So yeah, almost 3 months without a blog post, and I was doing so well too. This is mainly due to epic levels of cba, along with a fair bit going on in my real life. So anyway, I just renewed the domain so I figure I should at least try and post something, maybe this will motivate me to start up again.

As far as WoW goes, thing’s have died off a little. Since my last update I have done 2 main things; leveled characters using the refer a friend thingy, and leveled and raided a bit on my Shaman.

I decided to use refer a friend to level a couple of characters purely by boosting them in instances, mainly so I could get Mage back up into the 60s. I’d enjoyed playing my Draeni Mage, but after leveling that 1-72 I didn’t much fancy doing it all again Horde side. So I made a Blood Elf Mage, and a Tauren Warrior and off I went. I borrowed Dan’s Paladin to do the boosting (see Dans boosting guide if interested) though he did a lot of the actual boosting himself while I just followed him round. The idea behind this was to then consequently get my Mage to 80 and start playing that, as I was bored of Death Knight. Of course, with me nothing ever turns out how I plan, because I can’t be bothered to see these things through. The Mage made it to like 66 before I got bored and realised I couldn’t be bothered.

My next decision was to try a healing class, as I’d raided as a healing Priest pre-TBC and enjoyed it. I was also actually ok at it, which is surprising. I had Shaman at 66, priest at 62 and Paladin at 70 at this point. I decided on Shaman, as I tried Paladin healing and it was horribly boring, and I’d played priest before. Also Chain Heal looks pretty.

So Shaman got leveled, both as Enhancement and Elemental. Mainly Elemental, as I duoed the majority of the time with Dan’s Feral Druid. Set my off-spec as Resto and we did all the instances whilst leveling etc. I actually managed to stick with Shaman to 80, which I am more than a little surprised about. Stayed Resto a good month or so, did all the heroics (well most of) and cleared Nax a few times. At this point I went away on holiday, which basically spelled the demise for my Shaman. A week away in the sun without WoW basically evaporated all of my motivation. Now after being back for 2 weeks I’ve probably only logged in 3 times, so I guess Shaman is out of the window now too.

At the moment I currently have 2 gaming related activities going on in my spare time:

Fable 2

Just getting back into this. I’d bought it on my Xbox when it first came out, but not played it more than a few hours so never really got into it. I bought Fallout 3 at the same time and spent more time playing that. Buying 2 console games at the same time is always a bad idea for me. So I’ve started this up again, and decided to be as evil as possible. I’m pleased with the options you have within game to do this, though most of the time you can kind of see where the game is allowing you to make the choice, and funneling you in the direction it wants you too. I’ve managed to “beat” the game a few times by being evil in ways I don’t think it expected, but this doesn’t usually alter the story in any way. Its just personal satisfaction at having deviated from the expected paths. This is what I’m spending most of my time playing at the moment, I may even knock together a blog post or two about it.

FFXI

Ugh, I can’t believe I just typed those words. Yes, the game I spent like 2 years playing and hated by the time I stopped, I am currently in the process (or about to be) of trying it again. Me and Dan both seemed a bit bored with WoW, and as per usual have been looking at other MMOs to flake to for a while. With the announcement of FFXIV coming out next year, I think our interest in all things Final Fantasy have been piqued. So Dan found a copy with all the addons on the net for under 20 squid, we ordered it, and away we go I suppose. Apparently the soloability (if that’s even a word) of the game is greatly increased these days. One of my major problems with it back in the day (like 5+ years ago now) was that you couldn’t do shag all without a group of 6 people, as anyone who’s played it could attest to. It seems they’ve done a number of things these days to improve that; increased exp from mobs that can be killed solo, created exp rate increase rings, added collection/kill quests in zones and I think added a few more zones where there’s level appropriate stuff to kill solo or in small groups. So the plan currently is for me and Dan to get ourselves to 30, mainly duoing with a little bit of group work if we feel like it, grab some advanced jobs, and get back on the FFXI train. Choo Choo!

Should keep me busy for a month or two anyway. With Aion and FFXIV on the horizon at least there’s a few things to look forward to trying.

Over and out.

Yes, that is me surfing a flaming harpoon through the air. Epic does not even begin to explain. I think this may have been my favourite moment of… well life really. Maybe not quite, but you get the idea. I can imagine the moment someone though of this at Blizzard, people must have plotzed. I’m assuming numerous whoops and high fives followed. I can’t actually remember why I was surfing a flaming harpoon, I think it was just a way for the game to transport me back to one of the Alliance villages, but it really doesn’t matter.

Howling Fjord is pretty much exactly as it was on Horde; annoying. You have a fairly big zone, with like 3 or 4 little villages spread around it, and a few other random quest giver NPCs standing around by themselves in the wilderness. It has to be one of the more annoying places to level in the entire game. I don’t think I’ve found myself doing more than about 5 quests at a time the whole zone. I’m the sort of person who likes to pull up his quest log and see a big long list of

Quest of pwnage (complete)
kill 10 boars (complete)
kill 10 more boars (complete)
collect some boar liver (complete)
I don’t like liver (complete)
Your mum (group) (complete)
More dots! (complete)

and well, you get the idea. Howling Fjord does not offer me this. Having said that, the quests that it does offer at least attempt to avoid too much repetition, which makes it just about bearable.

Below are some random screenies that are at least semi cool moments from this zone. Luckily I’m at about 100/130 quests now, so I should be leaving pretty soon.

Yes I have an ugly UI I know. I’m intending on sorting it out at 80 once I cam remove a bunch of the leveling gumpf (technical term) I have.

One last thing, casting polymorph on a flying bird results in a flying penguin!

Admit it, you didn’t know penguins could fly did you?

Anyone who checks this blog (does anyone check this blog?) will have noticed a continued absence of updates for the last month or so. This is not to say that I haven’t been playing, more just that I can’t be bothered blogging about it. After leveling my Death Knight just a couple of months ago, it’s hard to be motivated to blog about the same levels again so soon. Even if the perspective is very slightly different when playing alliance. I’ll try and put something down though…

Schoz (yet another original character name there) the Mage is currently sitting at level 71, in the crap pot that is Howling Fjord. So basically since my last update *checks blog* I’ve done the vast majority of Outlands, and a little Northrend.

I won’t say much about Outlands, as its more of the same, everyone’s done it. I basically did the whole of Hellfire and Zangamarsh, skitted through Terrokar doing most of that zone, and dinged 68 after doing about 2/3 of Nagrand. I then decided to go to Netherstorm to do a few quests to upgrade gear and at least make a little dent into 68 before heading to Northrend. That didn’t last long, about a third of a level I guess, but I suppose it helped some. I decided to do Howling Fjord first again, just to get it out of the way really.

On the whole Outlands was pretty smooth. I kept putting all my points into Frost, so my survivability was excellent. I think I did once or twice during the whole of 58-68, and that was only due to being stupid. Experimenting with my water elemental has been good fun, I could quite easily kill 6-7 mobs without losing any HP. As it stands now, I’ve switched and added a few points into the Arcane tree in order to get clearcasting, quite how much this is helping me as far as mana goes I don’t know right now, but maybe that will become more evident in instances etc.

Planning on doing a small report on Howling Fjord next, then maybe some observations on Mage talents from my point of view. Just keeping things ticking over…

Woot!

Well, that was relatively painless to be honest. I went to Outlands at 58 and quickly made it to 60, whilst improving my gear quite significantly. I was still wearing random greens from like level 32.

Next step is to try and work on my Darnassus rep, so I can ride a nice tiger instead of a stupid oversized elephant.

In other news, Dan, I’m holding you to this:

and yet more leveling… that’s been my time in WoW recently.

As you can see in the banner above, I took my first step through the dark portal at lvl 58 today. This makes the *thinks* 6th character that I’ve done this on. It’s becoming a habit. Anyway, I started out the weekend at 51 or 52, and am currently sat at 59, so that’s pretty good going really. I also have Herbalism up to about 310, and Tailoring at 290ish. All in all a pretty productive weekend gaming wise.

I love seeing a full quest log of completed quests, mmmmm…

Leveling Mage as Frost spec just seems to be getting easier and easier. All the crit and freeze talents make killing things ridiculously easy, to the point where entering Outlands at 58 has been a complete breeze. On previous characters I’ve had a few issues until I hit 59 or 60. Not much to report really as far as leveling or playing alliance goes, this week I’ve been mostly just keeping my head down and getting on with it.

We did try and 3 man Ony however, with Theira at 80 (I think?) on his Shaman, Dan at 71 on his warrior, and me at somewhere in the mid 50s. Below is a graphical representation of what Ony thought when Dan asked for some loot:

You get the idea anyway. Suffice to say stage 2 took forever, and we died at the start of stage 3. She stomped his sh*t. We came back the next day with a couple more people and managed to kill her though. I was disappointed Mage T2 head didn’t drop, but whatever.

Still spending the majority of my time pondering on what class to play next. I’m currently debating between male Draeni priest (for the proverbial lulz), female NE DK (for the baaaaaa) or female human paladin (for the….. plate armour). Trying my best not to actually start on these though, hoping to ping through Outlands as fat as possible, then break into Northrend. Not too far behind everyone else in the guild now!

Might have a Fire spec impressions post soon, my resec trigger finger is getting itchy.