Played Lately: World of Warcraft

• Even with the new games available (GW2 and TL2 specifically), I find myself returning to World of Warcraft for reasons that are not entirely explicable. I can think of at least three, but there are probably more.


• Partly is because WoW is the MMO equivalent of comfort food. I always feel welcome in Azeroth.


• Partly because I'm feeling left out of Mists of Panderia. It will be strange getting to the new zones after all of the events are over.


• Partly is because of Wilhelm's exploits in the Emerald Dream private server. The nostalgia factor is exceptionally high reading his posts.


• I haven't gone back to my mage since coming back. She still has to finish Uldum and Twilight Highlands. So far, I'm not super eager to do either. Instead I jumped into my perma-TBC paladin to finish off Nagrand and head into the Blade's Edge Mountains. I'm getting to content now that I haven't seen in a couple of years. Between Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, and Terokkar Forest, it's not hard to hit level 70 and move on to Northrend.


• I found that the gronn in Blade's Edge have been nerfed to quest target difficulty as well. Which is fine if you're questing through at level, solo. But again, I find myself surprised at how much Blizzard has touched Outland in unexpected ways. I've been letting myself get overleveled so that I can take on the instances. I would having liked to take them out as elites, but it's a very small thing. So far, I haven't cleared many dungeons, but the patch 5.0 changes seem to be making that much easier so far.


• Speaking of which, playing a paladin after patch 5.0 is a very strange experience. After logging in and respecing, I was surprised to find half of my abilities missing, including my auras. I don't know what to say about that. Considering how much of my damage comes from Exorcism and Judgment, I'm half a ranged class now. Leaving retribution paladins as a cooldown limited class makes her play like a GW2 character. It feels like a lot of what makes them special has been lost.


• But I haven't spent all of my time on the live servers. Instead, I've been messing around in a private server I've installed on my own computer. It's at patch 3.3.5, which is late Wrath of the Lich King. I'm surprised at how well the game works even when you are the only one in the world. The server is a work in process, so several things are still broken. But when I logged in yesterday, I found that Hallow's End had started. I'm not sure how well implemented it is, but I was able to collect candy, get a costume, and earn a holiday specific achievement.


• My real goal for this is to see if I can modify the database so that I can convert an instance so that an on-level character can solo it. I suspect I'll start with something small like Ragefire Chasm. A long term goal would be that I can tune Molten Core for an appropriately geared single character. I doubt that will happen anytime soon (and I'm never exposing the server to the internet). But I would love to see if I can do it.


• As a side note, I'm going to have to keep my WoW sub going indefinitely to assuage my guilt. But that's a whole other matter.

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© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.