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.

It’s only the beginning of the holiday season and I am already so burned out. This might have to do with the thirty some people that crammed into my very small place for thanksgiving. After that whole ordeal, I find myself in a motivational slump.

Which is terrible timing (learned my lesson, don’t invite 30 over and feed them!) It’s a busy time. Family obligations, various fairs to attend, and massive amounts of game releases make for very little extra downtime.

And then a new WoW patch was released. And Word of Warcraft is so easy; my husband plays, my characters are already established, our guild merged with another small one so more people are playing. It requires so little thinking and motivation from me, I just piggy back onto the husband’s schedule.

Turns out that I now find myself raiding three nights a week and gearing up two characters. (WoW took advantage of me in my moment of weakness!) Bit more then I was aiming for, but then I should know better. WoW has always sucked me in whole; I’m not so good at applying the whole ‘in moderation’ virtue to WoW.

But I have to say that the 4.3 Patch has made the game much more fun. By that I mean progression is possible, without agonizing grinding or learning curves.

Plus the new tier 13 Warlock set bonuses are awesome! This is probably the first time ever that I have actively wanted to complete a set bonus. Doomguard more often? Yes please!! No more Shard fussing? Finally!

~sigh~ World of Warcraft is like a pit of Quick Sand. Seems like I’m stuck here for a while and the more I struggle the worse it will be. Portal 2 will just have to wait a bit longer. Oh well.

Last night I finally made 85 with my hunter (in World of Warcraft), which means I now have three characters at max level.
(Yes, lots of my spare time has been taken up with leveling. That and reading, as I am desperately trying to read my ten books for this month. Darn that needing to sleep. ~sigh~ Just means my post count takes a hit in the junk.)

Actually having three characters at max level is rather unusual for me. I’m not a poly-character sort of person. But Cataclysm has been so darn frustrating I have found myself with nothing else to do. Its gotten so bad I even broke down and started doing achievements!! ~shudder~

Well Patch 4.1 finally came out this week, which was supposed to be the Cataclysm revamp, and hopefully bring WoW back to resembling its previous Lich King incarnation a bit more. This has been the big reason I have held off reviewing Cataclysm, but its looking like the changes were not drastic enough to really effect the game much. Ah well.

Guess I will go on leveling characters and getting achievements. I do have two accounts, which leaves me lots of room for leveling characters. =D

I’m quite pleased with my 124 books read last year. Its certainly well beyond my intended one hundred. /flex

124 books translates into 46,346 pages (give or take a few hundred for user error). Now that is an impressive number!

So this year, instead of going for books read, my goal will be to read 50,000 pages. I will still be doing my challenges and reading roughly ten-ish books a month (I will actually be running quite a few different challenges over at Goodreads.com) but I will refrain from boring you all by posting about them. =P

The idea came to me last year after I had finished a monster book worth 850+ pages. It just felt so unfair that this huge volume only counted as a single entry.

This year size WILL matter. I can aim for meaty books and not feel like I’m limiting myself because each page will count!

So the latest World of Warcraft patch (4.01) went live yesterday. After two hours of patch downloading and two hours of patch installing and finishing with another hour of post patch patching, I was finally able to get into the game! This is what greeted me:

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The latest patch for World of Warcraft (patch 3.3) was recently released, featuring a few new dungeons and of course lots more gear to get.

Being the good little WoW hamster that I am, I hopped onto the gear and reputation grinding mill as soon as I possibly could. And most other times I find myself happily chasing that tantalizing carrot dangling ever so close to my nose, yet with this latest patch it seems like I am running through mud.

Adding in the badge system for purchasing gear and items was a brilliant move that opened up gear to a much larger group of people. With the 3.3 patch, new gear was added and along with that they added new badges to purchase the higher level gear. Only they made the new Frost badges almost impossible to get, unless of course you are raiding.

Even for those raiders out there, there is only one new raiding dungeon that was added. The only place that drops frost badges! To top it all off, they didn’t even finish the dungeon! Its still missing quite a few bosses.

/sigh

So I lumber through the mud, though its wearing on my patience. But I do understand why the decided to take this route. This is the last new content before the next big expansion and frankly its not much. How this is going to last for the next 8 months to a year until Cataclysm, I dont know.

I haven’t been playing World of Warcraft much of late.

Two weeks ago a brand new patch was released. It boasted a huge amount of new content and it completely broke the game. Finally, two weeks after its release, I am starting to find my WoW legs again.

The new features were many, like a new high end raiding dungeon (that is way too hard) and a new tournament system that tests feats of skill (like jousting). But the one that got me was the option to have two sets of talents.

“Players level 40 and higher will now be able to visit their trainer to pay a one-time fee and access the dual talent specialization feature.” 3.1.0 patch notes.

It’s not clear what I was thinking as I plunked down a thousand gold to purchase this new feature. I can only attribute it to being blinded by the Shiny New factor. Because if I had for just one second stopped and really thought about what I was getting into, I am sure that I could have saved myself lots of wasted gold and two weeks of agony.

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In a previous post I had mentioned getting my warlock to level sixty by this past weekend. It was an ambitious goal to set, but great motivation to get leveling. Never the less we didn’t quite make it. My warlock made 53.5, which is actually pretty good, but still leaves me quite a ways off from eighty. Go go level sixty this weekend!!

It is possible that the leveling could have gone a bit faster if I hadn’t waited so long to get talents. Talent choice are challenging for me to say the least.

Once my warlock made level fifty my husband was so appalled that I hadn’t spent any talent points that he took matters into his own hands. Knowing very little about warlocks, he did some minor research at Elitist Jerks and found a simple leveling build, then forced me to stop leveling and oversaw the tedious talent selection process with indignant single-mindedness.

The kicker? Well the new patch (3.1) for World of Warcraft just came out today and all the talent points for everyone are being refunded. I am cursed!

<3

Token Female Gamer