Into the Mists

This shall be my official "Hello Pandas" post. So, hello Pandaren, Jinyu, Klaxxi, and Ook Dookin' Houzen. Hi.

I told myself a couple months ago when the burnout of Cata (shudder, let's not mention that word much ok?) started to set in that I would take Pandaria in stride. However, plans don't usually go as planned especially with pokemon, farming, new mounts and exploration all up and open for grabs. (I even saw the rare Alani with no access to it....)

I created a battle plan. With the previous expansion my warlock Truny led the way to 85 before anyone else followed by my hunter, then druid. With Pandaland, my plan is Turny the Tree will progress ahead as he led the way through the yawn-inducing ilvl 410 end game content (and cause we're raiding right away).

One issue did rear its ugly head upon me: I hate questing. It took my druid a good while to quest and dungeon all the way to 85, for sure not in a week's time and let me just give you an example of how I quest.

How Truny Quests:

1. Bitch about having to quest. GW2 makes questing and the fact that there are other people around ALSO questing a dream. Anyways.
2. Bitch about having to click on the quest giver. Seriously, just mail/call/text me.
3. Afk break.
4. Come back, and read the quest text. Accept quest.
5. Afk break.
6. Bitch about questing.
7. Log-off and go gather mats on either my miner/herbalist.
8. 1 hour later. Come back. Do the quest.
9. Realize that I had neglected to pick up a nearby quest. Get frustrated. Log-off.
10. Gather more mats/explore/afk.
11. Come back, accept 2nd/3rd/additional quests.
12. Go do quests, complain about other players and the fact that I have to move and do things.
13. Turn in quest, and bitch about the 372 ilvl reward (this is a bonus step from this expansion).

But seriously, the previous expansion started out with us requiring 272s to get into the newer dungeons, which was on par with heroic Arthas. Now, what do we need? Is it 353 to get into the new dungeons? Isn't that....ZA/ZG 2.0? SO we are pretending that HoT and Deathwing never existed? Go figures.

ANYWAYS, I believe the single greatest point of Pandaria is the changes to the warlock class. I LOVE playing my warlock now. Who doesn't like a guaranteed 200k crit, with spammable 150-200k kill-shots?

Warlock Changes for Destruction

Truny comes into this expansion in full LFR gear with a single heroic Zon'ozz wand and she is totally keeping up with everyone else who has regular or heroic items (not that gear matters in WoW, this isn't Diablo). The new destruction system is great, despite looking rather simple, the game ends up being a matter of managing your resources properly. I have stuck with Destruction over Demonology since it just feels like it has more oomph, or perhaps for ONCE I am actually seeing large numbers rather than a stream of many smaller numbers (I did pick up a heroic Kiril for my Wrathguard on the last day of the previous expansion).

I think I am being vague. I shall delve a bit more upon Destruction, though this blog will NEVER again have a guide as the game pretty much tells you what buttons to push and it's not really that hard to figure out nowadays and there are better sites with pretty pictures for that stuff.

So destruction. Let's take a before and after look. (If I can remember)

Before: Cast your curse, use your T13 bonus to proc your free Soulfire. KEEP UP IMPROVED SOULFIRE AT ALL TIMES. Bane, corruption, immolate, conflag, incinerate. Leave out chaos bolt because it SUCKED. Or use it, whatever, warlocks sucked then. This was actually okay. Keep up ISF at all times and watch for procs and keep dots up. Remember to soulburn when appropriate.

Our Demon Soul cooldown was iffy for demonology cause our pet sucked.

After: Curse. Conflag twice, immolate, spam incinerates until your embers fill up and you burn with a demonic fury like never seen before. Now you have an option. Do you want to use your ember on a Chaos Bolt? It hits like a CRUISE SHIP. OR, do you want to save your embers for a vulnerability phase? Or for Soulburn? Or do you want to Soulburn multiple times? THIS can also crit like a truck. OR do you want to use it for AOE? Spread your immolate and rain of fire? Oh, rain of fire is set-it-and-forget-it now.

Demon soul is spec specific and it doesn't REALLY matter which pet you are using. Well it does, but...whatever.

One really nice thing about Soulburn and its associated glyph is that if you kill something with Soulburn that is worth honor/exp, you get your ember back, which means you can potentially Soulburn something else. This is great for small packs where you may potentially chain crit for over 150k on 3 mobs before anyone else can do anything. It's part of the Great Apology for warlocks I believe.

One thing I am scared of is an impending nerf to our huge numbers. But, enjoy it while it lasts!

Actually, this post was just to mention how awesome destruction feels now, so goodbye.

Truny the Warlock

Cross-Realm Zones

I dislike the new cross-realm zones, which constitutes probably ALL the zones out there.

The shiny excuse is that these zones are underpopulated and players lack socialization and all that jazz. Right? No!

I believe this cross-realm BS was implemented to lighten the sever load once MOP hits. That's it.

You see, I grew up post-WotLK launch. I levelled to 80 pretty much in complete silence. Azshara was MY zone for a brief period of time in 2008.

Ok you know what I am going to get straight to the point

Cross realm zones suck because it increases the competition for rare-spawns, especially the various dragon mounts that consume much time. Now I am not an avid camper, I have rarely wasted any time camping anything since it's a) boring and b) my attention span does not allow me to do so, but I do make my daily route around Storm Peaks and Deepholm for the occasional chance at glimpsing these rares.

Cross realm-ness has MY Storm Peaks filled with lame other players from Zangarmarsh, Thrall, and I am not even sure if it is myself who has become the intruder into their realms?

This is an issue. Storm Peaks has gone from an average of 1 or 2 people on at the time that I do my daily routes to around SEVEN HUNDRED, there are probably FIFTY people from each faction gathered at EACH of the spawn points at any given time of day! I may or may not be exaggerating but anything more than ONE is no good.

Now I ask, why does a game which has promoted the exclusion and separation of other humans via random dungeon queues, improved anonymous LFR looting and anonymous pet battles now promote the sharing of zones? It makes no sense! Why would I even want to chat with someone who will potentially steal MY rare? See the issue here? I am stealing THEIR rare as well, they could probably care less about seeing me!

Besides rare hunting, which will be PROLIFIC in MoP since we have already hunted ALL the rares up to Cata, this COULD benefit people levelling up but COME ON, seriously think when was the last time you had trouble doing a quest in WoW? There's no such thing as group quests or elites, or anything that involves much brain power while levelling and anyone else out in the field is just seen as a hindrance to your fast progression right?

So in conclusion, if the rare spawn mount in MoP has any chance of looking BETTER than the heroic or raid meta mounts, and if I happened to find this rare, then I would probably not give a flying baboon's arse about cross-realm zones. Otherwise, good luck hunting with the THOUSANDS of others in YOUR zone.

Mount Collector's Frenzy

Pink, purple....






Dearest reader,i type this from my phone so please bear with me. As the dawning of the pandas approached,i began to panic. I did not have the life binders handmaiden! Deep despite having completed the ds meta mount, with the removal of the last two fights as part of the requirements, anyone and their cat can obtain the dumb twilight drake! Ad the two week countdown began, I crossed my tree limbs and being one of the five handmaidenless raiders ,o slowly waited for the loots to distribute. Luckily, I won! Next up is ragnaros mount!