Leafshine: Lust for Flower

Hangin' wiv mah druid homies

Patch 4.2 has dropped in the EU realms, and from a PvE, questing kinda perspective, it's looking mighty fine right now.

More posting when I've had time to explore a bit more throughly…

A reminder of what we've lost...

I hear tell that the EU servers are up already, post-Shattering. But, before I plunge into the brave new world, I wanted to pause for a moment for a reminder of what we've lost:

 

Guess what I spent my last evening in old Azeroth doing. :-)

Yet Another Patch 4.01 first impressions post

In reverse order of importance:

1. Oooooh. The water's so pretty.
2. What have they done to paladins? OMG! Actually… it kinda makes me want to play my baby pallie more. Just one judgement? Fancy pants new spells? This looks like a laugh…
3. Usuri Brightcoin makes me laugh:
   Usuri? Usury? Geddit?
4. Wow. They've really given Moonkin some oomph. Laser chickens are fun! Fun! Fun! Pike was right…
5. So, wait. Resto druids get no new spells. All the old spells now do something different. We have to worry about a brand new cooldown. And we don't get to be trees anymore. Uh, exactly what is my incentive for completely relearning my class? Can't I just go and play a more fun class?

Early days…

Goodbye Tree of Life - or perhaps, just Au Revoir…

When a screen came up like this four years ago, I was filled with excitement. WoW 2.0 was on its way, heralding the immanent release of The Burning Crusade - and the arrival of tree form for resto druids. And now that screen is back, and I stare at it with melancholy (and a little over-tiredness and over-whisky consumption when you come to that), because it marks the beginning of a profound change to the restos. We are trees no more, now the druid who heal in caster form, and get to show our full arboreal glory only once in a while. 

It's a new world. It's WoW 4.01. And I'm not sold on it - yet.

Silence of the Leafy One

Sooooo...

I screwed up yesterday. This post was meant to go up before yesterday's post, but I scheduled that one and then saved this as a draft and then got distracted by...

Actually, you guys don't care about that. I just wanted to post a little about why I go quiet every December and why I've been quiet this one. Look, last December I only managed three posts in total! (And I was only 73...)

For instance, most of last week I was at the annual Le Web conference in Paris, and those of you with a general interest in the social media world might find my posts from there to be interesting reading. And work tends to be hectic in the run-up to Christmas, as does my social life. And thus, I play less WoW, and I blog about it less. C'est la vie.   

However, I do want to take you back, back to the future to the days before Patch 3.3.

When the world was Young, and Emblems of Conquest mattered...

Do you remember those long ago days? When there was an LFG tool? When there was a set daily quest? When we cared about Tier 8? Those were dark, dark days. We knew they would end, but we wanted to make the most of them. Each morning, we would login, and check, hopefully, for the daily Heroics that we'd yet to do. Late the week before the patch, I finally found Cyanigosa hanging in the magical viewer, and dragged my guildies into Violent Hold to grab that one (and two oh-so-precious Emblems of Triumph). And then I waited. And waiting. And then, finally, the weekend before the patch dropped I got this:

Yup, Anub'Arak had finally come up. It took us 7.3 minuted to clear the instance (this is an exaggeration, but not by much). And so, I was happily able to see the Proof of Demise achievement become a Feat of Strength with 3.3. Some of my guildies were not so lucky - but they've been consoling themselves with grinding out complete sets of Tier 9...

Oh, and in the "things I screwed up last year" stakes:

Yeah, I logged in so infrequently this time last year, I never got around to drinking my Beer of the Month for December - The Lord of Frost's Private Label. And so, I had to mount rams (steady...) until I got enough tokens this year to rejoin the club. It was worth it. The one Brewfest Achievement I lacked is now mine. Hurrah!

So...what's this I hear about the dance of Seven Winter Veils or something?

WoW Playstyles in the Wrath Age

I failed. 

I 100% absolutely failed. You see, with my post about the difficulty of WoW for the average player, I was trying to stay away from the raiding debate, and look at things from a whole-WoW perspective. But, unfortunately, people saw it as being about them and their playstyle, and that was not my intention at all. Lissanna was clearly quite upset about it, and posted this as the intro to her follow-up post:

Okay, so I got frustrated at poor leafshine’s post today. Why? Well, because she says that the pace of the game is just right – and that the average player is happy just doing the same content over and over and over again – and that anyone who is unhappy with the game right now, you are basically all alone because no one else is unhappy… because the game is in a perfect place right now, because it caters perfectly to her.

She's since rewritten the intro. But I'd just like to say: if that's how I made you feel, I'm sorry. I apologise for any upset caused. It was not my intention to lecture or criticise those who are frustrated with the game in any way shape or form. I am an occasional raider, at best, and I'm not in a position to make any comment at all about the difficulty level of the end-game raid content, 'cos I'm just starting Ulduar.

I certainly wasn't suggesting that the average player is happy doing the same thing repeatedly - I'm certainly not. Ulduar is brand-new to me. Most of the quests I'm doing as I work on Loremaster are, by definition, new to me. And I certainly made no suggestion that people who aren't happy are alone. Just talking about "average" people implies that that are non-average people. I was talking about the peak of the bell curve, the bulge in the middle, and not those who are on the further parts of the slope either side.

In a sense, Lissanna reinforced one of my points, rather than countering it. She filtered my post through her own experiences, and saw it through the lens of raiders, who are, quite literally, doing the same thing again and again while they wait for Icecrown Citadel to emerge. It's interesting that, on the whole, the people who responded negatively to my post are the people who play WoW mainly to raid¹. This reflexive assumption that any post about WoW difficulty is about raiding is a characteristic of the blogging demographic who are, by and large, raiders. That's what the game is about, on the whole, to them. I'm not one of them. I'm a WoW player who raids sometimes. 

I think the Fluid Druid sums it up best, in fact:

If you are a casual player (hint: If you read WoW blogs, you are probably NOT a casual player), then WOTLK is absolutely awesome for you. Unlike BC where most content was far too difficult to accomplish, 90% of the current content is puggable. Gear progression is easy, and getting easier. There are lots of paths for character advancement besides raiding; achievements, WE’s, PvP, etc.

If you are a raider, then things are very meh. 

He just summed things up in a few sentences that it took Lissanna and I a few thousand words to say between us. :)

Druid Tier 10: WANT

Blizz have just dropped a preview of some of the Tier 10 sets, and I think it's the best Druid set of the expansion, personally. Now, I don't have a hope of getting it (seeing as I'm rocking 1 piece of Tier 8 right now), but it does look awesome. 

Update: It appears that others don't feel the same. I'll take yours if you don't want it, Sylly!

Patch 3.0: Speed Karazhan

We're a small guild. We've never got Karazhan consistently on farm status. We've killed every boss in the place, but some, like Aran and Nightbane, continue to give us trouble. We are a two-night clear sort of guild.

All that was true, until the patch.

Last night, we killed the whole damn instance in around 3 hours, including the 15 minutes odd it took us to head back from the Prince to the Servants' Quarters, to give the beast boss a decent showing for completeness' sake. 22 badges, no wipes, but a few, rather over-confident deaths.

Kill times for the bosses:

• Netherspite 2:28
• Prince Malchezaar 2:23
• Nightbane 2:22
• Aran 2:03
• Midnight 1:36
• Curator 1:34
• Moroes 1:31
• Illhoof 1:28
• Maidien 0:58
• Tinhead 0:46
• Roar 0:45
• Strawman 0:45
• Rokad the ravager 0:36
• Crone 0:24
• Dorothee 0:27

Blimey.

If you want to see our Netherspite kill, read on: