Token Female Gamer

I didn’t know I had any firsts left in World of Warcraft. Then again I was pretty sure I was done raiding, so what the hell do I know. =P

Yup, for the first time ever, my warlock has her four piece tier set bonus. What makes this even more amazing is that it’s the current highest gear level. That’s right, tier 13.

The highest gear was only ever available to high end raiding groups, this means militaristic 25-40 people, methodically dying week after week, until the gear and learning curve were sufficient. Then it’s just grinding through the raid over and over. Sounds fun right?

Most like torture really. Loot hasn’t been much of a motivator to participate in such masochism, since the days of EverQuest anyway. And so I have forgone set piece completion in favor of sanity.

But with the latest patch, Looking for Raid (LFR) was added to the game. This is a cross server collection of 25 people, very much like the looking for group system. What makes this really work is that they dumbed down the encounters to such an extent that hardly any coordination is required and completing the event takes very little time.

So lots of success to be had in LFR, high end gear is finally available to all a wider range of players. But like all LF experiences you still have to deal with 24 other random people, replete with ninja looting, complaining, afk-ing, quitting, failing, and so forth.

Thankfully my warlock now has her 4 piece tier bonus, so I never have to LFR with her again. Sadly my druid isn’t quite as lucky.

SWTOR was released yesterday. The official ‘buy it in the store’ version; the beta has been floating around a while now. Never had the time to play it in beta, even though I got a few invites.

A new MMORG always has me hesitating. It’s a big commitment and most of them are just so disappointing, its better to set expectations low to avoid total heartbreak. But the husband wanted to try it, so I went out and picked up two copies yesterday.

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Ugh, I’ve come down with my seasonal cold and its sucky. Spent most of yesterday in bed, not so much sleeping as thrashing about trying desperately to sleep. Eventually I took some Tylenol, which did the trick.

I was trying to rest up for the raid I had that evening. Now that I’m back at my WoW job, there are expectations that I show. So I tried. I really tried.

This is what I learned. World of Warcraft is really hard when sick. Couldn’t concentrate on dpsing with spots in my vision and an inability to remain upright. Thankfully a friend took over for me and I returned to bed. But hey I tried.

Feeling somewhat better today (yaaay sleeping for 12 hours), but there is another raid tonight. Will just have to see how I manage that one. Oooh and I’m healing at tonights raid. Should be interesting.

So the new World of Warcraft expansion was announced at Blizz Con this past weekend. Titled Mists of Pandaria, it features a brand new race. The panda, sorry, Pandarians (yup, walking talking Pandas!)

Had to be a joke! After the april fools joke that featured the large cuddly bears, Blizzard swore up and down that Panadarians would never be a playable race in World of Warcraft. Which makes me think they are seriously running out of ideas.

The whole story even reads like a joke. And yet April is still five months away.

So not a joke, just another dubious design choice from the WoW team. It’s certainly not a confidance building announcement for me. My WoW time has already dwindled to almost nothing.

Though I will try the new Panda race and give the new Monk class a whirl, its going to have to be pretty spectacularly fabulous to keep me playing. And it might be. I do have a small amount of eternal hope left.

Final judgment will be reserved for after release. Until then I will continue to avoid Cataclysm as much as possible. =)

One of my goals for our move was to sift through all of our stuff, pair down or consolodate what we had. A huge part was sorting through all of our various games, a much needed process.

It turns out that our long standing addiction to MMOGs has resulted in a stack of game CDs to rival the Eiffel Tower. Okay, I exaggerate a bit, but it was quite shocking to find so many completely useless CDs. (EverQuest had by far the most!)

Just throwing them away seems extremely wasteful, but what does one do with these old CDs???

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This is something that has been circulating in some of the WoW Blogs I read occasionally. Even though I don’t consider this a World of Warcraft Blog (though it could easily become one!) I thought it might be a good way to pay my respects to WoW.

And respect it deserves. World of Warcraft: The Lich King expansion has probably been my favorite game of the year (2009). I know, it was actually released in 2008, but I played so much of the game this year, I think it fully qualifies. =)

I’m pretty sure that I played WoW more this year then I slept. And so I award WoW the “Better than Sleep” award. =)

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Aion seems to be thriving, the servers are at decent concurrency levels, there aren’t overwhelming server problems, and most players seem genuinely happy with the game. China can’t add servers fast enough and North American and European sales have almost reached a million.

Really it appears that the Aion launch (in North America) was not only successful but also quite smooth. Not something very many MMORPGs can boast. (To be fair, it was also not as large of a lunch as some previous games have been, plus they launched in Korea and China before they did here. Clearly that gave them an excellent opportunity to work out some kinks.)

And though I may be finished with Aion, I’m extremely glad I tried it. Much of my playtime was quite enjoyable. It just turned out to not be for me, which is fine. No game can appease everyone’s needs.

So I’m closing out the Aion book with a proper review. =)

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Aion is a newly released MMO where all the characters are angels, not that they call them that, but the world is populated with beings that can fly. From what I have read, flying is the thing to set this MMO apart, flying around the world, and even more importantly, flying combat.

Since at our house we like to try out many of the new MMOs that pop up, we couldn’t miss this one. And since I wanted to share, writing a diary of my daily Aion activities seemed the best option.

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…Finding them.

Once resigned to the fact that PUGs are necessary and need to be suffered, finding them becomes the challenge.

Sadly in World of Warcraft the Looking for Group function is horrible. It is incredibly limited and hardly anyone seems to use it.

On my server the big alternative is the trade channel. This channel is only available while inside a major city. Since it is literally the only channel that gets used with any frequency everyone joins it, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Imagine every PUG experience rolled into one very overused channel. It’s awful and I avoid it as much as possible.

Overall finding PUGs is not that easy, especially if you are a damage (DPS) class, as they tend to be a dime a dozen. Either you sit in town reading through agonizing trade chat, or you join the severely limited in game Looking for Group feature.

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One of the suggestions that I got from my WoW raiding 101 write up was that I hadn’t mentioned anything about PUGs and how those should affect peoples class role choices.

PUG – Acronym for the phrase ‘pick up group’ – meaning to play as a team with random people.

Pick up groups are something most aspiring raiders will have to deal with, especially in World of Warcraft as it is today. Unless of course gifted with a very dedicated set of friends to play with, or part of a large guild that has enough daily active members to provide frequent group and raid buddies.

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