The Return of the Escaping Gnome

Ok, I have to admit, the title is not very indicative of what I am going to say. In fact I am not sure what I am going to say. You see the last few weeks I've been thinking of writing up something in my blog, its been a while after all. But I always felt there is not much to say. As if the fun was drained out from both the game and the surrounding activities.

Yet the last few weeks Escape started assembling back from the holidays and begun raiding again. In order to do that we started recruiting once again, to fill in the gaps and form a raiders group around the veteran core. It a process, we have been accustomed to and it is probably an inherit feature of guilds with a more 'casual' approach like ours - although only our schedule is per se casual.

As with most guilds in our status the question was either push for more HMs or go straight for a Lich King kill to satisfy the popular demand. We kind of did both last week. This week, mostly because our seasoned drill Searg...er... raid leader and GM was not around we opted for a more "relaxed" approach. Get our usual HMs, do not try anything new and overall try to have fun.

Not sure what was the deal, I am not to fuzzed about the technicalities of WoW these days, but our DPS was excellent - think the Boomkin did work wonders there - and the raid was...dare I say it... fun! Even the voices of the raiders were sounding happy. Jokes flew over, our resident gnome got teased, the old-farts exchanged insults and as always I slacked trying to read a couple academic papers while raiding. Yes, I admit I do that during normal modes...

All in all it has been a while I had fun in a raid. But most importantly it brought as smile in my face as I saw Escape sound and healthy after another summer break. It seems Cataclysm - which I have been checking now and then through Beta - will include lots of opportunities to play around with guildmates and get some nice guild-rewards. This was enough to renew my interest to World of Warcraft for a while.

I feel I'll be updating this blog more often now...

Raiding, Marriage and tales from the crypt

I'll tell you one thing's for sure. Preparing for a wedding is like preparing for a raid. One, you need the proper gear. Two, you need consumables. Three, you got to do some reading beforehand. Four, you assemble a group and assign roles. Five, you wear rings...epic ones...and halos. And you videotape it and take screenshots for you to remember it. And people whisper...and behind your back. And you send invites! And people kinda sign-up and come over and eat consumables. And there are beasts and formidable creatures!! You know, ugly aunts and good looking females. And at the end of the day you are - hopefully - left with some extra gold and some loot. God dammit, getting married is like going into a fucking raid!!

I am sure you can appreciate that preparations are taking quite a bit of time and especialy hinder my blogging. But I have never been a very frequent blogger. Nonetheless... There is often something to write about. The wedding is one part. The waiting is the other...

Escape, has proven numerous times its very resilient. We had ups and downs, ins and outs. And we are kinda down these days. Many of our raiders are away for real life reasons. Some got tired of - what I consider the worst instance I have ever seen - ToC. Same place, no variety. Granted, the challenge is there but as far as I am concerned the scenery goes a long way. So we ended up loosing quite a few raid nights due to that. And we are not alone it seems...

Many guilds suffer from what I like to call a 'pre-patch trauma'. People for all sorts of reasons find excuses to stay out of the game. Contrary to after-patch times when people make time to be in-game and use excuses `out there', in the real world. I appreciate many people have ultra-valid real life reasons to stay out. But you can not change my view, we do make time to be in-game when we want. And at this time people do not want to be in-game. Simple as that.

Inevitably that leads people of no emotional attachment - or a weak one for that matter - to their guild to move to the... `upper echelons' of the guild hierarchy within a server. Its not the guilds that attract those raiders, that continue to raid no matter what. Its the raiders themselves that keep gathering up and forming such guilds.

The rest of us, those that have some attachments to the guild they are into await patiently for others to return. Hoping that when the time comes we will grab our axes and yell our battlecries.

I just hope this will take place before my wedding, otherwise I will miss a couple of weeks of the fun!

Quick 'n' Dirty - V

Its been a while since I updated my blog, once again being swamped with work and preparations for my wedding. Particularly the latter needs a bit of work :p. We are also planning slowly our Honeymoon on New York City! Exciting times! I think we are both much more thrilled for the trip than the wedding itself. But hey, we are in this together :p

Nonetheless, I did spent some time in WoW the last couple of weeks. Escape managed to slay Northrend Beasts in heroic mode and now we set our sites on the next hard-mode. Otherwise I spent some time to set up an inscription busyness to complement my herbalist/alchemist DK, manly created to supply Lance with consumables. The scribe is on my GFs account and his sole purpose is to put in the AH the leftovers of the DK. And its been doing well, I have more or less managed to level up inscription to 330 with minimal expenses, funding myself from AH sales.

I've got myself a copy of Windows 7. Ok, either Win7 are a massive improvement to Vista or my Vista install was pretty knackered. I am seeing an increase in FPS of over 300% in areas like Icecrown with full settings. I am pretty sure Win7 are NOT supposed to be that good (or better) and the never-underestimated power of a clean install worked like a dream. But hey, can't complain :p.

My dear friend Thoryel called me one day and informed me about Torchlight. Sounds and looks very promising and I am sure I will put my hands to it when time allows. I am also excited about patch 3.3 lore-wise but I wont even begin to comment on the Tier10 robes and the recent LoH Forbearance `band-aid'. I will be patient to comment on the 'final' version of things.

/Lance

DPSing in a healer's costume...

Yesterday Escape made a few attempts in killing Yogg without the help of Mimiron. We attempted to go with minimal number of healers and that meant that yours truly was to go DPS into the brain.

Facts:

• My gear is better than Naxx level by a couple of pieces but overall based on tier 7. I do not consider this as adequate and our RL and officers were aware of that.
• I have not raided significantly as retry, nowhere near as much as the 1/10 of my raiding experience as Holy which spans for about 4 years.
• I am accustomed to the healer's type of awareness, not a melee DPSer's and only now I am beginning to develop the latter (after the introduction of dual specs)
• I do not consider myself particularly skillful and I had never seen this fight from another perspective but as a healer outside the brain room.

As you can imagine my presence as a warrior of light was... miserable. I constantly failed to get out in time of the brain room, sometimes because I was not clicking properly, others because I was seemingly late. Although I can not fathom how faster I could be. That, coupled with some reluctance on certain parts of the fight and a misunderstanding with the portals did not help much. In fact it was so bad that I was banging my hand on my desk like XT having a tantrum. My wife-to-be was having seconds thoughts on my mental state... I am not happy at all wiping my raid, I am not happy at all wasting the time of others and I am not happy at all not being in control of my game. But...

Bearing in mind the facts above I must say I find it fairly reasonable. My performance I mean. Yes, the fact I sucked as DPSer. Out last attempt of the night was with the help of Mimiron, me healing in the brain room, our druid brain healer going boomkin and us one-shoting Yogg. Well, one-shoting him with Mimiron and me as healer at least :-p. I was sooooo pumped up with being back in the healers boots that for the first time in many raids I was first in healing. You see my healing style does not ever earn me any meter-prices; I like to believe (or fool myself) its more subtle. And no portal issues this time, going out of the brain room fast. Still... I felt so good to be in control of my game, so good to be back where I feel comfortable that I gave it all I had. Maybe it was guilt for screwing up and wiping my brothers-in-virtual-arms. Maybe because I wanted to prove myself to what I know best. Maybe because I wanted to have my vengeance from my other self. Kind of my real-life work situation these days. But that is a different matter...

Yogg fell, but I could not help thinking of what I had seen. I have been immersed in a different game, where my awareness of the surroundings was totally different. The closest experience I had of a melee play style was judging light in MC and smacking things with my Quel'Serrar for kicks. Ok and some 5-mans. But I had to make an impact here, watch the raid, stop thinking of those bars going black and watch the bloody clouds. Oh, the ordeal of a healer in DPSers boots...

Still... I am not giving up. I will continue to gear my paladin for retribution and I will be there when my RL needs me. Even that will be a rare occasion, rarer as I continue to fail :p . My holy set is almost complete, some tiny bits and pieces here still needed. Granted, it will take some time before I develop the situational awareness of a DPSer. But... as with anything in my real life that is difficult and seems daunting, or impossible... I will push forward as much as I can afford. I'll try to not do it at the expense of others.

Vengeance will be mine... Cookies too...

Yogg-Saron is no more

Yup, took us three visits to the Old God of Death to get him down. We have been....tenacious enough and entered phase 3 a few times before the recent nerfs so we were pretty confident he would be dead. In fact, the recent nerfs made him kind of a walk in the park in my humble opinion, although we already had tackled the affected phases. Nonetheless, we raid 3 days a week so we do not complain. The old god is dead and that keeps the guild spirits up is excellent. I got my 4th Tier 8.5 (or whatever the number is, I have lost count) and I look more like a Samurai than a Paladin...

Escape's 1st Yogg-Saron kill

Now, Escape will focus on getting some of the hard-mode achievements going, get out emblematic priest his fragments for his Val'anyr and gear up our raid pool as we go along. Hopefully I will eventually be able to collect the deathknight-looking armor set from off-spec bidding, equip the Scarlet Tabard and make a scarlet crusade-themed video...And possibly at some point get those fragments myself.

On a side note, its sad to see people leave the blogging community but I appreciate they want to move forward. Blog Azeroth has lots of new authors cropping up and I'd like to think that the 'nouvelle vague' of wow blogging ( I place myself in that as well :p) will keep the community active as ever.

Bad to the bone...

After some farming, quite a few dailies - as I am pretty crapy with the AH, contrary to Gevlon - I managed to get the cash I needed for my Mekgineer's Chopper. I must say driving this thing is immense fun, much more than I thought. And since the new bike needs a `bad-to-the-bone attitude' Lance is now sporting a new punky hairstyle. If only I could get rid of that skirt...



On another note, Escape killed General Vezax and had our first tries on Yogg-Saron. He will soon become the dead old god of death...

Why the bloody hell do we go in Ulduar?

Sometimes I wonder if its a good thing or a bad thing not having anything `juicy' to write in my blog. You see, I often report either good/positive or bad/negative news. If everything is...yikes!...`normal'... nothing to report.

Escape has been progressing steadily, facing today Mimiron seeking to complete the Keepers of Ulduar achievement. Freya was freed this week for the first time and although we got only 3 raid days per week we seem to make the best of them. Our 10-man groups also do well, with the most 'advanced' one facing Yogg-Saron.

On the solo front, I have been leveling fishing, (around 390 nowadays), doing some dailies in case I do get that chopper (yes, I still haven't crafted that for me...) and collecting my Argent Tournament badges for future use and rep with Silver Co. I already spent the first 50 on the Stormwind tabard but the damn thing depicts the guild's tabard when you are guilded. Still, I wait patiently till they fix it, I think its the most `definitive' tabard for Lance.

Nonetheless, one of the things that have been bothering me for some time is...why?

Why the bloody hell do we go in Ulduar, why do we participate in AT. Ok, in `game-terms' we do it for the loot, the fun, the progress. But what is the justification for our characters, our toons. The Ulduar cinematic did give some... political background in the whole story. But being an old player that have gone through the quest lines for Onyxia, Molten Core, AQ and even the old Naxx (although I never set foot in it)... I was used in having a background story, something to support why I am going there. Although Wotlk arguably placedt the players deeper in the story-lines, I feel that Blizzard kinda missed something when it came to Ulduar. Unless I am missing something - dazed from the endless coding in a tcl/tk 'clone' for work' - there is not even an NPC to direct you there. Someone to say, `oh shit, Yoggy is loose, the shit is about to hit the fan so we need someone to grab him and turn that fan facing Arthas bedroom...'!.

Or... maybe there is something and I missed it
...but then again...
...I shouldn't and if I did, its not my fault alone...

Thinking out loud

I sit down thinking, hoping to come up with something interesting for my blog. Various thoughts revolve around my mind but I eventually end up with the same. I am having fun in this game. Multidimensional fun. People seem to think I am crazy. You see, many of my older guildies have recently quit the world of warcraft. It was more or less that time for them. I feel tiredness was showing up in their game.

Still, I like it in Azeroth, its kinda fun and relaxing at certain moments. Granted, some times things are repetitive, but I often find that particular fact relaxing. Other times we are short of one person or two for raiding. Ok, been there, done that. There are good times, bad times, as Led Zeppelin sang. Jousting, farming, pvp... round round, I get around...

This raid week was somewhat `clumsy'. Yes, clumsy is the right world for it. We cleared most of the `farmed' content during the first two raid days and we got Hodir towards the end. That is 8/14 now. Still, our last raid was hindered from low numbers. It seems once in a while the stars align and mock us. We are a fairly small guild with fairly regular raiders. But once in a while things just do not add-up. So, this week left me with a bitter-sweet taste. Ok, we did get one more boss down (freed actually) which, sufficient to say, its more than many can say for their raid weeks. But I do feel with a tad more dedication and commitment we would be way ahead of us, competing with the `hardcore' ones in our realm.

But clumsiness often comes with the luxury of being able to raid three days a week to the max. Sometimes your guildmates may have prior obligations. Other times people have the odd-connection issue. Many things hinder a small guild like ours.

A busy week for me comes to an end. I think its time for me to come up with some more thoughtful posts than simply thinking out loud...

Quick 'n' Dirty IV

Its been a rather busy week at work and I did not have much time to update here. What I did though and had lots of fun with, was updating our guild's front-page with one that is based on blogger. I am surprised how many things you can do with this platform and a bot of good old html/css...

Will be back over the weekend with some thoughts on Ulduar nerfs, jousting and whisky

..and a year with Escape

It was exactly a year ago when I decided to leave the old server I played with friends for quite some time, in order to look for greener pastures. I had already done my research and was ready to embark to a journey to a different place. So some time in the afternoon and after my new GM had accepted my application I transferred my toon to Silvermoon and got a ginvite from him.

A year that took me from Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, all the way to Ulduar and the Silver Council. I made some good friends, had some good laughs and was fortunate to be accompanied through this year by some of my good old teammates. They will be a year with us in a couple of weeks from now.

Not much to say, I just wanted to share this with my readers, particularly those from Escape. Thank you for all the fun. See ya in game.


Ref: Image from Deviantart's Chudtoons