Cataclysm

I'm feeling much better. (sorry Rivs, didn't drink whiskey, don't think that would've gone well) I do feel a bit tired still, even though I must've slept twice as much as normal in the past couple of days.

I've finally found the energy yesterday to read up on most of the blogs and wow.com of the last few days and ran into quite some interesting stuff. But I still felt like falling over at 8:30 PM. I pushed it just that little bit further however since going to bed at that hour would only have caused me to wake up at 4 am or so.

So by the time that I did go to bed an hour later I think I was hallucinating pink elephants. Took about .3 seconds to fall asleep. All in all it took me till today to get back to posting. Pigsniffles, as Tamarind calls it, sucks.

Honored in Game
One of the articles that I thought was very interesting to read, and had some pretty cool comments was this one at wow.com.

(if you don't want to jump to the link, it speaks about how you would want to be honored in the game).

I have to admit, I've fantasized about this question before. About how cool it would be to see my characters name somewhere in the game as an NPC. And after reading that today I did some more fantasizing about it.

I think I would want to be a raid boss. I don't mean that my character should become a raid boss, nono, I want a raid boss based on my class and spec. A healing raid boss.

I imagine her (yes, it has to be a her, sorry) to be a gorgeous character like Sylvanas character model, but with a very mean twist. She would be a gimmicky fight, and you would have to use your abilities as they're supposed to be used.

If she has mana she will heal quite consistently through renew or flash heal, so she would have to be mana drained. She would also have to be mortal striked or similar ability to prevent her from healing too much.

She would not have shadowfiends, but ravens that need CCing because they cannot be killed, but they do give her mana and health and that do damage. So they need to be taken away from her and CCed. Oh, and she debuffs by mass dispell, so buffing is not needed since buffs will be dispelled about 2 seconds into the fight.

She would be like a bunny rabit in jumping around, just to annoy the melee, but she can be stunned into place (unless PWS is up) so everybody with a stun would have to work together to keep her where she is. Just to make it less boring for the healers, she would holy nova every now and then to deal out some raid damage.

She also has PWS so offensive dispellers or spell steal would have to keep an eye out for that, and she would throw out a must heal through or you die dot into the raid.

Yah, lots and lots of abilities, just like my priest. But hey, like my priest she would not have an enormous amount of health, you just need to pin her down and do everything right.

It would be a 'do it right, and you win fight'. Why? Because I love those myself.

Raiding
We did raid Ulduar 10 and 25 last weekend, and we killed the northrend beasts on 10 and 25 as well.

In our Ulduar 10 we got knockknockknock and I love the smell of saronite, so only 3 achievements left and we'll be riding a drake! I'm so proud of our team :)

We also did the northrend beasts encounter and got that down in 3 tries. Will have to write a quick overview since all the guides that I've seen so far make it all sound a lot more difficult than it is. Which they unfortunately often do.

In our Pugtastic raid we took Northrend Beasts down on Saturday, and went through Ulduar 25 on Sunday. We ended up one-shotting Hodir, and we had never even done that fight before. People did really well, and it all came together.

We have remarkable players in that PuG and coordination is so well done. People just listen to what is said, and when I talk them through the flash freeze even people who had never seen it before managed to get through just by following the running instructions.

I'm proud of both groups for achieving what we are achieving. These are not the hardcore raiders, they are just people with a good head on their shoulders, and who know when it's time to simply do what needs to be done.

Extending Lockout
I've heard and seen discussions all around about extending, and I have to say that I've asked my own 10 man and they said they didn't want to extend yet. We clear the instance in a weekend, and people are still needing too many upgrades from earlier hard modes.

I have to say that I don't understand most raids who do extend lockouts. Fights generally ramp up in difficulty, and you can often use the gear you get from earlier fights to gear up your raiders to be able to beat those harder fights.

I think that only in the situation where you need hardly any gear anymore and you're really only working on achievements for the last couple of bosses in an instance would you extend your raid lockout. But I see guilds extending it, just to be able to work on later bosses.

Well...if you're not ready, you're not ready. More time isn't going to change anything in that. If it really just takes you too long to get to that fight, and you wipe many times on earlier fights (which is how you end up needing the lockout due to time restraints) I would say don't extend.

Just do the earlier bosses again, get the gear, and extend at a later point. It can be frustrating I know, but there still is a certain progression within this game (luckily!). And you cannot just skip half of the gearing up and go to the harder bosses.

Catclysm
And finally the last subject I wanted to touch upon. It seems that wow.com has gotten some information somewhere that the next expansion really is called Cataclysm and that worgen and goblins will indeed be the new races.

Goblins for the Horde, and Worgen for the Alliance. I wonder if they're going to also allow these races to start at 55 or so, since I would not want to start at 1 all over x_X

What would be grand is if they would deal with it the same way as they've dealt with cold weather flying. They could have a tome to level your alt to 55 or so immediately, or even different ones to level to 55 or 65, one being more expensive than the other of course.

The name Cataclysm does seem to indicate the end of the world as we know it. I wonder what the hell they will destroy in the wake of this..