Ald Demo

Today was the day i waited for the entire week. Ever since it was revealed that the new Star Wars trailer would be released today, i'd been as giddy as a ten year old on Christmas Eve. Any other kid that grew up in the late 70's and early 80's probably feels the same way. It was the defining movie going experience for a lot of us and for our generation. It carried on into adulthood. Then the prequels happened.

I wish i could just forget they ever existed. That wouldn't be fair though. Sometimes we need tragic mistakes and miscalculations to veer us back on course and recapture the magic and excitement we once felt. To go back to great story telling with characters we actually care about. This time around hopefully with a decent script and non terrible casting decisions. One can only hope anyway. With Lucas removed, i do have that hope.

Ah, it's nice having a redo and learning some lessons from previous experiences. In this particular case i'm referring to making it easier on myself as far as my garrison goes. Combined with a little, or a lot in this case, luck as well. Had i planned ahead, i could have saved myself some headaches and avoided growing pains. That's never been my style of course as i much rather wing it and see what happens.

The first order of business, once i began leveling my Shaman, was to remove the initial Barracks everyone got first. Placing a War Mill in that plot assured me of some pretty nice blue and epic quest reward upgrades at a relatively decent proc rate. In turn, it got me to the required heroic dungeon ilvl much quicker than my DK.

The second decision i made was to go with a Lumber Mill for my medium plot instead of the Trading Post. Oh if i only knew how annoying and expensive it was going to be to gather all the necessary pieces for my Trading Post on my DK, i would have never put one up first. I'm going to be working on that bugger for a long damn time with no completion date in sight.

Chances are the Trading Post is going to be the long term solution anyway, but the resource gathering that a Lumber Mill provided was too good to pass up. Nothing like dinging 100 and immediately being able to upgrade my garrison to level 3. My DK dinged 100 with less than a dozen resources saved and gathering the required 2000 took me an extra week.

I feel like i got hosed, as far as followers goes, my first time around. Out of the 20 i managed to gather through my normal questing, only one decided to proc epic quality. The abilities it also acquired were pretty lackluster as well and not what i was hoping for. Certainly nothing compared to what my Shaman would get lucky with.

Once again the RNG gods were much nicer to my followers my second time through. Out of the 16 i gathered this time, three decided to proc epic. Not only that but the the traits they came with were phenomenal. I managed to hit pay dirt with Shadow Hunter Rala acquiring both the Scavenger trait as well as an epic mount. Not a single follower for my DK had either and boy do both of those make a huge difference in resource acquisition. My DK is sulking in the corner as i type this.

My first Molten Core experience comes as part of the 10-year anniversary event. I'd heard all the horror stories from friends that played back then but i wasn't prepared for what was to come.  Not even two steps into the zone and a pile of corpses already building up. I knew i was in for a long afternoon. I could also see why 40-man content went the way of the dodo. It's a huge pain in the butt.

My group spent the first hour of the raid just getting through the first trash pack. Apparently i wasn't the only one that had never done the raid or knew the mechanics. It was hilarious watching everyone screaming at everyone else and not really knowing why. We had a few "leaders" telling everyone that AoE was bad on the trash because it would just spawn more adds. No one seemed to know they were time based and so more and more adds spawned. Eventually we just became overrun. This continued for a while.

Thus the never ending zone in and die cycle began. Trying to get 40 people in a random group to all pay attention is virtually impossible. The words "don't zone in until they reset" reminded me of old school FFXI trains to zone lines that could take upwards of an hour or more. Of course along with this came the random jackass that's only there to ruin everyone else's day by prolonging the mess. It brought back so many memories of nonsense i don't miss.

Eventually we overcame the initial terrible start once more experienced players took the spots of rage quitters and complainers. The trash pulls seemed far worse than any of the bosses except one or two. I believe we wiped on only two bosses total compared to numerous wipes on trash. The entire run took about 3 hours if i remember correctly but i may be blocking some of it from memory. We did get a new mount for our troubles which always seems to make everything alright. I'm not too sure this event works or can be considered fun by the majority of players but i certainly enjoyed some of it.

My first profession to 700 and it's mining of course. I mean it's ridiculously easy to get since everyone basically has their own mine now. That fact does worry me a bit since i made decent gold prior to this expansion just running around and tapping every node i could find. With the daily limit of ore from the garrison mines, i'm hoping it isn't too bad and the market isn't flooded. Now my next task is getting my engineering to 700, which is going to take a bit longer with the daily limit on crafts that give skill-ups.

I finally won the battle of the queue boss and managed to ding my DK. After consistent 6k queues all week, it finally returned to normal today. It's amazing how quickly the final levels went by when i'm actually able to log on. Boy did they go by quickly. Before i realized it, i was a few bars from 100 and wondering where the time went.

The questing in Draenor was infinitely more interesting and fun than it ever was in Pandaria. I'm not sure if the flow was better or if getting ten levels felt more rewarding than five, but it just seemed to surpass MoP in every way imaginable. I'm sure the garrisons had a lot to do with it. I'm quite enjoying that as well despite their lack of customization. The resource hunt continues as i push on to level three.

The Battle for Shattrath was amazing and that's all i'm going to say.

Well it's been a few days now since WoD went live and I've managed a total of three hours of playtime. Much like everyone else, I've been playing the queue game, as i am right now. Currently sitting at over 5000 and not getting anywhere fast. This being my first expansion, i have no point of reference as far as how bad it is compared to previous expansions. All i can say is it's pretty bad compared to previous MMO's I've played. At the same time, all the MMO's I've played combined never had a player base as large as WoW. I fully expected a mess trying to log in but i understand why people are upset.

Find the NPC!

My "launch" time consisted of waiting around a huge pile of players for an NPC to spawn. The second 3 am rolled around, my game crashed and the queue game began. Despite telling myself not to stay up, i did it anyway. Well i wasn't able to get back on until a day later and then Blizz took the servers down just as i did.They knew. They specifically waited for me! That's what i'll tell myself.

The only thing i actually managed to get done while actually in game was hit 91 and get by garrison built. Speaking of which, why are Horde garrisons so ugly? Does the Horde not have any stone masons? You'd think with all their emphasis on war and fighting, someone would realize stones make for better defenses than huts and animal husks. Step up your architecture game.


That's pretty much where I've been for two days now. I'm hoping they fix this nonsense so i can get back to leveling. The little I've seen, I've actually enjoyed. Aha! I'm on to your schemes Blizzard. You've planned this mess so people want to play more. Joking aside, hopefully this next reset fixes all the issues and everyone can get back and enjoying the expansion.

I can stop the mount posts right now with this one. It's mission accomplished as far as I'm concerned. Oh who am i kidding, i still want the green one since it's the reason i started this journey. Pureblood Fire Hawk will have to tide me over until i actually manage to get the green version as some point way in the future.

It really is a beautiful looking mount and i like it much better than the purple version but i think that has more to do with rarity than anything else. I've had an incredible few weeks as far as rare mounts go but i fear I've used up all my luck for a while. Nothing i can do but keep pushing towards my 250 goal with only 200 more to go. Ugh!

I'm happy to say i no longer have to make the trek out to Malygos anymore. A couple weeks after getting the Azure Drake mount to drop, i was lucky enough to get the Blue Drake as well. I hadn't planned on even going for it until i took quick glance and noticed i was missing the 25-man achievement for this fight. Well as the RNG Gods have stated, drops will occur when one is either not really looking for them or barely paying attention to them. I was there just to grab a quick achievement and was super surprised when i checked the loot pool. MountQuest continues.