1000 posts. Heck

This is the blogs 1000th post. I do not know really where that compares with other wow bloggers, except my hunch is that many newer blogs whooshed past 1000 a while back because their authors are prolific writers. Good on them. Something to aspire to for me as a hobbyist.

I’ve obviously known that I was getting close to that number for a while, and I’m happy to have stayed with blogging.

The process of writing a post a week or so has helped with accepting and understanding the disciplines involved with regular writing. Distraction, anger, and fatigue can be huge barriers to writing and if it wasn’t for the gravity of work already done I might have stopped a few times along the way.

When it started the blog was about other non-game things like films and books as well; but over time I think a focus improved what was written. This is because I think the reading audience tends to expect a focused set of topics, and those who follow a blog look for material to match what brought them to the blog in the first place. It is a risk to dilute the topic too much.

Because of the computer gamer focus left me without a platform for all my other silly posts, there are two other blogs I write as well. One on nerd and more professional topics and the other for pen and paper role playing games. So I really was past 1000 posts a whole back, but it didn’t feel like 1000 until this blog got there.

So where to for the next few hundred or thousand? Well games for sure. Apart from that I’d expect world if Warcraft to continue to feature heavily, but I can’t help looking at other stuff from time to time.

In fact I hope that stays true forever.

Happy writing, TyphoonAndrew

Slowly is the only way to go

Thanks to a guildie (hello Tarc) I have completed the Nalak phase of the Legendary quest and am now killing bosses again in Throne of Thunder LFR for the x12 bling-things part. Twelve, that is better than Twenty; right?

Well yes and no. There is no indication that the drop rate is better or worse, unless you suspect that the change to an auto-drop from Lei-Shen might indicate that these little tokens were even more rare that the 20x odd of the previous type. I got the first one last night from Lei-Shen and I guess I’m ok with it taking 12 weeks to get the others. I like Legendaries to be hard and painful. Patch 5.4 will likely be out in production before I reach 12x drops, so I’ll hopefully be able to use the cloak in p5.4 content.

From a lore perspective I do not understand how it makes sense that Wrathion would ask for this many too. I mean there are 12 bosses, and these are rare things, and they drop from bosses only…and somehow we got 20x of them. No wonder Wrathion has us doing this, it is not logical in the setting. I bet he is amazed! Not a new theme though if I remember the Hand of Sulfuras correctly either.

Happy killing, TyphoonAndrew

Is LFR progress?

It is funny to think that LFR can grant players “progress”.

Strict progression is typically for normal and especially for hard-mode guilds, who are focused not only the hardest content, but also getting through the hardest content faster than their peers. Server rankings, kill times/strats, and sometimes even achievement points are ranked against each other to see who is first, and who is the best. LFR however is generally accepted as being easy, or scrub mode.

I ran a lot of LFR this week and was able to kill each boss in the current tier in LFR raids. It took more than the four nominal run through, as sometimes I joined mid way through, or the groups disbanded amid the raid.

That does not at all mean though that LFR does not have a place in terms of “progress”. Perhaps it is just progress for me, but I think there is merit in the system.

Are patches coming too fast? (wowinsider)

WowInsider has an interesting post – Are patches coming too fast?

My gut says yes they are, but only slightly. The main irritation I have with the patches is the news and hype mill, and the fact that I play so little that my main falls behind and that means zero alts.

As my friend Ragnaros says, “TOO SOON! YOU HAVE AWAKENED ME TOO SOON, EXECUTUS! WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS INTRUSION?”

The two points I’ll make briefly are (a) the ramp up of patch news arrived too soon for 5.3 after 5.2 hit the servers, and (b) our raid team was not able to get through all of the content, but I thin overall the timing of the actual drop was very good.

As far as (b) we could have done better if we’d had less in-team issues unrelated to the content. Folks leaving or having interruptions to their schedules caused us to lag behind where we really could have been. Should have been. Desire to be. One week extra would have made little difference, so this is really moot. The actual drop date was good. If I were a player trying to take two characters through the content then I suspect it would have been more of a struggle.

On (a) the rumour mill and the hype starts so far in advance of the actual content that I think it is a distraction to the current material. We had news of the 5.3 gear and weapon changes and some other patch notes before the best players in the world had killed the end boss on Normal mode. That is too fast. Far too fast.

The energy and hype on patches gives players excitement for what is next, but having the next carrot dangle when you have just got your teeth onto a new one feels like overload. We could have had one to two weeks of pure patch 5.2 discussion and feedback with Blizzard as a vendor, to make the feedback and excitement stick. Then they could have started talking about 5.3.

Heck we’ve already heard a blue make a “you’re going to love the next expansion” comment, which is too early by a bloody long way. We have not even heard a sniffle of how Garrosh will transition into a Boss.

Lastly I’ll concede a very valid point that too slow is worse than a little too fast. The wait at the end of Wrath of the Lich King and the Burning Crusade as long, and I think some players gave up due to that.

Happy killing, TyphoonAndrew

Related articles

• Are patches coming too fast? (wow.joystiq.com)
• The Thunder King Rises – World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Patch 5.2 Announced (epicagames.com)

TNB podcast featuring me *shrug*

My guest rant on the Twisted Nether blogcast is available for download, its issue 73 in your iTunes reader thingy. Having not yet listened to it myself, I’m sure there will be the odd “did I say that?“, and a heap of “tell me I don’t sound like that!“.

Downloading now…

A new home

This blog URL is the new home for Eye of the Storm, the personal blog of Andrew Breese. I’ve moved from a simple php program hosted in my account webspace, to this WordPress service.

Hopefully I’ll get used to the interface, images, etc that WordPress offer; and also import the old posts which can be found here.