Queue Queue Queues.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan

The new expansion is upon us, the Iron Horde are bashing their shields in a threatening manner, the draenei of Draenor are draenei-ing, and millions of player are clamouring to make their mark on a new world that represents the some of the best content that we've yet seen.

Or that's the rumour, at least.

A friend of mine who used to play WoW hardcore but left the game after Wrath asked me how the new expansion was. I replied honestly and said, "I have no idea".

Like many people I haven't had an opportunity to see the grand vistas of Draenor first hand due to server instability, DDOS attacks by script kiddies with nothing better to do, and obscenely long server queues to get into almost all realms; with the highly populous realms being hit the hardest.

All of this you know already, assuming that you're reading this and not playing WoW right now you're probably staring at something like this:

Now, I think most people expect that a launch day is going to be busy. When Cataclysm launched the fields of Mount Hyjal were packed with people all trying to do the same quests and getting in each others way, while the quest-givers themselves (Malfurion was the worst) were buried alive under the weight of half a server's population trampling them with their mammoth mounts. In Pandaria I was trapped in a never-ending wave of hozen that would respawn before I finished killing them, leaving me stationary and in constant combat for half an hour.

These sorts of problems are expected and not a real issue. It's all part of the fun of launch day.

But the queues. Oh the horrible, horrible queues.

Can there be anything worse than waiting to play a game that you've been waiting for months to play? Is there anything more disheartening than seeing a line of 5100 people in front of you, and the queue timer telling you that by the time you'll be allowed in you'll need to leave for work because 8 hours will have passed?

Better hope your chair is comfortable.

Patience is not simply the ability to wait - it's how we behave while we're waiting.
Joyce Meyer

Having been watching Twitter and some of the forums over the past couple of days, most people have taken this with a fairly good-natured, if somewhat frustrated manner. The DDOS attacks that the servers endured didn't help matters, but I for one assumed that launch day would have some issues--too many people, lots of lag, some bugs that escaped the crucible of beta, and other such inconveniences.

I did however, expect to be able to log in. It's frustrating to hear people talking about their garrisons, their level-ups, and how great everything looks and oh-by-the-way these new heroic dungeons are awesome, while I am staring at the Queue timer blocking me like a bouncer at an exclusive nightclub who won't let me in because I'm wearing the wrong brand of shoes.

A lot of criticism has been levelled at Blizzard because of these issues, most of which is unfair, in my opinion. From what it sounds like, DDOS attacks aside, the demand for players to play WoW is more than they've seen in years and more than they ever could have planned for. It seems that something about this expansion has caught the imagination of the playerbase in a way that hasn't happened since Wrath of the Lich King. Maybe it's the concept, the artwork or the relentless TV ads, but it seems that a lot of people are talking about WoW again and more importantly, actively trying to play it.

It's just a pity that the loading screen boss is the first fight that they're wiping on. 

The Mocking Smirk of the Loot Gods

"What's your luckydo?" - Every Grummle ever

There are some days when I just have to shake my head and smile at the weird way that things work out.

The thing about random loot drops is, obviously, that they are random and impossible to predict. You might go for weeks without getting drop, or get three great pieces in a row. Call it RNG Hell, the Loot Gods, Bad Luck or whatever, but blame random chance for that one item of gear that you've been unable to upgrade.

That's where I was last night. My gear was looking pretty good; 522 or better on every single item except for Boots (502 Raid Finder, so at least current tier) and my Shoulders.

The shoulders were embarrassing: [White Tiger Mantle], my LFR shoulders from last Tier that stubbornly refused to upgrade themselves. Weekly LFR runs of Iron Qon and Primordius and almost daily Heroic Scenario runs in the hopes that I would beat the miniscule odds and get a 516 drop with stats that weren't entirely useless.

Nothing. The Loot Gods were displeased, apparently.

I had given up hope completely of ever getting a drop. I was convinced that the drops didn't exist (much like the Shield from Tortos and the Twins, but that's another ranty, Gear QQ post). So I resigned myself to grinding towards Exalted with the Shado-Pan Assault and just buying a set.

And last night, right after Ji-Kun fell over dead into her own green slime, this popped up:

Finally! I was so excited. I wanted to teleport out immediately and buy them, but my raid leader told me to have some damned patience and wait until the end of the raid.

The Loot Gods are bastards, though. After more than two months of waiting and hoping and begging, once I was Exalted and could just buy the damned things and get the suffering over with, what did Primordius drop? Yup: [Spaulders of Primordial Growth].

My raid team all laughed and told me that at least I hadn't spent the money on the reputation gear and would I please finally shut the hell up about shoulders, already?

Now, you're probably saying, "So what?" This sort of thing happens to us all at one point or another. Random is random, after all.

But the Loot Gods have a real flair for the ironic. Guess what Iron Qon dropped? Yup! [Shoulders of the Crackling Conquerer].

I didn't even bother to roll on them. Yes, they're my best in slot and I would absolutely love to have them...

But three sets of shoulders in one night is just too much for any Paladin.

Ahead of the Curve: Lei Shen

Lay the proud Usurpers low!

Tyrants fall in every foe!

Liberty's in every blow! 

Let us Do or Die!  - Robbie Burns, Scots Wha Hae.


I really like my new Raid Team.

I suppose that they're hardly new any more. I have been raiding with them for three months now, and we've been from one end of the Throne of Thunder to the other. We've exulted in glorious victory together and toiled in hardship and defeat at the hands of our enemies. Good times.

Interesting factoid: The Snails on the stairs to Ji-Kun have killed more of us than Primordius and The Twin Consorts combined. Adversity, thy name is Gastropod.

Anyway, I'm really proud to be part of this group. When I joined them—undergeared and ill-prepared—I was understandably nervous about my performance and acceptance into the group. After all, I was replacing the former Raid Leader—also a Holy Paladin—who knew these people, had more experience with the fights and much better gear. Although I would never had admitted it at the time, my greatest fear was that the raid leaders would realize that I was a talentless hack after the first few pulls and ruthlessly relegate me to Non-Raider-Pariah status permanently.

Isn't it always nice when your Worst Fears don't come true?

To their credit, the group (and guild in general) made me feel right at home. To me, at least, Acquired Taste was an instant fit.

It's nice to have a home again.


AHEAD OF THE CURVE

First of all, I'm really glad that Blizzard has finally implemented this kind of Achievement. It's something I have been advocating for a long time. It finally provides a way to differentiate between people who put in a lot of work to kill a boss while it's current, and the Tourist who goes in after the fact to just look around. I love it!

Acquired Taste runs two different 10-Man Raid Groups. When I joined the guild both groups were at a very similar point in their progression and there was a healthy rivalry between the two as to who would get the next progression kill. Sadly, the Prime-Time raid always seemed a step ahead of the Late-Night Crew, but I'm proud to say that both groups have managed to down Lei Shen and are 12/12.

Despite the fact that the Late Night Crew has had a revolving door of people, we've managed to get things done. Doing a quick count in my head I can think of 6 or 7 different tanks we've used, at least as many healers and DPS that come and go before I can even learn their names. But the personality of the group has stayed constant. It's actually remarkable that we've managed to keep steadily progressing with all the turn-over, and (while I hope they don't read this because I wouldn't want to inflate any egos) it's a testament to Ittymar and Amara, our excellent raid leaders.

We actually downed Lei Shen almost a month ago, but I'm posting this now because last week was special. It was the first week that we downed the entire instance without extending the lockout, and it was the week that I personally got my 12/12 achievement as I had been absent when we first killed Iron Qon and The Twins and the group had extended the lockout to tackle Lei Shen. This week we took them down in order.

Now we're going to start playing around with Heroic modes, which will be another first for me.


NO ONE'S DEAD SO KEEP YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS

Apparently, our resident Warlock FRAPSes our raiding nights. This is a first for me; I've never been able to watch myself play the game, and it's especially odd seeing it from another's perspective. It's pretty cool, actually.

Here is our first Lei Shen kill. Look for the Paladin in the full Tier 9 transmog running through bad stuff and generally being out of place all the time if you want to find me. I'm the one calling the tanks impatient at the beginning if you're interested in what I sound like.

The Bottom End of the Learning Curve

In Which the

DWARVEN BATTLE MEDIC

Comes to the

STARTLING AND EMBARRASSING REALIZATION 

That he has Been Playing his Class

LIKE A TOTAL NUBCAKE.

Mists of Pandaria has introduced a lot of changes to all the classes, as is normal with any expansion. When Cataclysm launched I spent hours obsessively scouring each PTR patch note and news release for any change. So I had a pretty clear idea of how the rather fundamental changes to the game, and healing in particular, would play out. 

Come Mists and I did none of that. In fact, since it's launch I've spent far more time in my Protection Levelling/Questing/Pull-Twenty-Mobs-And-Mow-Them-Down spec than I have healing.

So the past few weeks have been spent not only in a frenzied effort to raise my gear level from its former barely-enough-for-LFR level to something that wouldn't completely embarrass me in a normal mode Throne of Thunder 10-Man, but it's also been a steep learning curve to fully understand my class again.

Big things like Talents I had a pretty decent grasp on, at least in the broad strokes, but in reading up on them in the excellent Bossypally Talent Guide I realized that some of my choices were less than optimal. Particularly Hand of Purity, which had been transformed from middling to awesome since the beginning of the expansion, a talent that I had never really considered before that I now consider an essential tool.

I also didn't fully appreciate the effect that normalizing Mana would have on Paladins. In all previous expansions, Intellect was a Paladin's no-brainer, don't-even-think-of-gemming-anything-else-dumbass, best Stat. Not so for Mists. Now the once lamented Spirit is a Holy Paladin's best friend, to the point that the once useless Blue Gems are pretty much all I need now. That was a head-scratcher when I first read about it, let me tell you, and it went against two expansions worth of common sense.

Similarly, Mastery is now such a viable gearing strategy that Ask Mr. Robot considers it the default way to build a Holy Paladin, relegating a Haste-heavy build to the status of the Ugly Cousin that ain't quite right in the head.

I admit, I took the lazy route this expansion: at the start of Mists I didn't do much in the way of homework on my class, and just kept gearing and gemming and playing the same way I had in Cataclysm.

But there's nothing like a Raid Boss to quickly show a person just how bad the lazy way is.


FEET WET IN THE THRONE OF THUNDER

Staring a progression boss in the face for the first time
in a long time. Please ignore the skeletons.

I have officially been a Raider again for three weeks now. My new guild Acquired Taste is full of excellent people who were more than willing to help me get geared up, as well as hand-hold me as I learned the new fights. Their help, as well as some getting some long-awaited good loot-luck in LFR, has seen my iLVL rise from 476 to 501 in three short weeks, still on limited play-time. I'm managing to keep up with the other healers, despite my still-inferior gear.

But lordy, it's been a challenge. Walking on to a raid team that had three bosses on farm that I had never before encountered or even studied, being expected to contribute in a meaninful way and not hold the raid back, all while sporting several blues and one or two PVP gear pieces. Not to mention that this is a brand new guild for me and I'm still in my probation period, so if I don't impress I run the risk of losing not just my raid spot but potentially my new guild as well. But hey, no pressure, right?

In the end I think I've done pretty well. The first week we downed Tortos for the first time, and we followed it up with a last pull of the night, three-people-left-standing Megaera kill the week after. Our third week saw Ji-Kun fall, with the Battle Medic on nest-healing duties.


FEELIN' GROOVY

It's felt great to be back raiding again. The people I'm with are great, the Throne of Thunder raid is excellent and it's nice to finally be caught up with the game again and to feel like I've got things under control.

What? Patch 5.3 dropped today? It's got a whole bunch of new stuff to figure out, two new epic questlines and dozens more dailies to do?

Son of a bitch.

The Long Road Back

In Which the

DWARVEN BATTLE MEDIC

Attempts to Reconcile

CERTAIN LAMENTABLE EVENTS 

and Makes a 

FATEFUL DECISION.

For reasons that I cannot quite understand, this expansion hasn't really caught my imagination. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of really great things about this expansion; I'm really impressed with the levelling experience, for example, and the visuals are spectacular—probably the best that WoW has ever done. Mists of Pandaria has humour, great stories and a lot of things to do. But it just hasn't captured me: I like Pandaria, but I'm not really excited about Pandaria. And I don't know why.

Actually, I think I can make a guess. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have no goal to achieve this expansion.

Once I hit 90 I simply felt lost. Run a few heroics, get some decent gear, start running LFR. Once that was done, then what? Dailies? To what end? What is the point of gearing up a character if not to raid? It becomes rather like a girl dressing up in her best ballgown, twirling in front of her mirror night after night because she knows she's never going to get the chance to go to the dance.

At the risk of beating the same old dead horse and paraphrasing real-life Forsaken zombie James Carville, "IT'S THE RAIDING, STUPID".

Since January when some tumultuous real-life changes hit the Battle Medic household, I have essentially been taking a sabbatical from my Paladin. I've spent very little time playing WoW since then, and the vast majority of it has been on various different Alts on various different servers. Alt levelling, low level PVP, dipping my foot in the dark side of Horde levelling. Basically anything other than logging onto my main.

THE LOW POINT

So imagine my surprise when I finally do log in only to discover that my guild has transferred servers. And they went Horde as well. Double whammy.

It was a surprise, to say the least. The letter that is automatically sent from Blizzard is a terse slap in the face as far as notifications go. In fairness to the guild, I wasn't around so it's certainly not their fault that I didn't know—the website had plenty of info and I'm sure it was discussed at length in Mumble. So I don't blame them and wish them all the best on Mal'Ganis as damned, dirty Hordies.

But it did leave me feeling rather abandoned and alone. And it got me wondering whether or not I still enjoy this game enough to be paying my fifteen bucks a month for the privilege.

Blues just ain't gonna cut it anymore.

As it turns out, fuck yeah! I do.

Time to get back to work and start gearing in preparation for raiding. I'm way behind and I've got a long way to go, but damn, I'm looking forward to the challenge. I've just joined up with a new guild that has a late-night raid team that should work around the Dwarfling's schedule, and importantly, seem like fun people to be around. A fresh start, so to speak.

Look for more from Battle Medic in the very near future. I'm certain I'm going to have a lot to talk about.

Year The Second: An Unexpected Journey

I'm a little rusty at this, so you'll have to bear with me a bit.

I almost didn't realize it, but Tuesday was the second anniversary of the creation of Dwarven Battle Medic. It's an occasion that deserves celebration but is marred by the dust on everything around here and the conspicuous lack of party guests.

Still, it's totally worth it.

There are many reasons why I haven't been posting much lately, and for the sake of your sanity I'm not going to get into them. Suffice it to say that real life has fundamentally altered how I play the game.


LIFE WITHOUT RAIDING

Raiding, once my passion and purpose within in the game, is no longer possible. Scheduled, uninterrupted time simply doesn't exist.

This fact has been the largest contributing factor to the stagnation of Battle Medic: without raiding, what is there to talk about? Looking back on my past posts, I talked a lot about raiding. As a WoW player, being a successful raider (at least, within my own goals) was something I took immense pride in, worked hard to achieve and thoroughly enjoyed. As a result I've had to find other things to do to make my play time enjoyable. It's been a hard adjustment.

Gone are the days where I had a meticulously crafted gearing plan and would chain heroics in order to achieve it. No more meticulous research on mechanics, strategies or min-max gobbledegook. No more pressure to get to a point where I could contribute without letting my Guild or Raid Team down. Instead, I've been playing at a very relaxed pace. And once I got my head around the fact that I am, even if it is against my will, a non-raider, I've been enjoying myself quite a bit.

It's kinda nice not to have any pressure.

But the really interesting thing that is only now just dawning on me is that it brings me full circle to the way I played when I was initially levelling up my first characters. Before I hit max-level for the first time I would never look ahead or research or do anything that would take away from the joy of discovering what comes next. It was, in many ways, a very innocent time. A time when I could enjoy the game on my own terms and not have to worry about whether I was DOING IT RIGHT because it simply didn't matter as long as I was having fun. That's the mindset that I discovered, or rather rediscovered, as I trekked through Pandaria.

So as the second year of Battle Medic winds down and a new one begins I find myself in the strangely familiar position of enjoying the slow, immersive solo game and yet wanting to do more. Now, how do I write about that?

A Good Day

Over the past month or more I admit that I have been neglecting poor, ol' Battle Medic, and not without more than a little guilt. I have not, however, been neglecting the game entirely. I have been sneaking and conspiring, negotiating and stealing rare moments to indulge in Azeroth playtime whenever there was an opportunity.

And the majority of that time has been spent blowing stuff up. Mage-style. Warlocks beware.

My little gnomish pyromaniac has slowly and painstakingly progressed into the mid-60s and is slogging through the mire that is the Outlands.

Anyway, today was a good day. I have been intermittently fishing the high, lonely lakes of Terrokar Forest for the Mysterious Mr. Pinchy for a long time now. Every single skill point in Fishing that my Shaman has achieved has come in the futile hunt for this nearly-mythological crustacean. But no luck. Never even a sniff.

Until today.

Today was a good day.

Sightseeing and Raiding Achievements

"The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." - Albert Einstein

Perhaps one of the more lamentable facts of life when it comes to World of Warcraft raiding is that as each new tier of content comes out, the raids and dungeons of previous tiers tend to get quickly abandoned like an awkwardly phrased metaphor. This phenomena typically gets worse the older a raid is until the only time people will visit is to do the raiding equivalent of sightseeing. Now that's all fine and good if the purpose is simply to revisit a raid that has been completed previously for the sake of nostalgia, but what about someone going in to see a dungeon for the first time?

There are some magnificently complex and wonderful encounters in these old raids. The truly sad thing is that the typical sightseer will go in as an overlevelled and overgeared wrecking machine and rip through these old bosses with the same level of delicacy as it would take to open a Chunky Soup can with a stick of dynamite. Bosses die and encounters are completed with no regard to the very mechanics and elements that make the fights actually interesting. The end result is that the player smacks around some poor, lonely, underpowered bosses and gets the achievement for completing the raid, but doesn't actually experience or understand the raid on anything but the most superficial level. It's rather like going to Paris and never leaving the McDonalds in the airport; you get the stamp on your passport to say you've been there but can't really say much other than the hamburgers are awful.

Sadly, this essentially renders the Raid achievements and the titles that are associated with them meaningless.

Take my Shaman and Paladin as examples. My shaman wears the Starcaller title for defeating Algalon. She got it long after Ulduar was relevant, as an 85 in a full raid of level 85s. I defeated the encounter but really don't have an appreciation of what the fight is all about, nor does the title have any true emotional value; it just looks neat.

My Paladin, Thosif, on the other hand, typically wears his Kingslayer title with pride. I earned that title with my previous guild Shadowgarde through a lot of hard work and effort while the encounter was still the pinnacle of raiding (Halion just doesn't count and everybody knows it). The title and the achievement have meaning to me precisely because I feel that I earned them. The fact that a person can take a group of 85s and blitz their way through Icecrown Citadel in an hour and get the title makes it feel a little less special as well; I know I earned it, but others would probably just assume I got it the easy way.

Now, before anyone gets huffy and starts calling me an elitist, this is just how I feel about it personally. There are lots of reasons that people like going into old raids and dungeons at high levels, and I am certainly don't want to take anyone's fun away. But for me, the thrill of raiding comes from the challenge, and if I'm going to experience a raid for the first time, that's how I'd prefer to see it.

The obvious problem is that it's virtually impossible to get a group of people at the appropriate level in the appropriate gear together at the same time to run an old raid. Very few people will halt their levelling progress on a new alt long enough to gear him to run a raid, and even if someone did it's unlikely that they would be able to find enough other people who were doing that at the same time. It comes down to motivation: There simply is no incentive to do an older raid at the proper level. It's much simpler to either get a guildmate or two to run your alt through it, or wait until you're maximum level.

THE TEMPLATE: HERALD OF THE TITANS

There is, however, one singular achievement (technically a Feat of Strength) that a sightseeing raider can't get: Herald of the Titans. This little gem of an achievement requires a player to be the appropriate level as well as have the appropriate gear for the encounter. No overpowered tourists allowed.

This title is unique in that it is only available for a limited time while a character is level 80 and once you've passed that threshold you're out of luck on that character. If you want the title now, you're going to have to pause your XP, gear up your level 80 alt and find a group willing to go with you and kill the encounter the old fashioned way.

In essence, what this achievement does is make this single old raid encounter permanently relevant.

This achievement is not new—it's been around since Ulduar itself—but as we move into the new expansion I think it can give Blizzard a template for future raids. Why couldn't each new raid tier have a meta achievement with similar requirements to Herald of the Titans, each one with a unique and desirable vanity reward such as a mount or pet? The players that are running it while it's current would get it as a matter of course, but it could give people reasons to run the previous tier with their alts using the proper gear even after it is no longer the cutting edge. This would allow people to get the feeling of Burning Crusade and Vanilla raiding (of having to progress through each tier sequentially) if they want it, but would not actually require anyone to do it if they didn't feel like it.

And while we're on the subject, why couldn't Blizzard add similar achievements to older raids? Why not bring the Hand of Adal title back, but require that only a level 70 in a level 70 raid group could get it? How difficult would it be to reinstate the Immortal and Undying titles from Naxxramas with a character and item level restriction? What would be the effect of a Karazahn achievement that awards a miniature Wolfman or Strawman pet? Would there be a massive move towards creating level 70 raiding teams on Twitter to farm this beloved raid instance? If the rewards were unique enough, the hardcore would likely start frothing at the mouth to get alts to the proper level to get them.

Hell, a new Lady Vashj title might even make Kurn resubscribe for Mists.

Blizzard has made a big fuss about making sure that there is lots of things to do at maximum level, but adding a couple of these little achievements and rewards scattered through the beloved and excellent older content would give people things to do before max level that are equally important to do. Right now, the content is massively weighted towards the maximum level, and that is by design, but that also means that—by design—there is a massive amount of content that the vast majority of people will never get a chance to experience properly.

With the advent of Cross-Realm Raiding and soon Cross-Realm Zones there will potentially be lots of players who might be interested in halting their levelling progression on an alt in order to do some older raiding for their one shot at a unique reward. It may help remove the pressure to level as quickly as possible just so that there's something that they can do with their friends, and allow people to stop, smell the roses and actually experience the content that's out there in this big, virtual world of ours.

The Lament for Theramore

Thee Theramore! O sadly lost!
Alliance lament frae coast to coast.
Now war grips, the barking host
May kill us a';
For noble Jaina's fabl'd post,
Is ta'en awa'.
Dwarvish Lament for Theramore *

It is the worst kept secret in the World of Warcraft that Theramore is going to be destroyed in the pre-expansion event leading up to the release of the Mists of Pandaria expansion. The details are still unknown, but the destruction of the city will change the Alliance's position in Kalimdor drastically. At this point it's unclear as to whether Theramore will be in Alliance or Horde hands, whether it will remain a quest hub or become an instanced scenario of some kind, or just be left as a smoking, purple glowing crater in the ground.

And while others (ahem, Rades) have speculated on what the destruction of will mean to the Alliance from a lore perspective, I want to talk about what it's going to mean from my perspective as a life-long Alliance player.

What brought this topic to mind is that I was watching this video of what Theramore will look like after the Horde have their way with it. It broke my heart a little bit.

DUSTWALLOW MARSH

Even the name isn't really evocative of a place you'd choose to go willingly, and certainly Dustwallow Marsh isn't exactly a vacation spot. It's not pretty or scenic. In fact, it's downright dreary and just plain creepy; the sort of place you'd expect a spider to drop down out of the trees at any moment as you're walking through it. As a player, I get an ominous feeling when adventuring in Dustwallow, particularly in places like the Wyrmbog with it's wandering Dragonkin, Witch Hill and the spirits that eternally haunt it, and Darkmist Cavern with it's endless supply of eight-legged beasties.

In stark contrast to the impenetrable depths of the Swamp stands proud Theramore, a small but gleaming (relative to the rest of the marsh, at least) Alliance city perched precariously on an island. Compared to the rest of Dustwallow and Southern Kalimdor, to the Alliance player Theramore seemed like a bright shining beacon of civilization jutting out of the literal middle of nowhere. It was the essential travel hub for an Alliance player looking to get anywhere on Kalimdor since the only other town with connections to the Eastern Kingdoms was in Auberdine (now Lor'danel) and trying to get to some of the more far-flung areas (I'm looking at you, Gadgetzan) could result in a half-hour long hippogriff ride and a good chance to catch up on some reading.

Theramore was also the main quest hub for Dustwallow, and for a lot of players like myself it was the first time setting foot on the Kalimdor continent after following a breadcrumb quest from a bloke eternally standing on the Menethil dock asking whomever walks by to deliver something to the Inn there.

Now, I can't really speak to how other people level their characters, but I always made a point to go through Dustwallow with my characters. It just seemed a more natural and interesting place to go after the Wetlands than Arathi Highlands or the Badlands. I always liked the stories that were told in Dustwallow during it's first iteration. The Shady Rest Inn storyline was particularly moving, with a great emotional pay-off at the end. I've always liked the chain of quests at Swamplight Manor to cleanse "Swamp Eye" Jarl. And of course who can forget setting the raptors loose on the unsuspecting Grimtotem?

It's a zone that reminds me a lot of one of my other other favourite zones, Duskwood. It has the same kind of creepy, foreboding atmosphere to it that I like so much. And both zones had an insane amount of running back and forth before they were mercifully streamlined in Cataclysm. And all of those great memories started in poor, doomed Theramore.


THE COMING DOOM

With the impending destruction of Theramore there is a lot of uncertainty about the future of Dustwallow as it continues it's transition from sleepy, moody swamp that felt very insignificant in the grand scheme of the world to the front lines of an all-out war with the Horde. What will become of the small stories? Who's going to take the time to cleanse Jarl of his demonic possession in the middle of a battlefield? Is someone going to walk "Stinky" Ignatz home with Horde siege engines laying waste to the landscape?

But all that having been said, why do a lot of Alliance players lament the loss of this town so much?

Well, it's been talked about to death, but during the early stages of the War (represented by the Cataclysm expansion) the Alliance has been getting the hell kicked out of it. Southshore lost, massive horde incursions into the Night Elf homelands of Ashenvale and minor ones in Darkshore, the loss of Andorhol after the Scourge were finally defeated, and our new allies in Gilneas turned to homeless refugees forced to live in a tree by the Forsaken war machine. To the Alliance player, Cataclysm has been one iron-booted kick in the nuts after another.

Now we're losing Theramore. Whump. That's gonna sting the ol' Dwarf Potatoes.

I think that for me, at least, losing Theramore is going to make Kalimdor feel a lot less friendly and much more foreign. It's hostile enemy territory now, with no real safe havens worth mentioning for the Alliance. Go away, Dwarves, you are not welcome here.

But in all honesty, the real reason that people are complaining about the loss of Theramore has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with human psychology: People embrace the familiar and fear the unknown. Things that we know are comforting. And in this terrifying new world of conflict, destruction and all-out factional war that MoP is bringing with it people are naturally going to cling to those things that remind us of a simpler, better time of relative peace.

You know, when all we had to worry about was an innumerable, unstoppable undead army that was going to take over the entire world and suck out our brains. The good ol' days.

* Adapted from Robert Burns' poem Old Scotch Drink.

Azeroth Photo Tour: Arathi Highlands

INTRODUCING THE GREAT AZEROTH PHOTO TOUR

Over the next few weeks and months I am going to go on the Great Azeroth Photo Tour. I'm going to visit each zone in the game (in Alphabetical order) and create images of the most beautiful sights and places in each of the zones. I may, if I feel like it, add commentary on the zones or images as well. My hope is that I can get the entirety of Blizzard's magnificent fantasy world completed before Mists of Pandaria is released. I will be updating the Photo Tour on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.



ARATHI HIGHLANDS

Stepping over the magnificent Thandol Span and in to the Arathi Highlands for the first time one is struck by an overwhelming sense of emptiness. Gently rolling hills covered in grasses and thistle with bare rock jutting through the turf; you can almost feel the wind rushing through the zone unmolested by any trees to block its path. It's a zone that feels hushed and solitary.

There is very little in the way of civilization here. One lone Horde town that hasn't changed much from the prison that it originally was, a couple of camps and farm houses, and the ancient, crumbling ruins of a once-great city that is now in the process of tearing itself apart from the inside-out as three different factions vie for control of it.

The most remarkable thing about the Highlands is the mysterious circles of standing stones scattered about, seemingly at random: Huge monoliths impossibly stacked and arranged for purposes that are their own, and surrounded by vicious elementals that make discovering their true meaning hazardous.

The Arathi Highlands is a zone that time forgot. Not just for the lonesome and abandoned feel of it, but also because it is one of the few zones that did not get revamped after the Cataclysm. If you visit, keep your voice down; loud noises feel distinctly out of place in the lonesome and desolate highlands.

Repopulating the Old World: Cross Realm Zones

Sometimes I think you want me to touch you.
How can I when you build the great wall around you? - Tori Amos, China


In a move that surprised everyone, Blizzard has announced that they are going to begin testing Cross Realm Zones in the Mists of Pandaria Beta. I love this idea like a big sloppy Dwarfling kiss, and given the subject of my last post, the timing of this announcement is particularly serendipitous.

I am a unrepentant Wrath Baby; I created my first character in the very twilight of the Burning Crusade expansion, mere months before Wrath of the Lich King went live. Because of this I have never experienced the Old World as the thriving, vibrant place that it was in Vanilla.

For me and thousands of other people who joined the game late, levelling in World of Warcraft is a solitary experience. The wilderness of Azeroth outside of the major cities is filled with bears and bandits and monsters of all types, but even on busy, highly populous servers, meeting another character is something of a rare occurrence. It's a lonely life, being a lowbie in Azeroth, but the new Cross Realm Zones aim to change that.

The way that Blizzard is trying to implement this is quite brilliant, if you ask me. Basically, certain realms will be linked together based on population, and each of those realms will share certain zones that are flagged as "Cross Realm". Using the Barrens as an example, a character on Sargeras would walk out of a realm-exclusive Orgrimmar into a Barrens shared by 5 other servers, and would see and interact with characters from all of those realms normally, just as if they were all on the same server. At the same time, Blizzard will have the ability to keep highly populated zones (Cities, to be sure) exclusive. This way Stormwind won't be crushed under the weight of thousands of people standing at the fountain oogling the fifteen thousand naked Night Elves dancing on the mailboxes.

I think this feature is fantastic. Not just a technically brilliant solution to make an older technology scale and adapt to the changing reality of the current, max-level focused state of the game, but also as a step to the ultimate goal of eliminating realms completely. I talked about this back in January, but the elimination of the barrier walls around the different realms is a very clever way for Blizzard to extend the life of the game. Right now, if Blizzard chooses to do so, the only realm-specific areas are the main cities, the Auction House and any zone that is going to be populated enough not to be a concern like the Cataclysm zones and the new Mists of Pandaria zones.

As a social, massively multiplayer game, it is always a little bit odd to run around the world outside of the two major faction cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar and see, well, nothing. By repopulating the Old World, new players will finally get an experience that is close to what older players experienced when WoW was new and when having a maximum level character was rare: A world that is full of people to interact with.

It really doesn't matter that there are no group quests in the game any more, nor is there any real need to team up with people to defeat the quests that people are given. Having a lot of people busily running around doing there own thing is exciting. It adds an immense amount of flavour to the game.

Like the bustling sidewalks of downtown New York, it's all about vibrancy and life and activity; it's about the soul of this game, which is missing in the low level zones. Bringing that kind of life back to zones other than the cities is going to go a long way to help make new players—and old players who love lowibe alts like myself—remain excited about this game for years to come.

After all, it is World of Warcraft. Bravo, Blizzard. Well played.

The Joy of Lowbies

"It strikes! one, two,
Three, four, five, six. Enough, enough, dear watch,
Thy pulse hath beat enough. Now sleep and rest;
Would thou could'st make the time to do so too;
I'll wind thee up no more." - Ben Jonson The Staple of News


As I mentioned in my last post, I don't have much in the way of free, unimpeded time to dedicate to WoW these days.

The only raid boss that I attempt these days;
believe me, this is a fight with a lot of movement.

I'm sad to say that such an odd, irregular and easily interrupted schedule is not one that is conducive to raiding. Over the past couple of months or so my level 85s have withered due to neglect. My regular raiding has completely ground to a halt after going 8/8 on two toons with no heroic bosses down at all.

With only an hour or so of available time in an evening, running dungeons or LFR seem like an exhausting, implacable mountain to climb and not worth the effort. Doing daily quests gets very boring very quickly. Maximum level PVP is new and scary and intriguing, but would require a fair bit of effort to get the gear that would allow me to survive for more than the brief moment between when an enemy sees me and when he decides that I should be dead.

So what's a Dwarf to do?


THE JOY OF LOWBIES

I am an Altaholic, but not in the usual way. I am in a guild with several people who I would consider the norm for extreme cases of Altaholism: They tend to create an alt and focus intently on it until it reaches max level before giving a new one any real attention. Consequently, they have a lot of max level characters and characters that are well on their way there.

I am a little different. I have dozens of low level characters of every race and every class scattered around 10 or 12 different servers. Not including the Death Knights (only one of which I've ever gotten out of the starting zone; he's level 62), only a couple of these characters are above level 25. My highest level Horde character ever just dinged 18. Seriously.

I really enjoy low level characters and low level questing. There is something very compelling about boiling a class down to its very essence and seeing it naked and helpless in its infancy. In those initial levels each class is very similar: Uncomplicated, pure, and a joy to play. To see which skills are learned and when, and to discover how to use each new skill and see the way a class gradually becomes more complex is very intriguing.

I'm not really clear as to why, but I seem to hit a brick wall between level 14 and level 20. In the mid-teens the class will have taken shape and while many important and class defining abilities are yet to come, the fundamental structure of how the class is played is evident. For me, at least, this is when the experiment to test my attitude towards a class feels as if it's run its course.

As well, it's at that point that a character is out of the starting zones and into the next areas (Barrens, Westfall, etc). These zones are larger and more involved than the starting zones and feel more general and less specific to the character. This is when my mindset changes from, "This is a fun toy to play with," to "Oh gawd, I have how many freakin' levels to go?!?". Taking a character through these zones begins to firmly cement the notion in my head that I'm committing to the grind to get the character up to max level; a long and daunting process, especially for someone who levels as slowly as I do. Therefore, any character that makes it past that barrier and hits 20 is one that—in my head, at least—has been selected to survive and make the slow journey to level cap.

I have really only levelled a couple of different characters past this breaking point. My first character, a hunter, got to level 48 before he was abandoned and left to rot as I switched servers. My Warrior, Priest and Paladin all got to max level in Wrath, and two of them have gone onto 85. Thallie, my Shaman and current raiding main (the cobwebs on her are, at least, fresh) was the first character I created when Cataclysm launched and is the only one that I have managed to take to max level since then. So many more have failed this litmus test and remain unlevelled and unloved.

It seems that the decision to go past the level 20 barrier is a significant one for me. It is a mental commitment to that character; a commitment to learn and master the nuances of the class at the very highest levels. However, if the class, or the character's name or the server or anything else doesn't feel right, then that character is doomed to a shadowy half-life of neglect. Not to be deleted, but doomed to sit in the Inn at Sentinel Hill or at The Crossroads with pitiful white or grey gear, never to be the hero that they could be due to the capriciousness of my whimsy.

So having said all that, with a fervent desire to play but with limited play time in which to do it, I have been spending a lot of time with my low level Alts lately. Some have pushed past the elusive and mysterious Level 20 and have become, at least in my mind, actual characters, whilst some are still merely interesting toys to experiment with. It's been a lot of fun, and I've been indulging myself by seeing areas of the game and doing activities that I've never done before. It's as good a way as any to ride out the end of this expansion, at least until the raid healing bug bites me again.

To Beta or Not to Beta

"It is my desire ... to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm sure this post will frustrate a lot of people who have been anxiously awaiting their Mists of Pandaria beta invite, if there is anyone left who doesn't have one.

As a Annual Pass subscriber I knew that I was going to receive a Beta Invitation eventually as it is one of the perks of committing to keeping a WoW account active for a year. It ain't all about shiny horsies, after all. When it finally did arrive I was thrilled; I had never had a closed-beta invite to anything before so this was something new. I was always a little jealous of people who could claim that they started WoW in the beta, so this was my chance to get into something at the very beginning.

Of course, as a blogger, the beta of a new expansion provides a vast new range of subjects to talk about. There are a lot of changes coming that need to be discussed and opined on, not to mention entirely new and gorgeous vistas that are awaiting my virtual, gnomish-engineered camera. There are endless topics in the beta to write about because the beta itself changes constantly. No blogger in their right mind would pass up the such a rich source of writing material, would they?

Well, perhaps I'm not in my right mind, but after the initial excitement I've decided not to participate in the Beta.

Don't hate me if you don't have one yet, let me explain...


NO TIME FOR LOVE, DOCTOR JONES

With the great heaving chaos that is my life right now, any chance I get to play WoW is a rare and beautiful thing. It often comes in the few fleeting moments between when the Dwarfling is put to bed and the daily chores are done (which means cleaning up the swath of destruction that she leave in her wake) and when I go to bed. Sometimes it's an hour, sometimes less. And sometimes all I can manage is to stagger to the couch and pass out, leaving the great, menacing evil-doers of Azeroth unmolested for a night.

There are two great drawbacks to spending my very limited amount of playtime on a Beta server as opposed to the Live servers. One is that everything that is done in the Beta is transient because it will be reset to zero when the Beta ends and the expansion is launched. So any time and effort that I put into a Beta character is wasted and I think better spent progressing my characters on the Live Realms.

The other drawback has to do with the eternal frustration of crashes and inconvenient bugs. There is nothing more infuriating than having a glitch cost precious time when on a limited play schedule. I don't think I could handle the instability of the Beta. I think it would create far more tension than it would solve for me. And I get enough of that with the low level PVP that I've been indulging in lately.


THE TEXTURE OF ANTICIPATION AND EXPERIENCE

The other, less concrete reason has to do with spoilers. I'm the type of person who values the quality of the experience as much as the experience itself. How something is done is just as important as doing the thing itself. A Beta, with all the bugs and unfinished bits, is not a great way to see content for the first time if the texture of the experience is a primary concern. Seeing things perfectly polished in their final forms is what I'm after, and if that means waiting, then so be it.

However, the other side of this particular coin is that on launch day it is going to be virtually impossible to see things the way they should be seen. The giant crush of people descending on the new zones will make things chaotic and mucky, as has happened with every expansion so far. The Pandaren starting zone is going to be wall-to-wall bear butts competing for the same quest mobs and objectives, people will be griefing with their gigantic mounts on top of quest-givers and things are going to be in a general state of higgledy-piggledy. Not really the best way to experience brand new content either, is it?


ON THE OTHER HAND...

Of course, when I see things like this I can't help but be tempted by the Beta.

Taken from the official WoW site.

From what I've seen so far I am incredibly impressed with the quality of the visuals of Mists of Pandaria. It looks simply amazing; the best work that Blizzard has done so far, I think. I would love to experience it first hand and create some stunning Images of Azeroth posts, but time simply is not on my side.

6x6x6: The Challenge of Sixes

There is a new meme going around, started this time by Gnomeageddon. It's the Meme of Sixes and is an interesting one. It turns out this has been around for a long time; a little casual link-surfing took me back to February 2009 and a swedish blog and a photo of a dog cuddling a baby. It's now making the rounds again in the WoW blogosphere and I have been tagged by both Navimie of the Daily Frostwolf and Karagena the Reluctant Raider to participate in it. It's so nice to be loved.


THE RULES

• Go into your image folder
• Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
• Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couldn’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
• Challenge six new bloggers.
• Link to them.

Of course, those rules are nice. They're simple and easy to do. Honestly, I could have this post done in minutes if I wanted to. But that wouldn't really be in the Battle Medic tradition, now would it?

So let's complicate things a bit.


THE BATTLE MEDIC RULE OF SIX BY SIX BY SIX

If there was a TV show for people who are incapable of deleting things on their computer, I would be featured on the premier episode. We'd call it Hard Drive Horders: Buried in Megabytes. I have all sorts of files and images that go back years, and quietly get transferred from hard drive to hard drive as I upgrade and then sit there collecting layers upon layers of virtual dust.

Consequently, I have many, many folders on my hard drive with images so picking just one doesn't seem quite right. Picking six would make sense, given the nature of this particular challenge, but that might take this innocent little challenge into deep, dark places of my computer that are better left unexplored. Who knows what one might find while picking through the decrepit ruins of my digital projects from the distant past.

Sounds like fun. Let's get started, shall we?


#1 - World of Warcraft Screenshots folder

Delving into my WoW Screenshots folder reveals a lot of subfolders. For simplicities sake, the source images of each panorama that I do get their own folder, and the sixth one happens to be Netherstorm. This beautiful panorama was featured in my Images of Azeroth: Outlands Part 2 post a few months ago.

However, the sixth image in this sixth folder turns out to be probably the least interesting image on my hard drive.

Yup. Nothin' but purple rocks. It's the sort of scene that makes your computer's video card wonder why the hell it's spending its considerable processing power rendering such a pointless, prosaic set of pixels. There really isn't much you can do with an image like this. Well, unless we decide to make it all about the textures instead of the objects. Hmm... let's try making it a black and white and then playing with the cropping and see what we get.

A little bit of creative blurring later, and suddenly we have something interesting and worthy of being featured on Battle Medic. Mind you, it's still not exactly a Monet.


#2 - Screenshots folder: Six Down and Six Across

Ach! This option puts me right in the middle of an unfinished Images of Azeroth panorama that I was saving for a later post.

Dude, you got your Deathwing all over my Tower. Ewwww.

One unexpected benefit to having a max-level Shaman at my disposal is the ability Far Sight. It gives me options for screenshots that I simply can't do on my Paladin. This image, for instance, was done after completing an End Time run and is a perspective that is not normally available to most other classes because it's half-way up a mountain on a completely vertical slope.

Look for the full image in an upcoming post.


#3 - Battle Medic sub-folders

The Battle Medic folder contains the very bones of this blog. Each image that I have created for Battle Medic, whether used or not, lies here in a state of perpetual readiness. This folder illustrates my image hoarding tendencies perfectly because I literally have no need for any of the images in this folder; the ones I needed have already been uploaded to the blog and are stored online, and the ones that didn't make the post aren't needed at all. It is an interesting archaeological dig through my blog's past, though.

The sixth subfolder of the Battle Medic folder happens to house the raw images from the photo shoot that I did with Ophelie of Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon back in June.

Digging through the layers of this folder is a little frightening. One of the fundamental truths that one learns very quickly as a professional photographer is that only about 1 in 10 portraits that are taken is worth keeping. The rest have closed eyes, weird expressions, strange homeless people wandering in the background or some other flaw that necessitates editing that image in favour of another. Randomly picking an image out of this folder could be disastrous.

As luck would have it, however, the sixth image in this folder was one of my favourites.

As a photographer, an image's success depends as much on your personality as it does the subject's; how people respond to you shows up very clearly in the finished images. A laugh is always photographic gold. I like this image because it feels incredibly genuine.

The image above is the unaltered version and is just how I took it. Below is the finished image once I was done with it.

Ophelie, probably laughing at my bad Austin Powers impression,
"IGNORE ME DOING THIS! IGNORE ME DOING THIS!"

#4 - Battle Medic folder: Six Down and Six Across

Like I said, I hoard my image files, and this illustrates it perfectly. This Blood Bowl image was pulled off the Cyanaide website for my post Encouraging Infidelity: On Burn-out and Blood Bowl, and I did use a portion of it in the article. I certainly don't need the full image any longer, so any sane, rational, non-hoarding person would simply delete it and move on. Not I. I kept it.

But not only that, I ended up keeping two of them. Because of the way that Chrome downloads files (possibly the only thing I don't like about the web browser), I accidentally downloaded an extra one; this is the second one.

"Some people think Blood Bowl is a matter of life and death. I assure you,
it's much mor... ARRRRRRGHsplorch."

And my wife wonders why I need to buy hard drives so often. Little does she know...


#5 - Artwork folder

The sixth subfolder in my Artwork folder lands us conveniently in the place where I store the finished work of my Portfolio. The sixth image in this folder is one that some of you will be familiar with already, as it was featured during my Images of Azeroth: 50,000 Words series of posts.

Sunset in Motion

Of course, the actual sixth image in that folder was the printer-ready version of this file which weighed in at a hefty 11 megabytes, so this is obviously a slimmed down version for the blog. I actually gave a 20" x 30" print of this to my sister this Christmas, and it should be hanging on her wall by now.


#6 - Dwarfling folder

This is what most of you were waiting for, I'm sure. Admit it, you're here for baby photos.

Of course, I have a folder of images of the Dwarfling. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of images in there. However, the sixth image in the sixth folder is this one:

The Dwarfling at 18 Weeks

Yikes. My daughter loves the camera and, at least in her father's eyes, is very photogenic. This one, on the other hand, is certainly not her best photo. It was taken by her mother and due to the camera-shake and the rather bizarre, doll-like quality of her expression this image would likely never have seen the light of day if not for this challenge. It would have been deleted except, as I mentioned above, I am an incurable image hoarder. It's times like this it can come and bite me in the ass.

Here are a couple of better, non-random images of her to keep you all happy.

One year old...

...and cute as hell.

PASSING THE TORCH

And in keeping with tradition, I hereby pass the torch along to these fine folk.

• Mylindara, my Guild Master and author of the seldom updated Cleansing Waters
• Gneisha, the lovely Ginger of Mountain Top and full of Unleashed Rage
• Nymphy at DE the Tank, founder of the militant wing of the Dwarfling's Internet Aunties
• Voros, fellow WoW Panoramist and author of The Other Tank
• Corath of Corath's Blog, proud new papa of the Spawnling.
• Aidrana of Miss Pew Pew

An End to Madness

Deathwing is dead.

Actually, he's been dead for a couple of weeks now. I'm just damned tardy in my progression updates these days.

My guild, Mountain Top, cleared normal Dragon Soul for the first time just before the 5% Power of the Aspects nerf hit at the end of January. Sadly, I wasn't there due to a family crisis, but I'm proud that our guild managed to down Dragon Soul before it's difficulty was reduced. And we managed it despite losing key members of the team and not having a regular raid night.

Did I mention we're recruiting?

I got my own first Deathwing kill on the first week after the nerfs, and am going in again tonight for my third. We've also begun working on Heroic Morchok, whom we got down to 10% on our first night before time constraints forced us to kill him on normal difficulty so we had enough time left to clear the instance that night.

At the beginning of this expansion I set a raiding goal for myself; I wanted to clear each raiding tier while it was current, something that I didn't manage to do in Wrath of the Lich King. With Deathwing's demise at the hands of my Shaman I have now managed to accomplish that on the last two of the three raiding tiers this expansion.

I view Raiding Progression as a very personal thing. As much as I share the accomplishments with my guild and couldn't do it without them, I look at the raid bosses I've downed as my measuring stick as to how well I've experienced the content and how I am personally progressing. I was enormously disappointed that I didn't clear all of Tier 11 while it was current, only going 9/12; I didn't get Nefarian or either of the Throne of the Four Winds encounters down before 4.2 brought the nerfbat to them. Despite that disappointment, I'm very happy to have accomplished what I have done.

ON DIFFICULTY

I promised myself that I would not make this post a discussion on the difficulty level but I need to at least mention that compared to Lich King, Nefarian or Ragnaros, Madness of Deathwing was a hell of a lot easier. It didn't take my guild very many attempts to finally kill him. I think I saw about five pulls on normal difficulty before I got my first kill. Even Ragnaros after the savage nerfs that he received seemed more difficult than Madness.

The question that I pose to you, dear reader, is: Was the Madness of Deathwing encounter inherently easier than previous end boss encounters, or did it simply seem easier because the vast majority of us had already seen and defeated a simplified version of it on the Raid Finder?