Pissin' My Life Away...

Just when you think you've broken free of a soul breaking obsession, certain sequences happen in life that make you run eagerly back to indulge... nay, -feed- whatever addiction that held you so captivated for so many weeks, months or years.

Yep. I'm back playing WoW.

I'll get into what I've been doing recently in a bit, but something happened last night was prompted me to write today.

I was doing VoA 10 PUG on my Priest when a raid member, and complete stranger piped up with, (paraphrased) "Rukuz? What are you doing online?"

Befuddled, I responded with my best 'this is how I respond to strangers shorthand': "?"

The stranger went on to explain that he/she had saw that I had quit playing via my blog.

!

Wow. Stunned, I quickly explained (in non-'I don't know you shorthand') that a buddy of mine had suckered me back into playing WoW. but that I hadn't posted anything about it.

In a way, I felt pretty good that someone had actually read this jumble of poorly thought out analogies and excessive carriage returns, so I tried extra hard to DPS Archaevon the Stingy* & friends with my janky outdated gear. (*That b!tch never drops anything useful) I was surprised that I broke 3.5k dps. I'm such a bad dragon slayer.

So, what have I been doing? Well, considering this is a PvP blog, I've actually been.. well.. PvPing.

Actually, that's somewhat of a lie. I actually stealth leveled a Warrior from 70-80 without telling friends and ground some honor under the auspices of possibly gearing him out as a new main character. It's quite amusing how the first thought (among my friends, at least), when we get seriously frustrated with our Arena experience, is to change classes. I thought that swapping to a Warrior would make me happier with Arena and PvP overall.

Did it?

No.

The problem that I had/have with PvP is the massive amount of time I have to spend grinding honor. I've said it time and again, but grinding honor is mad stupid. Watching the Nightfall Horde, geared in what digitally resembles used tissue paper, repeatedly fling themselves single-file like lemmings into the Alliance woodchipper is not fun. Playing a brand new 80 and grinding honor while expecting the Horde to not act like a SPED gym glass that takes to kicking each other in the nuts as a good idea, is a decidedly even worse way to work up a whole new level of frustration towards the BG Honor grind system.

So the Warrior got relegated to status: Not Even An Alt, and I started picking up honor on the Druid again to build up my Feral set. I already had my Furious Staff from last season's left over points, so I went to work grinding up Relentless offset pieces while saving up my pittance of points from my bogus weekly throwaway teams. I'll (maybe) comment about Feral in a future post, but let's just put it this way: Even poorly geared, Feral does a ridiculous amount of damage to equally poorly geared BG denizens.

Somewhere along the line, 3.3 came out and Haste got synergized with Dot classes and my Priest got forcibly yanked out of retirement. I will say that I've never actually been good on my Priest. I got carried to 2k+ in 5's as Discipline, and never really broke into the 2k+ brackets as either Disc or Shadow. However, 3.3 is about as close as we can probably get to 'The Golden Age' of the Shadowpriest, and 5 things in 3.3 really make Shadowpriests shine alot brighter (darker?) that before:

1. Haste affecting Devouring Plague & Vampiric Touch,
2. Vampiric Embrace becoming an undispellable buff on the Priest
3. Improved Devouring Plague hitting alot harder upon initial application
4. Mind Flay range increase without losing the snare
5. WotF nerf.

The amount of pressure a high haste rating Shadowpriest can generate to force cooldowns is absolutely ridiculous. Again, I'll (maybe) comment about Shadow in a future post, but for right now, melting faces is really, really easy and Rogues aren't as bad as they used to be (however, still a pain to deal with).

So, I'm back for a bit.. still not playing crazy amounts like I used to, but trying to stay positive about my gaming future.

Will this return herald more posts in the future? Tough to tell, really, but we'll see.

Cheers.