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!

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!

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!