Token Female Gamer

I’m finally feeling better, which means I’m semi productive in the real world instead of only being a computer game lump. Funny how most of my illnesses end up getting cured by playing lots of computer games, and maybe a little bit of sleep.

Since I missed it, happy belated May 4th (be with you), May 5th (Cinco de Mayo), and May Sith (revenge of). There, all caught up. =D

Game productivity, on the other hand, was high!

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April Fools Day online is great, because I get to observe without having to participate. Plus most of the online jokes tend to be funny and avoid being cruel. It also means that around mid march I start becoming suspicious of all news announcements that seems even a little strange.

Of course when April Fools Day does roll around and all the jokes are revealed, they inevitably only show up on the actual day and mysteriously vanish the next. I know this, yet still harbor a little bit of doubt, or maybe hope, each year.

Here are my top four “Let this be an April Fools joke” pieces of gaming news.

SimCity is most unplayable single player game of all time.

LucasArts gets Disneyed, I mean shut down.

Blizzard announces a card game….to play online. An online card game. Like Magic the gathering. Online. Still waiting for them to say this is a joke.

My World of Warcraft Warlock’s dps. Its a joke, sadly not relegated to April Fools Day only. Not news so much as QQ. >_<

As for ‘real’ April Fools, youTube was the clear 2013 winner. Best contest ever!

Any news items you think should have been an April Fools Joke or at least sounded like one?

It’s been pointed that I may have been a little overzealous in denigrating my current World of Pandacraft raiding experience. Thus I would like to clarify that I do quite enjoy raiding, really.

What I am struggling with the most, is that my character feels particularly ineffective right now and that my ability to change this is being hampered mainly by my unwillingness to run 400 daily quests a day. (Many gear upgrades no longer come from the actual raids, but are instead purchasable via valor and require faction.)

The recent 5.2 patch also managed to nerf Warlocks into the bottom ranks of dps. Though the change was to bring the very top tier of Warlocks more inline with other classes, the middling and lower level Warlocks (like me) end up bearing the brunt of the changes.

This also means that I have to go back to the drawing board and figure out a new talent and glyph spec. Mostly I rely on the internetz for this tedious task, but currently no one seems to agree on what is the best Warlock Affliction build.

I also get to dump mastery as a stat, which I have been gearing for, and am supposed to instead aim for haste. Knowing me and how slow I am to accumulate new gear, I might just be able to hit the haste cap in time for the next big Warlock nerf.

Maybe I should just level a monk. Viva la Raid!

It’s probably worth noting that my lack of writing motivation has been somewhat supported by my newest World of Warcraft endeavor, a Pandarian Monk. The original plan hadn’t really involved getting quite so attached, as I made her mainly to get the Pandarian only battle pet. (Gotta chatch them all!)

Yet I was having such a good time playing this new little monk character, that I just kept on going, even after securing the pet. Leveling her has been a breeze. Not only does she have 45% bonus experience from heirloom items (thanks to my higher level characters), but she also gets a unique to monk super buff that gives her 50% bonus experience for up to two hours. It’s the fastest leveling to date and I have to say that I am quite enjoying it!

As of this writing my monk is level 45 and though I have mostly run dungeons with her thus far, I have spent her 40s in Feralas hunting for the illusive Sprite Darter world drop pet. No luck thus far. I shall of course continue to use her leveling as an excuse to mine for pets. I even chose her professions for pet gain, jewelry and mining.

Anyway that’s a rather long-winded way of saying, monk leveling is fun, but I’m not giving up pet collecting or my warlock quite yet. Though I have to say that my poor warlock has been having the worst luck with loot upgrades. She keeps on getting only glove upgrades. Ah well.

I’m a big fan of pets, from D2’s Necromancer with his hoard of minions to Pokemon’s wide selection of tamed battle pets. Maybe it’s just that I like minions, but I often find games where I have the option of having pets/minions as helpers, preferable. This is opposed to the games like Nintendogs, where the entire game revolves around the pets. Not that I don’t like these games, they are after all very cute and lovable, but I definitely prefer to go on adventures with my pets.

Though I really enjoy the hoard of mindless minions like the Necromancer’s skeletons, or the imps in Overlord, or Pikman, they aren’t very permanent. In Overlord the entire point is to sacrifice your minions, which makes it rather difficult to get overly attached to them.

Pokemon made this leap from random mass of pets, by encouraging each one be named. Not that I ever did this, because I was devoted to Pikachu. SOOOOOOOOooooo adorable. It was a hard day for me when I finally realized that Pikachu was not a very strong combatant. Never the less, Pikachu was certainly my first favorite pet. (Don’t even get me started on how much Pikachu paraphernalia I had.)

My geekiest pet award goes to my hunter dino pet that I named Grimlock. Though I originally thought that hunters in World of Warcraft would be pet collectors, akin to Pokemon Trainers, they ended up having a very limited selection of pets. This means that I chose my pets very carefully, thus Grimlock came about. Turns out that the Beast Master spec at the time was a total waste of space, so I had to give him up.

But they did put Battle Pets in WoW (probably to make it up to all those disappointed hunters) and my favorite for that is the very awesome Star Craft 2 Collectors Edition bonus pet, Mini Thor. What can I say; I have a soft spot for robots.

As for mounts, the game I play with the largest mount selection (!!!) is, by far, World of Warcraft (shocker!) And though I started my Warlock mostly because the class mount was a Nightmare and I really wanted to ride a flaming black horse, my current favorite is the very awesome Ice Skeleton Dragon mount (its actually called a Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher, but my name is really more descriptive.) =P

My Blood Elf Warlock. =)

Okay this is going to sound cliché, but I almost exclusively pick elves. Here is the thing, games are an escape from reality, which means that when I have a choice about who should be my fantasy alter ego, I tend to pick the most fantastical, mythical, otherworldly, highly intelligent, attractive, cunning, and powerful. I want this avatar to be much more then I could ever hope to be in real life and in my mind this equates to Elves.

This also means that I am quite disappointed when a game only gives me human as an option. Quite often, this ends up impacting my enjoyment of the game, or contributes to my avoiding the game all together.

Though I am rather opposed to picking humans, I have no such restriction with elves. Give me any kind of elf and I’m happy, Wood Elf, High Elf, Blood Elf, Night Elf, Dark Elf, and so forth.

Humans are boring; I want my escape from reality to be better than real life. =D

Now that my Warlock is getting all squared away, reached 90 and equipped her well enough to raid, I find I have time to think about the possibility of leveling other characters. But which one to pick?

Well last night my husband pointed out to me that Druids have the option to be in perma tree form again, thanks to this nifty glyph. Yes, I am sure that everyone but me has known about this forever since it was in beta, but I just dont have the bandwidth to keep up with all the news.

Anyway, that pretty much made the choice for me. The entire reason I made my druid, way back when, was so that I could play a tree! And now I can again!!!!!

Now to figure out talents and how to play. Ugh.

Oooh, a little Warlock side note, I switched her to Affliction and am loving it. Demonology was kind of a cluster-f to play, but am finding Affliction quite intuitive and easy.

While I was checking my armory I noticed that my entire pet collection is viable online.

Here it is for anyone who would like to see how I waste my time. =P

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/hyjal/Sindel/pet#status=is-collected

As of today I have collected 301 unique pets. Considering that, when I began this quest to catch them all, I had a mere thirty, I’m quite pleased by my progress. Along with collecting, I have also been leveling my original team up and they finally reached max level, 25. My next goal is to level one of each type to max level.

Behold, the three pets who have gotten me where I am today. Spider was awesome against critters and capturing new pets, Mini Thor was anti beasts, and Onyxian Whelpling was basically good against anything else.

And for those of you who are wondering if I am doing anything to get raid ready, my Warlock’s iLevel is 451 and I have broken down and started doing Daily Quests that will actually result in good gear. So LFR is in my future and I will be ready to raid. If topping the DPS meter wasn’t a big enough incentive, then getting my warlock epic certainly is. Need lots of raids to finish it. =(

In an effort to curb my excessive World of Warcraft focus, I have recently tried to return to some of my previous MMOrpgs, like Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars the Old Republic. It hasn’t been the most successful distraction of all time, but its not entirely my fault.

Guild Wars 2, I tried to log in about ten days ago and found that it wasn’t recognizing my email address. Sent in a request for information via email and have yet to hear back from them. TEN days! Nothing. I still can’t log in, I have no idea why, but I’m getting rather pissy about it.

In the mean time I thought, oh I can boot up my old Star Wars the Old Republic account and see whats happening there. Due to my inactivity, there was a rather massive patch when I finally logged in again. Not only did it take forever to download, but it hard locked my computer twice.

Which means, though I had the best of intentions, I haven’t actually played any other MMO but WoW.

As for World of Warcraft, since I can’t successfuly replace it, lots of time has been spent working on my warlock. Turns out the end game (things to do after you hit max level) mostly revolve around daily quests. Not my favorite thing in the world, but I’m hoping that after I gear her up, I can ignore the daily quests from then on out.

Plus side is that this expansion seems to be the rise of Warlocks. Currently they are one of the highest ranked dps classes and they got a fancy new epic quest this expansion. Yup, already started it!

Short of it, World of Warcraft Wins.