since day 1 of my guild membership, I have questioned our relationship with theclan. Nothing the clan does really benefits our guild. The clan members thatDON'T play WoW tend to butt into our business a lot and they try to force theirways on us. For example, they pretty much demand that we assign one of ourmembers from the guild to be the "morale" officer. Lame. Anyone that spends anytime in our guild chat or guild vent knows that morale is NOT an issue. They also expect us to do "roll call" - this is a bi-monthly even in which weare supposed to indicate which games we're playing. Again, Lame.

The clan also thinks they can control what we do within WoW. WTF-ever. Our guild master was actually told to punish me (by the clan leadership) becauseI actually posted in our WoW forum how silly I think the clan is.
We've talked about splitting from the clan, but as it turns out, the guildmaster would rather bring in as many clan members into WoW as he can.

I'm now at the point where the interference from the clan is making me notwant to play in the guild. Some of my friends who have been in larger guildshave told me that guild drama is the norm, not the exception. Unfortunately,I'm starting to see this.

All I want to do is play the game and have fun.

Belonging to a guild

I pretty much soloed levels 1-60. Yea, I found the occasional pick-up-group (pug) and even tried a couple of guilds. The guilds always disintegrated within a day or two, so I had convinced myself that I would live out my time in WoW as a solo player.

Part of being a non-guilded player is the constant barrage of blind invites into guilds and the occasional whisper asking to join. One day in September 2006, I was coming out of the bank in Stormwind (one of the major Alliance cities) when someone named ItchyCoyote whispered me asking why I wasn't in a guild. I humored him and told him that my experiences with guilds was less than impressive and that I was probably going to stay a solo player.

After chatting for a few minutes, he invited me onto their ventrilo server (a way to do voice communication while in-game) to talk. I was hesitant, but decided to jump in to see what the deal was. We talked for a few minutes and he said (in a nutshell): give us a try. If you don't like how things are going after a couple weeks, you can leave. After mulling it over for a few minutes, I decided to join the guild named Baptized by Fire.

Over the course of a couple months, I realized what I had been missing out on during my solo play. I was finally getting into higher end instances / dungeons and completing some quests that required more than 1 person. My gear slowly went from all green to all blue to now some a mix of purple and blue (note: the color indicates "quality" - grey = worst, white = blah, green = better, blue = even better, purple = best).

After my probation period (during the first 5 weeks, they can kick you out with no reason given), I was offered an officer position within the guild. I enjoy being an officer, but sometimes people forget that it's just a game and get pissy about stuff. I'll blog about the "drama" more in future posts.

While we have about 90 in the guild, there are probably 5-6 of us that get on vent every night and play together. It's a lot of fun to get to know people that share my interest in WoW and I have definitely made some friends.

Some stuff about me

Welcome to my blog about The World of Warcraft!

I've been playing WoW for just over a year. I started playing after a couple of my friends convinced me to try the 10-day trial of World of Warcraft. At the time, I was 100% into first person shooter games like Halo, Half-Life, UT, etc. I told myself there was no way I was going to continue past the 10-day trial.

Here I am, just over a year later. I have my main character (human rogue) to level 60 and some alts (35 human mage, 31 dwarf hunter, 20 elf warrior).

In September, I joined a guild and am having a ton of fun playing. I'm really looking forward to The Burning Crusade.

I play on the Stormscale realm which has given me the opportunity to experience some decent world PVP (I love killin' horde).

Anyway, I definitely have somethings to say related to my experiences in a guild setting as well as some silly stories to tell.