Cataclysm was Great Because......

A lot of my posts has moaned about how bad X was and stuff. But to be fair I'm only critical of the game because I love it so much and with the post-expansion blues being around I thought I'd put a short post together extolling the virtues of the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion.

My aim here is to be only positive and what I'm about to post will no doubt be deemed controversial or potential troll bait by some folks. So without further delay here are my 5 reasons Cataclysm the expansion rocked.

1. Heroics felt heroic;
2. Tier 11 was great content;
3. Guilds mattered;
4. 1-60 revamp:
5. Transmogrification;

The Backstory: Deadwood Days (pt 3)

It really is strange, I made this blog because I wanted to tell the story of my progress in WoW and I am not even close to telling the story upto the point I started the blog some 27 months ago. Anyway, the story so far can be read in the following posts The Backstory: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, and Part 12, which ended with me in a guild called Deadwood at the end of Burning Crusdae. 

Today I'm going to give you the next installment.Wrath launched and with it came a new found passion for the game, the guys of Deadwood were hoping for big things and we had retained most of the guild during the end of expansion lull and had even strengthened the roster with some cross realm recruits, from Nagrand iirc. 

Role Playing in a Role Playing Game

Recently a work colleague has decided to start playing WoW with his friend, as it had been a while since I leveled up a melee class and as I haven't yet done the Kalimdor questing post-Cataclysm I decided to join them and made a Night Elf rogue. I made my character, named him Axeholme. 

They had decided to play on a role-playing server and I didn't think much about it. Now for folk that may not be aware what is special about a role-playing server, it is a server where instead of simply playing the game you  immerse yourself in the game a bit deeper than just running around and killing things and doing quests. Ratehr than waffle on and get it wrong I decided to let Blizzard define it:

Role-play means that you play the role of a character living in the game’s fantasy world. How much or how little you role-play is up to you; some players construct entire background histories for their characters and adopt unique mannerisms when they’re ‘in character’. Immersing yourself completely in the fantasy can be a lot of fun, but tastes vary, and it’s perfectly alright if full immersion simply isn’t your style. This kind of role-play is purely optional, and we provide separate Role-Play realms for those who prefer to play in an immersive world.

Despite playing since 2005, I too have never actively played Warcraft in a way that would fit the role-play description. So, now I have decided to role-play as I level up. This will be a completely new adventure for me and I'm not sure how much I will enjoy it, but if I never try it, I'll never know.

The tricky bit here is that I decided to do this after creating my character, and Axeholme isn't a very apt name for a Night Elf, but having spent 5 hours getting him to level 12, I didn't feel like re-rolling, so now I have increased the difficulty of my first hurdle, creating a backstory which is something that already seemed a bit scary. 

Transmoggery

I love transmogrification in fact I think I'm actually addicted to it, there I said it!

Seriously, this feature is simply awesome,it has given me the greatest satisfaction in the game outside of raiding since I became unable to level my Shadowsong army.

The thing I like is that it allows me to have my characters looking good regardless of their gear sets. On Evlyxx that wasn't overly hard because a few weeks into a raid tier she had many items that even if not a set were part of that tier of raiding's theme. But my alts usually looked like they were wearing any old thing that came to hand (and to be fair they were!), however, now it is a completely different story!

Apart from looking good, it also allows me to remember what gear set they are wearing, a good example is of my paladin, Eusebian. I have 3 gear sets (1 for each spec) previously there was little visually to identify the set I had on and on more than 1 occasion I had gone into a fight as a holy geared tank or worse a tank geared healer. Now it is very obvious which gear set I'm wearing.

Eusebian in holy gear (left Judgement armour), tank (centre, Judgement recolour) and retribution (right, Wrath recolour)

There is more to the whole transmogrification scene than simply looking great. Firstly, there is the revitalisation of old content. The armour sets above needed to be collected from Molten Core, Blackwing Lair (Judgement armour) various Burning Crusade heroic and normal dungeons (Judgement recolour and Wrath recolour). Molten Core can be solo'd by most classes easily (some bosses are harder than others for certain classes) and Blackwing Lair needs 2/3 players for some bosses and the Outland Heroics are easily soloable by all classes. While this is good for everyone there are also some great side effects for you the humble player. 

From the vanilla raid instances, you can expect to grab a couple of hundred gold per run, in the Burning Crusade dungeons the average drop in coin and vendor trash is 70g (as Vile documented in his 2011, 3 part Outland Dungeon Runner Farmer 1/2/3), which whilst not earth shattering isn't bad for 20 minutes of work in trying to get your drops. 

There are also tons of greens, some of which are also potential transmog items so you really should check the way these look before blindly getting them disenchanted for the raw materials. While you can use the good old fashioned CTRL-right click a much more elegant solution is to use the excellent add on MogIt.

In addition to the greens are cloth and rep mats (Fel Armament, Arcane Tome, Mark Of Sargeras, Sunfury Signet & Coilfang Armaments) which can be sold, processed or used to increase your faction standing with the relevant Burning Crusade factions). Another trick for rep grinding is to equip the Horde/Alliance city faction tabards (sadly the Wrath and Cata factions don't get rep from the Outland dungeons).

So all told, you can make your toon look bad ass, have a ton of fun (especially if you take a friend) and make a crap ton of gold.

HC Morchok Dead

The title says it all, so just a quick post to say that I did it! Well OK me and 9 others. As with most first kills it wasn't text book but the record book showed we killed him and we got loot so who cares how messy it was.

Grats to Brimar and Lifeshifter on their loot wins too, hopefully there will be more for us all. The big question now is which boss next? If you have any suggestions, please post a comment below...

Duane: Greener Grass

My long term readers might remember Duane, he is not a real person, he is merely a character I have created to represent "my guildmate". It has been a long time since I had to write about him as the guilds I have been in are mostly devoid of drama and even when there is some drama it isn't anything I felt the urge to write about. But this week that changed....

Wow Ironman: Ironiana hits 40

Been a bit slow lately due to Mists beta, work and other WoW goals being pursued but I have finally gotten my ass to 40. The questing through Stranglethorn's 2 zones has been fun and to be honest a lot easier than I had expected.

I'm not sure if this is me settling into the mindset, having more abilities (traps and feign death) that assist in controlling the unexpected or if the zones isn't as dangerous.

The Alt Factory: Eusebian

Primary role: Tank
Birth Date: January 5th 2007

Whilst Eusebian, was rolled because of an ex-guildie, Dragonbait (now known as Dragonsting). During the Burning Crusade, Dragon and I was running old Vanilla content to get Large Brilliant Shards for mana oils and I was amazed at the punishment a pally could take even as holy tanking and thought I need one of those! As Dragon is Portuguese, I decided to name the pally after a Portguese footballing legend, Eusébio, but sadly the name had gone so I simply dropped the "io" and added "ian" to put my name in there too!

I Can Has Dragonform

I earned this the Evlyxx way ofc, refusing point blank to buy the mount until I could craft it myself.

Of course now I am a very happy bunny even if I am now 31000g poorer give or take 1000g.

If I had prepared better it could have been done faster but I had to make all the parts and transfer gold and mats around toons to make it happen.

MoP: Mists of Pandaria Coverage

With the exception of this I have so far, unlike many WoW bloggers, I have so far resisted the urge to splurge copious amounts of Mists of Pandaria information over my blog since the recent Blizzard press day and the NDA was lifted (not that I got that summon ofc). That will all end soon enough when I start playing the Beta that I have had for the past week and a half and not started downloading yet.

MoP: Accountwide "Stuff" in Mists of Pandaria

Mists of Pandaria has brought many cool new things and 3 of the key features for me are the fact that pets, mounts and achievements are now becoming account wide.

Pets are becoming account wide to facilitate the abomination that has been labelled Wowkemon around the community. But that aside the benefits of account-wide pets is bitter sweet sure it will save us all buying a pet multiple times and enabling us to use hard to acquire pets on our alts. The flip-side is that as an auction house player I'll have less opportunity to sell pets to other players in numbers. However, there are rumours of being able to sell battle pets and that may well be a better income stream than traditional pet sales anyway.

Mounts is pretty much the same deal and getting all my raiding achievement mounts on my alts will truly rock it also makes mount acquisition a bit faster if you can be bothered to grind rep with a faction on 2 characters simultaneously (Baradins Wardens/Argent Tournament). But the biggest win here for me is that Evlyxx will finally get the Baron's Mount that my deathknight, Nobunaga got a while back.

However the kicker are account-wide achievements. This for me is sweet and will allow me to recover my long lost TBC raiding achievements from when Evlyxx was an alt to my other priest purely because he was a tailor, in particular the Champion of the Naaru and Hand of A'dal titles.