This isn’t my first attempt at keeping a blog. I have tried a few times before this and I just never kept it up. After I’d abandoned it for a few months I removed it in embarrassment. None of these attempts reached more than a dozen posts, mostly a lot less than that. So to some bloggers the milestone of 100 is nothing, easily and quickly passed, to me it means a lot more than that. I debated what my 100th post should be about. Should it just be a normal post, or should it be something?
When I started this blog I called it a “Warcraft and Swtor blog”, when I stopped playing Swtor I changed it to just a “Warcraft blog” which is what it remains as. I’m increasingly blogging about other things than Warcraft but it remains at it’s core a Warcraft blog. I think I hold that responsible for the success of this blogging attempt. In the past it was just a blog, not about anything and consequently it didn’t have any posts. I’ve tried not to get too personal with the posts as well, and do more opinion or discussion pieces. Sometimes I’ve failed with that, but I don’t talk about life here, which means I don’t regret what I post, there is nothing to worry about.
So this post is going to be a bit of a mixed bag, just something to mark the milestone of 100 posts, then I can get on with writing the next 100.
Wayback Machine
I don’t re-read my old posts very often. Occasionally I will look back if I remembered I said something, and it is funny how things change over time. Back in March I posted ‘Love and Hate: A Tanking Relationship’ where I quite firmly said things like “I loathe tanking raids”, “not an experience I will voluntarily repeat” and other such decisive comments against raid tanking. I said I liked tanking 5 mans but wouldn’t tank raids willingly. That was during Dragon Soul so how did I get from that in March 2012, to main tanking when Mists was released in the September?
Quite simply what happened was I got more experienced. I’d always liked tanking but tanking raids scared me. It wasn’t until one memorable run where we had a pug tank and I had the unheard of thought “I could do better than that”, that I realised that I could tank if I wanted to. I wasn’t enjoying healing, wasn’t enjoying raiding full stop. So I decided to take a chance, to refuse to heal in Mists by virtue of not having a healing spec or gear. Early Mists days were pretty rough, but once we got a few bosses down, I gained in confidence and realised how much I liked tanking, especially how much I liked tanking with active mitigation. It’s odd that in that tanking post in March I’d talked about not liking the responsibility in raids, of how things could go wrong if I screwed up, as with active mitigation a lot more can go wrong as survivability is much more in your hands. Yet I love the new tanking model more than I ever did the old one, maybe it’s the control freak in me.
What else has there been? Well I’m no psychic but I put in a call for Multi Loot in March 2012, I don’t think it was announced until at least the following month, I certainly honestly didn’t know about that at the time. That’s not too impressive though, I think especially with Swtor having implemented it, it was something on everyone’s wishlist. However, in August 2012 I wrote a post called The Fifth Element, where I wondered what future features there could be. This included something that I called flexible raids, which would use the LFR loot system. Now I can’t credit myself completely with the idea as I think I got inspiration/stole it from The Grumpy Elf. However, I did at least agree with him that flex raids were a future possibility, and well they are being added in 5.4.
My Warcraft future
Just a little personal paragraph. As I demonstrated above, when I started this blog I never would have imagined that I would be main tanking, I would have been scared out of my mind and run away if someone had suggested it. So in another 100 posts where could I be? I don’t know, the future is wide open and it can change at the drop of a hat. There’s some struggles in my guild right now with the roster, I hope we’ll get it sorted. I’m also not logging in so much as I referenced in my last post. Is it burnout? I don’t know, I’m not giving up on the game, but it doesn’t have much draw for me right now. Perhaps when the guild situation is more settled there won’t be the worry and the pressure about it, I do tend to avoid things that bother me.
Away from your irregularly scheduled Warcraft posts
It’s the beginning of July so it’s the second Camp NaNoWriMo session of the year. As you can perhaps tell from the word counter, which I haven’t taken down, I did not do so well in the April session. I decided to set a more realistic goal and went for 10k on anything, rather than someone like 50k on one project. It’s the 4th and I haven’t written a single word outside of blog posts, which I could count this time I suppose. However, it’s fiction that I’m really interested in and I’ve written none of that which is very wrong. I want to write but well, I guess I’m scared and I do tend to avoid things rather than face them. It’s easier to dream, rather than make that dream meet reality. I don’t want to give up though so there may be more writing posts in this blogs future, or at minimum the word counter stays.
I’m still enjoying my vacation from Azeroth with Marvel Heroes and Swtor so there may be more blog posts about them. Marvel Heroes especially has grown on me, it’s so different from Warcraft, and on the surface seems to be about the part of Warcraft that I hate – the grind, but that really couldn’t be further from the truth. With Marvel Heroes there is only a very loose framework of quests until just after level 20, and after that it’s just dungeon crawling. Apparently they will add difficulty modes in the future, but the game is just focused on the activity of playing the game, or at least it is for me. I’m not chasing anything in particular as you can’t really do that, I’m just throwing a shield round as Captain America, sending barrages of repulsor blasts as Iron Man, hack and slash as Wolverine, the game is the fun, the journey and not the end. I really, really wish that they would sell a pack, like they did pre-launch. The items are priced for individual purchase, and on the assumption people will only buy a couple, so yes I want the pack for the discount, I want to pay a lot and get good value for money. I won’t pay anymore than I have done for the individual items, so they’ll get more money out of me selling a pack, but I digress these may never be on offer again, all I have is hope.
With Swtor I did manage to finally get back into my Bounty Hunter. It wasn’t easy after all that time away, as I’d forgotten everything about how to play it. Noxxic came to the rescue, and practice did the rest. I’m a bit stuck right now as I finished all the quests on Belsavis, but I’m level 43 and not level 44 so Voss (the next planet) and so if I went to Voss I’d likely get owned, I had enough trouble on Belsavis as it was. I’m not quite sure how to gain my extra half a level, in the past I would have done space missions but as f2p the XP gain is harshly reduced for these. I really want to push on though, as when I’m level 48 I can complete Mako’s companion quest and romance her. I guess I’m a romantic at heart, and like to RP a bit without really doing any RP. I got into the whole character thing though, from the race I picked for my Bounty Hunter, to the personality I picked for him, and therefore the dialogue options I chose. It isn’t what I would do or say, but it’s my character which is kinda fun to be honest. Back when I was subbed I briefly rolled a Sith and had fun picking all the evil options. I much prefer playing the hero though and so I have my Jedi Knight to fall back on until I get my Bounty Hunter unstuck, though it’s also fun in it’s own right of course.
Time to light the candles
On behind the scenes footage of TV shows when they reach the milestone of 100 episodes they have a cake with a lot of candles on it, seriously it usually looks like the cake is on fire. Anyway, they blow the candles out, eat the cake and then get on with making the next however many episodes. If they reach 200 they do it all again, and so on until the show is cancelled. So this post is like my cake and candles and then I get up and start on the next batch.
Two posts that are upcoming are entitled ‘Warcraft and Micro transactions’ and ‘The Next James Bond’ so 100 is definitely not the end point – it’s only the beginning. In fact the Warcraft post is what pushed me to finish this 100th post, I was dithering as I wanted it to be special, which it kinda isn’t. However, I want to post that Warcraft post and this has to be post 100 so here it is ready or not, post 100 so post 101 can be released.