Married IRL

Is it?

No no, not dead.

Just in a state of…. blarg?

Summer time funk? Check. Expansion blues? Check. Raid Burnout? Double Check. Bored and not sure what to do about it? Yea, that’s us.

It was bound to happen, I would think. I know last week, after our Canadian friends went to Georgia and then home, Jas and I looked and looked for something, anything, game wise to give us that spark of interest back.

The game store was BARREN. I swear, I’ve never come across such a crappy time for games. Everything that looks interesting is COMING SOON!

Well, why not be there now damn it?! There were a few things in WoW making me really not want to log in (get to that shortly), and as much as I love Mass Effect, I can only play it so much. But all the good stuff? Spore, Infinite Undiscovery, Spore… ok, so I’m really looking forward to Spore… but you get what I mean. The nifty games aren’t here.

Jason likes WoW, but he’s not a real MMO type of person. WoW has me hooked to the MMO environment, so I figured I’d experiment. I tried four or five different trials of other MMOs…

Out of all of them (Guild Wars is still HELLA BORING), EQ2 was the only one I might consider ever purchasing (Jas, and the internet apparently, refuses to let me try FFXI). So yea… not a bad experiment… I guess. But arg. Of the other types of games I’d like to play? Store didn’t have them. I miss EBgames. Game Stop sucks. /sulk

I’d love to try the Prequel God Of War, I love that series. It’s a ton of fun, and I definitely can’t wait for the third in the series. Crisis Core also looked awesome, but again, the store didn’t have it. I don’t have anything against my PSP, but sometimes, just playing on that tiny screen just… well, it’s TINY!

So, we bought Dynasty Warriors 6 for Jas (he’s in love with that series) and Gears of War.

I. Suck. At. Gears. Of. War. HARDCORE. I keep getting myself or Jas KILLED. It’s IMPOSSIBLE to tell which big beefy guy is my F’ing team mate and which one is the bad guy!

So yea, kinda trying to keep myself occupied… it’s hard. I’m very excited about some of the games coming SOON… and excited about the expansion for WoW… but blarg.

I deleted Leilu. Level 50 shaman with 350 JC’ing and 330 LWing… I’m cursed. NO MORE LEATHERWORKERS! They’ll just get deleted. I made a horde priest in her place. Cause I needed a priest there. I’m spending a lot of time on both sides now. Another Blood elf, though I’m kinda wishing I made her a troll, but she’s 21 and I don’t feel like starting over. So, all my hordies on Drenden be Blood elves. Yarrrr.

AC has pretty much given up on the raid scene till Wrath. Why? Well, between the stress, summer scheduling, our MT burning out and what not… it was just too much. Jas and I just said too much to re work. So it’s kinda sad, people have split off to keep seeing content. Which is fine by me. But the green has gotten kinda sparse and that’s kinda sad to see. But that’s life.  Edit:  Thought I put more… anywho, some will be back, others may stay where they are.  But either way, still have plenty of friend to chat and play with.  I’ll miss it, but I don’t miss the stress.

Our friend said we’re veteran raid officers now. Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. ;P But it’s something!

I need to set aside some time to redo the layout of MIRL. It’s starting to get on my nerves…

Triple dots (…) seem to be very prevalent in this post. O.o Oh and I should probably update to WP 2.6.1… but it looks really difficult! I feel like I’m gonna fudge something up.

Oh, if you’ve made a comment to one of our posts for the first time and it’s never appeared… I’m sorry. I had to go through 100 spam comments like yesterday and … GAWD. How do people filter this stuff? I know there’s some sort of addon to WP (another thing I can’t seem to figure out) called Kismet? Er something, and it makes the spam go away… er something. Rarg. Any tips oh veterans of WP?

That’s all I can type for now. Time to go to work in like 40 mins so I should get some more Darkspear Troll rep grinding done.

Toodles!

Guild Whoas and Woes

Today’s post is gonna be one of those weirdly impromptu ones, where I sneak in time between work to write a tid bit.

Yesterday’s scheduled post ended up not happening because I’ve been working all week and haven’t had a chance to unload in all my thoughts onto Fio, so he can come back and edit this one with his own two cents (HINT) later ^.^

For now, a little bit of Whoa:

A’lar! Dead! We did it on Monday and frankly, we would have done it last week but bugginess said noooooooooo and we were DENIED our first kill. Well, no more. That makes us 3/4 TK and 5/6 in SSC. Huzzah!

Guild Woe: We lost one of our core healers on Wednesday. Now I’m of mixed thoughts on the subject. On the one hand, I can understand the desire to do more raiding. We only raid three times a week, Monday/Wed/And Sunday for about 3 hours that time. We have a smattering of other raid type things going on during the week, Kara runs, now ZA runs and the PuG Gruuls or Maggys, but the srs content, the progression content was on those three days.

So, off this person goes to raid some more, which ok, I can understand… but it still kinda hurts. Because as much as they professed to loving the guild… we never ever hid the fact that we were a casual raiding guild. Ever. This raider started out raiding only once or twice a week, but slowly and steadily worked their way into our core. Dependable, always on time, repaired and fully reagented and repaired… they will be missed. But still… it’s gonna be tough to try and replace them, especially now that we’re working on Vashj and soon to be Kael. /shrug But we’ll manage I guess. It was just… not something that we expected, and with all our Real Life crap, I know I’m slightly off kilter to have this affect me more than it should.

Guild Whoa: We did a 5 clear of SSC in one night! HUZZAH! That means Vashj all night Sunday! Here’s hoping we can get her to Phase three! Now that the SSO badge vender is up, it’s HIGHLY doable! So far our biggest problem is the Strider, but this week we’re gonna have one warlock with us and a new shadow priest, so … MOAR DOTS!

Woe: Our awesome of awesome warlock Leo tank burned out. /pout And that just sucks butt. Because while I found his Hellfiring if there was a possible wipe ways annoying as hell, he is otherwise a fun guy and a great raider. He shall be missed T.T

Whoa: Mount Hyjal on Monday. You heard meh. When our Raid Leader of awesome said if we can clear A’lar and get to the 3/4 and 5/6 in both the T5 content, we’re gonna try our hand at the joke that is Rage Winterchill.

Color me UBER EXCITED! From what I’ve read and heard so far, MH is pretty much like a 25 man version of Black Morass…. UG. But still, looks interesting. I’m playing Warcraft 3 so I can understand all this LORE! I love the lore in this game, hence why I and a friend are trying our hands at this whole RP thing… though I’m a bit out of my comfort zone because we’re horde but hey! You can’t grow if you don’t challenge yourself! ^.^

Woe: Drama. Capital D. I hates it. Wish there was an easy way around it, but there never is. I’ve been gaming for 7 years now, and doesn’t matter what the medium, it’s always there. The common denominator is as people. Where there is people, there is drama. /sigh

Whoa: We got two new recruits on Thursday and Friday. A new Shadow Priest and a new Holy Priest! /dance Both are pretty awesome people, both know their stuff. We had an impromptu Maggie’s scheduled Thursday, just to see how bad he was nerfed since 2.4 and we brought both new recruits on to see how they’d do…

Omg… Oh. Em. Gee! They nerfed Maggie BIG TIME! Like, I swear we didn’t need the 25 people there! It was amazing. We had only downed Maggie once before the patch and it was rough… timing the clickers, making sure they all stayed alive, making sure Celli stayed alive… it was hard core. Now he’s a loot pinata. Srsly. He’s also lucrative enough to kill each week, with all the goodies he drops. So another thing to consider XD

So yea, my week in a nut shell. Mostly good, some bad, but there it is ^.^

Oh, and saying hi to Dammerung last night made my night! Eventually I’ll catch B quad!

PS: Picture courtesy of WoWhead… cause Cay got a Hatchling last night! /squee!

Scribbling Notes - Raid Prep

So it’s raid time again. Wednesday nights is our SSC clear night, to prep for the Vashj attempts on Sunday.

On nights like this, organizing healing targets is a breeze. We can do Hydross and Lurker in our sleep, Leo wakes us up cause he’s a hooche, Fathom Lord is a walk in the park after the Shammy goes down, and Tidewalker while very annoying is doable.

But on nights like Sunday and Monday, progression nights, my desk is covered in notes and napkins with healing assignments and raid positions to snacks and whatever else just so happens to land there (like my cat).

I highly recommend that the raider has something handy to write stuff down on. Sticky notes are my bestest friend. These things are awesome when you might have something particular to a fight you’re learning. You can glance up from the screen really quick to refresh your mind on Phase Two area, and your sticky shows a big fat circle around “You Are Here”. That sort of thing.

Now with a title like raid prep, I bet you were waiting for some sort of in game reference. HAHAHAHAHAHAH SUCKERS! FOOLED JOO!

Seriously though, there’s all those awesome things you can do to prep in game for raid (bringing your consumables, i.e mana potions, food, elixirs/pots, being fully repaired, etc) and then there’s a bit of out of raid prep. Having handy dandy stickies = one bonus. But also, do your raid leader a favor? Read up on the strats. You may not be tackling things exactly as what you read, but at least you’ll know things like boss abilities, what to expect during phases and the like. That’s what’s most important. Let the RL worry about how things will go down. Just know what to expect. Best thing a raider can do to make things run smoother.