So admittedly, it’s been a long time since my last soloing guide, so long that those old guides are now horribly out of date in terms of advice (and a little out of date with regards to rewards).  Those have probably been the things that have driven people to this blog the most, and I’m happy to have helped people out with their soloing adventures, even those that (for some reason) don’t play enhance shaman.

I’d like to keep going with those in the future, but with the item squish and changes to level scaling, a lot of my advice boils down to “hit the boss a couple times and get your loot.”  So until such time as I do a full guide to each of the remaining expansions, I figured a short post on what’s changed in Warlords would be good.  Some of this will be general advice, some will be enhance-specific.

So what’s new?

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So, BlizzCon is almost here, with all the goodies that it entails.  It’s interesting seeing how it’s grown since I first started watching in 2010 (never while actually at the convention, though; I’m just too poor and also a college student), from covering three game series up to five (possibly more!) this year.  And with another year comes another wave of announcements of future titles, expansions, and other such things.

Just for fun, I’m going to make some guesses as to what we’ll see this Friday and Saturday, and then we’ll see how right I was afterwards.  This is all speculation, but I’d say it’s educated speculation, taken from knowledge of Blizzard’s past releases, the BlizzCon schedule, and good ol’ gut intuition.

What awaits us this year?

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It’s funny that this is coming up just after I put up a post about why I’m excited about the expansion, but it’s a hot-button issue and I feel like I needed to post my thoughts on the matter.

In the first previews of Draenor, Blizzard said that the Alliance and Horde would have their capital cities on the continent, each one taking up shop in an existing structure.  The Alliance would be granted asylum in the majestic draenei temple of Karabor (before it became twisted and corrupted into the Black Temple), while the Horde would rout the Bladespire ogres from their fortress and claim it for themselves.  For something like a bit over half a year, this is the info we had been given, and this was the info we had taken to be fact.  And then, just a couple days ago, a tweet out of nowhere shattered the perceived solidity of that information:  the faction capitals would instead be moved to opposite sides of Ashran, the world PVP zone.

Naturally, people were not pleased.

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Part of the appeal of a new WoW expansion is the sense of “new:”  the expectation that we’re about to get a boatload of fresh content that we’ve never seen before.  Each expansion adds a new region to explore, new mechanics, new types of content, and other such things.  The key thing to note is that a lot of the “new” stuff of previous expansions was easily visible as being new; when members of a new race start running around your capital or a new class pops up in your dungeon groups, it’s easy to see that yes, you’re in a new expansion now.

The thing about Warlords is, on the surface, there seems to be little if anything truly new.  On the surface, it just looks like more of the same “new” stuff we get with every expansion, without some of the “new” stuff we’ve come to expect:  new PVE content but not new types of content, new PVP content but more of the same, new continent but we get one of those every time, and no new race or class to ogle.  Instead, an amount of people (maybe not large, but definitely vocal) seem to focus on the small amount of truly new things (garrisons, Draenor perks, new race models for ten races) and declare this expansion to be the least “new” yet, writing it off wholesale just because it doesn’t have what they believe an expansion should have.  A “back in my day” problem if I ever heard one.

Despite the perceived lack of new types of content, I’m still pretty excited for the expansion.  And strangely, it’s less to do with bringing in the new, and more to do with throwing out the old.

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So, while I’d like to say I’ve been working on my Wrath soloing guide these past few months, I honestly haven’t.  I put this blog on the backburner while I worked on finishing up my last semester of college, and even took about a month’s break from WoW in the middle there (though to be fair, it was more that I replaced it with Diablo 3 for a while).  However, while I can’t put up my third in a long-running series of how to do stuff by yourself if you have no friends, I can at least give a small update on how to solo a boss that drops a much-coveted mount:  the Lich King, on 25-man heroic.

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Well, I was initially going to make a liveblog of the various panels just to have a place where I could keep track of all the info being revealed and such, but after doing some quick research on the topic of liveblogging software, apparently nobody wants to offer a free or cheap version that isn’t incredibly gimped.  There is a WordPress liveblog plugin, but that only works if you have your own domain, which I don’t.  Whee, college student!

Thus, this isn’t really a liveblog as it would normally be thought of.  It’ll be written live, but not posted until it’s done.  So if you actually WANT something that you can read live, you should probably go elsewhere.  If you want a play-by-play you can read about after the fact…well you could also probably go to some site where the person can actually afford CoverItLive or something and read the archive there, OR you could stick around here!

With that having been said, on to the live*blog!

*For very loose definitions of “live.”

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So, 5.4 has been out for about a month now, and (barring some server hiccups earlier in the patch) most people have gotten their hands on the new content.  I was on the server very shortly after it came online (I happened to be in class, I was just so impatient) and have spent a good amount of time mucking about with the patch.  I figured an impressions post is in order!

Warning:  I will be talking about some lore spoilers under the cut.  If you don’t want to see ’em, I’ll put up another warning for you to skip over them; if you’re really paranoid, maybe you should hold off on reading for a while.  You also might want to stay off the internet for a good while, and also out of trade chat, and in fact should probably lock yourself in a closet until you’ve gotten to the end of SoO.

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So, the summer semester is finally over, which means I have roughly a week or so of free time (or I did, when I first started writing this).  Hence, more time to get some writing done, which I once again failed to do regularly!  I’m truly the best!

But I do have some updates, and also some musings.  Shocking, I know, given the title.  Most of them aren’t going to be enough to fill a whole blog post, so I’ll just condense them all into one!  Efficiency!

It’s still going to be absurdly long, but when is it not?

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If there’s one thing I hate about WoW’s community (apart from hunters), it’s the vocal “hardcore” players.

Before I continue, I’ll clarify:  A lot of people who play WoW more competitively than others are rather mute.  They get on, do their raids, and have the content on farm in weeks rather than months.  They don’t care about anyone lesser than them because they already know they’re the best around (nothing’s gonna ever keep them down).  I would wager a guess that those who are a lot more brash on forums or in-game are not the cream of the crop like they think they are.  It’s my personal belief that these most vociferous players are on the upper levels of the casual group or the lower of the hardcore.  These are people who want the status of being the best raiders around, and when they get it, they want to make sure that nobody else gets what they’ve gotten, even if it’s old and outdated and they really shouldn’t care about it anymore.

I’m getting tired of saying it, but I’ll repeat it until I’m blue in the face if I have to:  this has got to end.  Because it’s stupid.

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Man, forgetting to update for almost five months really makes me feel like shit.  This past semester was a very busy one, and that coupled with a bit of apathy towards WoW in general made me neglect this blog for much longer than was acceptable.

So I guess I get to start with some apologizing.

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