Back From the Dead

Hello there!

A little over thee years have passed since I last posted anything. Unfortunately the last thing I posted was that I was sick, so hopefully none of you thought I died (I am alive!). Just today I was strolling down memory lane and wanted to check out the blog again, after all of these years, to even see if it's still around. And to my surprise it is! With a decent amount of total views on it! Rereading the posts made me feel nostalgic of course, but it also made me feel extremely bad. While I may not have had a ton of consistent readers, I did have them, and I abandoned you guys with no warning, no farewell, just left. I apologize for this, as you all deserve better than that.

The point of this post is pretty straight forward: what am I doing now? And what am I going to be doing?

I have a lot of questions:

• Do people care what I think still?
• Is Blogger still a good platform for blogging?
• Should I return to posting (to be honest I've always missed it, and I always felt I was somewhat decent at it)
• What the hell is going on in WoW!?!? (I've been away for some time)

I think I will try to get back into writing, I will give it a shot. I will not promise anything though. I have missed writing that is a 100% fact. If it ends up not working out (I lose interest again) I promise I will spend the time to write a final post saying goodbye.

Now another question you may be asking: What have I been up to this whole time? Let me answer that! 3 years have gone by and in that time I failed college twice (don't worry I'm doing well in the job department, promise!), waned interest in WoW (now returning), picked up League of Legends as my main game these days, and gone on many real life "Asilventures" that I could probably have a good amount of stories to tell.

I will say I am doing well in life, and I hope you are all doing equally well.

Follow me on Twitter @asilventures for daily updates on what I'm up to, as well as for when new posts go up.

 Now, let's have some fun, shall we?

Asilwen Is Ill

So that is why there was no post yesterday. Sorry to let you down this week, I have a virus (if it were a disease I would just cleanse it but I cannot rid viruses!) I will have a post for you Tuesday, promise! Now I'm gonna go back to resting/sniffling.

So to make up for no post this week, please enjoy this picture of what happens if you use a Potion of Illusion
on someone who is in the form of the Alchemy Dragon... then ride that person AS an Alchemy Dragon. (I'm the one on top!)

Enjoy:

Raid Ready

I fall into this trap with myself at this point of the game where I have yet to do an official raid yet and am trying to prepare. According to my iLvl, my skill level, and my mental state yes I'm ready for raiding technically. But I feel like I'm not. I am a completionist, I don't think I'm ready for a raid until I have done every single thing I possibly could before entering. Does anyone else feel this way?

I in no way want to be carried and always want to pull my weight. This kind of mindset is a gift and curse. I would rather wait until I have every single piece from heroics and crafting before I even set foot just so I know if any one's holding the raid back it isn't me. Is this crazy? To my extent, kinda. But really I kind of wish everyone had a tiny bit of this mentality. I really feel like the majority of people have no feeling of responsibility of self preparation. Like raiding is supposed to be the natural next step after 85 with no work in between. As almost as if they "dinged" level 85 then were immediately teleported into Bastion. 

I for one am a big fan of linear progression without, how should I say it, warp pipes (for all you Mario fans out there). I want raiding to require to require you to do everything in order. For example let's use Wrath of the Lich King's raids. In order for your to do Ulduar you should have to do Naxx and everything before Ulduar. I do not like the point/badge system where with every near tier the gear you can get from getting points from heroics goes up. That would be the warping point. Like the people that near the end of WotLK that had never even stepped foot into Naxx or Ulduar were getting Kingslayer titles (not that is some astonishing feat, just annoying.)

I guess what I'm alluding to is the return of Attunments. I believe while Cataclysm was still in the process of being made they toyed with the idea of bringing them back and I really got my hopes up. Attunments are one of the best parts of raiding in my opinion because it was another tool to see if someone was raid ready. This is why I still think to this day for the most part The Burning Crusade is when Blizzard got raiding right. Everything had to be chained. You couldn't do Hyjal without doing a quest that made you go into Serpentshrine Caverns and Tempest Keep. And the raids had reasonable player limits (10 and 25, not 40 man raids). This is how it should be done.

Attunments and keys are what I miss most of the long list of good things removed from this game. They got taken away because of people and their wanting to raid on alts. If you really want to raid on your alt that badly, go get it attuned. I got three alts attuned for Kara because I wanted to raid with them. And once I was attuned, I knew I was ready for the raid (or at least most of it; and yes for the record I know getting attuned for Kara is like nothing but still just saying.) Nowadays it's "Oh you have 348 average iLvl? Welcome aboard!

So Blizzard, please, please, please make raids have attunments in the future. If you do, I promise I will buy every single unicorn you ever sell in your little shop of micro-transactions... (we'll just ignore the fact I would buy them anyway.) Who's with me?!

Lipstick on Pigs

Although this was announced some weeks ago, I was not here to talk about it. ZG and ZA are being re-released in 4.1 as 5 man dungeons and well; I'm not exactly the most thrilled about it. It just makes me ask the simple question of why?

Why is it necessary to bring back these instances? Am I saying I hate ZG and ZA? No way, in fact ZA is one of my favourite dungeons to this day. I just don't understand it. Why not take the redesigned boss fights they made for these dungeons and apply them to an entirely independent new dungeon. I just don't like recycled content. Old content that is reintroduced is not NEW content.

Blizzard doing things like this worries me. Not worries in the way of I'm freaking out or threatening rage quitting, just worries me in a way of the direction they're taking the game. The "new" dungeons seem catered to the "new" WoW player. The ones that are Wrath-babies (my apologies if this is you, I mean no harm) or even Cataclysm-babies. They're saying "Hey these were great instances, so we're gonna redesign them and update them so people can run them again." This is great... for everyone but people that already spent countless hours already in those instances when they first came out. I understand they're redesigned but they're still the same instance. Put these new bosses and loot into a new Zul instance... name it like Zul'John or something, it doesn't matter. No one would know the difference.

I guess to sum up that last paragraph: Blizzard redesigning old dungeons is supporting newer players but leaving veterans unfulfilled. Which seems to be a major theme in Cataclysm. I just feel like the long time fans are left in the dust. Honestly I feel like Blizzard needs to implement a few new things that change the game and make it a bit intuitive to keep it fresh.

What's just around the corner for WoW if this is popular for them and they deem this a success? The next expansion could be "Return to Outlands" where they redesign Outlands and all the raid progression will be as before... but don't worry guys, there will be NEW LOOT AND MOUNTS. Then after that? "Wrath of the Wrath of the Lich King"? Where Bolvar is causing problems in Northrend and we have to go kill him while "enjoying" a redesigned Northrend? This potential 'Tol'Barad PvP' style of game design may be (honestly) severely exaggerated, it sadly might not be too far off. This future would be awesome for the new player (which seems to be Blizzard's new demographic) but terrible for the people who have been there done that.

Which, for the record I'll say now, if I ever have to go to Northrend again for anything relevant I will just quit on the spot. I hate that place with passion. I'd rather go raid the library, it would be more fun than that dull place.

Alas, yes I will run these dungeons, yes I will probably enjoy them. But I feel like more could have been done. The recycling of dungeons feels like, to me, a Disney Movie from their "magic Disney movie DVD vault". They randomly get reintroduced to the current public with more and more features and you buy into them because they are your old favourites and, admittedly, that super cool Hakkar poster would look nice on your wall (and sucks you in deeper). But in the end was a new product made?

No, just an old one upgraded then published as if it were.
And this doesn't sit well with me if this is the future for my beloved Azeroth.

I'm Back!

There's a naga riding a camel. That can only mean one thing! I'm back! Yes after a bit of RL aggro and some WoW stagnancy I am ready to return to blogging and the world of Azeroth.

I have a sense of renewed inspiration as my guild is once again changing directions, going towards raiding.

I also want to thank Jamin at Time Wasted Tuesdays (I think) for featuring me despite being on a hiatus! I appreciated that so much it helped motivate me to logging back in! So thanks again.

So I just wanted to give that short update, I planned on officially returning next Tuesday, but I was just tooooo excited to hold back. Anywho that's all for today, the whole point of this short post was just to say I'm back!

So... hi!

Hiatus

Very brief update:

Due to RL being more and more demanding I have to go on a hiatus for a couple weeks from Asilventures. I'll still update my twitter when I remember to so I'm not going away forever, and will be back soon. Just right now I have no time for WoW and even less time for writing about WoW. My apologies to any hearts broken over this news! Asilventures isn't over, it's just on hiatus.

My apologies =(.

Daily Boredom

I won't say that Blizzard's "quest redesign" was a complete success because I feel like they forgot about making daily quests fun too. Like if you want to take a walk down memory lane of how quests used to be, go visit Tol'Borad. That place is the place for you if you love "killing x of y". There are a ton of fun quests, but none of them are dailies! This is discouraging. The most fun quests you can only do once, what's up with this Blizzard? Let's talk about few shall we?

If you've never quested in Uldum, let me tell you about Gnomebliteration. Gnomebliteration is a quest where you assume the role of a giant flaming Katamari Damacy and are in charge of killing one thousand unsuspecting gnomes. I have no idea why I am supposed to do this because I (like many others) do not read quest text, but I do what is told when they offer me gold and crappy vendor items in return. While I have no idea why I'm killing these gnomes, there is one thing I do know. This quest is a ball. It's great. When I first did it I was rolling on the floor laughing at how fun it was. It showed to me that quests can be fun.

Another fun quest chain is of course the Peacebloom Vs. Ghouls quest chain. You do this amazing mini game then after you kill the boss you never get to play it again on that character. In the beta there was an endless mode option but it got removed from live because I'm convinced Blizzard is on an anti-fun agenda. Let's hope they go back and add in an endless mode and then I will be happy.

There are many examples of fun quests yet none of them are dailies. Sure maybe one or two dailies are fun like Thieving Little Pluckers. I just wish there was more of an emphasis on making dailies fun instead of just normal one time only quests fun. Why Blizzard? Why do we get stuck with daily grinds of boredom instead of potential fun ones? I just imagine the one quest designer at Blizzard who loved collecting X of Y got put in charge of daily quests in Cataclysm. 

So I'll leave you with an acrostic poem (by yours truly):

Doing

Arbitrarily 

Inconvenient

Labor

Yelling

Quit

Underestimating

Everyone's

Stoicism

Towards

Success.