Casting Rebirth on Loupe

Song of the Post:  Trivium – Down from the Sky

So for the past 1-2 months, I have been concentrating on my mage Wrathbringer and rarely logged onto my druid Loupe.  I’ve been having a lot of fun playing on the horde side again with The Green Crusade and raiding BT and SW.  However, it has become clear that I am going to have a hard time balancing between both my Horde and my Alliance characters.  I have been thinking long and hard what I am going to do when WOTLK comes out.  Over the weekend, I made a decision.

I will be leveling on the Alliance side when the xpac comes out.  Now I am not abandoning the Horde side, but I will be leveling up Loupe first to 80. 

I made this decision because of several reasons:

1. My wife – This was very crucial because I really love playing with her.  It is something that we can do together and spend time with each other.  Now don’t be thinking “geez, Wrath is whipped.”  Well, you are wrong!!  Kinda…. .  She does not have a high level character on the Horde side and she does not really know anyone.  She approached me the other day when I asked her to play some more on the Horde side and she said she likes the guild we are in on the Alliance because its small and she knows everyone because most of them are RL friends.  So this brings me to…
2. Smaller guild – I actually really like being in a smaller guild.  You know everyone, easier to schedule runs on the fly instead of having sign ups, not having to worry about DKP.  I am also one of the officers of the guild and I really like having this kind of a role in a small guild.  I was really excited when Blizzard first announce WOTLK and mentioned all the raid dungeons would have a 10 man version.  With our small guild, we can actually do some sort of progression instead of just Kara and ZA.
3. Need to be more Casual - And being with a larger guild, its harder to be involved.  Nothing against the Green Crusade at all because I love all of them, but if you want to raid, you have to be somewhat hardcore between being able to get gear and getting into the raid.  I have to scale back my playing habits a bit because frankly, I play way too much.  So with the smaller guild environment, I can still raid and not have to make attendance or worry about DKP.
4. Missing the Drood – I have not been super impressed with the Mage changes.  It was a nice change to not have to tank all the time, but after raiding as a mage for a while, I realized that I really love tanking.  Its a lot more exciting than sitting back and just DPSing.  I also dont have to try to compare my DPS to everyone else because that is not my focus.  Even though my mage is well under geared compared to everyone in the guild, I would still get mad at myself for not doing enough DPS.

So I am looking forward to progressing my druid and await for the day of the xpac. 

Currently I am working on getting the Ambassador title for Loupe which hasn’t been too hard at all.  All I need is Exodar and Gnomergan reputation to be exalted.  After that I think I will either work on getting non combat pets or leveling up a shaman as high as I can before my refer-a-friend program ends.

Peace and Hair Grease

\m/

BT Gitters

Song of the Post:  Metallica – My Apocalypse

So its been about 2 weeks since I started playing with The Green Crusade again.  And it has been awesome!

I have been running heroics, doing PvP and a little bit of Kara.  My goal was to try to gear myself up to at least be able to do ZA.  I didn’t think I would be able to go to any of the content that they were doing, which now they are starting to dab into Sunwell.  Since I knew that I probably would not see Sunwell at all, at least I could still play with them on their alts through ZA.

Over the course of this past weekend, guildies were telling me to sign up for the first half of Black Temple.  I told them I didn’t think I was ready with the gear that I had.  I still was not hit capped and my spell damage was under 1k if I was specced full frost.  They said we will just gear you up since most of the raiders just need stuff off of Illidan.  Plus, they needed mages.  So, after more and more pressure to sign up, I signed up for the Tuesday raid.

On Monday the guild leader whispered me asking if I was going to be around Tuesday night.  I say yup I sure am.  He said well get ready to go to BT with us!  I was stoked.  I finally get to raid with my old buddies and get to see what BT was all about. 

But I was very nervous.  The last time I had done a 25 man raid was about a year and a half ago with them when they were just starting out on Gruul and Magtheridon.  All I had been doing the past year and a half were 5-10 man dungeons.  On top of that, I didn’t want to be a liability to the raid if I was too undergeared.  But they really want me to go, which is an awesome feeling, so I went to studying the bosses and getting elixirs/food/oils for the raid.

So yesterday I stepped foot into BT, and I think it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.  Namely because they pretty much have BT on farm status, but thats beside the point .  It felt pretty natural getting back into the mage role in a raid.  Sheeping, spamming frostbolt, sheeping spamming frostbolt, spamming frostbolt, etc.  In all seriousness, it was a blast.  Seeing all of these bosses I kept hearing about and actually doing the fights was a rush for sure.  The only fight I was nervous about was Gorefiend.  If he gives you a debuff, you have to run to the other side of the room and you turn into a ghost.  Your role at this point is to slow down these spirits that head towards the raid so they do not kill them.  Since I had never done this fight before, I was hoping that I would not get the debuff.  Fortunately, I did not .

We cleared everything up until Mother due to several people in the raid (me included) need shadow resist gear for that fight.  So that will be something I need to work on.  I ended up getting some robes and a wand, both are really sweet.  I was really glad that the robes dropped so I could test out a fire spec since I have been told that is the raid spec to go now.  I am going to test this out and see how it goes.

All in all, it was great to raid with them again and I had fun doing it.  Those guys are not only one of the most talented groups of people I have played with, but also the most fun.

Wrathbringer Reborn!

Song of the Post: Mors Principium Est – Parasites of Paradise

Happy Labor Day all!

Sorry I have not posted in a while, I have been very busy lately.  And here’s why.

Wrathbringer is back!  There are a few reasons why I have revived him and want to play him more.

Ever since I started playing on the Alliance side with my RL friends, it felt very weird.  I had played Horde strictly for 3 years.  I had grown accustom to my guild that I had been in for 2 years and I made many great friendships.  And I missed all of this terribly.  Deep down, the Horde blood flows through!  Plus its so metal .

Another thing that has happened, which has happened to a lot of guilds during the summer/pre-expansion is lack of participation.  I now only see about 3-4 people on everyday on the alliance server.  Sometimes, I am the only one on.  Now I love playing this game, but one of the reasons why I do play is to play with my friends.  I know several of them have RL stuff to take care of which is totally fine, but I know there are some that just stopped playing.  I could work on PvP and get my hunter geared, but I don’t like running BGs by myself.  Its no fun unless you are with people.

This however does not mean that I quit playing on the alliance side.  I am going to be going back and forth between both servers.  Hopefully after playing on both, I will get a good feel as to which toon I will be leveling up first when WOTLK comes out.

So on Thursday night I popped into my old guild’s forums and sent the guild leader a message saying that I was interested in coming back to play with them and not expecting to get into any raids.  I knew it would not be a problem because my guild leader is an awesome guy.  I was surprised when I first logged on that I was still in the guild and saw the wall of green text.  WRATH!!!  It was a great feeling that there were still a lot of people I knew and they missed me.  They immediately wanted to start running me through heroics and/or do some PvP.

So I have been either working on getting honor or getting badges to get some upgrades on my gear since I still had a lot of blues.  That pretty much took up the bulk of my weekend by playing with my hordies again.  So it gives me great pleasure to be able to yell this again….

FOR THE HORDE!!!