Zhevra Mounted

   I have been absent from this blog for nearly a year now, and I have a pretty good excuse, but I missed it and I plan to pick it back up. The novel following this is to explain myself and my bad behavior. :(

   Mists of Pandaria was something I was excited for when it was announced, as most Warcraft fans were. A new expansion, and this time we're going to a new land again. The Theramore pre-launch event should have clued me in to how I would feel about the expansion, but I soldiered through and bought my husband and I both copies the morning of launch.

  We landed in Pandaria and began our adventure, excited about the hidden treasures to seek and interact with. I even found the Bind on Account Jade Infused Sword 30 minutes in to play. We encountered our first Rare, Morgrinn Crackfang, and were excited to find that Rare mobs were truly the Elites of old.

  Then we realized that there weren't really any instances to level with, and they certainly weren't our favorites we had ever done at that. Then we realized how many dailies there were and that they seemed, oddly, to be about the only thing available. Not many more instances unlocked at 90, professions were tied to dailies, and our guild of 6 years had moved to 10 man raids because there just weren't enough incentives to deal with the extra stress of planning around 25 people. Looking for Raid was my own personal nightmare; it was tuned way too easy to even keep you awake, better yet entertained, and populated with the same pond scum that trolled the very worst Looking for Groups.

   Needless to say, it wasn't long before my husband and I both found ourselves seeing our WoW subscriptions showing up on our bank account and realizing that we hadn't even logged in that month. We ended up cancelling our accounts and biding our time with League of Legends and joining some old guild mates on Guild Wars 2.

When the Siege of Orgrimmar patch launched, I had a guild mate tell me about Flex Raiding. We could now run raids, even current content, with anywhere between 10 and 25 raid members. It would automatically scale so people could even come and go as they pleased. I was intrigued but was going to wait it out until I saw Blizzard running a Facebook campaign for a free week of game time.

A week passed before I knew it and I was sucked back in. Guild mates were dragging me around Timeless Isle and I was able to get into Flex on any of my characters I had leveled and just enjoy the company of friends I had for years. MoP was more than tolerable. I was having fun again.

That lasted for 3 weeks. We started hemorrhaging players each week until even Flex, with all of its...well, flexibility, couldn't be run anymore. We found they were leaving for oQueue groups that required 550 iLvl. This despite the fact that we were clearing each boss on 3 or less attempts each week. They quickly turned Flex from what it was supposed to be, an opportunity to play with who you wanted to, in to another way to try to quickly devour content, get hot lootz, and move on.

Flex was a large step in the right direction, and after watching Blizzcon I have hope that the expected changes to raid types will be the final and correct one. Meanwhile, it sounds like we have another WotLK on our hands, with a massive gap between the final patch and the next expansion. In the meanwhile I believe we will be utilizing OpenRaid and I will be picking up Project Troll Roll once again. Here's hoping Warlords of Draenor will be a breath of fresh air.

Vanilla Completed!


   Well, this section has been an experience due to patch 5.0.2 dropping right in the middle of everything. I had Zen'Sera to level 54 when the patch went live, and it threw a serious wrench in the works.

The beginning of Arathi Highlands, a large chunk of the Hinterlands and most of Western Plaguelands make up levels 30-40.

The Hir'watha quests and the Lumbermill quests in Western Plaguelands were the only major drags, everything else was quick and pretty stream lined. I'm glad all 9 of my girls are Herbalists, it would make you sick to see how many herbs you had to pass up in Western Plaguelands.

• Zen'fera - Still Fury and still doing very well.
• Zen'za - Speeding up with talents, still not as fast as Survival.
• Zen'tuku - Easy to level in general, being sneaky has its perks.
• Zen'sera - Had to stay Disc all the way up to 40, I'm hoping Shadow may finally be worth it in the 40-50 bracket.
• Zen'jie - I'm starting to believe my Shamans will always be my favorite characters to level.
• Zen'kazkah - Send Pet. Dot Dot Dot. Tab. Dot Dot Dot. Repeat.
• Zen'kikii - Finally getting more points into Tiger's Fury (regain energy/more damage) has made the Druid one of the fastest classes this bracket.

Through my multiple alts, I often wondered if there was a faster way to level. Then one day, inside a truly sorry Arathi Basin match, it finally hit me. It hit me in the form of five perfectly timed Lightning Bolts.
Dual-boxing has been around for quite some time now within the WoW community. Some people are against it, saying that it gives unfair advantages within PvP. While this may or may not be true, Blizzard has clearly stated that they have nothing in the ToS against dual-boxing, and that they are not concerned with its effects in PvP.
With that out of the way, we have to wonder what the pros and cons can be to running a multi-box setup. The obvious pros to multi-boxing are; leveling multiple characters at the same time, the ability to complete difficult quests (and even instances) by yourself, and coupled with refer-a-friend two and a half times experience bonuses up until level sixty. The cons depend on what set up you chose, but a few are present no matter what; it can be difficult to acclimate yourself to controlling multiple characters, paying for multiple accounts each month, and the price of purchasing the game and any expansions for each new account.