Because the internet needs another gaming blog.

I logged in to World of Warcraft last night, and as per routine, opened my friends list to see who was on.  No one.  What to do?  My dailies were done, and Wintergrasp wasn’t going to be open for another two hours.  I pondered the situation for a moment and then logged off.  Just like that, I logged off.  Typically I would have wasted my time in some fashion or another in WoW, but last night, logging off came surprisingly easy to me.

I then decided to try a game I had purchased earlier in the day for $10.00 called Fate.  When I saw it on the store shelf I remembered hearing good things about it and figured “what the hell, it’s only ten bucks”, so I picked it up.  It’s an older game, from 2005, and there’s not much to the gameplay; it’s basically a cuter version of Diablo.  It’s also surprisingly fun and sucked away two hours of my evening.

After EverQuest II and World of Warcraft, I’ve probably sunk the most gaming time into Diablo 2.  I’ve tried revisiting that game recently and just couldn’t get back into it.  I’ve tried Titan Quest several times, hoping to recapture the original Diablo 2 feeling, but for whatever reason it never seems to hold my attention beyond a few play sessions.

This Fate game seems like it’s got what I’ve been looking for.

I wrote a post back on October 1st, 2008 which outlined how I was spending my play time in World of Warcraft after having been at the level cap (then 70) for several months.  Here’s a snippet from the post:

…there is a part of me that’s not finding a whole lot of things to do in game.  There are the dailies to do, but those to me are the very definition of a grind.  Battlegrounds don’t really appeal to me, nor do the arenas given how badly I get slaughtered by the super twinks.  That leaves running through instances, which I love doing, but generally don’t have the time for on a daily basis.

So what does someone in my situation do?  If I were any sort of rational thinker I’d quit playing MMOs altogether of course, but that’s just crazy talk.

Fast forward to the present day where I’ve been at the level cap (now 80) for a couple of months now, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve become a slave to the grind.  I’ve settled into a disturbing routine lately.  I wake up every weekday at 5:00am (my dog’s bladder is a crazy accurate alarm clock), have breakfast, and read the paper for a few minutes.  At 5:30 I’m in the shower, getting ready for work, making sure to be done by 6:00 so that my wife can start her morning routine.  I start work at 7:00 and it’s a half hour drive for me, so that gives me from 6 to 6:30 to do whatever I want.  Naturally, I log in to the game.  Once in, I meet up with a couple friends and we run the Argent Tournament dailies together which take roughly ten minutes to do.  The rest of my time is spent finishing off the dailies that can’t be done as a group.  If I work things just right, I can get all the Argent Tournament dailies done before I have to leave.

I do this every morning.  Sometimes, for one reason or another, I find myself running late and have to speed things up in order to make my 6:00 log in time.  There have been times where I’ve been genuinely worried that I’d be unable to do the dailies, but I’ve managed to do the Argent Tournament dailies every single day for about a month now.  The same few quests.  Every.  Single.  Day.

Writing that makes me want to slap myself upside the head.

In addition to my daily routine, I’ve levelled my blacksmithing to 446/450, and even run through a few instances when time has permitted.  I’ve also started doing the Arenas again, even though I’m as terrible at it as I ever was.

What does this all add up to though?  I’ve certainly kept myself busy in the game, but it’s starting to feel like a series of make-work projects as opposed to having fun.  It would appear as though I’m entering the inevitable level cap funk and I’m looking for other things to do with my time.  The difference between now and my level 70 funk is that there isn’t a new expansion two months on the horizon.

I’m not going to be silly and predict I won’t be playing WoW in two months, but for now, I can see myself putting my main character back into hibernation for a little while, only to emerge for the occasional instance run.  I’ve been meaning to go back to my mage alt (currently level 34) who I haven’t seen since Lich King came out, so I suppose this Is the perfect time to do so.

Now, who among you is willing to bet that this is all a load of crap and I’ll be right back doing the daily grind within a week?

Anyone who has followed this blog for any amount of time will know a few things about me.  You would more than likely know, for example, that I’m witty, intelligent, and incredibly gorgeous.  Those are the obvious ones.  You would also know that “real life” has limited my gaming time a great deal over the past two and a half years.  It feels like I mention that fact in every single post, but there it is again for added emphasis.  This time it’s actually relevant to the post.

My usual routine in World of Warcraft these days consists of doing the Argent Tournament dailies and maybe a Wintergrasp battle.  I’ve managed to pick up some decent weapons from the Argent Tournament, but the rest of my gear has come from quest rewards.  Long story short, my gear is adequate for doing routine things, but not up to par for raids or heroic instances, and I’m fine with that.  Unfortunately, at times it seems like everyone else in the game expects you to be fully decked out in epic gear in addition to being an expert on every facet of the game.

After a routine Wintergrasp battle there was a call for people to run the ten man Vaullt of Archavon.  A couple friends joined and asked me to come along.  This was my first time doing the raid, and in fact, aside from knowing that it existed, didn’t know anything about it at all.  When all was said and done, I thought things had gone fairly well.  It took us no more than fifteen minutes.  Then a message went out to the entire raid:

[some guy with recount]: Wow, 733 dps, that’s pretty awful.
[some other guy]: WTF?  Who had only 733?

At that point, [some guy with recount] pasted the dps order showing that, of course, I was the pathetic fool with only 733 dps.  Thanks for pointing it out to the entire raid.  I’ve been in groups with friends who run parsers and I know I typically do quite a bit better dps-wise than that.  It was an anomaly and I don’t know what happened. I’m assuming it’s because I was too worried about screwing up to focus on doing damage, but that’s not the point.  We won the fight.  Loot was distributed.  Why do you feel the need to single someone out like this?  Ah yes, it’s World of Warcraft… land of the e-peen.

Behold Ragnaros – the Firelord!  He who was ancient when this world was young!  Bow before him, mortals!  Bow before your ending!
- Majordomo Executus

I’ve always considered it a bit of a shame that the longer a massively multiplayer online game lasts, and the more it grows, the more obsolete its original content becomes.  Once reserved for World of Warcraft’s elite hard-core raiders, Molten Core now lay mostly void of players.  It used to take a raid of 40 skilled and dedicated players to assault Molten Core and ultimately kill Ragnaros.  Molten Core was the type of place that the majority of players would have only dreamed of ever seeing.

Ragnaros is old news now; just another long forgotten mob whose time has come and gone, the spotlight having left him long ago and now shining down on some frosty guy up in Northrend.  He still gets the occasional visitor, those seeking an achievement, and even those just looking for kicks and giggles.  When I started playing WoW, I wanted to see two things above anything else: Onyxia, who I got to kill a while back, and the Firelord himself.  Last night all the cards fell into place, and I, along with five friends, ventured into the original end-game.

Our “raid” consisted of:

80 Shaman (Enhancement)
80 Death Knight (Unholy)
80 Rogue (Combat)
80 Warlock (Destruction)
80 Druid (Restoration)
70 Warrior (Fury)

To spawn Majordomo Executus (who in turn summons Ragnaros) we needed to kill all eight bosses in the zone.  While none of the encounters were overly difficult for us in our state of overpowered awesomeness, I can certainly see how it would have taken 40 players to get through them back in the day.  Just reading through some of the strategies listed on WoWWiki shows just how much planning and precision some of these fights used to require.

Seeing Ragnaros appear from the lava was quite awe inspiring; in a word, he’s huge.  Our first attempt ended in a wipe.  We picked ourselves up however, and went right back in.  Our second attempt went much better, lasting about six minutes before Ragnaros was killed with all raid members alive and kicking.

The fight itself wasn’t anything spectacular.  Our level and gear advantage meant we didn’t really have to worry about his abilities too much, relying instead on a tank and spank approach.  Obviously the experience will never live up to what it must have been like for those guilds who put all the hard work into beating Ragnaros the way it was intended, but I’ll take it.  It was really cool to see something I had never thought I’d see.