Roads to Safe Places

I wish I were done for today. But no, there's still the oral report waiting to be finished and that other oral report and I haven't heard back from some of the people who volunteered yet.

Ever since I found ( this dub of 'We Didn't Start the Fire' set in Stormwind ) I've rediscovered Billy Joel, especially:

Is anyone else exited about these wee guys?



I don't see anyone on my server with these out, but I love them and I was delighted when I found one in my inbox. It's infinitely more fun to level my cow with baby Onyxia flapping about next to me.



Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only casual gamer on my server.

Given the entire purpose of MMORPGs it's rather strange, but I used to hate instances. This is why I didn't do them very often, which is why I sucked at them, which is why I didn't like going - especially with my Shadow Priest, because even though my DPS sort of sucked, I sucked even worse at healing, which I was usually forced to do, because, "Of course you'll manage! It's not that hard!" - which of course it was, especially in Ulda, where it's at times nigh impossible to see anyone and people kept running out of reach or not wait for the drinking casters, which is why no heals arrived, which is why they ended up dying a lot, which is why they got angry at me, which is why I avoided dungeon invites.
So - not really my thing.

Until I started going with people who know what they're doing, and until I started playing a class I enjoy rolling in a dungeon. Yes, I know, everybody loves them, they are ridiculously overpowered, they will be nerfed and stop being so awesome, but to my battered cloth-wearing little heart it is such a relief to be able to play a fierce and plate-encased imba melée class, it's bliss.

In other words I have just spent the evening on a different server than usual doing ridiculously fast Hellfire Ramparts/Blood Furnace runs with three other DKs, among them niaseath, of course, and a Priest and Shammy, rounding it off with an stint into the Slave Pens. And I Had A Good Time.



My DPS didn't suck, either, but maybe that was just everybody else only having played their DK for a couple of days and in one case being two level below the rest of us. Still, during the fight with Quagmirran I ended up top of the damage meter for the first time ever, and seeing as this is about my seventh time in an instance at all, I'm rather pleased with myself.

Fun. Me. In a dungeon. Go figure. 

Screw the quests there. They combine everything I ever found annoying about WoW quests. Come to think of it, screw pretty much all the quests in the western Grizzly Hills, I did not like those in the Drakil'Jin ruins, either, although Thor Modan annoyed me most - up to twenty iron dwarfs to defeat to get to the very back of the bloody canyon, and once you've completed the first quest, you get sent back in. Then, having procured whatever stupid item they sent you in for, it's, "Oh, we forgot to mention- we need some data. Please obtain it. From the very back of the cave."

WoW quests always were like that, of course, but I have never seen mobs respawn as quickly, so occasionally you have to fight your way in, then turn around only to find that everything's respawned and you have to fight your way out again. Thanks to the fact that the spaces are so confined, you can't even simply avoid and walk around mobs, you can't use your mount because it's inside, and of course those dwarves can stun you, so running is also out of the question.

I know, it's naive, but I had so hoped that they wouldn't include so many of the "kill number x of mob y and z" with the follow-up "get x items in the same area", and the final quest "kill the leader of y"-quest chains they always do to introduce you to new mobs. I do appreciate WotLK's new found phasing abilities (the entire quests in the Ebon Hold and the Battle for the Undercity quest chain are probably the coolest I've ever done) and quests where you can mount random creatures, even though my money might have been more sensibly invested in a single-player game, as I play it mainly for the quests, not the instances, or the raids, or PvP - I think I am not really cut out for MMORPGs which are really MMOPvPs and tend to place only little importance on the RPG part.

As far as real RPGing is concerned, my brother has been trying to talk me and Crocky into starting a group for table-top gaming. I liked that while I was doing it, and he's been curious for years. Crocky's intersted, too, but seeing as none of us are very experienced and we don't know anyone who'd do the honours of GMing, it will be difficult, as one of us would have to get so very familiar with our system of choice (so far, we're leaning towards D&D 3.5). Of course, we would start with with premade campaigns to get into things, but without anyone who knows what they're doing, it's doesn't really sound as though it's going to be that much fun. Quite apart from the fact that we're in different cities and would have to game via messenger and webcam and Gametable, anyway. I'm curious about how that'll go.

I always knew that icon-making is not only a waste of time, but also fun and addictive. So. Here are some vaguely pointless icons of various WoW-creatures.


The model viewer is great fun, especially because I can see all those NPCs on it that I've never seen before, and the final bosses that I will never see in game because I suck too much.

Credits:
~scully7491's icon brush set, ~redheadstock's Arcane Circles brushes, and the Icon Table Generator.

It is important that some parents are alerted to the dangers of internet addiction, but I somehow don't really think that the protagonist is to blame for looking for friends elsewhere, seeing as NO ONE (except possibly his girlfriend) seem to mind that he keeps dropping dead.

Ok. Back to trying to find a driver for my external harddrive (there is no brand name on it anywhere, which makes things much more fun). It SHOULD work on XP, but somehow, it is Plug&Play resistant.

I am torn between "OMG! How awesome" and "OMG! How scary".

If they really do that, I am so going to buy that.