Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

Well, after about 3 weeks without playing WoW, I have decided to resubscribe.

A big part of the reason is simply that WoW provides amazing bang for the buck. I live out in the boonies where entertainment options are limited at the best of times and with three small kids the limits are even more constrained. I’ve been doing a lot more reading, but even with Baen Webscriptions, that’s not all that cheap - roughly $5 per hour of entertainment. Assuming that I have about 1-2 hours per night for entertainment, that works out to about $150/month. Compared to $18/month for WoW, that’s rather expensive.

I miss playing with Jaimie. It’s fun to do stuff together, but due to the aforementioned small children, it’s hard to get out to do stuff. WoW gives us something we can both enjoy.

I had thought about switching to Lord of the Rings Online, but I would have to upgrade both mine and Jaimie’s computer to handle it. That’s about $200 each, plus the cost of the game itself, so I’d be looking at roughly $600 just to start playing. If we weren’t going out to visit Jaimie’s family later this summer I might consider it, but for now I need to save my money for that (and the seemingly inevitable van repairs that accompany trips out there).

So hi ho, hi ho, it’s back to WoW I go!

Renamer NG is a handy utility when I’m too lazy to reboot into Linux to rename a bunch of files.

After a long, long, long hiatus, we got together to play D&D again. It took a long time to find character sheets and somehow I seemed to have missed noting some stuff from where we left off last.

We ran a part of Vlindarian’s Vault from Dungeon 141. We managed to get to a fight with 3 beholders in fairly short order. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening fighting out that one fight. The fight went well - a couple of somewhat close calls, but nothing to tough. As they were in a treasure vault, they got some very nice loot.

I’d forgotten how much number crunching went into a D&D fight. I don’t think I want to run any more D&D games - way too much waiting and consulting with references. “I swing with my sword of +5 plus the crit bonus minus magic effects due to the anti-magic ray, plus flanking bonus, minus….” I’d like to find a game that still lets players do cool things without all the number crunching. I’m going to keep an eye out for such a game.

The nice bit of tabletop roleplaying is I can dynamically adjust the number and type of encounters. If the players want to feel amazing, they can blow through mooks (or trash mobs). If that gets boring, I can handwave the trash away and jump straight to the boss. I wish there were some way in WoW to say “I’ve done these fights before, let’s just jump to the boss.”

QuikWars looks like it might be fun to play with Evan. Alec isn’t at the point where unit stats mean anything to him. Maybe we could play this weekend.

I have canceled my World of Warcraft account.

It was fun while it lasted, but I’ve seen what there is to see and I want to move on to something new. World of Warcraft has provided amazing bang for the buck - it has cost me pennies per hour of play and that’s a better deal than almost any other form of entertainment out there. I’ve had fun and I’ve had the opportunity to play with some fine people.

• My primary reason for cancellation is that I’m tired of seeing the same old stuff, especially in levels 20-60.
• Being ganked and camped by players who could two-shot me didn’t help either. “Frederic: You make it a point of never attacking a weaker party than yourselves, and when you attack a stronger one you invariably get thrashed! Pirate King: [Holding up finger] There’s some truth in that.”
• I really didn’t want to spend any more time grinding; “Oh look, after killing 100 identical critters, I’ve moved 1% closer to my goal - now I need only repeat this another 9900 times!”
• Raiding didn’t appeal to me any more. I haven’t seen all the raid content but what I’ve seen (beat Ragnaros pre-expansion, the first three Karazhan bosses post-expansion) convinced me that it’s really not worth the effort.
• Blizzard’s customer service was either impotent or arrogant or both. “You’ve spent three hours to get to this point and can’t continue because of a known bug? Nothing I can do about it, try again (sucker).”
• The people I played with have either quit playing or moved on to other guilds. Thus I don’t play with them any more, so the social aspect is largely gone for me. I’d have to reform a community of friends and the game is no longer compelling enough for me to want to put forth that kind of effort within its confines.

I may come back to World of Warcraft. One of my friends is talking about upgrading his wife’s computer so that she can can play. If that happens and if the two of them want to play with Jaimie and I, I wouldn’t mind playing again. If I haven’t upgraded my computer enough to play any other games by wintertime, it would be good to have something to play again. Who knows, Blizzard might publish new content for 20-60 (or I might win the lottery and have tons of time to play).

System Requirements Lab has a useful application that tests to see if your system can run specific games. If your system can’t handle it, the parts that need to be upgraded are highlighted. This looks very useful, particularly as I look for something to replace World of Warcraft.

In Armory data: Popular and unpopular specs - WOW Insider Zyph of Maelstrom looked at the most popular and least popular talents and builds of over 6000 level 70s. In my case it’s interesting to note that less than a quarter of holy priests take the 31 point talent and less than 17% take the 41 points talent. Looks like the only class/spec with even similarly miserable talents is survival hunters.

In my case it really doesn’t matter to me that the holy priest talents suck. I’m pretty much done with running my priest except for the occasional instance. Maybe at some point I’ll run him again but for now I’m tired of healing. (I don’t go shadow for RP reasons, but don’t tell anyone. *grin*)

Thanks to Wordpress Theme Generator I’ve changed the look of this blog a bit. We’ll see if I stick with it.