Scenes from Azeroth

Some musings on patch 4.2

I think I’m one of the weirdos that actually likes 4.2, for two main reasons:

(1) It gives me a lot of things to do with my more well-geared alts. I have a lot of characters - more than I can play. This invludes five level 85s, an 82, and an 81. I’ve spent much of Cata trying to figure out what I want to do with all these characters especially once the novelty of TB dailies wore off, and while my jewelcrafter and alchemist will always be useful, I have little that my blacksmith or gatherer can do to be ‘useful’ to my other characters. While I suppose it’s ultimately pointless (since I won’t be raiding with these alts), the addition of the Hyjal daily hub has given me some new goals for the somewhat neglected paladin blacksmith and gathering hunter, such as gear upgrades, pets, and crafting patterns. I remember being similarly excited about Isle dailies hub back in Burning Crusade, and the Argent Crusade hub in WotLK. (This probably tells you a lot about me.) In the end, doing dailies endlessly on multiple toons always gets boring, and I’m aware that sooner or later, Hyjal dailies will have the same fate. But until then, I have lots of quests to do, achievements to accidentally complete that I haven’t managed to get on my main, rare pets to die to tame, and vendor items to buy.

(2) Raiding progression.I know some people would quibble over what I call progression: I don’t mean to imply that my guild or my team is a top-anything. But, we set goals and work to accomplish them in a timely manner, and enjoy a relatively high ranking on our server (currently, 6th on the realm for T12 10s, 7/7). We got our first Firelands boss kill on Shannox at the end of June, when the patch was released. We made decent progress since then, despite the typical frustrations of keeping a full roster during the summer, missing entire weeks of raiding due to scheduling issues, and the occasional sniping at each other in the heat of the moment.

We’ve not really moved immediately from killing one boss to killing the next, but usually it only takes a night or two of attempts to get a new boss down, with the exception of Ragnaros. I’m estimating that in the month between when we killed Staghelm and Ragnaros, we wiped on Rag at least 65 times. There are logs that were never uploaded while our RL was out for a few nights, so it’s definitely more than that. In the end, we extended two weeks on our last lockout, last week and then this week, which started last night. Last night was also the night we killed Rag so I’m not sure how accurate it is to say “we extended two weeks”.

I like having a challenge, but I don’t like banging my head against the wall for weeks on end without *some* progress. And I feel that that’s what we’ve gotten so far in Firelands - making progress by overcoming not insurmountable challenges. Of course, I’ll probably be changing my tune once we start hard modes after a week or two off.

There really was no point to this post - just me putting down some thoughts on the recent patch.