Cross Realm Boosts

So uhm there is a perfectly good reason why my last post was almost two months ago and that reason is uhm...well.. ya see...HEY LOOK OVER THERE! /Cast Invisibility /Run Away

The real reason is that life in Zurich has kept me rather busy and sometimes I just don't have the time to blog about things and stuff in the World of Warcraft! I am still playing and still raiding in the SoO raid instance(at a really late local time) and over all I've been having a good time. Lot of stuff has happened since the last time I blogged and I figured I might as well make with the yakkity yak blog stuff.



First off is the recent announcement that Normal and Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar are now able to be done in 10 and 25 person raids with people across realms. That is correct, you can now raid Normal and Heroic SoO with friends on other servers! This is pretty sweet because if you're short a tank, dps, or healer on a raid night you can now invite btag buddies to cover those spots! Now you still need either 10 or 25 people to do normal and heroic raids so if you have more than 10 and less than 25 people, you can only do Flex raids.

Since I am currently Flex raiding and have between 10 and 25 people, I don't know that I'll step foot into a normal raid but hey if any of you awesome readers wants to invite my mage into your raid, I'll gladly come along and pew pew pew all the things! I tried using Open Raid to find a group the other day and people are seriously stupid. It was waves of people looking for people who were 570+ ilvl and knew all the fights. Now on my mage I'm sitting at almost 550 ilvl and I knew almost all the fights from Flex difficulty. The people starting the raids basically wanted people who had all the gear they could get from the normal mode raid. Why would you bother doing a raid that you didn't need gear from? Obviously you wouldn't and so it said to me that the people who were looking for such high ilvls were NOT at said ilvl and wanted a group that would carry them through the raid. Or they were looking for people who wouldn't compete with them for gear that dropped.

Either way this made finding a group difficult and I said to hell with that! Honestly this behavior has been going on since cross realm was first introduced. At the time it was "LFM Firelands 390+ ilvl!" which meant that you had to be wearing all Dragon Soul gear to come to a raid that dropped 378 gear. Kind of dumb if you ask me and sadly it makes it hard for someone who is trying to find a normal raid and is sporting flex in all available slots.

I might have a few opinions about this behavior. Just a few.

Anyway let's move on before I rage anymore more. So boosted characters! If you hadn't heard Blizzard announced that if bought the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, you would get a free level 90 character. You get a one time boost to 90 that you'd use on an existing character or a new character and they would go from whatever level they are to 90!

In essence you're getting a current max level character that you can use to play with your friends at level cap. Raiding, Arenas, and BGs are now something you can do with friends who don't have a current max level character! Now obviously Blizzard saw how much people were looking forward to this and they decided to make this service available to everyone without pre-ordering WoD.

For the low, low cost of $60 you can boost a character to 90! No more of that whole leveling mess! Before if you wanted a friend to start playing WoW with you, you'd have to level an alt with them to keep them interested because honestly leveling alone your first time is no fun. Now you can just roll a level 1, pay the $60, and get a free max level character. That's a pretty handy tool for increasing your subscription numbers.

When it was announced that this service was coming there was a lot of outcry about it trivializing leveling and how Blizzard was selling out, etc. Blizzard released statements that said that they set the price at $60 so that people won't just use it on every single character they have and never level again. Leveling means something and so it's not a cheap shortcut. To everyone who is complaining about the service/price I just have this to say: "You're obviously NOT the intended target!"

If you can't justify spending the money on the boost then you shouldn't use it! It's not a mandatory thing! It's a completely optional service that was made available for people who do want to use it. Personally I won't be using it because 1) I enjoy leveling, 2) I'm at the cap of characters I can create for my main account, and 3) the idea of boosting doesn't appeal to me. I get a free boost when I get WoD that I'll have to spend some time deciding which non capped character I have will get the boost.

So that's my post! A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.