We Killed Some Orc’s Son or Something

Saurfang Carrying His Dead Son

Patch 3.3 is out and I once again tricked myself into thinking that we might be able to raid on Tuesday. And yes, I know it’s kind of stupid to schedule raids on a Tuesday but oh well, it works for us…except on patch days.

We spent a good hour and a half trying to get into the instances but all of them were borked and we could never get in. Most of the night was ganking horde trying to get inside and killing them at the instance gate and at the graveyard. lol. PvP servers do have their amusements.

Today we actually got inside Icecrown Citadel and tackled the first wing available for play. I’d say it was fairly easy. Most of the difficulty comes from just not knowing the mechanics of the fight. Even after reading up on the encounters, it never fully clicks until you see it live.

I don’t believe any of the bosses took more than three attempts. That being said, my impression of the instance was that it reminded me of being in an immaculate and cold Naxx type structure. I wasn’t blown away by the architecture or the bosses. I did however find it really nice that they put all the vendors at the front room of the instance. Always nice to see your potential gear before you head in. lol. I think the consensus is that the rogue’s got the shaft this time in terms of aesthetics.

Favorite fight was the airship battle. Two reasons mainly, I get to burn down and destroy the horde airship finally AND you get nifty cool rocket packs to jump from one ship to the other. It was hella fun playing around with that.

By far the BEST thing about 3.3 is the new LFG system. I actually feel like it stands a chance of really working. PLUS, the big bonus is the auto-transport system. As soon as you get a full group, boooooom, you’re instantly teleported into the instance. No more wasting your fucking time waiting around for people to fly their asses out to the instance. And then when you’re done with the instance, you walk out and it teleports you back to where you were before the instance. Great stuff.

As far as I can tell, it matches you up with even geared type players so it seems like the odds are much better now that you will have a successful group. Also, in my case, the fact that I can get matched up with players NOT on Boulderfist is a big bonus. It’s a win/win situation for me as the pugs on my server are of the lowest common denominator. Of course, I’m sure everyone says that about their pugs.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the heroic version of the Icecrown Citadel wing goes. I think the 28 day delay for the new wing is actually good. It gives my raid time to play catch up and maybe finally finish Ulduar (Algalon) in the meantime.

Slash Played

slashplayed
Originally uploaded by alachia

I saw a cute little twitter exchange between @hawkito and @kathunter about my /played. I have never really done one before so I sat down this morning and pulled up my list of sixteen characters including alt banks.

The total was about 328 days. This did not shock me at all. In fact, it seems like quite a reasonable number for some who has been invested in the game for five years come this Christmas. That's like an average of what? 66 days a year.

If you calculate that the average American works around 245 actual days per year, the truly scary figure is that I only got about 3.5 hrs of sleep on avg for the past five years. LOL. Of course that's ridiculously skewed.

The number I found the MOST fascinating is my mage's play time. 70+ days. That's close to 20 more days than my other characters. The reason it is so shocking is because I played her far less in terms of month spans than the other ones.

I think it's a great commentary on the nature of raiding and gameplay from 40 man hardcore raiding back in vanilla wow vs the 25 and 10man raiding from TBC and WoTLK.

In the few months I raided with my mage, I racked up massive amounts of /played. Compared to my shaman who I have raided with for about a year, I only raided with my mage for about 4 hardcore months. But I nearly put in 35hrs of raid time each week, roughly 4-5 hrs for four week nights and anywhere between 10-15hrs on the weekends.

You can click on the image to go to the flickr site to see the notes regarding which character corresponds with the /played.