The dearth of time abounds, please standby

The end of the year is a time when hobbie time seems to evaporate, leaving me frazzled.  This year is no different with work deployments, shopping needs, appointments, training courses, and some such all stopping online gaming from happening.

I’d not be exaggerating to say that I’ve played less than 2 hours in the last two weeks, and about 10 minutes in the last 8 days. In fact yesterday was 5 minutes, which counts the loading screen.

I’m sure that the new year will see far more regular playtime, and a few more posts. For now at least I’m enjoying reading about how much fun the raid team are having – I’ll be blogging about the game again soon.

Happy (free time) holidays.

The new 5 mans in patch 4.3 are very reasonable

I’ve now played each of the new 5 mans in patch 4.3 a few times and they are very reasonable; however the player base and loot mechanics are still problematic.

From a pace and visual style the new instances is excellent. The tasks needed are obvious enough that you get the idea quickly, the mechanics are not difficult to follow, but they need to be addressed properly (interrupts, fire on ground, proximity, special kill orders feature strongly). All in all, good stuff. Worth waiting for, and certainly feature rich in terms of game lore that the characters get to participate in.

However the two same aspects of running randoms remain frustrating, and they are related. Morons and rude mongrels still populate the queues just as frequently as average players. Great players are still rare. I’m an average player overall, and I have a sixth sense in detecting when somebody is a mongrel, which of the handful of runs so far I’ve seen a typical spread of douche-bags.

End Time, thoughts

I played the first of the new 5 mans last night – End Time. It’s ok. For the first attempts at these instances I’ve decided to join as dps, so that I can at least not have full pressure for the runs. As dps the job is no different than before: kill, interrupt, avoid.

The trash was actually sometimes harder than the bosses, especially the initial shadow panther things. They just keep spawning till you get to the light – I like that.

Boss mechanics are straight forward (avoid bad, move on special, interrupt when casting X) and not so stacked together that we suffered. I think our wipes were more to do with having a group with no CC, an arrogant tank, and a sluggish healer, than the mechanics.

I enjoyed it, and am looking forward to the next one in the series.