Well, my return to World of Warcraft wasn’t as smooth, fun, or heralded as I expected. I haven’t used bullet points in a while. First off my guild of the past three expansions was gone. It wasn’t that I was kicked out of it but that it had completely disbanded. I was shocked because even…
All posts in Blizzard
Finishing an Expansion: WoW
I spent a lot of months in Legion last year, and it has been probably my second favorite expansion. I have a strange relationship with WoW that bounced from love to hate and most emotions in between. It is hard to explain why in some regards – I have had multiple accounts at multiple times,…
Hearthstoned Part 2
The last time I played or wrote about Hearthstone was to explain why I uninstalled it. The coles notes is that in an effort to ramp up revenues they ramped up expansion packs, requiring a bigger commitment to buy new packs and accept new meta strategies to remain competitive and have fun (if competitive is…
The Overwatch Conundrum
My son and all of his friends play Overwatch. Typically that style of first person shooter (spammy, jumpy, TF2-ish is probably a fair description) has never been high on my list. And yet, I find myself playing it. The oddity of this isn’t the fact that I am playing it (I play all sorts of…
I Uninstalled Hearthstone Today
Hearthstone is a card game that I have had some great enjoyment with. The pace of the expansion packs has felt really rushed and clearly in the past three months they have been pumping out “I win” cards with each. This is somewhat understandable in a free to play format where they want to get…
24.9% More Important
Well, I caught up to my F2P Jedi as a full subscribing Jedi (completing chapter one of the Knight story line)Â and I shaved 3 hours off of it. That is a decrease of time of 24.9%. This was completely non scientific but most of that time was saved by being able to use quick travel,…
New Metrics – WoW Sub Edition
I remember fondly when bloggers and gaming media roasted Turbine for reporting the millions of characters made in gameto show how successful they were doing. Then Activision reports this gem: “World of Warcraft MAUs for 2016 grew 10% year on year, with fourth quarter MAUs spiking to 20% year on year growth. In terms of hours…
Blizzard is a Currency Manipulator
Yay, a faux Donald Trump quote as my title! Finally! Dreams do come true. Yesterday Blizzard launched their fake in Azeroth money for other fake Blizzard games / item money pyramid scheme and the value of the WoW token exploded. BOOM! Yes it crashed right back down to earth quite quickly but last night when…
Rescue Time
In my last post I talked about how Tuesdays were a fun day in Azeroth, and made some claims about my play time. Prior to that thought I had already installed “Rescue Time” on my laptop which logs all of your activities while actively using your laptop. I assumed that doing everything I had planned…
Christmas Tuesday
Tuesdays are a wonderful day in the world of the (filthy!) casual WoW player. First off, you get your Class Hall chest (free lootsz!!) for completing Mythic + the 7 days preceding. There is joy (and misery) as people open their chest and link to their lastest and newest legendary item. Much like Christmas, many…
Character Immersion
I have mentioned before I have a stable of alts in every level bracket and that current Legion content has not given me a ton of time or focus on them – although mechanics exist to help them “get into the endgame” activities quickly, there is so much to do that on my play schedule…
Better Late Than Never
During  my regular WoW playtime this weekend and paying attention to what is coming down the pipeline in Legion patches I realized that Blizzard has been doing an awful lot to ease-in playing alt characters. Make no mistake about it – there is a TON to do with just one character alone – more than…
Vacation Catch Up
The Vacation I was on vacation last week, somewhere sunny, on the ocean, with 30 degree (Celsius) weather everyday. I had started to write up some posts to auto-post during my vacation but the whole point of why I blog is to interact with people – and doing so in an absentee fashion seemed counter…
Old Dog, New Trick
I know I am not fooling anyone here anyway, but I am really not a “cool” gamer. I am a (filthy!) casual. No RAID OR DIE, max content pushing here. World of Warcraft is my current game of choice. And I don’t hate myself for it (I used to in the old days, when I…
Third Time’s the Charm
So, this happened on the weekend. Quite by accident, and I was somewhat not trying to, but being so close to it I figured I might as well put in the effort and level up my third Legion character. Notice the awesome Bumblebee helmet and the mismatch of all the other gear from questing, time…
Cool Feature – Destiny
Remember that Bah Humbug the day before? Well, it still rings true. I did find something cool about Destiny quite by accident while surfing Tales of The Aggronaut – that Destiny has a web browser to look at your characters, stats and stuff. They have your characters done in a stylized cartoon way that really works…
Bahs and Humbugs
Ghost of Christmas Past (Tis The Season!) I haven’t really been a holiday season type for much of my formative time here on earth. Â It was a life made up of phases. Kid phase, awesome of course. The presents, the mystery, the joy. Young adult phase, awesome too. Parties with friends, travel, excitement. In my…
Carrots and Sticks
The mere participation of the activity should be the reward, right? Unfortunately that always isn’t true. There are parts of our gaming that we have do to in order to participate in the parts we enjoy. The most glaring example of this is leveling in itself. This has manifested itself in the World of Warcraft…
Hearthstone Expansion Launch
Mean Streets of Gadgetzan Despite a silly little bug forcing card duplicates out of the pack (which has harmed pretty much everyone who bought a 50-deck starter pack) I have to say I love the way this expansion launched. Before the good, the bad is that I love the illusion that there is a fair…
Hey Good Lookin’
IÂ finally transmogged my Druid. At ilvl 867 upgrades are few and far between and the parts that I hated about transmog (having to redo it every piece everytime there was an ugrade) is most likely slowing to a crawl for me. I have never been one to worry about costume sets and the look of…
Becoming a Well Rounded Azerothian
And not by voting, because they don’t have that yet in game. What is the Azeroth equivalent to the Donald? Leeroy Jenkins? Worlds Apart I continue to be torn between the world of ‘Mains’ and the world of ‘Alts’. Couchon (Main) is at 867 ilvl which means he can do all of the pug content…
Hearthstone
Return of the Cardigal Son I started with Hearthstone when it first launched and then abandoned it completely. I only recently I started playing again. The resurgence came from when my son came back from camp this summer. Camp has a very strict ‘no electronics’ policy and the kids were there for two weeks  –…
Leather Fetish
My World of Warcraft journey continues to be fun. My druid is ilvl 860 and equipped for Mythic +4 (that is where my confidence stands) as a healer – I still don’t know the fastest routes through a lot of the instances to feel comfortable tanking. My tanking set is, of course 859 with the…
DPS Disadvantage
Playing a pure DPS class is quickly proving to be a major disadvantage in this expansion than a class who can tank or heal. I am just noticing this now because I traditionally haven’t mained a pure DPS class. The game has been moving this way over the years with only 1/3 of the classes…
Enthusiasm Reborn!
So much for the waning. All it took was a teensy bit of of self effort. Let me set the table a bit. Part of the frustration I was feeling was that I had gone as far as I could, except for a couple daily routines. To make matters even worse on those daily routines…