Negativity

There are few things that annoy me more than poor attitude while raiding. I’ve been around the block with raiding and have been doing so off and on for years now. Nothing will suck the life out of you or drain you more than poor players and poor attitudes.

The worst of it comes from those who mistake progression for failure. Lately, we’ve been hitting up hard modes in Ulduar which is sort of our first real blocks of progression for this patch. I admit, it hasn’t been all that fun but definitely feels doable. The learning curve is much greater than anything we’ve encountered since Black Temple in my opinion (Naxx, OS, EOE were extremely easy to learn).

Because my 10man group has sort of become fluid due to RL stuff, we’ve have quite a number of alternates now. One of them in particular has been starting to gnaw at my nerves. Every turn we make, there’s a new negative comment.

“we can’t do this with this group”.. “we don’t have the gear for this”..”this isn’t the right make up”…”we don’t have enough people”….”maybe we aren’t ready for this”… blah blah blah. I’m sick of hearing it.

All I want to hear is the sound of people rezzing and running the f*ck back to rebuff and go again. In my experience when it comes to raiding, the people who think they are good enough usually end up becoming good enough. And when you’re hitting up a particularly hard wall, for f*ck’s sake, don’t bring moral down even further with BS negativity. Start pwning or GTFO.

Ahune

Ahune
Originally uploaded by alachia

This year was my first time with Ahune which means he was easy sauce for me as it's only a 73 elite boss. I heard back in the day it was quite a challenge when the level cap was 70.

I have to say he was an impressive beast.... I haven't been this impressed by a boss since Ragnaros which is ironic because according to the lore, he was designed to take out Ragnaros.

They don't make giants like this anymore in the game...even the bosses in Ulduar don't compare graphically to his epic size and grandeur.

Lucky for me, he is easily two-mannable. I haven't gotten the pet scorchling everyone farms him for yet but I actually like visiting this boss now for the hell of it.

Pole Dancing for XP

Pole Dancing
Originally uploaded by alachia

Midsummer Festival is probably one of the most useful holiday events of the year. I went around all Saturday pissing on horde bonfires and honoring alliance once. This yielded me a great deal of gold.

Today, I realized you can pole dance to gain the Ribbon Dance buff increasing my alts XP by 10%. The more I danced around the pole the more the buff would stack in time until it reached the max 60mins.

The buff stays as long as you don't die so it's pretty uber.. now is definitely the time to level alts... not to mention all the bonfire nodes give pretty darn good XP.

Broom Broom

END Northrend Road Trip: Borean Tundra
Originally uploaded by alachia

Got a little pissed off in the real world today...so I decided to buy myself a chopper this evening (which did make me feel a lot better).

It was a lot more fun than I thought it would be considering they nurfed the falling ability. It's still just cool as hell being able to ride around with your friend.

Flipmax and I decided to ride throughout the southern lands of Northrend from Howling Fjord to Borean Tundra with a slight detour up through Sholazar Basin to do some Thelma and Louise action.

It was actually nice riding through a lot of the wowscapes again...most of them I had only seen from the aerial view. Also, we stopped for horde. mwahhaha. Ran a few "cows" over...road kill ftw. I wouldn't mind taking a few more road trips around the older parts of Azeroth as well. I have to convince Flipmax to get one or the Mammoth so I get to call shotgun next.

here's a video of our roadtrip:

Ice Crown Camp

Ice Crown Camp
Originally uploaded by alachia

I love when you are on a quest and find some obscure added element on the banks of a border. I finally got around to doing the Argent Tournament quest lines and one of them landed me on the northern cliffs of Ice Crown.

The Black Knight is a threat to the tournament or such from what I gathered. My quest was to discover his mater's plan for murdering other tourney players. I snuck into this tent to take back the stolen Tournament invitation as well as the Black Knight's orders.

His plan intercepted, I pwned the Black Knight and now we can all relax and do our dailies. lol.

Looming Date

 

Now that we have the in-game calendar, all the holidays loom before us like a ticking time bomb. I was pretty gung ho about the holiday events (everyone wants their violet proto) but ever since the Children’s Holiday, I start to bite my nails when I see an upcoming holiday.

Will I get it done? How long will it take? Will there be the annoying RNG factor to fear like the V-day holiday event? Terrible, no? That something that should be considered a sort of fun thing to do would turn into a bout of anxiousness.

I mostly think they don’t interest me as much because I end up missing the first spree of achievement rallies and end up having to do the quests solo. Hopefully, it’s like last year though and you get to go around pissing on horde bonfires. hehehe.

Yogg Brain Zapped

Last weekend we downed Yogg. Kind of an interesting fight. Being the last non-heroic bosses in Ulduar, I expected us to be stumped on it for awhile. As it turns out, it was a lot easier than both Mim and General. I was quite happy because this means we can now start to delve into the hard mode aspects of the meta achievements.

The fight was quite fun though. I imagine it’s a lot more fun for the melee than the casters. First phase is avoiding gaseous clouds that spawn mobs. Second phase you kill tentacles as casters while the melee warp into Yogg’s innards and nuke his brain down. Third phase you nuke yogg down while killing his ads.

I can’t say I’m all that enthusiastic about full clear being part of a hard mode set. It’d be nice if hard mode was only tied to the meta achievement but in order to see Algalon, hard mode is a must. They say in 3.2 the meta achievement reward and title will go away. Here’s hoping we’re not in for another rush.

Rille II does Westfall

Rille got entangled in the business of the SI:7 and some conspiracy involving Van Cleef and the Defias. Rille did not care much about the conflict other than he was promised gold and the opportunity to decapitate someone’s head.

Along his journey, he came across a camp of Gnolls responsible for helping out the thieves of Dead Mines. He had no problems taking on three to four at a time. Rille is awesome like that.

However, a pesky and stinky human priest came through and tried to battle the Gnolls himself. Unable to keep himself alive, the priest fled in a panic thus leading the entire camp to Rille.

Rille was able to battle two more before falling. Rille has a distaste for weakling priests. Silly little human, PWNing is for gnomes.

Rille II

I fell in love with a gnome named Rille. He’s a gnome warlock on the Fenris server. I first met him through a little Viddler video when all the guys in Bindpoint where introducing their WoW toons.

I don’t even like gnomes! Anyhow, I was so infatuated with this gnome that I made a clone of him on my server and have started to level him up.

I thought for fun maybe I’d make him an RP gnome on a PvP server. I figure his backstory will go something like this….

Gnomish transporter gone awry. Evil twin was created from Rille and thus Rille II was born. He is now roaming all of Azeroth with a vague memory of another half. All he knows is he wants to eat souls and pick flowers.

For Gnomeregan!

Episode 44 Supplemental

Episode 44: Starman Portals is up.
You can download it here or subscribe to WoWcast on itunes.

I had a really great time picking Starman's brain last Sunday night. He's one of those meta peeps who has opened up portals in the meta in all different realms. The most prominent one being World of Warcast Podcast. It was actually interesting to hear his approach to podcasting and what he's trying to accomplish with his media outlets.

Everyone has their opinions about fragmentations. Lately, I've come to understand that people are very particular about how they culturally integrate in the meta. Some use it as an outlet, some as a media soap box, some as teaching tool, and others to realize themselves or to become something different all together, an evolution per se.

Few things are harder to grin and bear than the feeling of repression. When we can't be who we want to be to the people we care about is much like living in your own personal prison. To tie this in with WoW, go listen to a group of raiders who aren't familiar with each other vs a group of RL friends raiding together. It's night and day really.

I think it takes time to find where you want to be in the meta. I've encountered quite a few people who just can't except this state of living as valid or don't know how to feel comfortable integrating.

Just think about it, how often 10yrs ago would have posted your diary to strangers or been comfortable showing your family album to anyone in the entire world? As Jemimus said last week, "Make no mistake, we are in the middle of a revolution." I totally agree with him, that we do not see the full profound implication of what is happening around us. It will be talked about and studied for years and years to come for sure.

This is definitely a cultural revolution. As we refine how we define ourselves online, it'll become clearer just how we should engage with each other.....right now, you have to realize that most of the proper tools don't even exist yet.

Starman's Push My Follow podcast definitely delves into a lot of the new media tools of today. It's a round table discussion podcast from people who are pretty versed in new media formats of the meta.

Also be sure to check out geekistry.com for more of Starman's mind dumps. It'll be interesting to see what is to come.