Raider of the LFR

I made my first run in the LFR last night through Mogu’shan Vaults. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it at this point.

First off, I think there seems like a big push by Blizzard to push people into the LFR. I have been running dungeons in the LFD since that came out back in Wrath. I’ve been quite happy with it. Before that, I tried to run a few dungeons back in the day, but would spend most of my hour or hour-and-a-half of game time just trying to get into a group, and over to the dungeon, only to have someone have to leave, and bam, the night goes down the drain. With the LFD, I queued up and went about my other business, and would get into a group with not much fuss. These days, DPS queues on my server are about 12 to 15 minutes, and I’ll do dailies or run a scenario while I wait. I enjoy most of the Dungeons they released in MOP now that I’ve been through them a few times (except for maybe Gate of the Setting Sun and Siege of Niuzao Temple; I wouldn’t call either of those a favorite, but I guess they can’t all be)

But it seems like Blizzard is not content with me running dungeons to progress my character gear. No new dungeons in 5.1 or coming in 5.2. And the comments Ghostcrawler has put out lately pretty clearly indicate that Blizzard wants people to progress through the LFR after the initial dungeons. So no new dungeons for someone like me, who likes running dungeons. I guess I can keep running the same dungeons over and over ( and over and over) again plus dailies to unlock rep gear to spend on my valor, or take the push from Ghostcrawler and give the LFR a try.

So that brings me back to the top of the post. I did take that push and the Mogu’shan Vault a run last night. I’ll be the first to admit, I had no idea what the hell was going on. It seemed like twenty five people were running around trying to tank and spank the bosses to me. I read through the Raid outlines for the bosses on Icy Veins, so I felt like I did a little research, but admittedly, not a whole lot and it don’t think it really helped me a whole lot. I’m sure that I’ll get more comfortable with what’s going on, just as I did with dungeons when I started running those so long ago. Just as the LFR seems now, those seemed frantic relative to my mostly solo questing at the time, and now I don’t even think twice about mixing them up. So maybe LFR will also seem that way. I hope, but I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem like you can really have twenty five random people assemble and do anything that seems remotely organized with no planning at all. It seems like it’s mostly just going to be chaos. And I’m not sure chaos seems all that fun to me. Maybe I’m wrong, and this will be my favorite part of the game and I’ll enjoy gearing up for it and through it. But I’m not sure at this point. It’s definitely not something that I instantly fell in love with. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Bloodied Up

After leveling up my Fury Warrior when MOP first came out, I turned my attention back to my Blood Elf DK. I've leveled him up and geared him up to iLevel 466 in the LFD with a few pieces of Rep gear thrown in.

Mostly I've leveled as Frost DPS. I played as Frost ever since the three trees were revamped at the beginning of Cata, and like to think I have a decent handle on it. However, as I've run a few Scenarios, I noticed that if there were some clothies or rogues in the mix, I was taking the brunt of the hit points, so I decided to give the Blood spec a try for this situation.

Now, I'm not truly tanking, and while I've mixed in some Tank gear, I've also just kept my higher iLevel DPS gear where it made sense. But I've found in these types of situations, taking this approach and running in a blood spec works quite well. I can take most of the pounding dished out and have enough self healing to take care of myself while the clothies pitch in more DPS. It works pretty well.

I've run enough LFD now, that I may try one of those as Blood and see how I do. The world needs another tank, right?

Daily Blues

Kind of hitting the wall on the dailies. I finished the Dominance Offensive this weekend. I really enjoyed that and thought it was some of the beat dailies work Blizzard has done.

Unfortunately, I'm still working on the 5.0 daily reps and I'm finding them to be a grind. I hit revered with Golden Lotus, which was nice and picked up the Chest piece there. That also unlocked the Shado-Pan and August Celesteials for me. Both have enchant recipes I'm looking for, but I'm pretty sick of the dailies grind now.

Blizzard, for all their talk of options has pretty much made the dailies mandatory if you want to max out your professions. I'm really not sure the thought process there, but it's got me kind of stuck otherwise, I'm just running LFD, with scenarios during the queue. I find that to be a heck of a lot more fun.

Back to the blog

I never really got off the ground with this WoW blog, but I thought I'd give another go now that we're hip deep into MOP. I have leveled both a Fury Warrior and my Frost Death Knight to 90. I have started working on my Ret Paladin too, but mostly I'm running Dailies, scenarios, and five mans on my DK.

I see a lot of chatter on the blog-o-sphere about dailies. I think the way they were implemented in 5.1 works. If you want to work for a few extra extra pieces of round out gear, you can run a few dailies.

But I have to say, they number of dailies, implemented in 5.0 was way too many. Running both those and the 5.0's on my DK is brutal and a grind. Blizzard says they aren't mandatory, but unless your running five mans as a full time job, they pretty much are to get your iLevel up. I don't know what you'd do with the valor you earn in scenarios and five mans either if you don't run dailies to access the rep gear.

I think like a lot of things Blizzard does, they take a good idea and do so much of it, they ruin. The Firelands dailies in Cata it the Argent Crusade dailies in Wrath were nice patch fillers, but building the whole entry level 90 game around them hasn't worked at all in my opinion. I was much happier with the model in Wrath and Cata and hope we swing back to something more like that in the near future.

Creature Comforts

I was looking for an activity, so I decided to start leveling some of the professions that I'd never done on my alts. I'm using my Fury Warrior as a bank alt, so I decided to level Blacksmithing and Engineering on them. I had read that both of these are expensive to level and don't generate a lot of cash, but with $300k in the bank, I figured I'm in position to finally level them now.

I've been at it a week and finally have both up to 425 and then I came across by new bank alt best friend, the MOLL-E. The portable mailbox for engineers is absolutely awesome. I've got an Argent Gruntling on my main, but the two minutes to use the mailbox is pretty limiting for AH duties and I don't like parking my DK anyway. The MOLL-E has a ten minute up time, which is perfect for cancelling and reposting all my glyphs. No more running back and forth to the mailbox. Woo Hoo! The two hour cooldown is a bit of a drag, but I usually don't repost that often anyway unless I'm just killing time on the weekend. Overall, it's a huge quality of like improvement for an aspiring goblin!

Questing in Cataclysm

So I've been thinking a lot about how questing has evolved and specifically about questing in Cataclysm.

When I started WoW back in Vanilla, the questing wasn't sophisticated by any stretch of the imagination. I loaded up my quest log with every available quest until it was full and then I went out and killed my boars. Pretty straight forward. There wasn't much story, but the good thing was you got to go out and explore the world the way that you wanted.

Questing now is a completely different beast. I worked my way through the Worgen starting area, and the entire thing was on rails. There's a pretty good story, but the entire experience was restrictive and I really didn't enjoy that aspect at all. I didn't feel like was out in the world at all. I was just walking through an interactive storybook.

Questing in the revamped zones was a little better. There was a definitely more structure, but you could still go out and explore. Things flowed well too, which was nice. It felt very natural and moved me from one place to the next well.

The new Cataclysm zones are another story. You only get a few quests at a time, and with the heavy use of phasing, you almost need to complete them in order to unlock the phases. If you don't do one, you might miss unlocking a phase and all the later quests. Not liking that one bit. It's nice to see the world change because of my actions, but I absolutely hate that I'm locked into something on rails and don't have much choice in what I do in a zone. I find this to be one of the least enjoyable parts of the new questing and I think it's probably why I haven't pushed too hard to level up in the higher levels yet. I just don't like how it's been put together.

Do you have any thoughts on questing in Cataclysm? Love it, hate it, or just trying to get through it to other content?

Northrend Blues

I have to admit, I'm suffering from a serious case of the Northrend Blues. What do I mean with all this new content?

Well, I spent several years leveling up two toons to 80 during Wrath, eventually running my share of heriocs and gearing them up. I also have three more characters I played into the lower 70's, two at 72 and one at 73. When Cataclysm came out, I started leveling my DK through Mount Hyjal, but I also made a new Worgen Warrior. I thought this would be a good way to see a lot of the new lower end content and see the alliance side, which I'd never really played much.

Problem is, with heirloom gear and the guild bump, I burned through that content in a couple of weeks. Outland wasn't bad, since I burned through that content quickly as well, but then I hit Northrend again. Even with the first couple of zones having Alliance quests, there's really a lot of overlap with the quests I've already done. And now that I've hit the Argent Dawn quests, there all the same ones I've done before. And if I want to level up the rest of my professions on my other toons, I've got to get them to at least 75, or higher in some cases, so that's going to be even more time in Northrend. Ughhh! You'd think two years would be enough time there, but I guess not.

To Scribe or Not to Scribe...

Lately I've been reading a lot about the Glyph market and there seems to be two polarized camps on it now.  One camp says that the Shattering and Cataclysm killed the Glyph market.  The cost of materials is up, while the demand for repeat glyphs has disappeared, resulting in prices below cost and no more profits. They say you can still make a little money on Fortune Cards or the Darkmoon deck, but the glyphmas is over.  

A minority of others are still making a boatload in the glyph market.  People seem to be have abandoned it because of the higher mat costs and moved on to greener pastures.  The ones that are left, are doing well.

Personally, I've seen both.  On the horde server with most of my toons, I'm printing money in the glyph market.  We don't have a regular camper in the market, so it's possible to post a couple times of day and sell a lot of glyphs.  Further, I never really saw that particular glyphs people were buying for special builds or to switch specs.  I always sold a wide variety of glyphs, mostly to levelers, and that continues today.  However, on my Alliance server, the glyph market is a mess.  A started a scribe to make money to buy my heirlooms, but it's been tough to scrape a few bronze together.  Few glyphs sell for much and mat prices are high.  Further, there's somebody posting large batches every few minutes so it's impossible to really make money.  The contrast in markets is stark.

What's your market like?  Are you still able to make money on glyphs or are you having to pack it in?

Vial of The Sands

Since Catclysm, I've been making some serious Gold on the Auction House, so I decided that I would spring for the Vial of the Sands.  I thought it would be pretty cool to be an early mover on the "cool" mount this expansion, and what's cooler than turning yourself into a dragon?  I have to say though, that in the end, the Sandstone Drake is a little disappointing.  Sure, there's not toon riding on his back, but I found the model they used to be pretty boring.  When you look at the cool drake models they put together for Drake of the East Wind, Drake of the West Wind, or Volcanic Stone Drake, The Sandstone Drake seems pretty blah.  What do you think?  Have you got your Sandstone yet?

"Hardcore" Casual

Welcome to the Argent Stand, the ongoing struggles of a World of Warcraft "hardcore" casual. Is that an oxymoron or what?! I've never really fit in the categories very well. It's hard to say that I'm strickly casual, as I've been playing WoW since pretty consistently since Vanilla. I've taken small breaks here and there, but I've pretty much played a few times a week for an hour or so and maybe a few hours once a week for over six years now.

Mostly I've leveled/quested with a variety of classes. I think I've pretty much tried them all, except maybe the Shaman, but have pretty much leveled with my melee DPSers. My main has been my Blood Elf DK, but I've leveled a Paladin, Warrior, Rogue, and Hunter into the 70's or higher. Mostly I've leveled them until I've kind of plateaued, then occasionally I've come back to them and given them another shot. In Wrath, when the LFD tool came out, I did my first regular dungeon runs, and was able to get my two 80's, my DK and Paladin, pretty well geared up running Heriocs a couple nights a week.

Since Cataclysm, I've been doing a few things to keep busy and have been playing a little more than usual. I've been leveling my all the professions on my older alts. I just picked up Balcksmithing and Engineering on my 72 Goblin Warrior I'm using as my current Bank Alt. I really want to level my three higher level alts up to at least 75 so I can level up their professions too, but there's only so much time in the day! Mostly, I'm leveling myDK up as 2H Frost, currently an 83 finishing up Deepholm quests before I move on Uldum, and running a Worgen Fury warrior on the Alliance side, my first higher level Alliance alt, currently at 75. I'm also playing the AH quite a bit. My main profession has been Inscription, which has been very lucrative since the Shattering and contrary to some blogs I've read, still printing money for me. I've made several hundred thousand gold on my server in just a few months, but I also have been dabbling in some other professions as well, trying to branch out for when the gravy train comes to an end.

I've got plenty of thoughts on the state of WoW and what I've seen that I'll be sharing. I hope that you all have some good thoughts to share as well. Once thing I've learned in all my time playing WoW is that it's a very big game, and for those of us who have a life outside the game, there's way more out there than we could possibly learn or keep up with in the few hours a week we have to play. Hopefully your've got some thoughts to help myself and others out.

For the Horde!