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.

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.

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.

Its about time for another little World of Warcraft update. And though I have been trying to keep WoW topics from overwhelming the site, I do still spend quite a lot of time playing it still and could go on and on. Thus I am consolidating all my latest news into one post.

Almost forgot to add that the Midsummer World Event began today which is the last world even that my warlock needs to complete the purple drake flying mount achievement.

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Its hard for me to believe that its already been over a month since my last WoW Rant. This whole moving my entire life from one house to the new one has taken up much more free time than I expected, but then most things take far longer than I expect. =P
That plus raiding four nights a week and my goal of reading one hundred books this year have left me bereft of almost all my spare time.

How do people do it??

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Okay, so maybe not all woes, but all it is certainly time for my weekly WoW ranting. (Hmm maybe I should do this weekly, might be cathartic.)

Somehow I have gone from being mildly interested in raiding, to raiding consistently four days a week. Since the new dungeon came out, Ice Crown Citadel (ICC), I got invited to be a guest (Hunter) on a regular ICC10, which turned into semi permanent. Then my little guild started running an ICC10 (Warlock does guild runs) and we got invited as a guild to join an ICC25, which has been taking two days a week so far.

The guest gig currently has the best success rate, as it’s a more consistent set of people. Our guild is too small so we always have to pick up a few extra random people (same with the 25man run). But overall the challenge is exciting and succeeding is invigorating.

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