Doing Stuff Interferes With My Gaming Time!

I am heading out of town tomorrow to spend time with my family and take my dad to a concert for artists we both enjoy a great deal. Unfortunately this is a busy weekend for gaming and I will miss out on a lot!

WCS Season 2 (link may contain spoiler alerts!!) finals are happening at Gamescom. Dimli will be watching and sending me updates since I can't really watch it while trying to convince my non-Starcraft 2 watching family that I'm paying attention. "OOOOOOOOOOOOO LOOK AT THAT FUNGAL! What were you saying Mom?" doesn't scream "I'm paying attention to you" to people I only see twice a year for a weekend or so!

I'm just going to get my picks out of the way. I am picking wants, not who I think will actually win. It's more fun this way! I'd like to see Jaedong, MC, Bomber, Polt, (Sorry Grubby!), duckdeok, INnoVation, MMA, and Scarlett to come out for round of 8. After that, I want to see good games with Scarlett doing really well. I can never not root for MC. He is one of my favorite players and is in fact, THE BossToss!

In addition to the WCS finals, I'm also missing the early access for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, which will, forevermore only be known as FFXIV here. Dim, understandably, will not be waiting around for me to play before he takes off into the world of Eorzea. I wouldn't want him too. Okay, I want him too a teensy bit, but that's just unrealistic and selfish. So when I get back he'll be level 25 with other classes leveled, and I won't have even logged into the live game once. Damn you min/maxers! You make me sad.

One other thing I'm missing? The chance for a Heathstone beta key. Getting one isn't likely but I'm already having nightmares that I'll get one and Dim will find it and take it before I get a chance to play. I'm not kidding when I say this is not only a likely possibility It is, in fact, the only way it's going to happen. Oh, he'll help me fish Jewel Danios in WoW, and maybe run an LFR or two for my last two Secrets of the Empire to make up for it. I'm sure he'll also be glad that I don't require flowers or diamonds, just a pocket tank who can help me run old content! But it will happen. I guess I shouldn't begrudge him the chance to play a game I won't be able to for at least three days. Someone should be getting some enjoyment out of it, right?

Whatever happens, enjoy your weekend gaming snf check out the first iteration of the Erratic Fanatic podcast on the blog or our attempt at seeing if we want to incorporate video content with the cast. Yes, it's lame! Sorry. We're having fun learning all this stuff from scratch so give us time to create awesome. We *are* working on it

5.4 Date Gives Me Great Joy - More Time To Fish!

Yesterday Blizzard announced that WoW patch 5.4, Siege of Orgrimmar, would be released on 10SEP13. This is very exciting news for me, because I was really stressed out it was going to be 03SEP13. I think this is the first time I've really been relieved that they're not releasing sooner!

This timeline gives our group the opportunity for at least one whole fresh run. We can sub in people for fights they might have missed and get one particular person their Feat of Strength "Ahead of the Curve" since they had to be away for work on the night we got Lei Shen down.

This is all well and good, but it isn't the mainstay of my excitement. I am behind two Secrets of the Empire in my quest for the legendary so new runs give me some good chances for drops. I will still need the runestone thingies, but that won't be *that* bad....I hope.

Still more, I'm almost capped on valor and I've already upgraded the pieces I want/need to! So that means I get some time to fish for my Tiny Carp pets and general putzing around with fishing, achieves, and old dungeon and raid content. This makes me happy more than almost anything else in the world.

Don't get me wrong I am loving raiding. But I am really hating the valor capping, farming for flask mats, and farming for food mats. It just seems like such a slog. Lore would have said that "casuals" don't have to do any of this, but I disagree. While we put real life needs first, we still want to do the best we can with the limited amount of time we have. We want to be as good as we can be, and still incorporate the idea that we each have other priorities and needs both inside and outside the game.

As far as the 5.4 trailer, if you haven't seen it yet, here it is:

I've never seen a WoW trailer that made me more excited for getting into game and particularly, killing those bosses! I love the storyline, but I am very sad that we'll be saying goodbye to the beautiful Vale! I love that place. Not that I've just spent what feels like 8 million hours fishing Jewel Danios there. But that it's a great storyline and I'm really attached to just the bright sunshiney feel and wonderful little nooks and crannies you can explore.

Dim keeps telling me the Timeless Isle will be wonderful...blah, blah, blah! I'm sure it'll be fine. I'm sure I'll like it, and since I'll spend a ton of time fishing there, I'm sure it will grow on me. But it's hard to say goodbye, and I'm not ready yet.

As far as 5.4 changes, the patch notes are exciting! From what Twintop is saying, it seems some proc based playstyles will be coming back to Shadow Priests. I love that style and am really interested to see if it's really a viable way to raid, since it's so much fun for me to play. Maybe I'll get a bit squishier, but we have good healers.

So now I have a big decision to make! Do I continue to level my mage for possible raiding in the new expansion (yes, I level that slowly!), or do I wait to see what they do with the Shadow Priest and continue playing that character?!

I have always been a single character MMO players. I dislike the idea of alts, mules, and additional characters, so the idea of playing something other than my beloved Tina is abhorrent. But part of me wants to make sure we're progressing as quickly as we can through the new content (I like the "hardcore casual" label, personally). Hopefully, a decision will be made clear to me with the 5.4 expansion because otherwise, the decision will probably come down to a dice roll!

Erratic Fanatic Podcast: Episode 1 - Blizzcon Predictions

We really wanted to get out our Blizzcon 2013 predictions before the Blizzard announcement this week at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, just in case we got it right!

Since we've also been talking a lot about wanting to learn podcast stuff we decided just go for it and recorded our very first Erratic Fanatic podcast! You can find the download on Libsyn. They also have an embedded player feature, in case you want to listen to it from the web.

This episode has Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft predictions. We're hoping to get to SC2 and the other stuff very soon.

If you have comments on the production quality (currently none) or the topics at hand please let us know!

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn - Open Beta Thoughts

I want to start by saying I certainly didn't get enough time to really take a good long look at the game, particularly due to the dreaded 3102 error after about 9 hours of playtime which does not include a quick break for laundry and food. These are just my initial thoughts on the game and what I am excited for and what worries me. While I want to state I have full faith in Square Enix (SE) to provide a good game and proper support, I can not ignore what they've done in the past and go all fangirl crazy about it. I should note I have pre-ordered (about a week ago) and am excited to play the game in the coming months.

I played FFXI at launch for a teensy bit but adding North American players to a Japanese server that had already been running for six months turned me off that game so fast I didn't even get past the initial 30 day play time before I gave up. I didn't have enough faith in Squeenix to even try FFXIV 1.0, though I did do a media review it for an MMO site a long time ago. Back then the controls were difficult, the naming conventions were odd and non-intuitive, and the game play seemed to cater way more to a console controller than a PC. To top it all off, Final Fantasy online players of either game are relatively difficult to get along with, and that's saying something given WoW's general disdain for newbies. In my experience players were either cut-throat LIKE IT OR ELSE or had given up long ago. So my experience this weekend really came from a new player of the Final Fantasy (FF) online world perspective though I am not at all new to the FF singe player games.

Character creation was what I expect from an MMO. Very similar to EQ2 as far as options available, and way more customization than WoW. I do feel like my character is how I want them to look. Others may feel differently, but for me, it was acceptable. The character benchmark download allowed me to pre-create my character, so once the servers launched I was able to port over my created look without doing it all over again. A very nice touch, I thought!
   
The intro scenes are beautiful. They are narrated with full voice over (though I didn't get any NPC voice overs from it) and allow for character interaction in that you get to choose your character's responses to the intro NPCs. The cut scenes really show off your character and some of their animations. I felt immersed in the story from the very beginning. The starting areas of Limsa Lominsa (Marauder and Arcanist classes) as well as Gridania (Conjurer, Archer, and Lancer classes) felt well put together. They were a bit confusing to navigate at first but I learned them quickly. Coming from someone who cannot navigate a map in real life or an average MMO to save their life (just ask Dimli) this is quite an achievement!

Cutscenes, on the other hand, mostly had no voiceovers (fine by me!) but others said that they were supposed to. So I am curious as to whether this is intended or not. Of course, again, it is beta! This is the time to get all this stuff worked out, because if it's plaguing me come pre-release I will become more pessimistic regarding the game's outlook. I found the scenes helped deepen my interest in the storyline - and gave me a chance to take a drink or a bite of food while not missing a chance to whomp on anything....or fish (fishing was fun!).

The music was pretty amazing and is well placed in the areas I've visited so far. To be fair, what I've seen of the game is quite limited but I still feel that the music is something I know and love from the Final Fantasy teams. The ambient noises are also very well done. I realize I'm in the minority here but I'm a really big fan of the little things in an MMO that make your everyday playing life just that much more immersive.
       
As far as quests go this is a pretty standard MMO. Run for 3 minutes, kill 3 things, run back to your quest giver who sends you back the same place to kill 5 more things in the same place. Innovative, definitely not. But it's supplemented with a type of public quest called Full Active Time Event (FATE) that are level based and spawned fairly often this weekend in the areas we were in. We found the experience gained was pretty good and as a Marauder and Arcanist class we had no trouble getting a large chunk of our experience this way while we ran to and fro on quests.
   
Not including the 3102 error, we experienced what I would call excellent performance. No lag and hitches only every few hours and only for a second or two even when walking through heavily populated areas or participating in FATEs filled with people. We did not create on a super populated server mostly because we don't really enjoy being sardines. We like our space and are willing to forgo a heavy busy economic world for being able to actually log in and not competing like crazy people for accomplishments. We'll see how that works out for us 3 years down the road.
   
Game animations seemed a little off, but only barely. For the most part they fit my character well and I liked they way they fit in the world overall. I love the fact that they included jumping! It's just not an MMO without it. Though I feel the need to mention that jumping just doesn't seem natural. It's more of a straight up and down than a forward or backwards arch. I was also pleased to find there was also a sprint button! Every game should have a sprint. It still annoys me, to this day, that WoW doesn't have a generic sprint available for all characters.

Cut scene animations were a little more off-putting for me personally. I felt like I was just standing there watching my character participating in something I had no control of. It's not a big thing to be sure, but it does cause my heart a little angst.

Combat pacing is a nice change from my WoW raiding nights. I think I will enjoy it. I'm not sure how the game will open up in the later levels but my level 14 Marauder could hold her own in level 19 FATEs with Dim's level 14 Arcanist doing some healing. The global cool down is almost double that found in WoW. It makes combat a little less hectic for me, and while there is positional/action-y stuff going on, I didn't find it near as offensive as Guild Wars 2 combat (sorry guys, I hate that stuff in an MMO!).
   
As far as the things that worry me - most of then have to do with SquareEnix and their history with MMOs in general. The 3102 error started occuring and just steamrolled into what can only be called a disaster. This *is* beta though, so I get that things happen. I was mostly disappointed in their lack of communication regarding the issue. I do understand that it happened at an inopportune time considering their offices are in Japan - but if they have no one on staff or on standby that could get a message across on the forums, Twitter, or Facebook, I find that disappointing at best.
   
I am not totally willing to absolve SquareEnix of the atrocities they committed in FFXI and FFXIV 1.0 but I am willing to give them a grudging opportunity to win me over. Evidenced by the fact that I am both participating in beta *and* handing over cold hard cash to play the game. I am committed to at least three months of playing albeit at the one month subscription price.
   
As far as in game goes, the questing is really linear. Everything I've read has told me that will open up between 18 and 22, so while I'm willing to give that one a pass it does worry me a little. Movement is overly controlled in some areas, like some of the early questing areas of Gridania. Here, you can see across a river - but gods forbid you want to walk through the river to get there. One must find the bridge and may only move across it, not jump off either side. This seems somewhat non-open worldy to me. It's not at all a deal breaker but is somewhat disappointing.

  
The 3102 error did cut short our time to play, but I am hoping it gives the team to debug and fix whatever it is that broke the ability of thousands of players to log back in after being kicked from the servers.
   
The re-launch for FFXIV will be no different than other MMO launches. There will be login issues, server issues, and issues with getting one when you want. We will probably see login queues or server crashes and will definitely see the frustration of the community we see when they're not getting the services their payment entitles them to. Let's face it, logging in and playing is a basic requirement of an MMO. I do think that they'll figure it out, though it always takes time when these games launch.
   
For now, I am optimistic enough about the crafting and gathering skills as well as the basic questing and partying options that I am willing to give some faith to SE. I hope they can pull it off, because this could be a really great game.

What We're Playing 13AUG13

Tovin:
World of Warcraft
This week I've been playing, as always, a ton of World of Warcraft (WoW). I am working on:
    -Valor for my shadow priest, who I raid on
    -Leveling my mage (she's level 46 now!) so I can raid with her whenever the new expansion comes out
    -Fishing! I LOVE fishing! I am trying for the tiny carp, got two so far, only two more to go. Then lots for my guildies.
    -Loremaster of Kalimdor achieve, because I'm kind of an achievement whore

There's just so much to do in WoW, I tend to have a hard time focusing on doing one thing at a time. I've started on the PvP achievements, and find it a bit annoying playing with people who all seem to be doing their own thing rather than having a dedicated goal of winning and team over self. Oh well, that's WoW, right?

Starcraft 2
I've also been playing Starcraft every now and then. I mostly do a custom game every few days, though I've been slacking and yesterday it showed, when I lost to a computer AI set on "harder". That was sad, so back to playing at least once every two days! My zerg level is 27 and moving along quite nicely!

Final Fantasy 7
I got Final Fantasy 7 a few weeks ago, but it's hard to sit down and find long uninterrupted time to play. I really don't want to stay logged in and ramp up extra time played!

Faster Than Light (FTL)
I've played a few games of FTL. I suck at it. Turns out I also didn't know how to actually maneuver my people around! Now that I have that down, I'm excited to give it a try. It's a good game to pop in and play for a few minutes, now that my Plants VS Zombies (PVZ) addiction has calmed. I blame the recent re-attack of PVZ on the slot machines in Laughlin that we found that are themed around the game.

Second Chance Heroes
I've been playing in the Second Chance Heroes beta every now and then. This one is fun, though not exactly my style. I am enjoying Abe Lincoln with a chainsaw immensely! If you want in on the beta, check it out!

Dimli:
Dim has been playing a ton of Diablo 3, to get ready for whatever expansion news we'll be hearing out of Gamescom in Cologne, Germany this month. I think it helps that the current races in Path of Exile are happening at times that he can't really make and he tends to enjoy that type of game play.

He's also been leveling his Monk in WoW. He levels so much faster than I do! Probably because I pretty much refuse to do dungeons. I hate them!

I think we've ended the BorderLands 2 downloadable content marathon he went through the last three weeks, since he hasn't loaded it up once over the weekend or so far this week. I guess I just have to wait and see.

He also went through a huge Orcs Must Die 2 marathon a few weeks ago, and I think we've got that craze out of his system.

Looking Forward To:
Not a whole lot on the upcoming game market we're super stoked about. Waiting to see what Blizzard announces at Gamescon. I am excited for a D3 expansion, my hardcore Demon Hunter needs some love!


I browse the the Camelot Unchained Founders Forums weekly and watch with complete non-enthusiasm any news about Wildstar.

Otherwise, just waiting for Labor Day weekend, when my brother and sister-in-law will be down. They're both huge gaming geeks so we always have a blast! Last time we played some rather tipsy Star Tropics (WAY harder than we remembered) and some Mega Man 10 from WiiWare on the Nintendo Wii, lots of great fail laughs between pizza, Cheetos, and refreshing drinkage.

I am open to suggestions on great, relatively inexpensive video games we could play together and have some fun with!

NASL Production Of WCS Season 2 NA Regional Finals

Apologies for both the wall of text as well as the formatting issues. Blogger is annoying, and Blizzard doesn't have any WCS media kits that I can find - and it's late so I can't go take screen shots and stuff. I will plan appropriately in the future!

On to the actual post!

I decided to do some thoughts on North American Star League (NASL) and their production of this weekend's Starcraft 2 World Championship Series (WCS) Season 2 North American regional finals. regional finals went in my opinion.

I should probably start with the fact that we did not watch live, but instead watched the VODs through Twitch. There's just too much going on in my house to watch most Starcraft events live, and pausing is a Godsend, when I need a break to get stuff done.

The Casters/Hosts

I tend to enjoy the NASL casters, when they can stay on target (ha ha). Sometimes Rotterdam and Mr. Bitter tend to go off on weird jokes from personal conversations that the audience isn't privy to. By the time they reign themselves in, the bit has gone from weird, to not funny. It happens very fast! Depending on the situation this can be a complete mood killer, taking away the attention from the match and players. Or it can be oddly entertaining in a WTF kind of way.

The NASL casters are great, and I am really hoping they go back to doing "The Pulse", but I don't see how they can do that as well as nightly content. I do miss that show though, it was a lot of fun and so different from the other options available in the scene for weekly breakdowns.

Mr. Bitter

Other than aforementioned weird tangents, I find Mr. Bitter rather entertaining. His play by play is not always accurate, but I find him to be both entertaining and I love that he explains things in a very easy to understand way. I suppose this could be taken as a bad thing (if you read a lot of Reddit), but I don't understand the game enough to know what most people watching know, so I think it's awesome!

Frodan

It's been fun to really watch Frodan grow from NASL 3 to today. He is fun to watch, and actually really hysterically funny. I enjoy his humor, his style, and his approach to casting. Overall sometimes he misses the stuff I want him to be talking about in game (he doesn't switch topics fast enough sometimes to match the pace of the game), but the rest of the fun of watching him makes up for it.

Gretorp

Gretorp is knowledgeable and brings excitement to the games. He's sometimes a little dry, but he and Frodan make a great duo. I will never forget the 36 orbital command game Gretorp played, I think it was during NASL 4. I enjoy the back and forth they have and think they complement each other well. I find his input on why a player is doing something and the moves it opens up down the road to really make the game easier to watch and much more educational.

Rotterdam

Rottie is fun. Weird, but fun. He, like Mr. Bitter, tends to get off track a little too easily, but at least they make the awkwardness fun to watch. He seems the most...comfortable with being a little crazy and that comes off very well.

Terry the Intern

Terry had some truly awkward moments where you could see his mind thinking "how do I get out of this?!", like during the "Who was the 50th president?" trivia. Otherwise, I enjoyed his appearances and find the strange awkwardness a little refreshing. As I mentioned before he needs to stop with the pushing social media like crack. It's annoying.

Clutch

Clutch needs to stop yelling into the microphone unless he's yelling "ARE YOU READY?!". This weekend I learned that he considers himself an actor and that he interrupted every interviewee for a quick story that somehow steered the story back to him. He comes across a little....off. I can't quite nail it down though, but he's didn't really add a whole lot to the whole production for me personally. Don't get me wrong, he's an awesome announcer, but the other stuff just doesn't seem as natural to him as it does to the other guys. Interview skills definitely need work.

DAY9

Day9 is always fun to watch, when he's not giggling like a crazy person when casting with Apollo. A lot of yelling, since he didn't have to cast the whole gig. This is normal for Day9. A little tiresom, but normal. He certainly knows his stuff and it's *really* fun to hear him talk out what timings could mean and what we need to see for each option to unfold in the right amount of time.I enjoy his casting but you just never know which Day9 you're going to get. A reason why I stopped watching his dailies. I always tune into an event when he's casting though, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much. He's always entertaining, if a little overboard on the enthusiasm.

Husky

Husky gets a lot less credit than I think he deserves for his ability to quickly and efficiently call good play-by-play. There's very few in the industry that I have seen that can do it and get away with it. Husky actually does it really well, but there's still a lot of yelling going on. Husky and Day9 make a great casting team overall, so it was really fun to have them both there.

Production

NASL did a really amazing job with their overall production. They had a LOT of B-roll. A whole lot! And it really added to my enjoyment of the cast overall. Their music was pretty good too, but could have used one more song to add to the rotation. By the end of Sunday I was a little sick of the same song - and of Dimli walking around humming it. I also love that they have countdowns during their downtime, so I can see how long I have to get stuff done before I miss something - though we did watch everything on VOD, so I suppose I could have paused it.

Almost forgot to mention there was no dubstep! Did you hear that?! Other music DOES exist! I loved it!

Also, while there were some sound issues intermittently they were minor and quickly fixed (except for Clutch's mic right there at the end).

One things I did miss was some community stuff like Carbot's Starcrafts, and Temp0's stuff. It wasn't a bad production without it, and I'm not sure if it would have been better with it - but for some reason I did notice it wasn't there.

The B-roll features (that I saw) included:

Interviews with all the players

 Outros from the players ("I'm so and so, and you're watching WCS something something") 

I really loved this and think EVERYONE should be doing it! A great addition that made it feel like I was watching a real production.

Paintball Competition 

This was a really fun and just great entertainment. Less shots of Lauren's ass would have been fine, but I suppose their market is 18-24 year old guys. As an aside, I've been wanting to try paintball, and the injury report at the end kind of ended that for me. A big thank you to NASL for saving me from injuring myself greatly!

Rotti's Wing Eating Competition

This one was....weird, though the commentary of the spectators was entertaining.

Santa Monica Pier Meet and Greet

This was a little short, but was fun to watch the players doing something other than playing. It was just fun to watch.

Walkthrough of the Player House

The NASL personalities never cease to amaze me with their deadpan commentary and general funny stuff they say. I liked kinda seeing the "behind the scenes" how players live kinda stuff. I haven't really seen anything like this except Dr. Pepper gaming house stuff, which just feels like a gigantic advertising waste of time which doesn't tie in to SC2 directly.

Website and Social Media Stuff

I am 100% tired of NASL pushing the social media stuff. ESL does a much better job of making Twitter an organic part of their production. The NASL approach of "OMG TWEET! TWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!" is very tiresome and feels so forced it's just not cool.

The NASL website is pretty easy to navigate, except that there doesn't seem to be a lot there. Even now, the FAQ and schedule says it's coming soon and the newest "news" is the announcement that they were doing WCS Season 2. Clearly, they are focusing elsewhere, but it'd be nice to see some stuff there. They do have a mention of the Santa Monica fan meet and greet, but it didn't make it into the news section. Picky? Yes. Requirement for a site to file stuff properly? Yes.

I do really like that they have an option to turn spoilers off and on. That's a must have!

I couldn't really check out Twitter or Facebook during the weekend because we were always so behind the live event that we didn't want to risk having the winners announced. So I can't really say here, except that they can stop telling me to do it.

Final Thoughts

I thought NASL did a pretty good job on the regional finals that took place this weekend. Part of me wonders if this is because of the horrendous job that Major League Gaming (MLG) did last season set the bar pretty low. Yes, I'm hating on MLG. I thought the overall production value for the  was not as good as it could have been.  I thought could have done more than a regular MLG event for their production. I do realize they were in a bind, and I thought the event was fine - but it wasn't particularly interesting or appealing as an observer. I haven't figured out whether I blame MLG or Blizzard more, but certainly both are responsible.


I know NASLs production value comes in part from having more time to prepare and seeing the mistakes that were made previously. Nevertheless, it was a typical NASL broadcast. It was fun, lots of high energy and lots of great stuff to watch that wasn't always the games. I am definitely excited to see what they come up with for Season 3! And for figuring out Bloggers retarded formatting rules! *points at the "final thoughts" header I spent 30 minutes trying to fix*

Raiding In WoW: Tier 14

Dimli and I raid in World of Warcraft (WoW) Mondays and Wednesdays from 8:30pm to 11pm in a 10 man group from our guild. We have currently downed 11 of 12 bosses in this current tier, the 14th WoW has released so far. Our Wow Progress page shows both good and bad. I am more frustrated by the bad at the moment.

I can't begin to tell you how frustrated I am that Blizzard decided to ramp up the difficulty on this tier? We hit a huge wall pretty early, on the second boss in the raid, Horridon. It was maddening for Dim, who is our main tank and one of the leaders of our raid. It was frustrating for me but it really got to him pretty early on.

We finally killed the damn thing, and moved on to boss 3, Council of Elders. This one took us a little bit, but no where near as long as the stupid Dinosaur with lasers on his back. But then we hit Tortos. The most annoying turtle ever put into any game, ever.

We were on Tortos, with me kicking the shells, for what felt like an eternity. Since we've gotten him down, we have breezed through every other boss we've come across. We've never one shot anything, but a night or a night and a half on each boss hasn't been ridiculous especially considering we are pretty casual about who can make it when. We know life comes first, and raiding/gaming second.

Green Wall Strategy Group of Swift Justice (Velen)

Why on earth does Blizzard feel it necessary to put the hard stuff up front? The number of raiding guilds who started off by killing boss 1 and then never killed boss two is ridiculous. Then add in the true show stopper that is that damned turtle and we have what really can only be considered a mess of progression as far as difficulty.

Towards the beginning we were waiting for the usual nerfs that Blizzard has traditionally done, making encounters easier by debuffing them by 10% every few weeks. Instead, they implemented an item level increase via valor points that didn't seem to really help us a whole lot.

Are we that non-typical of other raiders? So far below the average folks that Blizzard doesn't take our plight into consideration? Or did they just miss the mark in how they ramped up their progression difficulty and tuning of the bosses?

I hate feeling that I just suck that bad - but at least we're killing bosses now, with a good chance of finishing up this tier while it's current content. I am super excited!!

This week we're on the final boss, Lei Shen and I really hope to see a kill!

Can I finish off by saying that I miss Josh "Lore" Allen so much since he want to Blizzard Entertainment as an employee? His PST and Weekly Marmot content is really missed. His personal take on raiding and the game in general just doesn't seem to exist on any of the current WoW community sites. I can't find direct links for his stuff on either of his YouTube channels (devomorph and devolore) but as soon as I find it I will link it!