I'm having an identity crisis

When I started playing the game, during my trial period, I had a rogue and only got to level 20 or so on whatever realm I got assigned to. Then the people who introduced me to Warcraft told me what realm they played on and I rolled a hunter there. That was my "main" for quite a while until we needed an additional healer in the guild and I decided to try a druid. I fell in love with the playstyle of the balance tree and my "main" became the druid and I leveled him to 70. At some point I got bored and rolled a shaman to level as an alt. I leveled him to 70 as well. So, now I find myself logging into the shaman far more often that the druid. With the shaman, I can still heal when we go into dungeons and I can DPS when needed. I seem to be enjoying playing the shaman more, but I still like the druid.

The question then arises...who is my "main"? I'm starting to feel that it has become Okole, the shaman. Not by choice, but in practice, it just kind of happened. I am feeling a bit of guilt over this, like I'm having an affair. Have any of you ever felt this way?

The plague

When you see a floating necropolis from the Lower Rise at Thunder Bluff, there must be something big going on. Sure enough, it looks like world events are starting in preparation of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. There are plagued ghouls and zombies all over the major cities and wandering the landscape of Azeroth. There are also Necrotic Shards, that are spawning at various locations and spawning undead that need to be dispatched and are dropping Necrotic Runes that can be used as currency to buy various items from the Argent Dawn Quartermaster. I picked up a Tabard of the Argent Dawn and nabbed a Feat of Strength achievement and added another tabard to my collection, it looks good too.

It appears that the initial plague is over, a cure has been found by the Royal Apocathery Society and the zombies attack has been stopped. I have my doubts that this is over though. 16 days until we can get to Northrend!

Achievements make you do strange things...

They sure do. That is the picture of Ariki, Mishandala and Okole fishing in Ironforge. We didn't really set out to fish in Ironforge, we strated by clearing Gnomeregan for that achievement and the get the Workshop Key, and just kinda decided...why not?

We only had one poor hunter try to challenge us and we dispatched him easily. After our adventure fishing with the dwarves, we decided to take the tram to Stormwind. Mish got on okay, I missed the tram and met a nice hunter and his core hound who promptly killed me...Ariki ran down the tram tunnel all the way to Stormwind. I rezzed in Elwynn forest - crap. So I took the 25% penalty and spirit rezzed and headed to Stormwind. We got our Fishing Diplomat acievements and they logged out.

I, however, ran into another guildie and we decided to run through Deadmines to kill Van Cleef and get that acievement. I did this with a level 29 set of Bloody Brass Knuckles from an earlier SM run. I kinda like the achievements, it gives us something to do and tends to be a social gathering time.

Horseman and Zombies...oh my!

Alright, finally got most of the addons working and starting having some fun with the guildies. We have been plowing through the Headless Horseman and working on the Hallow's End achievement. I am just needing the Sinister Squashling and I will have everything I need for the "the Hallowed" title. I have seen it drop, but haven't managed to win the roll yet...yet.

And now it seems the long rumored world event has begun, the zombie invasion. Some players are going out of their way to become infected and turn to zombies so they can run around and infect others, this seems to be fun for them. Well, I enjoy healing and when I see someone afflicted with a disease - I need to cure them! This has gotten me some very rude comments and suggestions on fornicating with myself. But, we all have fun in our own ways. LOL

Almost back to normal...almost

After a few days of updating addons and getting my UI layout just he way I want it, I'm back to actually playing the game. There are aspects of it that make it seem like a whole new game and that is the way I have been trying to approach it.

There is so much complaining out there on changes that have been made are are still to be made. So far I haven't seen anything that drastically affecting how I play the game. Having said that, I'm not a min-max hardcore raider that would even notice a losss of 5% DPS on a DoT or whatever. I have specced my Shaman into Elemental again and I'm having a blast killing things very quickly. My Druid is back to mostly Resto with some points in Balance to help out with the damage. My builds are probably not the MOST effective they can be, but they match my style.

Which brings me to another point - why do people give others such grief over they way they spend their points. Certainly there are some choices that are questionable, but the player MUST have had a reason for selecting the build that they did. If it doesn't work, they can change it. I have a lot of respect for the people that build a spec that works for them and not just for the T6 wearing raider that saw the build on Elistist Jerks.

Addon Hell

As was to be expected...many of my addons are not working. SO, I am spending some time digging around looking for the updated versions. WoWMatrix is helping, but some are just outright new versions, so the updating process does not help all that much. Bartender3 is now Bartender4, for example.

I am impressed by what I have seen visually so far - I'll report in later on game play, hopefully.

Gah!

The servers are still down - it's almost 7:00pm Eastern Time and I want to get in there and see what is new...but I can't.

Oh, I know I'm not the only one and I am feeling for everyone who cannot get in yet, and for the Blizzard employees who are trying to get the servers up and answering all the calls form the really impatient ones who I am sure are calling already. I'm doing my best to stay calm, updating addons, reading forums, that sort of thing. But I sure hope they come up soon.

Progress!

I've got epic flight, exalted rep with Aldor and SSO, 1000 Gold and primary professions maxed out on both toons that will be heading into Northrend. All that is left of the goals is fishing with the Shaman (316) currently.

So - in the words of guildmate Claz/Greatjohn/Narandia - "I sooo can't wait for the new patch".

I have been doing some BG to get honor points and maybe pick up the Merciless shoulders for my Shaman, they look nice and that is the reason I'm getting them. Minor increase in stats, but the looks are what is drawing me in. What can I say, vanity is a curse.

new laptop is running WoW like a champ

I ordered a new laptop recently and it arrived yesterday and I got it all loaded up and copied my Warcraft folder over and spent some time tweaking it out. The resolution is much higher, so I had to redo my carefully crafted layout to get everything where I wanted it. This is an obsession with me...I have some OCD tendencies and I have an addon - Align - that makes a nice grid on the screen that helps me get everything lined up just the way I like it.

So after spending a bit of time on that, I decide to embark on the dailies. I usually avoided the Isle because the amount of players and movement made my frame rate drop to 4 or 5 - I never really got a framerate better than 15 while playing ANYWHERE. So, off to the bombing and a solid 60 fps and 1 pass and all objectives complete. Nice.

I removed the Vertical Sync option and the framerate shot up to over 200! The downside of that is the fans went into overdrive and they do get a little loud. 60 is great, so I turned the vertical sync back on and I'm a happy camper at a solid 60 fps.

All of this is at 1440x900 with all the options turned up to max and man was I missing alot of detail before. Little things - but really cool llittle thnings. I have so much detail on now that I occasionally get lost because things no longer look the same as they did and I miss "my" landmarks.

I am very happy that I got this before the patch and expansion - now bring on Northrend!

Progress on goals

1. Max out professions - only cooking (374) and fishing (302) left on Okole
2. Get to Exalted with Shattered Sun and Aldor - Okole only needs to get SSO, cranking the dailies out every day.
3. 500G per character - should still be set on this.
4. Get all gear enchanted/gemmed - Hopefully, after the patch these will all still make sense, but may need to change a bit.
5. Bank some quests for quick XP when the expansion is released - going for Gold instead
6. Epic Flight - putting the money together for Okole - 600G to go and I'll be content to spend the 5K.
7. Brewfest mounts and bosses - got both caster trinkets for both toons, no mounts though.
8. Hallow's End events and bosses - still awaiting this one.

The end is near...

Blizzard has made an announcement that is leading many people to believe that the new content patch will be released on October 14th. What they actually said was that Arena Season 4 will end with patch 3.0.2 and then later stated that Season 4 will end on October 14. So the quick deduction is that patch 3.0.2 = October 14.

So be it. Slightly less than 2 weeks and we get some new stuff and changes to old stuff. A just a few days after that they are likely going to be sending all of us to Scarlet Monastery to fight some Headless Horseman.

Yeah - Scarlet Monastery is in Tirisfal Glades and just west of the Plaguelands. Not a bad place for the scourge to begin a second assault against the fine folks of Azeroth is it? So could this be the beginnings of a world event scenario? Probably not directly, but they could easily plant seeds during the event that will lead to something in the time between the end of Hallow's end and the 13th of November that will make us want to go kick some Lich King ass.