azerothisburning.com

I consider myself to be lucky to belong to the World of Warcraft blogging community. Why? Because, for the most part, we are a reasonably accepting group. After all, there are even people who read my mad ravings.

If you look at blogging in general, excluding the personal update things general found as part of the livejournal/facebook set, bloggers tend towards the exclusionary and even reactionary. Some groups are worse than others, true…If you want to see vile hatred spouted, read Redstate or Daily Kos. Political bloggers are almost always the worst (kind of like political talk radio hosts). Heck, there are even food bloggers get in on the exclusionary act with their “if you don’t eat what I like, you are wrong and beneath notice”. And you’d think there would be nothing so inclusive as eating.

When you get right down to it, WoW bloggers are pretty accepting. Yeah, we each have our focus (well, I don’t have a focus, but I have 10 characters…it’s kind of hard to be focused when you are like that;)). But I can only think of one or two WoW bloggers who are just outright exclusionary in the gobs of us that are out there.

So, stand up and be proud, WoW Bloggers. You’re doing a good job of forming a community amongst the whole, which is something that seems to be difficult to do in the anonymous world of the internet.

I’ve been dealing with some health issues and haven’t been on much. Will try to get something up in the next couple of days.

I realized today how far Flaime has come. Today I soloed the entire Path of Conquest questline. This time last year, a Son of Corok would killed me. No matter how much I buffed, I could never get one below 10% solo. Now, I take them down with 95% unbuffed. And a Crazed Collosus doesn’t push me below 85%.

Now certainly, Flaime is my most played character, but I hadn’t realized how much progression he had attained before. After all, my guild is not a heavy raiding guild. We are more about fun. But, we run Kara. And have started a Gruul’s run with some alliance guilds. We are getting better at places we haven’t seen and we are getting better gear. And, quite frankly, we are better players over all than a lot of hardcore raiders I know.

It’s just interesting to get a tangible example of that.

This has been an insane week. I was going to post this on Tuesday, but 11.5 hours of overtime got in the way.

So anyway, on Monday, all of our regular raid leaders were AFK and I wanted to get the Prince down. So, I started the invites and called in some friends and spammed LFG in our alliance channel and we eventually got 10 and headed off to Karazhan.

We actually started on Chess having cleared up to the Shade the previous night. The first pull was a little shaky (tank ran into the room while I was still marking) but we lived through it. Had some trouble with the shades before the first room of ethereals, whcih was sad. But we regrouped, cleaned them out and made it to Chess without further incident. Followed up by clearing the trash to Prince with ease.

That, of course, is when the troubles start. Try one, the tank got knocked out of LOS for the healers. Wipe. Try two tank gets to close to rest of the party, shadow nova, wipe. Tries three and four, bad infernal drops, both wipes. Try number 5, the DPS just kind of gets destroyed some how (I don’t remember how), and we have 2 healers, the tank, and 1 hunter working the prince. They just ran out of time at 28%. Try number 6, lost the tank, I picked it up (but was in cat gear), and eventually the prince did back to back crushing blows…wipe. Try number 7 was another bad infernal drop.

I think part of the problem was that we just had too many melee for our gear level (most of us are in kara gear supplemented with badge, but we had a couple of puggers in blues). It happens. You take the hand you’re dealt and move on.

I recieved compliments on my raid leading. I guess, because I was and didn’t scream and yell, people felt that I was in control (I wasn’t. I kept dying, after all:D). But most of them said they’d be glad to run with me again, which makes me happy.

Take a week off and it seems like every WoW blogger but you gets a Beta key. Yeah, that’s a slight exaggeration, but of the 15 or so WoW blogs I read regularly, more have Beta keys than not…Hey Blizz! I want in on the action!

So the Olympics are here and that brings us a pair of competition themed items for PvPing in BGs: the Competitor’s Tabard and the Spirit of Competition pet token. It seems to be working this week as Alliance has won both AB and WSG in my battlegroup at record levels (heck, they might almost be topping 30% now!) I fully expect, however, that once everyone who wants the pet has it, we will be going back down to our 50% AFK teams and 2% wins in those BGs.