I'M SO CALM

So there is a legendary for the 4.2 patch and Firelands. It's a caster dps staff. It has lore for the blue dragon aspect, as well as being a stupendouslu awesome dps weapon.

It requires a lot of effort from a whole guild to make. There are at least 3 big collection quest stages where you only get boss drops. There are a few solo sections, some lore-ish and some actually challenging. And there is a boss that takes a raid to kill.

We'd chosen a mage to get this staff first. It wasn't perhaps a well thought out choice, but he was actually in the raids when we started getting the first quest item drops. I accept responsibility for that ill-thought out and foolish choice.

Tonight that mage gquit.

The legendary is roughly 2/3 done.

I am ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS. I managed to keep my calm and get the raid going tonight, but most of the time I wasn't talking on Vent I was saying "fucking ******".

Perhaps it wasn't explicitly stated when he initially got the first quest items, but I thought there was some sort of agreement whereby the guild worked to get him the staff and he stayed in the guild, at the least until the staff was finished.

I want to be absolutely clear here. It's ok to leave a guild if you're not happy in it. If you don't fit in it's far better to leave before you cause trouble. However, it is NOT ok to get a guild's help for what is basically a group quest credited to one person, and then bail before finishing all of the quest. Especially when only one person can get the quest items at a time. If you're not in it for the long haul you should not be trying to complete a legendary.

Also the circumstance of his gquit are enraging.

He'd been busy on our first raid night of the week, and had missed killing the first 4 bosses of FL. Tonight he wanted to bring his rogue alt, because his mage was saved and he wanted to make sure that his mage got all the quest items he could for the week. Officers said ok, but we're going to bring mains before we bring your alt. Now, because we had to work around him it took us some time to get the raid set up. We had 2 spots open and were about to bring his rogue alt in when I don't even know what he was angry about but he gquit all his toons.

Just fucking like that.

We weren't willing to blindly gear up his rogue and so he took the guilds hard work and ran off with it.

Fuck I am so angry.



****** No, I'm not going to give out his name. I'm sure if you want to figure it out you can, but I'm not going to give it to you.

Attack on Taurajo

I have been leveling Khyrie in Kalimdor. With all the leveling speed buffs and doing an instance every so often I've been doing green quests almost all of the time. However, I really wanted to see as much of the post-Cataclysm quests as I could.

There have been some really good changes to the way that many of the zones were upgraded and streamlined. A fair amount of it sadly feels on rails, but the new quests in general are interesting and entertaining. However, the Southern Barrens really just ripped my heart out.

What used to be the single big rolling plain of the Barrens, is now split in half by a huge and horrible lava filled cleft. The Northern Barrens remain similar to what they used to be: a relatively safe area where the Horde is carving out a place to live in Kalimdor. However the Southern Barrens are drastically changed.

In particular I almost cried when I saw that Taurajo was a burned ruin filled with looters.

There are several quests to go back to Taurajo from the refugee camp to the north. Someone wants you to kill looters, but Winnoa Pineforest wants you to Honor the Dead. You've got to take a Tauren funerary totem and place it by the dead bodies of four Tauren who stayed behind in Taurajo to make sure that others escaped.


Omusa's Spirit says: No, stay with the others. Escort them north, away from the fighting. I will stay here with the wyvern and cover your escape. Go!
Omusa's Spirit says: ...wait, is it over? I've been run through... Ah. Of course. I understand now. I am expected elsewhere.
(Then Omusa's spirit flies off on a spectral wyvern.)


Drahn's Spirit says: I can feel the embrace now of all living things, the Earthmother's eternal peace. Thank you.


Krulmoo's Spirit says: I ran to wake the others up when the attack hit. Were they able to escape? I tried to fight the soldiers off with a skinning knife...


Yonada's Spirit says: Alliance - they've surrounded the camp! What are they doing here? Why are they attacking Taurajo? Get the children - run! RUN!

I was deeply saddened by the destruction of Taurajo and the sacrifice of the Tauren that I eulogized. I'm not ashamed to admit that Khyrie slaughtered as many Looters as she could find.

Making Bank

For a long time Lithui, my little blood elf paladin, was our banker. He is still currently GM of <Bank of Balou>.



But he's transferred his banking duties over to Nivki, my little goblin rogue. She has that fabulous Goblin racial for discounts on everything. So Nivki is scanning the AH, and listing Ikoli's glyphs and selling random crap that is in our bank.

Possibly I shall enlist DraNgNon's help to transfer GM from Lithui to Nivki.

Karazhan: Shade of Aran

Shade of Aran is roughly the 8th boss in Karazhan. Order depends on if you kill him or Illhoof first. We would usually kill him before Illhoof, because once he's dead you can port up to Aran's room from the front door.


Shade of Aran yells: Please, no more! My son... he's gone mad!
On engagement Shade tries to pawn us off with (true) accusations about his son.

Shade of Aran yells:I am not some simple jester! I am Nielas Aran!
Shade of Aran begins channeling his mana into a powerful arcane spell.

Shade of Aran says: I'm not finished yet! No, I have a few more tricks up my sleeve...
Here is where Aran summons four water elementals.

Shade of Aran yells: At last the nightmare is over...
I often felt a bit bad for killing him, but at level this was such an annoying fight. It was entirely too easy for someone with too much lag or twitchy fingers to wipe the raid during the Fire Wreath.


I'm sure I'm missing a few of his speeches since we killed him so fast. But the general idea is there. Shade is a mage boss, and does lots of magey things.

Bat!

Khyrie reached level 60 a few weeks ago. And shortly after that she went back to Orgrimmar to visit the nice Troll cat druid who explained a few things from the Loas. Most notably there was an explanation of flight form!

The Loas gift the trolls with a bat form! Because it's only regular flying the bat is just a bat, with no fancy armor.
But still! BAT!



Watch out! I'ma bat! I've got rabies and I'll bite you!
But I'm also a druid so I can heal you too!

Garrosh's Horde

Bit of a spoiler for Southern Barrens here.
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Basically you've got the old commander who isn't making any progress defending or taking back the territory that the Alliance took during the actual Cataclysm. So the new commander is coming in to get things going.



So what happened here is that Gar'dul asked you to meet him up in a tower, hoping to get rid of you and the new commander before he was "officially" replaced. However this didn't work out for him. Between your character and Bloodhilt, Gar'dul was pretty handily defeated. And Bloodhilt, well, he threw out the old commander, literally, using a window.

Khyrie was a little bit shocked by this. She is a druid and they do try to strive for some sort of balance. Now Gar'dul had tried to kill her and Bloodhilt, so she wasn't too sad to see him go face first into the ground below that tower. But still "Garrosh's Horde" didn't leave that great a taste in her mouth.

Molten Front Dailies and Quest Design

The 4.2 patch was a while ago, however, Mornara and Kuanchichi have still not completed the Molten Front dailies. Mostly because they are dead boring, and the rest of the game is a lot more fun to do. Those quests are so repetitive and anything new adds on to the very end of the sequence of quests.

Blizzard for some foolish reason decided to make the Molten Front Dailies a giant quest chain that you have to repeat every day. You can't skip the horrible and tedious Wisp Away quest when it is up, not unless you don't want to do the rest of the quests that follow it. Also, is it really the case that the Druids of the Talon and the Shadow Wardens are so completely incompetent that they lose ground every single day and we have to help them retake it?

I think that the cause of all this misguided chain of daily quests is due to Blizzard learning exactly the wrong thing from the Death Knight starting area in Wrath.

See, the Death Knight starting area is quite well done. You wake up a slave of the Lich King and he and his lieutenants send you to do stuff. You get one or occasionally two quests at the same time, and until you do those quests you don't get to do anything else. It is extremely linear, but that's ok, because you're a slave of the Lich King. You have no free will. LK says jump, while in the air you ask how high. LK says kill peasants: you get evil encouraging whispers as they die. Eventually the Death Knights are released from his control, but up until then any Death Knight is on a straight and narrow path of doing exactly what they are told.

But in the Cataclysm expansion Blizzard decided that they wanted to take more advantage of their fabulous phasing technology. This is fine on the surface of it, but it has led to very linear story lines. There are usually a couple of paths to take, but they all ended up at the same exact place eventually. For example in Mt Hyjal, you can do the 4 ancients in whatever order you want, but you have to rescue all four of them before you can move on to the next part of Hyjal. Unfortunately every Cata zone is like that. There are few to zero side quests that are in there for fun or randomness or to help flesh out the world. Everything is all about YOU the HERO coming to save things.

I really wish that for the next expansion (Mists of Pandaria or whatever it is) Blizzard goes back to their older style of questing where things were a lot less linear. But especially I want any daily quests to not be some sort of linear chain of painfulness.