Monday Random Thoughts

- Managed to get one of the two ahead of the curve achievements.

- Sort of behind the curve however.

- Went back to high maul for the first time since blackrock came out and blew through it.

- Amazing what a difference some gear makes.

- Even with only 9 people it was easy.

- One shot all bosses except the last.

- That took three pulls.

- Yeah, gear makes it so much easier.

- Got stonewalled on blast furnace this week which meant we never got to attempt blackhand.

- Sucks being the time of the year.

- Missing our top healer and one main tank not to mention two of our best damage dealers these last two weeks didn't help either.

- I am sure if I extended the lockout and we had everyone next week we would have done it.

- Darn, one week too late.

- I know we will never go back so I might just pug a kill for the sake of having one later on this expansion.

- Just like we never went back to high maul as soon as the new raid came out.

- Even more so being the gear from it will be crap compared, why would anyone want to go back.

- At least I got one end boss this tier.

- Better than getting none and being the first time that happened to me since ulduar.

- Tournament came out so darn quick we never finished ulduar before it came out.

- Still say ulduar is the best raid ever.

- Wonder if part of that is because it was the only raid tier I did not kill a last boss on since I started raiding.

- Maybe that is why I remember it fondly.

- Wouldn't that be weird, remember something you failed at fondly?

- I blame us not finishing partly on our not raiding all that much and bad decisions on my part.

- I never extended and we could not get to BH in our two hour night.

- Everyone wanted to restart each week because people needed, or is that wanted, gear.

- I ended with 0 tier pieces from heroic.

- Two of our main healers ended with 1 tier piece on heroic.

- Our top damage dealer ended with not even having a two piece set.

- Not even normal pieces.  No normal and no heroic.

- So I can not blame anyone for it not happening but myself.

- If I had extended or pushed for more than 2 hours a week, we would have downed it easily.

- We are not a bad group, just don't raid as much as we should I guess.

- Next time around I need to learn from my mistakes and not give in to people that want to get tier sets.

- We could have manged it, I have not doubt.

- Heck I am the lowest item level of the entire team at 683 so we were well geared, over geared even.

- And BH is not a hard fight but it is a mechanic fight and anyone that raids knows that if you can do the numbers all you need to kill a mechanic fight is make pulls.

- So there is absolutely zero doubt in my mind we would have downed it.

- If only I extended once or twice when we were at him and gave us a full night of attempts he would have died.

- I'll kick myself over that decision for a while.

- Stupid decisions like that on my part is why I say I am really not a raid leader.

- At least not a good one for a casual raid team.

- I wanted progression and I went the way the group leaned toward leaving me wanting and upset with the tier as a whole thanks to it.

- Pitfalls of leading a casual raid team sometimes I guess.

- At least one thing is for sure, we did have fun killing the bosses we could kill each week.

- The fights as a whole were fun and interesting, it was a good raid tier.

- Even if they did not love us and did not give us gear.

- Paladin, priest warlock tier my ass.

- We sometimes had a priest or a warlock, never had a paladin.

- I swear that is the only tier piece they make, because I never saw the others.

- I hate RNG, have I mentioned that lately.

- And what of the bonus rolls that was supposed to help with RNG?

- How come none of us got tier off rolls?

- Yeah, RNG can kiss my elf butt.

- Speaking of elf butt I am going to put my elf butt out on a limb and make a prediction.

- Save up your apexis crystals.

- Even if you will not need any 650 gear for 5K crystals or the 695 upgrades of 20K crystals, save up your crystals.

- A little bird has been whispering in my ear.

- Blizzard liked the upgrade system so much last time as a way to nerf content over time instead of adding the zone wide buff so I can see them going that route again.

- And apexis crystals seem to be the logical thing used to upgrade gear.

- What I think they will do, to slow us down, is limit the amount of upgrades we can do each week.

- They do not want someone with 2 million crystals saved up instantly upgrading all their gear when they add it.

- So I can see them doing something like making it so you can only upgrade 2 or 4 upgrades per week.

- Makes sense.

- Damn, just thought of something.

- It does make sense which means blizzard won't do it.

- Can't do anything logical.

- But I still say there might be a reason to collect at least a small stash of crystals.

- I spent a lot of mine yesterday.

- Bought some mounts and pets I kept forgetting about.

- The reputation ones where you needed gold and crystals.

- Yeah, never did pick them up, until now that is.

- Spent over 3 hours on friday night trying to find a blackhand group.

- Did not find one.

- I really hate that group finder.

- Went to open raid, figured it has been a long time since I was there, maybe I will just garb a fast group there.

- There were always what seemed like 101 groups going on in open raid so picking up a group could not be too hard.

- I log in and see a tumble weed blow by me.

- I look around and see or hear... nothing.

- Go to alliance chat and see three people in it.

- One of those three was me.

- Holy crap what happened to open raid, the place is deader than a doornail.

- It made me very sad.

- I gave up for the night never finding a group.

- I looked sunday morning for a group, figured I would try both horde side (for the hell of it) and alliance side.

- I am having an extremely hard time believing there are over 7M players playing this game now.

- I know it is sunday morning, an off time.

- I know there is also the zone issue.

- But seriously, horde side had 6 raid groups and alliance 11.

- And I am not talking heroic BRF.

- I am talking all possible groups.

- That means there was only 6 horde and 11 alliance groups forming for any raid.

- Normal high maul, heroic high maul, normal blackrock and heroic blackrock.

- Like, wow.

- Each group had 2 or 3 people in it.

- Basically meaning even if you combined all the horde groups together you might not have had one group and alliance wasn't much better off.

- I know it was sunday morning when I looked but I can not believe there were that few people playing.

- It make the open raid chat with 3 people in it seems busy by comparison.

- Sad being sunday morning would be the only time I could really squeeze in an alt run or two.

- Friday night I did find one group that interested me even if it was not on blackhand.

- I did see someone on iron maidens looking for some DPS.

- Figured I would join, kill maidens, kill whatever else they needed to do, any maybe we would get to blackhand.

- I was willing to take the chance.

- Basically because I knew the person who was running the group.

- He has a blog I read.

- That is why I was willing to help.

- I got declined.

- Very sad.

- Do you think if I had put "It's Grumpy" that he would have accepted me.

- I know he knows who I am from the blog.

- I wonder if I told him I applied to his group and he declined me what he would say.

- I might just do that, just for fun.

- I have really horrible luck with groups.

- Only makes sense really because I have horrible luck with everything else.

- Doing black temple to try and get the pets.

- You know the head boss with three different pets?

- I got pets to drop from all the bosses in there except that one.

- Ahhhhh.  I need three different ones from there and I get all of them except any from there.

- So I got lots of extras, but none from that one guy that has three different ones that drop.

- I am to the point I am going to break down and just buy the damn things.

- I can afford it, sure, but the fun is in the hunt.

- I want to actually loot them, not just buy them.

-  I'll give it a few more weeks before I give up and just buy them so I can get the achievement out of the way.

- How many of you would just buy them and not even bother trying to farm for them?

- I guess I am just weird that way, I like to farm stuff.

- Which brings me to what I tentatively plan to write about tomorrow.

- The grinding patch.

- Great for me, not so sure about everyone else.

- Wonder how well it will go over for the masses.

- Grinding for drops, grinding for crystals, grinding for reputation, grinding with gathering for felblight.

- Grind grind grind.

- I dig stuff like that, really do, anyone that reads here knows that.

- But I think there is still something missing.

- That can't really be all there is to the expansions last (possible) patch.

- I hope a lot of people heeded my warning early in the expansion and did not drop their gathering professions.

- So many people thought they did not need them any longer.

- I told them do not drop them, you will just need to relevel them.

- Did people really think the garrison free for all with materials would last forever?

- I knew it wouldn't because I knew blizzard would realize the mistake they made with it.

- Again, I said that since beta.

- Obvious stuff is obvious

- So how does blizzard always miss the obvious?

- I do have a very serious problem however that I need to discuss.

- My characters seem to be losing their abilities.

- I mean I log in and they are there, but once I go out in the world they are gone.

- All of my characters, every last one of them.

- They are expert miners and expert gardeners while in my garrison.

- Never even once mining up an ore fragment or picking an herb fragment.

- They are masters of gathering.

- But when they go out in the world they somehow forget how to do it.

- My hunter went to mine a node and it said I need mining.

- But I don't in my garrison.

- Did I suddenly forget how to mine as soon as I stepped out of my garrison?

- Okay, enough of this joke, but it really does fit what I said from the get go.

- Our followers should mine and herb for us.

- Not us.

- If we have mining or herbalism we should be able to do it ourselves and get more, but if we do not we should need a follower with mining or herbalism to gather for us.

- That would have made much more sense.

- Oh, there I go talking logical again, sorry about that.

- Blizzard and logic do not mix.

- BTW it just occurred to me blizzard won the flight issue.

- Even if it seems like people won with blizzard adding flight back.

- Blizzard had all intentions of adding flight back in most likely when we moved to the next expansion.

- As a matter of fact I am sure it would have come in 7.0, the prepatch for the next expansion.

- So they decided to push it up.

- But by them saying they would give it to us later we are at their mercy.

- They could effectively add it three months before the next expansion, which would be close to when they were going to add it anyway, but they made the players feel like they won.

- Devious mother f-ers.

- Nah, disregard that.

- To devise such a masterful plan that works perfectly to do what they wanted to do while making us feel like we won something would require someone with keen business like intelligence capable of manipulate the masses.

- There is no one that works for blizzard that fits that description.

- But I tell you one thing, that is exactly how I would have done it.

- I would have made people feel as if they won while still doing what I wanted to do from the beginning.

- But that is because I am an evil person.

- Hey, at least I admit it.

- Not going around kissing orc babies and making promises I have no intention of keeping.

- Speaking of that, who is ready for 16 months of hellfire?

- Don't think it will happen again, think again.

- The next expansion has not even been mentioned yet.

- There has been no "in the works" leaks or rumors.

- So it is not even in development stage to the point worth mentioning.

- Now lets say that point, where it is worth mentioning,  is a few months away.

- Now add alpha time, early invite time, beta time, and the experience from the last times blizzard has done this, and you are looking at, at absolute best, a year before the next expansion.

- So 16 months again is not out of the question.

- If it was going to be shorter, we would already have had the next expansion announced and the early invite betas would have went out already.

- Open invite beta would be coming soon and we would all know about it by now.

- So yeah, we are in for a long haul again.

- Unless blizzard surprises us.

- Do you think they have it in us to surprise us any more?

- I don't think so.

- Have a great day.