So long, and thanks for all the fish 2014!

What a year this have been! Both in game and out of game. I guess I should divide it into bulks.

Real life -up's and downs

The last year was a very special year. I think I have visited most hospitals in Oslo during the year, and now I hope I am done with that for a LONG TIME. That said, my gosh, nurses and doctors -you do a hell of job! I am very grateful for the warmth I have been met with during my stays!

It started out with a nice and innocent operation. Then I got an infection that would not go away. While being treated for the infection, I got blood clog (emboli) in my lounges that got into a critical phase -luckily it got discovered in time so they gave me emergency treatment that worked well, but the infections would not stop. Had to have a second surgery to fix wounds that would not grow, and more infections due to that I am most likely allergic /reacting to surgical threads.

Spent half a year getting rid of all the infections in my body and building up some energy (being ill constantly really drains your energy), and I was extremely happy when I was able to get back to work again. Only to start randomly faint "everywhere" -got blue lip from one crash and banged my head in the floor more then once. After 2 monitoring-sessions they finally caught one "live". Turns out my heart stops working for several seconds, making me faint. So I was suddenly finding myself in the hospital again. This time to get a pacemaker to help me so I don't faint again. So, now I am known to the guild as "Cyborg Class" :D 

Most important, it works fine, have not fainted since I got it and it really makes me feel a lot more safe then before. I am just glad I don't drive a car, because if that had happened while driving it would not have ended well.

In-game / guild 

In-game things have happened too! Our biggest achievement last year was to kill Garrosh on Heroic (old heroic, what now counts as mythic, but we killed him before it got changed). Wow, that felt amazing after spending SO MUCH TIME working on it. Bastard boss! 

We also had some discussions in how to transform into a mythic guild without loosing ourself in the process, we watched a lot of guilds merge and was not sure that was for us, merging 2 progress-raiding-guilds, that could crash in terms of .. well everything (we are all set in our ways, admit it :P). We decided to take it easy, and not rush into anything just because Warlords was closing in, and we did get some recruits here and there. 

Then this fall we had a request from another guild (they were not raiding at the time, but are known on server for skill and progress in past tiers) if they could join us.

It was a guild with ties to our guild already, several of them had been in our guild earlier plus some of our current raiders and members came from that guild, so we discussed it and decided to welcome them to the family. At first it was very strange for me, but I suspect also for the rest of the guild, new and old, to see 60 people online on a regular weekday, but the merge have gone very smooth IMO. We have gained a lot of new friends and raiders for both teams. Now I just need to remember who is who when speaking on Mumble -lot of new voices, all sound familiar but the "who was that again?" is still valid for me. But that will sort itself once we get to raid more on a regular basis :)

Priestling -from disc to holy 

Another BIG thing that happened was that I went from "Disc FOR LIFE!!!" to "Holy heals all!" in terms of specs.

SHOCKING I KNOW!

I had my mind set on playing disc also this expansion, as I have done all expansions since.. well ..tBC. :) 

I leveled as shadow (ofc), and then for the first instances I was all "ok, lets crack this thing up". And it was SO BLOODY HARD (insert random "ThatsWhatSheSaid-comment ;-)). I mean, I expected it, but I did not expect that it would be that hard and after failing an UBRS hc I wanted to go cry in a corner. Nothing of disc felt familiar anymore. 

After sobbing a bit, I thought back on when Cataclysm was released, and I had exactly the same feeling for disc then as I had after these hcs, only that back then I refused to try holy, but rolled shaman instead (did I mention that I am old and set in my ways? And stubborn? No? Well, now you know! :D). This time I was like "I am going to try holy and see how that feels."  Luckily I had kept up with my holy-playing via my priest in @welshjemz' horde guild (The Drafia! :D), so it was not all new to me. 

And it was GLORIOUS! I mean, WOW, what a change. Suddenly I could do all those things I wished for and I was all "ok, Ill keep this spec for now and then go back to disc for raids" (since we did not have a disc priest but we did have another holy one). As raid-start creeped up on us, I realized more and more that I didnt want to go back to disc, not even for raids. Holy was SO fun and ofc all my gear that I got was holy oriented (stats-vise holy and disc clashes as usual. Grr) so I was disc for half a raid and then thought fuck this, Im going back to holy.

Then we got a set of applications, where 1 was a disc priest and I checked stats, gear and talents and it all looked very promising for me staying holy! They are now all on the progressteam and the disc priest is doing a very fine job, so I'm happy for both that she is very good at disc-priesting, but also very happy to be able to stay holy! :D 

Progress and TPR

We did kill Kargath on heroic on the first night, but then we met the Butcher and he.. butchered us. :P So we did do a few normal clears to get some gear and are now working on heroic again. Last night we killed 6/7 on heroic, and got 2 tries of last one on heroic before it was raid end. 

All in all, I think we have a good team, lot of nice folks, strong personalities -and very strong skill-vise so I think this will be a good expansion for us! 

If you want to follow our progress, I will stream all progress-raids I attend. I will sometimes announce on Twitter when I'm firing up the stream, but not always (I am an old woman, and therefor forgetful :P)
I stream at Twitch.tv/priestclass  :-)

Warlord of Draenor -finally released!

Finally Warlords is here! 

Everyone I know was more then ready to do some orc-slaying, and having 60 people in guild online the first days -even with lag and random disconnects- say how excited everyone was! And more and more are coming back to the game, so we have a lot of new people and old people (original TPR-people from vanilla-TPR :D) in a lovely mix. Guild chat makes me very happy these days! 

FOR AZEROTH!

And boy, did Blizzard deliver! 

Also, before someone say "oh but garrison was bugged and the queuetimes was horrible" I KNOW THAT! :) And I'm not talking about that, I am talking about how freakingly awesome the game looks! 

Look at that sky! <3

If you have been playing WoW through some expac's, you should know that Blizzard always under-estimate how popular they are, thus there will be lag, DC's, bugs and queues the first days! :D

But I will give them credit, they worked their ass of to fix things, constant rolling restarts, updated hardware to fit more people, and after a few days it is now working as intended. :)

Falling through the world

 I took the whole amount of 4 days of work (Thursday-Tuesday, today is my last day *sob*), and I have enjoyed it immensely! My priest hit 100 on.. hmm was it Friday or was it Saturday. I am actually not sure :O *checks armory*  15th! That means Saturday indeed. :)

Final DING! I have been saying DING! in g.chat for every level from 90-100. Just because! 

I was very happy to be 100, but lacked a few levels to join normals, so after being lucky with some random upgrades, first part of the ring-quest, and a couple of pvp-items later.. I was ready to hit heroics.

All priest-normal-group (for ring, yo!)!  Except for the tank. Not intentionally but still very funny :D 

And then it started to hurt...

Did my first heroics with a full melee group from the guild, and me as disc. Boy that hurt. A lot. They were good at CC'ing trash and all, but constant ticking dmg and me not having great gear + not much to cast "on the run"... It made me want to cry :< Had that Cata feeling all over again, and not in a good way :P (disc was really crap back then too :P) I mean, disc is viable as a spec if you either have good gear/group have good gear, or you can stand still and build up those shields.

On the move spells are Divine star (needs somewhat aiming), penance (long CD) and shields. Prayer of Mending: casttime, all normal heals: casttime. Lvl 100 spell: casttime.

So Monday, I re-enchanted my gear to +multistrike, went to priest trainer and said: make me holy, oh good priests! And they did.

And gosh, its like a new world! :O Suddenly my heals, HEALS for something. And I have my renew back <3 (yes I know as disc I should have hated it and all that, but I used it as disc aswell and I miss it in my spellbook when I'm disc :()

So, for now -for heroics at least- I am planing to stay holy. Maybe until they fix disc even. Not sure really. Disc really have its uses for raids, with the Clarity of Will-talent that gives disc another absorb-talent on top of the rest. And you can just put it on the whole raid. No restrictions on targets.

The holy version of it is very interesting for raids too, it replaces Prayer of Healing, and instead of healing the group it heals people around the target you are casting it on. I foresee "holy healing melee" in raids, inc. again just like when Circle of healing was introduced :D (I was one of two holy priests in raidgroup at the time and our job was always "heal melee" :P)

But at the moment I have taken the extra Prayer of Mending proc. for heroics since it makes more sense for heroics. :) The last talent for lvl 100 seems utterly useless. You get an instant heal, but your healing suffers for 10 sec after. And it stacks. I mean .. wtf?

Other things Ive been up to: not understanding Garrisons completly, but I have one, and IT IS GLORIOUS! :D I still don't know how to make followers help on profession-houses (I think they can at least, judging from g.chat discussions) but I'm sure I will understand it one day :P

My very own Stormwind! :D

I am not sure if it is an option now, and that I just dont know it (could very well be!) but I would love for my Garrison to have things like Auction House, Bank, Void Storage and (ofc!) Transmog-options!
Yes I am putting it out there! Gimme my bank, and transmogger plix. All propper citys like Class' Garrison (tm) needs it! :D

So that concludes my journey so far! I have taken some awesome pictures, so might probably will be more posts coming^^

/Class out

Why I love my guild

I love my guild, I really do. It is full of awesome people, that care about each other and about the guild, and if you need help with something, usually asking in guild helps. We have all types of people in the guild, tho we are on the "mature side" (that's what we call old ;P) Most of the guildies are 30+ but we have a few younger as well -and older :) And it is a nice mix of progress-raiders, casual raiders and purely social members.

Many of us have been playing since the game came out in 2005, and some of us even raided together in the "old days" (Vanilla/tBC) before splitting ways pursuing different goals in the game. The later years we have found together again in this guild we had as our first raiding home (for me at least it was), because times change, life change, and priority's change. Whenever we get new members we do our best to make them feel as part of the "flock" -tho it helps if they are social creatures that are not afraid to hit /g.

Many have got family obligations and do not have time to raid 4-5 nights a week anymore, so the light raiding-schedule we have of 2 raid-nights per week fits perfect. That means we have less time to dick around (pardon my French^^), and when we are raiding we try to get the most out of it, while having fun in the process. I think we achieve that quiet well.

We do enjoy doing things together, like doing X amount of Headless Horseman runs to get the people in the group their rings. Or jump on mumble and talk rubbish while doing achievement runs in old instances. Or doing PvP together, while trolling /bg chat (Yes, im looking at you Shadrea! ;-)) and having fun. :D During this expansion we have had 3 guild-groups running Gold Challenge Modes, those have been really fun to do together! The biggest challenge there was to find a time that fitted all 5 in the group! 

    Second round of CM for me. :)

In addition to having 2 raidteams, we also have been running flex-runs (now called NORMALS ;P) on tuesdays, that are open to all guildies plus they have been cross-realm-raids with friends from Twitter. The bosses of these runs have been Shadrea and Rel (@iamchris and @reliqEU on twitter). We have a few regulars that come every week, and some that drop by from time to time, and its all fine. The giggle factor on Mumble is high, and the jokes so bad! :D

    Flexrun at Klaxxi -this is one of the earlier raids we did :)

At work I sometimes have twitch-stream from former runs going in the background while working, and GOSH we laugh a lot. Specially me, or maybe that is because my voice sounds extremely loud compared to the others, since I'm the one streaming (+ I am loud :P). But we have so much fun in raids, and we kill bosses at the same time. If things get too serious, there is always inappropriate jokes to be found. 

Like when we were working on HC Paragons, and the names Iyyokuk and Korven came up. Me and our Swedish lock (Erik) started giggling uncontrollably, when the others asked why, we had to explain that Korven means "the Sossage" in Swedish, and kuk means dick in Norwegian. So YoKuk (thats who they say it) suddenly became very awkward to say to another dude and Jade and Rel (our tanks) giggled whenever they tank-swapped "Can you taunt ... eh.. YoKuk? *trying to keep serious voice and failing*" :D

Funny (random) quotes/comments from a typical raid night with the progress team:

Patro: "its time to bring the A-game!" 

Patro: "I'M A PALADIN!!!!" 

 Erik: "Can someone please rez me, even if I don't look dead?"

Erik: "Don't kill the adds before Nazgrim!! Its a huuuge dps loss for me!!" /cries

Jade: "we got a mass-rez inc. dont release. Erik, I am looking at you!" 

Sipollo: "Anyone need food? I have 150 noodle-wagons left, and mats to make 80 more!" 

Sipollo: "Remember to eat one noodle and then fill up so you have 5 in your bags!" 

Class/everyone in raid: "That's what she said!" To ANYTHING that could be slightly interpreted as an sexual innuendo. 

A every-raid-conversation between Jade and Erik: 

Jade: "Erik, please get well fed" 

 Erik: "yes yes I will, you keep forgetting that warlocks are high maintenance! We need to pull out our pets, and then kill them, and then place portals and summon cookies!" 

Jade: "Ye ye just eat" 

Hunter-talk about belt on Siegecrafter hc:

Gymer: "Its not fair I died, I was virtually inside Demandred!"
Demandred: "WTF dude!?"

 Other convos that happen during raid:

Patro: "I laid hands on Erik"

Erik: "You did whaaaat??" 

Jade: "Anyone got Jeeves?"

Haelden "Yeah me. Its coming in the back"

The Raid: "#ThatsWhatHeSaid!!"

Haelden: "oh YOU GUYS!"

The raid: Laughing

Other things happening while waiting in raids: 

Shadrea chasing Blexis around yelling "Pat the Willy! Pat the Willy!" (the pet, Willy, I have to add ;-))

Making pink-pirate trains walking around the boss-room while waiting for everyone to be ready/back from break. 

Also needs mentioning is that there is no raid without someone making fat jokes to/about Blexis (male draenei shaman, and he loooves cake). And if we don't, he do it himself! 

A typical example of this is when we are killing Galakras:

Jade: "Blex you can jump down from the tower now"
Blexis: "Earthquake inc!"

Needless to say, Blexis is very fond of Sipollo, since he is a "sure thing" for getting food!


The very same Blexis /whispered me this when we were doing trash before Garrosh HC:
"Go search for "Bird is the word" on Youtube! Do it do it!"
Result: 

He still randomly /w me "Bird is the word!!" and that always make me giggle :D

Lately we have had some friends join our raids for Mythic together with some from OpenRaid, since we have some folks on holidays and on break before WoD. Here is a cut of a friend of a guildy singing:

   

       Good morning, good moooorning!

And when we raid, we are quite serious when the fight have started (bringing our A-game and all ;-)). Here is a link to our killvideo of Heroic Garrosh:

When we were working on Iron Juggernaut (or Iron Juggs as I pref. to call him^^) Blexis said that if we kill him within that raidweek, he would wear pink transmog gear for a whole raid! That was all the motivation we needed, and the boss went down that very same week^^ He refused to farm a pink set tho, so I spent some time at the Auction House to find some pretty&pink mail pieces for him! Unfortunately, I was not there the raid where he used it but Shadrea took a nice little screenshot for me :D 

LOOK HOW CUTE HE IS! :D :D

All in all we have a lot of fun, but also can put on the serious face and kill bad-ass bosses, one do not exclude the other. 

I am feeling very talkative these days, in general about the game, so I decided to make a blogpost about my guild, to show them how much they mean to me. When I mentioned it in our ClassBox (our shoutbox is named after me, cos I'm ms. spam-a-lot^^) everyone got very excited and on Mumble tonight when I talked about things I have mentioned here, they were all bubbling over with suggestions to other things I should mention -so this feel like it is a guild project^^

At the end now, and I want to mention that if you are on the EU-servers, think you got Mythic raiding in you and are looking for a guild that kill bosses while having fun, you really should check us out, our webpage is The Phoenix Reborn . #ShamelessSelfPromo!^^ 

If you want to spy on our raids to see that I am in fact NOT LYING when I say we are Teh Awesome, you could check out my stream here: Class on Twitch.tv
#MoreShamelessSelfpromo :D

And as usual, thank you for reading! <3

Patch 6.0 and ramblings about disc priests

So, patch 6.0 have arrived, with lot of changes to ... everything tbh. Characters, stats, gear, quests... (And I see that I need to update my blog with new picture of "Class 6.0": bad-ass draenei with T6-transmog!^^)

I have (as usual) not been reading up about all the (beta) changes because things change so quickly that something I read one day, is invalid the next. So I usually wait till things go live and then I read some and /poke friends and guildies (a special hello to Sipollo and Stilgar <3 ;-)) "what was this again?" and "where do I find that now?" :D Probably horribly annoying for them, but easy for me :P (yes, I am a bad person lol!) Tho, I do pay it forward, so whenever someone asks about help or have questions about things I try to help them too, so I think my Karma is intact all in all ;-)

I have some screenshots of the different versions of UI. One is from before 6.0 and one is right after stripping and one is how it looks atm. 

First a RIP old disc-setup:

Second is how it looked when I logged on when 6.0 had hit:

    Yay, no addons and default blizzard UI (holds up sarcasm sign ;-))

And this is how my UI currently looks, after moving stuff around:

   Soooo many empty spots :( On the plus side: hurray: I got silence-spell! :D And I see that I have some spells twice! That's not how it was intended :D

I tested out holy and disc a bit on early beta, and it made me want to cry back then. Disc had lost A LOT of talents/spells, while holy was pretty much intact (more or less). We did a dungeon and as disc I felt it was an impossible task, and swapping to holy made it a lot more bearable, even if I have not played holy for .. well a year or so? 

Disc Beta:

Here I have not added pots and food and such to the bars, but still... many holes!

Holy Beta:

So when the patch went live last week I was feeling rather unwell tbh. Dreading to log on, and also dreading to see the nerfbat on live, having the feeling from beta fresh in my mind. And it started "well" too; could not log in, got DC'ed when the loading bar hit 90% -and it kept on like this for hours. At the time I didnt mind much, because I had a insane day at work and was really tired, so when I DID get online, I did the Blasted Lands quests and logged off. 

Sunday was the first real "test" of discipline healing, with raid and mythic and all that jazz. Found out that absorbs are still king, my dps is not the same (compared pre-patch) but the hps is still rocking. Helps ofc to have endless mana :P

I read on twitter many saying "only spam holy nova and you win", which put me off that spell already before trying it, haha. I have it on my bars obviously but only used it when it was useful, aka stacking up (so mainly Norushen, Sha of Pride and Thok). 

Personally I am not sure what I think of Holy Nova yet.(It reminds me of old-times PvP, and how to destroy snake-traps from hunters and get rogues out from hiding :P) I used it a bit, but for healing up groups I still use my normal playstyle of Prayer of Healing, shields, flash heal. Think the only boss I really used it on was Thok, towards the "instant screeches" stacks. Maybe its "wrong" to not abuse such a strong spell, but I do like to play my priest "properly" (Imo :P) with all the tools in my healing kit. That means dps till wings, use wings when big dmg is inc, use shields when it drops of tanks -or a poor sucker of the dps get a blow to the head (^^) and need an emergency absorb so he/she wont die etc. Use penance on CD, either for hps or dps, and also try to keep Holy Fire usage on max. Also I am not used to having Holy Nova, so I think I need some time to adjust to it. 

And I know as a disc I should not say this, but I miss renew. I used it whenever I was on the run (and as shadow it was my "heal when getting smacked by mobs"-heal). When I was running with the weapon on Garrosh heroic I kept it on the tank as often as I could, since it often procced DA due to my high crit at the time. And its just.... Renew is a priestspell! I know holy have it, and disc dont, which is ...odd imo. I know its an important tool for holy, but I dont see holy loosing their shields... :P (A bit sore? Yes. Does it show?! ;-))

The one thing I really hate tho, is the cast time they added on Prayer of Mending. Before patch I used it on CD, now its like "shall I spend X amount of sec to cast PoM or shall I use those sec to cast a Prayer of Healing instead? Usually PoH won, specially if it was (high) dmg going around. PoM was used when dmg was low and mainly on tanks. A real shame Imo. (Also, I love the bling! bling! bling! sound from PoM bouncing around! :D)

As talents go, I could not let go of Spirit shells, so I have that talented now. Since Twist of Fate now only is for healing, its not very interesting in the super-duper-ultra nerfed content of SoO, and knowing how to time SS -it is still king. 

Other then that I have the same talents as before, more or less. I still swap between the lvl 90 talents depending on fight, tho, I havent really used Cascade yet, it probably is more handy in 20 man then in 10 man, so I need to test it before I can say how it feels. /puts Cascade on "check-list" for next raid. Also use Angelic Bulwark on most fights (except Siegecrafter hc and Paragons hc where you want Spectral Guise to drop sawblades and aims), still use roots over MC / fear, and Mindbender and feathers...

All in all, disc did not feel as nerfed as it did first time on beta, and I will still keep disc as main spec in WoD, but probably have holy as offspec. Depends a bit on the fights there, and if absorbs are still good then. I would think it is, but you never know :) But I think things will change when Warlords go live and all, but for now I'm sure I will stay discipline -but probably have holy OS if I see that as needed for new content. But hopefully disc will still be a valid spec also in the next expantion.

A cosmetic note: They have changed the way Halo looks, I must admit I liked better the visual of the old Halo, where you could see it spread nicely. Now its more like BOOM! And its gone. It looked prettier before! :)

I have probably forgot a lot of things that I wanted to mention here, as per usual.. :) Random thoughts are random! :D

10 YEARS :: 10 QUESTIONS

The Godmother of Twitter (@AlternativeChat) have challenged gamers to answer "what is your Warcraft story" and I found it quite fun project. If you look here you can find out more!

Onward to the questions!

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

I actually started playing because my (now ex-) partner was very, very into it, and he had me try it out on his account. I was extremely skeptical, since I thought "this is not me" etc.

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

I made a human rogue, and made her look as much alike me as possible. I checked out the other character models, but they felt strange and not "me" at the time. I also named my rogue after my computer at the time, Acer :D It is quite hilarious to think back at now ;-)

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

I went for alliance, all this gaming being new to me, I wanted to look pretty, and also wanted a character that looked like a "real person" as much as possible. Horde scared me a bit, and there was also LoTR that gave horde a bad feel.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

I have many of those, one thing I do remember very well is that my rogue got a quest to learn pick-pocketing, and I was very triggered by this, I did not want do it because "I was not that kind of person! Stealing from others!" haha Gosh, thinking back now it is all fun but back then, my gosh, it really bugged me! :D

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

Raiding. I would never survive this long without serious challenges, having fun making jokes and killing hc bosses, that never gets old (well almost never! ;-)) for me. Been raiding since 2006 I believe, or maybe late 2005. Not sure actually. I still love it. Over the later years, I found out that healing is really my thing, and I have healed raids since tBC. Occasionally dps'ed but very rarely.
I also love alts. Always have. If someone tells me they only have one character and "want to focus on my main" Im a bit "eeeeh ok....I can still do that and lvl 10 other characters!" :D Plus, professions being covered! Win-win!

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

Hmm .. I have areas where I'm all "yay I'm back here!" (like Westfall, Nagrand, Sholazar.. generally the green areas of WoW) but I don't actively seek them, mainly seek to the main capital of the time for my mains -alts can be more shattered, depending on what level they are at :)

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I think I started my sub in April 2005 or so, might have been May 2005. Never had a break. When I think about it, it sounds almost horrible, but I have had periods where I played less (raid-logging) but I have made lot of friends over the years, and usually I always have someone to chat to when online. Specially after Battle.net came with Real-ID and all.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

No, not really. ;P Unless I can't find the stuff I look for, and I have to read a bit closer. But generally, no...

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

Hmm... I have pretty much done what I have felt for when gaming. Sometimes I have felt that I have been sticking around too long in a bad team, but looking back now I feel that there was always a reason to stick with it, that be friends or loyalty..

10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

I met my man here! Even moved abroad to check out how it would work out to see each other more then every 2nd weekend. And now we live together in my home-country. So I would say big impact on my everyday life!

Greetings,
Class <3

My city, Oslo

I have been thinking about this post for a while, but not got around to writing it before now.

I live in Oslo, Norway, and I wanted to share this lovely city with you -and why I love it so much. :)

Barcode Oslo

First of all, it is not very big -according to statistics 623 966 lives in Oslo pr. 1. of january 2014. Big enough to be able to hide in tho, and to find new -and old- friends in.

I remember the first time I was in Oslo -I was terrified to get lost and not find my way (I grew up in a very small town on the west-coast), but over the years I have lived in different parts of the city, and explored most of the other parts, so I am not afraid of getting lost anymore ;-) Now I really enjoy walking around in parts of the city that I am not so familiar with, and I always find new favorite places. :)

The different parts of the city all have their charm. Since we live on the western part of the city I tend to go for walks mostly on the west-and northern part of Oslo, but lately I have also taken the tram/subway to other parts to get some variation. The public transport system here is very good, you do not need a car if you live in the city, not for work or for getting around to the different places in the city. Same if you are here for a visit. Just jump on a tram/subway/bus and it will take you there in no time. 

The most used path I use for pure exercise is Sognsvann. It is a lake located at the north-west of Oslo, 15-20 min ride with the subway from downtown Oslo. I have posted some pictures from this place on twitter but here you go again:

This is taken from the "start" of the lake, sometime this spring. Sognsvann is used a lot all year long for walks, and during summer it is a popular place for the population of Oslo to go BBQ and relax, sunbath and of course take walks around the lake. 

Here is a couple of more pictures, one from the end of the lake:

And from the side:

Sognsvann is a perfect place to go for a walk, but during the weekends it can be quite crowded, so those days I try to get out and around before noon, before it fills up with family's occupying the whole road. :) As nice as it is, it kinda hinders you to get any kind of speed up :D

If you take the subway up the mountain, you can exit at Holmenkollen and have a look at our skiing facility's for ski-jumping and cross-country skiing (we really love those winter-sports ;-)) This is a closeup of the ski-jump, during summer they have these activity's where you can slide down from the top till the end via a line. By the looks of it, you get quite some speed. Nothing for me tho /chicken out! 

If you turn and look the other way, you will have the view over the city:

I also like to take the subway all the way to Frognerseteren. The forest of Oslo have lot of walking paths and lakes. Here is a small selection of pictures:

The road

Tryvann

Where to go?

Ullevålsseter

If you take the tram to the eastside of the city, you can exit at Ekeberg, where you also have an amazing view over Oslo and the islands connected to it (there are boats going out there several times a day, for normal public fare), here is a view from Ekeberg: 

Some of the islands have people living on them during summer, others are only for day visits. It is a very popular place to visit during sunny days. I forgot to take pictures from it last time I was there tho, so boo. :( But here you can find more pictures of the different islands outside Oslo city in this link 

You can also walk along Akerselva. It is the river that split the city in two (splits west/east). The last years they have upgraded the walking path there, so it is a very nice walk aswell. I took some pictures the other day when I was walking there. Here you see some of them:

 The text say: Boat for hire at "Syng" (Syng is the name of a Cafê/Restaurant by the river). Thought it was so funny I had to take a picture :D

I could totally live by the river! In the middle of the city, 5-10 min walk to the city-center and it was so nice and quiet! Birds singing and green, pretty trees. Lovely! :) 

I should have taken some more pictures from the east side of the city, they also have some nice walking paths and waters, but I have not been there yet this year (shame on me!).

Oslo have all the comforts of the city, but closeness to the forest and the sea as well, so it really have it all. :)

For more information about Oslo, and what to do here, I advice you to check out this site: VisitOslo.com

The story of Filah and legendary cloak no. 3

Today's post is going to be about this chick:

That lovely draenei in the picture is Filah, she is a restoration shaman and she was my main for 2 expansions. She was created back in tBC when alliance could have shamans (and horde got paladins), and I instantly liked her. She became my most favored alt and I even manged to get her into progressraids here and there because our guild only had 1 resto shaman at that point, Class was shadow-specced and back then there was no such thing as dual-specs. ;-)

When Lich King expansion came, I decided that I wanted my shaman to be my main, and parked Class away for a long time. At one point I got really fed up with raiding back then, and instead being a dramaqueen, I simply said "I'm sorry, I need a break" to the raidteam.

I decided to roll a horde character for the fun and laughs, since I had not really played horde before.
Someone I knew from my alliance guild was in a guild on hordeside, so I made an application there, and after some days I was invited to the guild. The guild was called "in Concordia", and was also on Turalyon server. This all happened when I was living in the Netherlands with my bf, I did that for a little over a year. And yes, I spent a lot of that time in Azeroth, being unemployed (was the plan all along, have a year off) I had lot of time for gaming and getting to know the hordeside more :)

In "iC" I first played shadow-priest as main, but swapped later to resto-shaman (named Ataia, aka Two-Toes for laughs on TS, she was "twoll mon" thus only have two toes! :D). We cleared ICC, unfortunately I was on holiday when they killed LK, after that kill we did quite some heroic modes before the raid-team collapsed (our maintank X-realmed on us among other things).

<-- This is Ataia, she is now on a different server (I needed the space on Turalyon), she is currently inactive in a guild on Magtheridon server. Its ok, the guild is inactive too, so no one misses me/her. :P


This picture also show what I meant about trolls and calling her "Two-toes" for fun^^


Anyway, I decided to go back to alliance side with some people that I got to know while playing horde, that also had alliance characters. So on Filah I finally got my first Lich King kill, short time before Cata was launched. Gosh, I was a happy cat that night! :D

Filah was still my main during Cataclysm, I applied to a 25-man progress-guild named "Wasted" and met some totally awesome folks there, that I still keep in touch with.
With Wasted I cleared raids while they were current and also did quite some heroicmodes, but when Dragon Soul hit the guild started loosing a lot of people, and many were not happy with current state of raids. At that time I had some issues with my shoulder that I had to do something about, and raiding 4 nights a week did not help at all, so when the team scaled down to 10 man, I stopped raiding with them.

Wasted is unfortunatly no longer active, it died at the end of Cata when -on top of everything- our GM completly vanished. I have talked with him since and got the whole story behind it, so there is no hard feelings -not that it was before either- it was just nice to hear what happened and that he was fine now. :)

I also want to share with you a kill video made from our other resto-shamans POV, when we killed Cho'gall (normal). I love this video, and the song is sooo perfect for that guild "Born to be Wasted" <3
I miss them sometimes, even if I am perfectly happy in my current guild. :)

(Ps! I am the shaman in the group further away)

In the end of Cata I had more and more contact with the "old guild" that I started raiding with all those years ago, "The Phoenix Reborn", I saw that a lot of people I knew from earlier days had come back to the guild because their lives did not work well with 4 nights a week raiding, and most guilds at the time were 4 raids a week-guilds. So I joined them for some achievement runs in DS 1 night a week, and I had a lot of fun! So I decided to say yes when I was asked to come back to "the team" for MoP. Only thing was, they had already 2 resto shamans, so the GM & RL asked me if I would consider rolling a monk for the team. So I did.

During MoP I leveled Filah up slowly. While questing I died a lot, even if I had a lot of DS heroic gear, and I was generally annoyed with her as elemental. So when my rage had calmed down, I decided to try out enhancement spec and things automatically went A LOT smoother (have no idea why but well :D) and she finally got to lvl 90. I started with the stone-collections, but hit the wall at the 6k Valor-capping, so I parked her for quite a long time. It was only the last few months or so that I started playing her again, mainly in Flex raids.

But! Last week Filah got her legendary cloak!! Hurray! I finally managed to find the energy to actually do all the LFRs that I had to do to get the items required. I felt like I had to get it for her, since our history goes back so long, and she is still my favorite alt.character. :)

I love this picture, its so great! I wish the cloaks looked like that^^

Quiet times

Hey all! 

It's been quiet from my end lately, I have simply not been gaming that much now with summer here, and I am not that much in front of the computer these days. I log for raids mainly, and not much else. 

I have been playing a little bit tho, I have lately joined my guilds flex runs that we have on tuesdays (contact @reliqEU or @iamchrim on twitter if you are in the EU and want to join us for some relaxed runs! :)), and I have come rather close with all the stone gathering on my shaman for the cloak! Today I got stone 11/12 so I have actually hopes to get my third cloak this expansion. Crazy, I know. :)

I have also been playing some WildStar the last weeks, not very much but when I are awake enough to play it I do (if I do it when I'm tired, I only get lost / die a lot / fall asleep on the keyboard / all of them at the same time), so I am still only low level on my Exiles-medic. She is currently lvl 16 if my memory do not fail me. :) I have also started a Slayer that is Domination ("hordeside" in WildStar), that is around lvl 10. It tend to go slower once I hit lvl 10 (I have various other lowbie characters). 

WildStar is a very nice change, but I don't have the same drive / urge to play it as I had once with WoW (once = for many years), so I guess that is why I have not given it a lot of gametime. It is a bit "same-same, but different" if you understand what I mean. Also I find the professions a bit strange atm. Maybe its just me not having the energy and urge to re-learn a new game? I log it now and then for some quests but I get tired quickly from all the focus needed (for me) for playing it properly. Probably will be playing the game mostly together with my bf, since I'm a medic and he is an Esper -we are good team and can easy do team-quests together. :)

Not that it is hard to get groups for quests, not at all! Lot of chatter going on in the public channels so that is a very nice change from the abuse you get from tradechat/LFR-groups in WoW. People are very friendly and helpful and it helps that there is no "tag" on mobs. If you jump in on someone killing a pack of normal mobs, you get credit and loot from it too. A big plus imo, makes things go smooth. :) 

I am horrible at taking screenshots, but I have taken a few of my girls. First one is of my medic, her name is Vanera and shes an Exile on the realm Lightspire. 

After creating and playing with her for quite some levels, I realized that she looks a lot like Oliva's alter-ego in "Fringe" -if you don't know that series/character you should look it up. :D
Once I realized that it made me giggle a bit, have a bit of a fangirl crush on her -she is so cool and awesome in that series!




The next one is of Sans, shes my Domi-slayer on Archon realm: 

I had a period where I died a LOT on my low level spellslinger due to quick respawns and all that crap, so I rage-quit, cleaned the house to get rid of all that negative energy I had in my body and then I decided that I would try a totally different character then what I normally pick (I tend to avoid melee-characters, simply because I am bad at it). Surprisingly enough, I really enjoy her! Might become a competitor to my medic, and that is scary for a healing-person like me! :D 

Then again, the first character I made in WoW, that I leveled first to max level (60) and play a lot during vanilla WoW was actually a rogue. Maybe its a sign? :)

So if anyone asks me if they should buy WildStar, I'd say "sure, try it atleast!" or see if anyone on twitter have a guestpass. 

I know a lot of WoW-ers have really fallen for it, specially since it is such a LONG TIME till Warlords of Draenor comes out, so maybe it is just me being an old hag and not being crazy excited about changes^^ 

I do have to admit I love the character-creation in WildStar tho :D That is the most fun so far! And they have all these cool/pretty/freaky/funky/great looks, styles and races. Worth to try just for that imo! :)

That is it for me for now, sorry if this comes off as a lot of random chatter, I am a bit tired but felt like giving an update on what's up here with me :)

/Class