Altitis

On my paladin, I finally dinged 80, ending my first toon’s journey to the new endgame.

A couple of thoughts about the latter parts of the journey, if you will.

Veteran of Wrathgate: I completed what some people have dubbed bestest quest chain evar and as is often the case when expectations are high, I actually ended up disappointed. The wrath gate itself, the cinematic (which isn’t playing in my game, had to youtube it) both look like a massive rip-off from Lords of the Rings. Heck, even Bolvar seeing the dragons coming in his last moments smacks of the battle at the Black Gate, when the joined forces of the West see the eagles coming. Now of course I’ve been long aware that Blizzard recycles content and the various easter eggs, cameos and not always so subtle references are actually enjoyable. This transposition smacks of lack of imagination, badly written fanfic, nothing more to me.
And flying through Icecrown later on while getting my exploration achievement just left the same aftertaste: it’s Mordor-on-the-rocks, it borrows really heavily from the visual atmosphere created in the Two Towers when Frodo is at Minas Morgul. Pity.

In a similar vein, lamest dragon ever:

Alexstrazsa, queen of dragons. You may be a massive red dragon with mean looking fire coming off your eyes and whatnot, but the  earrings? horn-rings? totally ruin her otherwise badass look. What’s the point depicting such vanity in a dragon in her dragon form?

Irony is always present in this game. Getting insulted by my future me about my gear? When the future me not only wears the same but manages to have 4.5k hp less than I do? Come on. The future apparently looks bleak, gear-wise.

My future me is apparently totally gimped. Oh well…

So as soon as I ding 80, Steptoe wants to reform our PvP duo. 102 bars of saronite later and a friendly blacksmith located and I’m ready to go with the crafted savage saronite gear. Ret paladin and DK, we’re bound to pwn, aren’t we?

Looks like our start in Season 5 is pretty much the same as our start in Season 2 (when we first formed our duo). Huge learning curve again, and massive fail. 9-1. For all other teams. Geez. 

Oh well. In actuality, I’m wearing kit with more than double the stamina and AP of my future me in Dragonblight, that’s got to count for something.

We also tried out Strand of the Ancients. Fun. With a little help of Megan’s wisdom, I wasn’t completely clueless on the first run. That being said, and to put the record straight, dear Megan:

• There’s always been QQ about PvP on both sides
• The faction which did actually boycott AV in many Battlegroups was Alliance
• I remember in 2005 and 2006 that there was a lot of tears about shammies in BGs, in particular in WSG

And having played AV on both sides (though not since patch 3.0.2) at some point, other mechanisms aside, let me assure you that having to fight through most of the alliance NPCs to get to Vann is a bit different than bypassing most of them when you want to get to Drekk. Which might have been a balancing mechanism due to the fact that Balinda is less of a hassle to kill (and much more difficult to defend) than her orcish counterpart, but as such, it’s badly implemented.

That being said, while the people complaining that alliance have an advantage by attacking first are obviously dumb as a pair of bricks (that is, twice as dumb as I am, I come with single-brick dumbness), the advantage you see of buffing everyone on horde def doesn’t exist. Players trickle in when the BG is started and immediately mount up and race to the beach. You never get to buff the entire raid, at least not with a PUG, and same with assigning groups. Players trickle in and the smarter go either man the canons or look who’s riding to what side before deciding to reinforce the weaker side. Preforms are probably different, but for PUGs, neither side is advantaged or disadvantaged by who goes first, methinks.

I defended Wintergrasp this afternoon, and it was a dreadful lagfest at the end. Manned a cannon for 20 minutes, and then things went downhill for us. Still, it’s good fun, and it’s good honour considering the fun to be had If you haven’t tried it out yet, you should

Last but not least, I keep saying this but I’d really love dual specs to be live.

And this concludes the short report about the last leg of my first journey to 80. DK and mage are next.

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Today was the time when my shaman had to go to Badlands, which for hordies is always a rather long hike.

Unfortunately, when I entered Loch Modan, I realized there’s one thing I hadn’t tried out for ages, so I went to check whether the sneak way up to the airstrip was still accessible.

It was.

Of course, Ironforge Guards weren’t exactly welcoming, and since I had only ever been there on alliance toons before, learning about them the hard way cost me a loooong corpse walk from Kharanos all the way back up.

Still, I was there and took in the sight, then went over to the mountaintop above the dwarven capital. And there, too, dwarf security forces was ready to make sure nobody would climb their favourite mountaintops. Tsk…

Undaunted, I continued my trip, rode between IF and Kharanos, then back into Lock Modan. See, I really needed some discovery experience. Badly.

Before getting back to my initial goal, the Badlands, I decided to make another short detour to repay an old debt. See, there’s this level 20 named bear which had killed my very first alliance toon ever, when the unsuspecting youngster was exploring the world at level 15.

Only thing, the furry bastard lost his l33tness with patch 2.3. And here comes a horde shaman, with a vengeance.

And let me tell you, Ol’ Sooty didn’t like Stormstrike one bit.

A job well done, and a moment later I was killing troggs in Badlands for a bit. I have switched to dual-wielding and my 1h-mace skill finally caught up. The amount of Windfury and Shamanistic focus procs you get out of a mere 17.5% crit rate is crazy – stuff dies so fast it’s almost not funny anymore. And guess what, I can’t help but compare it to the measly 7 procs per minute you get out of Seal of Command, for a lousy damage. The difference is just ridiculous.

Anyway, made level 43 shortly after that excursion. So far so good.

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