Legion and doubts

Wow, this is a blogpost that have been sitting here for ages, and never really managed to get it posted because I am so much in doubt still what to do...

What am I talking about? I am talking about this ofc:

DemonHuntards are coming!

Reason is that when I am thinking forward and about Legion in terms of what to play, I am STILL IN THE BOX considering what to main. There are so many changes to MistWeavers I am not sure I will still main it in Legion. 

I have tested it on Alpha and it seem ok enough (now, but things can and will ofc change till everything is live), but they remove core abilities (Imo) like Nimble Brew (get out of stuns etc), Spear Hand Strike (interupt), Fortifying Brew (increasing your health by 20%) and Expel Harm (selfhealing). Not to mention fistweaving is gone.. I don't use FW much in raids, sometimes at the start of the fight only, but I use it a lot when we run dungeons. So def. going to miss it. Other changes are that Mana Tea and The Statue will become talents... :-/ Mana Tea will change, and give you cheaper/free casts when its up (10 sec? Iirc), so def. not the same. Now I will have to worry about mana like every other healer! Whats up with that!? ;p

RIP

Ofc, me being me and never pugging ANYTHING, I have not tried to do any dungeons or so yet, (plz Blizzard, give Alpha to my man Rel (@RelWoW) so he can TANK for me and be my partner in crime! Kktybb! ;) <3) so I don't know how that play out. But I suspect I will get the same feeling for Sansari as I had for Class and disc going into WoD: My bars was "empty", so much was removed (I still do not feel comfortable healing as disc). Time will tell how Legion will be. 

Disc going into WoD... :<

I have been looking at other classes, mainly shaman, since I have mained that before, and shamans are pretty awesome. Me and a guilde have been talking about "old days" when I first met her and at that time I mained a shaman. Thinking about those times made me think "hm maybe I'll play Filah (shaman) if Sansari dont work out for me.."

We met during our stay in Wasted -if you follow me on Twitter, you have probably seen the logo, but here it is once more for fun, it is amazingly made! It is pictures of all the raiders of the guild, placed on the logo :D Filah is sitting on top of the S, if you were wondering. ;)

Born to be Wasted

After maining shaman big parts of 2 expansions (WoLK and Cata) it is something I really can see myself playing, but giving up the monk feels a bit ugh too. Specially since we do not have a monk healer in our team (atm), but we have a shaman (sort of, when he is there..)  

AND LOOK HOW CUTE SHE IS!! /faint <3 :D

And I keep telling people that they have to play what they find fun, and I know that also should count for myself. It's just.. one of those expansions again. I had the same issues before MoP. Then I was asked if I would main a monk -so I agreed to it, but during SoO I changed back to my disc priest and have rocked her big parts of WoD, before I was -again- asked to go monk due to surplus of priest healers. 

That is also part of why I am considering going to shaman, as I have never had that ...feel... with the monk as I have had with other classes. I don't understand them intuitively as I have done with in example priests and shamans. So it involves a lot of reading and doing things that are said because "that is how you do it" that I would never have understood on my own. That said, I have enjoyed -and still do- playing it in raid settings. For dungeons I have not really been a fan of monks, ever. :P I do them, but prefer to go on my shaman, druid or priest..

Sans have her moments of uber-cuteness too tho <3 :D

TLDR; I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO NEXT YEAR AND IT ANNOYS ME! 

A new start

The 25th of August it happened - I made a new account on US side!

My first 10 Achivementpoints :D

I have a thing about "starting fresh" on new realms, I really like the whole "struggle" with no money, bags, glyphs etc, and work myself up from nothing. However, when I do that (on the EU side) I have access to things that make my life easier, like heirlooms, fully leveled pets and heirloom mount from lvl 1 (love that part btw Blizz <3), so it is not really starting fresh.

Lately I have lacked inspiration, so a couple of weeks ago I started an account on the US realms. After a lot of fuss and confusion and "how do I actually DO this??" (thanks goes out to Rel for mental and practical support :D) I finally could start a character -guess 3 times what race and class I picked ;p.

And talk about starting fresh. I had NOTHING. No achivements, no heirlooms, no mounts or pets. Or that is not true. I had the pets that are account bound (blizzcon pets etc) and the 1 mount from winning some matches in Heartstone, but was also it. 1 mount and 4 pets. But, I dont need more then 1 mount, lucky me it is a flying mount too (once I get there!). :D

My own little bodyguard^^

So basically, I'm starting fresh. The only thing I have is my knowledge of the game, and the character(s). Everything else is wiped clean. Terrifying and exciting, both at once! :D

If you follow me on Twitter, you have probably seen some screenshots from my journey, I am very excited and happy about this. Only backdraw is that there is the 6 hour time difference from servertime and my RL time. Aka when I log on in the morning it is middle of the night realm time, my afternoon is mid-day over there, so I haven't really been online much in the "coretime" of the rest of the realm. Which is fine really, less people around and no queues (I picked one of the most busy realms on US side: Zul'jin). Zolvolt was nice enough to accept me into his guild, Exiled Legion (@zolmation on twitter)  Backdraw is that ofc I dont really get to know the folks in the guild much because of the time difference.

However I am fine with that since I do enjoy just doing "my thing". :) I have never been the "lets group up and quests together" type of person, I like to fiddle around on my own. Me and my bf have tried to level together a few times, but we both get distracted on each our end ("oh look! A mine/herb!" /strolls off :D) so we stopped doing that.

My favorite quest! <3

Also, I have all these plans for my "second start", maybe someone find them recognizable:

- If I start a zone, I will fully explore it AND get the quest-achievement for that zone.
- When capturing pets, try to only collect green/blue pets (if I capture a grey/white one, I will try to find a green/blue, and then I release the lesser one).
-having gathering professions while leveling to get money, later will change it to 1 gathering 1 production profession. What will depend on what AH can offer / cant offer. So far it looks like inscription will be the smart choice. Im over lvl 30 and still not found glyph of penance... GRR!

That is what the journey have brought me so far. At the moment I am in the Hinterlands, one of my favorite zones. Or, one of many. :) I am enjoying it a lot, just running around by myself, being happy over green upgrades to my gear :D I have not done any dungeons yet, I had originally planned to do that, but I chickened out. I really am a wuss when it comes to pugs. Even lower lvl ones :D

I can really recommend it, if you feel like having a new start and start from nothing. First leveles are hard but after that it becomes trivial again. And boy I was happy to have that Heartstead-mount in my bags when I (finally) dinged 20 :D

Onwards, horsie!

Rant

I see in my twitter-feed, and in game in general, many people complaining about this expansion, "nothing to do" and "I only sit in my Garrison" and general QQing. And when new things are out they complain that they have to go out and DO THINGS. "It is too grindy" "Oh great, DAILYS again" etc. I must admit I get a bit /roll eyes over this. 

Like everything else in life, you have a certain responsibility to entertain yourself. There is a lot of content there, you just need to go out and do it. "Yes but I don't like to do that, I don't like to pet-battle / do archaeology / level alts / LFR is boring/heroics are boring" -take your pick. And ofc my favorite: "Omg I have to actually go out in the world and do things to get flying?! I HATE THIS." Excuse my French: then do something else then for the love of all that is holy! No-one is forcing you to do ANYTHING. If you don't like the game they made, fine, play a different game. And yes, the game changes. And yes, it is good. I played the game in Vanilla and believe me, it was NOT better. Running everywhere till you were lvl 40, and then you got a SLOW mount. If you could afford it, that is... 

Damn right xD

 Sometimes I feel that the more Blizzard is doing to keep people happy, the more complaints they get. Yes sure, sometimes things dont play out the way they had planned (pretty sure Blizzard didnt think everyone would just sit in their Garrison all day) but that is how it is. Now they have tried to fix that with adding new stuff. Yes its dailys, and I am the first to admit that the first days I felt overwhelmed with the time it took to do them. Now, a week out in the new stuff and I have my head wrapped around it and its done (if I want) in a  lot shorter time then first round. I can choose: do I only want to do the dailys, or do I want to get extra apexis and do all/most of the bonus events too? 

                                              IT IS ALL UP TO ME!

Or maybe I simply can not be arsed to do dailys that day and just sit and fish all day instead? Maybe I want to level my druid, or log my hordepriest and shoot the breeze with my horde-guildies. I can do that. You are in charge of your own happiness in game just like you are in this thing called Real Life. 

There, rant over^^

Random thoughts about latest events

The things that have happen the last month or so have gotten me thinking (never a bad thing -or is it...? ) about a lot of things. 

When guilds break or somehow don't work out, it give you a sort of  sadness much like when a personal relationship with someone you love comes to an end. When it is going on you are filled with contradicting emotions; anger for how it ended, sadness for what you lost, happiness for the good things you had together. Specially when the ending was not of your choosing. 

Being on your own is not as fun or interesting as you maybe thought (not that I thought it, but if you are the leaver you might believe it will be awesome and find out that it really is not), and finding someone else to fill those holes left is not done in a hurry either. Or if you do, maybe you jump into it for all the wrong reasons. Loneliness, the wish to have fun with a team again, but find out that it is not the same kind of fun. Maybe this is specially for me, since I don't change raidteams very often. In fact over 10 years, I have been only in 5 (raiding) guilds counting my current one. 

When I joined Nova back in February, I so nervous and full of anxiety for messing up or in some other way make a fool of myself. Nova was a big step up for me, progress-vise, but after some stressful weeks, I managed to calm myself down and find my spot in the team, and I felt like wow, this is actually a great team. A lot of nice personality's, and also got to raid with some old friends of mine, as well as getting new ones. 

So the shock when one of the officers, a highly trusted one, "took off" with most of our dps'ers to "start fresh" on a new realm I was really shocked. I could not believe it. (And yes, I know they made an active choice to go and all that, but someone planted the seed in the first place)

This happend right before I was going a weeks holiday, we had just killed Thogar on Mythic and I thought the spirit of the guild was quite high. 

So many dead, but also boss so! :D

Then it exploded. We were left with tanks and healers, but 8 dps was gone and Turalyon is a "small pond" with few "fish" in terms of recruitment. Some felt so betrayed, they decided "this is it" and stopped their subscription. Also the GM's. After giving up so much for the guild, and then have something like this happen to them, it was just the last drop. I can not blame any of the GM's/officers that put so much time into this and then being left like this.

You might say "that is the way of the game" and a lot of other crap, but it is not an excuse to treat people you have known for years as bad as this. I know it is the way of the game, people come and go, but if you are not happy, and it don't get better, you go to try to find somewhere to call home, but you don't destroy the guild on your way out. 

Anyway. I decide to wait a few weeks to see what was going on, but with very few online that also felt very "meh" to use a very common "Class-word". After couple of weeks had passed and nothing new happend, other then the GM telling me to go look elsewhere because they would not try to paste the guild back together, I started looking around... In the end I decided to test out a different guild on a high-pop realm.

It is always strange to be on another realm, first time I have main-raided on a different realm. It is also a PVP-realm, which I am not too excited about xD It feels a bit like betraying Turalyon.

First raid was (sorry Matt :P) horrible in my eyes, and really made me regret the move. Decided that "OK, we can all have bad days/raids/whatever, and there are some nice folks there too, so lets see for a few more raids how it pans out". Tuesdays raid was already a lot better, tho comments like "we need more gear to do this" kinda makes me /roll eyes. :P Sure gear helps but all the gear in the world will not save you if you meet your fate with random trains (yes we are at Thogar Mythic)... Anyway. Fun and games ;p

If I don't not manage to fit in (never know with teams, how they work out and how I work out with them and so on), I think I will have a raiding break and just be a "dirty casual" like the rest of my friends atm. ;-) And I mean dirty casual in the best of ways! :D Hanging out, chilling, playing some lowbies or whateva'. :) 

I am not sure what happend to our realm (connected realm even, Turalyon+Doomhammer= still very low populated :S), in the last month 3 of our top10 guilds have kneeled. All around Nova's progress-level. I know ofc that the subs are going down etc, but really.. Turalyon/Doomhammer now have lost 3 progress-guilds in a month, that is a lot IMO. And this was before the ban-wave even.

Ending this with a picture of the monk that I absolutely love, BUNNY EARS! Just to have something sweet to finish this post with ;D

Transformation

As some might know, I have recently moved guild to Nova, residing on Turalyon EU. I do not change guilds often, so for me it is always a huge step to take, leaving old friends behind to find new friends and challenges. Thankfully I have good friends, and we stay in touch across guild-borders. :)

I have always considered myself as a skilled player, able to follow instructions (and bossmods ;-)), being well prepared and sharing my information with my fellow healers and guildies. 

For my trial Nova they were starting on Kromog HC, and the goal after was Blast Furnace HC. The first trial raids I played quite well, IMO, read up on bossfights and came with suggestions and input on bosses per usual. We killed both bosses -with me on the selected group- and I felt included, even if I was not in the guild at the time. After two raid-nights, they wanted to give me an in-guild-trial. And this Tuesday, a week later, they decided to rank me as raider, making me extremely happy!

Last Wednesday raid, we were clearing up to Kromog and beyond, and WOW I died a lot. Trying to remember tactics for 10 bosses, while learning 30 new voices (ok, 25, since I knew a few from earlier :P) was hard! Didnt help that suddenly we were a much bigger group (30 people vs. 15-20 when learning Kromog and BF) then earlier either, so I felt pretty lost. Everyone knew each other, and I did not know anyone at all.

I have always loved the 10 man raid-format. It was just enough people for everyone's personality to shine through, but those times are gone. I have raided 25 man before tho, so it's mainly an adjustment issue. :)

But it have to be said, my play the first week of raiding in Nova can be easily covered by the meme under here.

Then it helps to have people to talk to, and /soothe my crazy mind. Like a friend in the guild said: I know you. I know you are good! Relax and it will be so much better! :)

Adjusting to the guild socially have gone very well, they are a nice bunch of people, it is a bit step up raiding-wise, more hours, but also very efficient. I like the drive, and the humor in raids.

Wednesday we killed up-to and inc. Iron Maidens on HC in just a few hours, leaving Blast Furnace and Blackhand still alive. Not bad for a few hours of raiding. All over I played better Wednesday then the first week, but Iron Maidens can just go die in a fire (yeah pun intended ;p)... For the rest I did ok, so I am hoping that slow and steady wins the race. That every day I get more confident, and trust myself again. :) I am -after all- pretty awesome! ;-)

I have spent the last days thinking how to change things around, and I think what I have to realize is that TPR-Class is a different person/player then Nova-Class. And I need to find out who Nova-Class is. I have to find my place in the group. I always have some adjustment-time for new guilds, and so it will be here too. Usually I land on my feet. I hope I figure her out soon, so my nerves can get a break, and I can relax a bit. And so my friends can have a break from me obsessing over this ;-)

At the end, a song I have been listening to a lot lately. :D

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