Good day! Here is my blog, where I write about strong opinions, my own designs, and the things that I learn while living the life of a freelance web designer.

I’ve always gone by the philosophy that as World of Warcraft is a game, and an MMO, it should be spent playing with friends and people that I don’t mind being around. The entire “hard core” guild thing was not always my thing; I just simply had friends who were in these guilds and talked me into applying at one point or another.

I was in the guild, Giant Censored Robots, for a good time. I’m not one to simply guild hop; it’s usually things that cause me to leave a guild. The guilds I’ve been in, from first to last:

Warrior Nation – I spent a good year or two in this guild; it’s the first guild that I began to raid with. However, RL issues with the guy I was seeing at the time caused me to leave, and apply at Remorseless. I went back to WN when things were resolved with this… guy, but the depression of having wasted an entire year set in… Things had changed so much in WN, that I felt like I didn’t belong anymore, and so I moved on to Giant Censored Robots.

Remorseless – this guild was amazing; the first really “pro” raiding guild I’ve been in, and I love all of them still. The same guy who caused me to leave WN caused me to leave Remo as well; however, I’m still in contact with many of the people from Remo, and will probably go back to Arthas at some point on some toon to play with them again.

TG – Yet again the same guy, but this time… I found myself a heals leader, and a raid leader. Then, well, the GM sold his account, and the others in the guild weren’t too happy with that, so we all basically left, and it melted away… and I went for several months guildless, then went back to WN.

Giant Censored Robots – GCR was the first kind of hardcore raiding-type guild that I’ve been in – at least, it was a step up for me. I began to raid with them whenever Wrath hit; I piddled in T6 content with them for a little while, but it wasn’t until Wrath that I became an actual part of their raiding team. I’m still friends with some of the people in there, but what really pushed me out were the kinds of people in the guild; it upset me that someone could insult other players in the guild and still have a raiding spot (as precarious as it was), and the kinds of comments I was receiving after I took an hour out of my life to write a post in the forum outlining the things I saw in the guild that were going to be a problem – it became oversimplified by my guildies and was simply glossed over by most of them. It ended in me making a very brash decision, and trialing at Aftermath.

Aftermath – the guild I was part of for approximately a month and a half as a trial. The problem? They had a sudden surge in attendance… And I guess that I’m not one who wishes to sit outside of an instance for nearly 6 hours, or on vent for 6 hours when I could be doing other things. If I’m not needed, fine. Tell me. Let me go do my dailies and bullshit with my friends instead of wasting both of our time.

Where do I go from here? I’m not quite 100% on that myself; I have some friends in another guild that I’m looking at going to, while a friend or two in GCR are asking em to rejoin them (or at least making me regret my brash decision further). Frankly, I want to find a guild where I can live by my philosophy that raiding should be done with a team of friends – it shouldn’t be a time that I dread, or one that I feel apprehensive and nervous about. Have I found that guild through the ones with my friends? I certainly hope so.

On the other side, will I get to see the hard modes? Will I get to see the final final boss now? Or do I value my friends above that question? Can I set aside my desire to be “the best” and my competitive nature?

Admittedly, for a person who’s always seemed to find a place among top guilds, I find myself wanting more and more to just have fun while raiding – so yes, yes I can. I mean, it was fun raiding with GCR before all of the crap I received, but I want a guild I can joke around with and be myself – I’ll admit my sense of humor is a bit rough around the edges. I don’t feel like hard mode honestly matters in the face of friendship and fun – fun to me is not being told I’m “bad” for a rather humorous death in which I was tanking Auriaya for half a minute.

Even so, I’ll admit that I am looking at folding when it comes to playing WoW. I’m not too enthused by the attitude of many of the players – that you have to be in a “top guild” to be any good or to have fun. If it is going to become this serious of a game, then I would prefer to find destressing through other means – perhaps replace WoW with the hobbies that it replaced in my life.

One of the issues I have as a shaman is dealing with paladins.

One of the things that really piss me off are paladins who decide to walk up and gank me.

Sure, it is a PvP server and I should just deal with it, and cut my QQ. But on the same note? How would this paladin like not being able to do his dailies. How would he like it if I decided to walk all over him because my class was much stronger than his. Yes, I hexed and earthbind-kited him. But what’s that really going to do against shockwave and the rest of the paladin’s arsenal?

I enjoy my fair share of world PvP. My Death Knight had almost two thousand honor after leveling just from world PvP. However, I do not camp people and wait until they ressurect for me to take advantage of them. In addition, on my death knight, the people I PvP’d against in world PvP were usually at or above my own level, and the majority of them happened to be other death knights – and I did not camp them.

Frankly, I’m just not a big fan of assholes, and I’d define campers as just that: assholes who like to take advantage of people, and waste their time to /flex their own epeen. So, next time you decide to go camp that dwarf priest or that troll shaman? Why not take a look at yourself.

Season Five, in my opinion, was absolutely terrible.

My two’s partner and I did not even participate in Season 5 because of how horrible its terribleness was. Of course, neither of us are necessarily hard core arena players, so watching our rating dwindle down to 1300 in the first ten games was disheartening, to say the least – considering that I was only in 4/5 Hateful from doing raiding and heroics and my partner was in mostly craftable gear, there was good reason as to why we lost. The problem is – we were roughly 5-5, and even lost points for winning. That’s no way to keep people happy and arena’ing.

So Ninja Panda was put on the back burner for a while. Until, of course, last night.

For those who don’t know, in Season 6 arena teams start out with 0 points total. However, until you get to a certain bracket, you don’t lose points for losing, and gain quite a few points for winning. In about an hour or two of arenas, my scrubby little team was at an 800 rating (which is where we called it for the night – at least until tonight). We were having such a good time – through wins and losses – that we didn’t even notice when we had played 50 games.

And so, thank you, Blizzard, for making PvP fun again. I wish I had a frost wyrm mount from Season 5, but hopefully I’ll be on the road to Gladiator this time around.

Sincerely,

Ninja Panda

As promised – the video of the tram ride on Mimiron!  I thought it was really neat.

As I went down the hallway, I tried to catch some shots of just how fantastic the place was.  Notice how each hallway has its own feel; entering Mimiron’s just feels like re-entering the level 30 instance of Gnomeragan, and you noticed the initial hallway – Freya’s – felt like a small jungle.  Going into Freya’s itself felt like entering a fantasy – despite its huge amount of trash, I thought it was pretty neat with all of the dragons, the ents (walking trees – I’ve always thought they were like ents), and of course, the walking flowers.

So, tell me how Ulduar is going for you!  I’d like to see some opinions

Well – of course we could expect as much for an instance about the Titans.  Of course, there are a few rooms that don’t seem so large – especially the hallway when  you’re on the way to Hodir.

To be honest, I feel like Ulduar was definitely worth the wait.  The small touches that Blizzard put in are simply amazing – from the challenging boss fights, to the celestial design, to even the volcano that menaces from above Ignis, it is simply fantastic.  We were even pleasantly surprised with the tram before Mimiron – I caught part of it on video, but unfortunately was too transfixed by the event to hit my hot key fast enough.  I’ll definitely get it next time, though!

The major pitfall I see in this instance is the fact that we’ve been cuddled thus far with the ease of Naxxramas.  I know that Blizzard wants to open the content for everyone, and that’s great.  However, there needs to be challenges – I’ll admit them, I’m excited by the fact that we wiped multiple times learning the mechanics of each fight.  Of course, many of them are buggy, such as Mimiron’s Phase 4.  So, of course, is Ignis, which apparently has a bug where he melees the target in his pot.  And many people are complaining about the difficulty of the dungeon.  Yet, maybe this is from the perspective of a person who’s done quite a bit of raiding in the past, but I feel like it’s just right.  The best in slot pieces will drop from the hard mode, making them a real accomplishment, while the other gear that drops are small upgrades that maybe will be slight sidegrades to the 25man Naxxramas.   I feel like this is the way it should be.

Maybe this is an elitist attitude, but I don’t feel elitist in it.  If you feel gear is so important, then perhaps you are actually the elitist, not me.  I feel like the most important aspect is to make raiding fun and rewarding; it’s similar to how Blizzard put certain ratings on the better PVP items.

On the same token, I’d kind of like to see better upgrades in 10man mode.  Some of what we saw drop were mostly just sidegrades to what we already had.  I picked up a helm and a healing cloak; I’ll probably wait to use the helm, though, as I don’t want to lose the 10% critical damage bonus to Lava Burst from my 7.5 set bonus.

But a note to everyone already jumping in:  Don’t forget to look up!  ~_^