20 days of WoW blogging Day 05

 This one has been hard for me to really decide upon. I have banged back and forth on it for a while, trying to decide whether I wanted to do something humorous, or to do something serious. Surprisingly, it was a hard for me to decide. I would like to think that I am funny, and some days I even am known to be funny, at least in my own mind.

In the end, I decided to be serious. The item I decided on is part of the reason I originally decided to try to begin to make gold consistently on my original server. I saw some guy riding around on this guy with a couple of his friends. I then later found out that he even had a couple of vendors on his back which was even cooler in my mind. Finally, finding out that he had a repair dude on his back made me giddy with glee. I might even have squee’d a little though don’t tell anyone.

Without further ado: Traveling Tundra Mammoth.

Edit: Thank you to the person who notified me that the picture was not working properly.

20 days of WoW blogging Day 04

Day 04 – Your best WoW memory

I am not sure what my best WoW memory. I have had a lot of really good memories as I look back at my time here. I have had the opportunity to do a lot of cool things, met a lot of great people, and even learned a few things about myself. With all of these different things it is hard to come up with one particular thing that I would consider my best WoW memory.

I think I will talk about a memory I remind myself of when I get frustrated with different things in the game. I am not known to be the most outgoing person on the game. You won’t find me talking a lot on chat most days because I don’t go out looking to talk to people. Now this isn’t to say that I want to play a single player game. If someone talks to me I will talk back and from I’m told I can even be pretty interesting and insightful. I don’t know that I necessarily believe that, but hey it made me feel good.

Anyway, Best WoW memory. I am often annoyed by the fact that the guilds I have been in do not often do things together. If you are a special snowflake, you are allowed into runs, or small groups get together and do things consistently on their own. Because of my lack of outgoing nature, I have not really been a special snowflake, nor am I often part of one of the splinter groups.

I often am left to pug things like Baradin Hold (BH) or Vault of Archanon (VoA). Back before Wrath died I got frustrated after missing running VoA for several weeks in a row. I got it in my head that I was going to run a VoA raid all on my own. I’d done the fights enough to know what is needed and how to do it. It isn’t like the fight was hot and heavy, and only rarely did I ever see a wipe in it. So I began /2 calls for a VoA run. Surprisingly to me, I got a pretty good number of requests for invites right off the bat. I had my tanks and heals within the first few minutes, which was awesome because of how rare they could be. After filling the DPS with a couple ringer friends, we ran off to Wintergrasp to smack us some bosses (or at least one boss).

As we were getting gathered, I did have to ask some of my friends a couple of questions like how to set a lootmaster, do raid warnings, and the like. Feeling slightly foolish as I asked the questions, I quickly learned what needs to be done and got it all set up. Buffs were done, and off we went. After a mis-cue on the first trash mob that roams around right at the bottom of the stairs I was a getting really nervous. The bodies were rezed, or people ran back in and I waited for people to ragequit /leave party. None did, a few jokes were made and people continued forward. The group was able to get through the trash with no further problems, which bolstered my confidence a bit before we got to the boss that we were going after (it is a bit foggy to me now which it was, but I think it was the fire dude).

Feasts were dropped, buffs were applied, tanks co-ordinated on when the switches in taunts should happen, and off we went. By this point, my heart was pounding blood in my ears, and I could barely keep my calm as it began. Amazingly (to me at least), nothing bad happened. The dude was popped like the big loot piñata that he was, and the lootmaster tossed out the gear after rolls were made. I even ended up with a piece that I could have disenchanted.

I couldn’t believe it, nothing bad had happened. I had survived my first attempt at a raid run. Now I don’t have any illusions, I have no experience at raid calling, nor do I pretend to think that I am any good at that sort of thing. Having never done it and a bit of a lazy streak, I doubt I ever will, though on occasion after that I have been known to set up and run a VoA here and there. Now that Cata has dropped and been around a while, I will probably someday set up a BH run or two. Hopefully those runs will be added to my memory of the first VoA run I set up.

20 days of WoW blogging Day 03

 

20 days of wow blogging day 3 – First day in WoW

 

Ok, my first day in WoW was kind of a long time ago. Also, I have started and stopped a couple of times before I ever really hit my stride in WoW. I am pretty sure my first character ever was Skerril the Human Rogue. I remember thinking Holy Crap this is hard right at level 1. I was able to level my way out to about Westfall at level 12, before giving it up as a lost cause. I also know I tried a Warlock, and Paci my druid who persists to today.

Instead of trying to remember my first day in WoW, I am going to talk a little bit about early impressions of WoW from the standpoint of looking back and remembering what it was like. I cannot say that these memories are not warped by time, some may be completely inaccurate, but I leave it to you, dear reader to determine reality vs. fantasy.

Things I remember that actually almost kept me from ever really getting anywhere was WoW was how absolutely difficult it was to get started. Back in the early days of Wrath when I started, the beginning area still had mobs that aggroed you and would beat you to a pulp because they would gang up on you; man were there a lot of them too. I ended up learning some very hard lessons, like dying over and over is a part of the game, and I even used a technique that had me run as far into an area toward a quest goal as I could before I died, and then ran back and continued my run trying to get as far as I could before I was killed again by the hordes of troggs, defias thieves, or rat dudes that filled the area I was questing in.

I also remember thinking how the game was essentially solo content. Or at least to me it was. I knew a couple of people on the server, but they were already max level and were busy, so only popped by to see me for a few minutes, throw a buff my way, pat me on the head and send me on my way to certain death. One of these times I remember my friend running me through the stockades instance in Stormwind. As we ran through it, her destroying everything in sight and me staying behind just collecting all the stuff and meager xp all I could think was this could not be the way that Blizzard intended these instances to be. Why would the developers put so much work into creating these instances if you couldn’t run them when you were at the level where they were relevant? I knew that some people had friends that were of equal level and played together, but I didn’t see how two people could master one of these instances on their own, they were made for five people to run, not two or three.

Eventually I gave up on Alliance for a while and went over to the Horde side where I found my home for a while.Before making my way back to the Alliance.

20 days of WoW blogging Day 02

Why did I decide to blog?

This for me is a very interesting question. Why did I start to blog? I have long professed that I am not a writer. In fact, some of you readers may agree with that statement. I have no training as a writer, I have spent very little of my time writing anything at all other than the required papers, documents, letters, emails and the like that any person is forced to write as a part of living.

I decided to begin WoW, Am I Lost not long after I left my last MMO Final Fantasy XI. I am very good friends with person who played FFXI with me, and we spend many an occasion having long and deep conversations about the game, its mechanics, lore, economy, other players, events, what have you. When I eventually got to the point in FFXI that it was no longer fun, and was more a chore to do than anything else I talked to him at length about hanging it up.

In the end, while I did hang it up from a FFXI standpoint, I found that I really couldn't or didn't want to hang it up from an MMO standpoint. I had some other friends who played WoW, so decided to try there again. I had tried a couple times in the past, but not found the right combination of game and people to get me clicked in WoW over other MMOs. This time I did. I joined a guild that my friends were in, got into some friendly competition over over leveling with another person who played with me, and found a home. In vain I attempted to convert my FFXI friend to WoW but couldn't do it. Too many disparaging remarks had been made about WoW, mechanics, graphics, and player base. I had found none of them to be true in the long run, but he was not so easily swayed.

So I found myself playing a game with a great group of people all around the country, but none close enough to talk to that had an inclination to talk about the game and their thoughts about playing. I looked around at the people I knew and was with on a daily basis. There just wasn't the interest in the game that I had, co-workers, friends, my wife, all sort of looked at me askance when I began to pontificate on a zone, the mechanics of fishing, or how there is a cost to gathering that some people who play the auction house just do not seem to understand.

After a while I got tired of the funny looks and out right running away when I began to talk about WoW so I stopped voicing my thoughts. But they continued to bubble inside. I even found myself having conversations in my head when driving home from work about some of these very topics. I knew I had to do something or I was going to start talking in my sleep about WoW which probably would frighten my wife into leaving me once and for all.

Then one day I was searching for information on something and I came across a blog. I don't remember who's it was, but as I read it I thought to myself, "What a great idea! I can write a blog that will let me get my thoughts out without being put in a loony bin." And so WoW, Am I Lost? was born. Actually, the original name was WoW I am Lost, but when a friend created my banner, he changed the name and I liked it better than what I had come up with so it stuck. The rest is history.

20 days of WoW blogging Day 01

So while trolling around other blogs I click here and I click there, usually looking at what other people are writing and saying. Often times I get to a point where I have no idea what path I took to get to the blog I am on now. The other night I was on one of these kicks. I was looking for information on my DPS as a DK, but then saw something that led me to something else that led me to a blog about Warlocks. I decided to look a bit more at it because I had been leveling a Warlock a bit and was curious what there was to be said about them.

That is how I found myself on Spellbound, a blog written by Saga who has been playing a very, long time (in my eyes at least). At first I was interested in the information posted about the Warlocks, but quickly became captivated by the different subjects that she hits on in her posting. I actually have even gone so far as to add her to my ongoing blogs to look at daily. I will link her in my side bar with this post so you too can enjoy her writing.

Why do you care about this? What got me writing about it? Well, it all comes down to this one post. About a month ago Saga posted a 20 Days of WoW blogging thread that has been picked up by a number of people. I like the idea and have decided to do it myself.

Without Further ado:

Day 01 – Introduce yourself

My name is Chris, and I play World of Warcraft on the Malygos server. Depending on who you talk to, my main would either be Michelinea, my Death Knight or Paci my Druid. I do not isolate myself to just two characters though, and am known by many names on many alts. For whatever reason, I find that I enjoy trying out and banging around on many of the different classes to see how they work, what they can do and what not.

As far as faction/race, I originally started WoW on the Alliance side, but didn’t stick. In fact I tried it two or three times before moving over to Horde and finding a home for a long time there as a Tauren. Only when friends moved on to other things and games did I come back to the Alliance where I make my home today.

Outside of WoW, I am a project manager by trade. If you watch American sports, you probably have seen commercials for my Company, but it isn’t for me to say. My main job is spent slowly herding all the cats that work on our software in the right direction. Not a bad job to have most days. When nothing goes wrong, I have a pretty boring job in fact. Sadly, that isn’t really my lot in life. Things go bump in the night all to often.

I also am a father and a husband. I am extremely lucky having my family put up with all of the crap that goes along with being a slightly middle aged gamer with entirely to many issues for his own good. My wife is an amazing cook and baker who has the goal to make as many great tasting things as she can to help fatten me up.

My wife  and I love to watch movies together. While we both love horror movies, we are also known to watch action, drama, many different foreign movies as well as the occasional comedy. Also, we’ve been known to lose whole weekends to television shows like the Big Bang Theory, Doctor Who, Criminal Minds, Red Dwarf, or Fawlty Towers.

We have 3 children, 2 teenagers and a little guy. The teens are both pretty typical kids, loud, boisterous and generally insane. Our middle child, a girl is especially good at making me furious and insane at the drop of a hat. I have never been as mad as I have with her. At the same time, she is amazing at making me smile at the oddest times. This can be a good thing or a bad thing. The youngest is a lot like his mother, cute, entirely too smart, and quirky. It is amazing to see where his mind wanders, which is really anywhere and everywhere.

Ok, I think that’s enough of an introduction. Day 01 down