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!

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!