From the Mage's mouth

Hello adoring audience, your normal writer Jed has been sidelined for numerous reasons that he has assured me are not made up or pathetic. He asked me to cover for him I've chosen to pretend that he isn't a complete slacker and have taken pity on him. So you get to enjoy my amazing writing. Who am I? Why I'm the amazing, outstanding, and oh so awesome Archmage Jedem!

You may recognize me from the image in the banner of this blog. Sadly that photo is from years ago when I was younger and slightly less experienced but as often happens to people, I've come a long way since then. Why these days at my disposal I have several weapons of mass destruc.... uhm pretend you didn't hear that and if the mages guild asks you, you have never heard that term before. Let's just say that I am even more awesome than I used to be. Why am I here writing this blog post instead of off adventuring in the past Draenor or saving some damsels from distress or drinking many wonderous alcoholic beverages? Well like I said, Jed is a slacker. He asked me to regale you folks with stories of my amazing adventures. That bum knows how to appeal to my one weakness, talking about my awesomeness.

Blizzcon prep

Last year I wrote a Blizzcon post with all sorts of details about what I was planning on doing. I wrote it because it was my first Blizzcon and I wanted to make sure I had my plan set out so I could make sure that I didn't miss out on anything. Now that I've got one con under my belt, I think I've gotten the hang of it. There are a lot of people out there who are going for the first time and so I figured I should help them out a little with a list of things to do before or at the convention to fully enjoy it all.

So without further ado, here is my small list of tips for Blizzcon goers:

Gotta heirloom'em all

They should have renamed the 6.0 patch to the Heirloom Patch. I say this because since the patch went live I've done nothing but try and get heirlooms from Garrosh Kills on all my characters. Some I've gotten through groups I've put together and some through awesome people on twitter organizing groups. I've yet to get one through the new group finder because sadly most of my groups fall apart after one wipe or because people think they can overpower mechanics and as we all know...that rarely works. At least I can cry myself to sleep holding the heirlooms I have.

So a lot of heirlooms, a lot of changes to classes, and a Halloween holiday event. Blizzard has definitely provided us with a lot of content in game to keep us busy until the expansion release date which is almost upon us. Throw Blizzcon into the mix and suddenly October has been a very busy month for most of us! With all this activity it's been fun to see people who stopped playing WoW, finally log back on after a long time. They are usually confused at all the changes and are often asking questions in guild as to how to do stuff or what things are.

Random Musings

Sometimes I think I should post more but I can't figure out what I want to write about and then when I think about a topic I can't find the words to convey what I want to say. This is why my blog posts have been...lets just say few and far between. It sounds nicer than non existent. I am sadly having this problem with a lot of projects I have going on. I just can't find the words I want to use. It makes me the sads.

In an effort to force myself to write something I have decided to just post whatever random thoughts I have floating around in my head and see if I can make a blog post out of them. Bear with me, it may not be the most cohesive blog post I've ever written but hey no one reads my blog for a well written post anyway. So...uhm buyer beware or something.

The new year

It's been a bit since my last blog post and a lot has happened since that time, both in and out of game. The last time I blogged I talked about how Blizzcon was awesome and how I had a great time and met all sorts of cool people. Wow, I really am a slacker when it comes to writing blog posts. =(

But we all knew that well before now so too late to pretend otherwise. So whats been going on ingame for your dear old Jed? Well I've been flexing like crazy in Siege of Orgrimmar! I've met a bunch of new and cool people and wiped repeatedly with them on bosses/trash/random falling deaths. Some of the people are from twitter and some are from friends of friends who are from twitter. Hell some of my raid team, I can't even remember who is friends with who and how they got into the raid. I just know that they are now people on MY friends list that I send invites to.

Honestly Flex raiding is one of my favorite things to come out of the entire expansion. We always have room for a few more people as long as they are either a healer or a dps, our tanks are pretty set and we have back ups in place already. So if you're alliance and you'd like to flex it up with Jed, we flex Wednesdays 5-8 PST and Sundays 3-6 PST. Hit me up on twitter or leave a comment and we'll get it all worked out.

In other ingame news, Ursin was FINALLY CONNECTED! While this is not a server merge, its the next best thing! We were connected with Andorhal and Scilla and since the connection we've been listed as a medium population server the majority of time! So if you've ever wanted to alt it up with Jed and the whole low pop server situation scared you away, that's no longer an issue! I've been slowly working on getting my flex team to roll an alt on Ursin or to transfer an existing alt over. So far it's been working and we've gained a few new members. Always cool to see people online and doing stuff in guild. =D

Out of game theres been a lot going on. The biggest thing is that I am currently living in Zurich, Switzerland. Yes, you read that right. Switzerland, the land of chocolate, hidden bank accounts, and beautiful locations! I've been blogging about it over on a different blog so feel free to head on over and check it out. I've posted a few posts already with some very nice pictures so hopefully you'll all enjoy them.

Next up, I am now selling that cool light up jacket that I wore to Blizzcon over on Etsy. For the moment there is only a black color jacket available but it's available in several different sizes. If these manage to sell I'll possibly add different color options. But clearly you folks need to buy all the jackets that I have available now. The jackets are pretty neat and the light from them is pretty bright without being annoyingly bright. The light wire also does not generate any heat so you won't have to worry about overheating while wearing it. It's what all the cool kids are wearing.

I've also started a Tumblr page where I've posted pictures of my car, Switzerland, and other miscellaneous things. So if you are on Tumblr feel free to follow me.

So that's what has been keeping me from writing blog posts. It was a busy end of year and so far this year is looking to be just as busy but I'll do my best to post more often here. So keep on keeping on people!

The Blizzcon Experience

Blizzcon. A place for the WoW players to mingle and share their love of all things Blizzard. This year I was fortunate enough to be able to get tickets to the convention. I think that the only appropriate word that I can think of to describe it was: AWESOME! I had written a blog post about how I was worried that my introvertedness would make an appearance and punch me in the face. Thankfully that was not the case! So buckle up my faithful readers for beyond this point lies Blizzcon! (Also expect a lot of name dropping)

Blizzcon Plans

With Blizzcon rapidly approaching I figured it would probably be a good idea to write down what my plans are going to. I decided to make it a blog post because I figured maybe someone out there would want to hang out or meet up or just walk by and awkwardly wave at me. With so many people from twitter going to Blizzcon, I'm sure I'll meet at least one person. I honestly debated blogging about this because I thought to myself "What if no one wants to meet up? What if someone is going to stalk me while I'm there?! What if no one cares?!" I ultimately decided to say screw it, I'm going to post this because I'm not going to let my scumbag brain win! So here are my plans for Blizzcon and with any luck I can meet at least a handful of you fine folks!

Thursday:
I fly into sunny California Thursday afternoon and plan on picking up my badge from the convention center After that I'll probably grab a bite to eat nearby and then I'll be heading to the Wow Insider Party and hanging out there for a while. If you'd like to hang out I will probably be live tweeting the event as soon as I arrive so people can definitely tweet me to see where I'm currently at. The party is open to everyone so everyone can attend!  I'll probably hang out there for a while until I either 1) get bored or 2) find somewhere else to go hang out and drink. I'm sure there will be plenty of people hanging out at the lobby of most nearby hotels so that is always an option.

Friday
Friday morning I'll obviously be in line to get into convention center along with everyone else but if you are further ahead of me in line and wouldn't be opposed to letting me cut in front of you, I suppose I could be nice and hang out with you a bit. ;-P
The convention panel plan is currently to hit up all the WoW related panels first and see all the things! I probably won't decide what I'm going to do until I'm waiting in line to get into the convention center because that's just the kind of slacker that I am. Now Blizzcon itself will take most of the day but afterwards I plan on heading over to the Twisted Nether Blogcast party and hanging out/drinking with all the cool attendees. This party is also open to everyone whether you blog, read blogs, or are illiterate! I expect to see all of you lovely readers there!

Saturday
Obviously more Blizzcon WoW panels during the day but at night, well at night it's going to get awesome. Since they have not announced who the closing musical act will be and chances are I won't be interested anyway,  I'll be at Medieval Times Saturday night for their 8:15 show so that will definitely be awesome. Blizzcon attendees get a discount for Medieval Times so it's cheaper to go see a show now than any other time! They have dinner and a show for a cheap price, can you do any better? I didn't think so! After the show, I'll have to figure out what I'll be doing but chances are I'll be hanging out in the lobby of the Anaheim Hilton hanging out for a bit.

Sunday
Sunday is normally a day of rest but this time...it's time for BLIZZNEYCON! I'll be hitting up the Disneyland theme park for most of the day. I'll be getting the two park ticket thing so I'll be at one of the parks most of the day. Lots of walking, lots of park rides, and lots of silliness. Afterwards, depending on how tired I am, I could be talked into hanging out with people. I'll also be live tweeting so if you're wandering around the park and want to hang out you can probably tweet me and see where I'm at.

We fly home monday morning so I dont plan on hanging out unless you're at the airport or on my flight.

That's pretty much my Blizzcon plans and most of it will be affected by how tired I am feeling, how much I've had to drink, and how little I've had to drink. If you see me walking around and want to say hi, please feel free to! I only ask that you introduce yourself first so I'm not left playing the "Who the hell is this" game. If you want to buy me drinks at any of the parties, I will definitely NOT turn you down but I may walk with you to the drink vendor and get a fresh drink. Not that I don't trust you folks but I don't trust you folks. I'll tweet out what cool geek shirt I'll be wearing each day so you can identify me in a crowd.

ALSO IF YOU HAVE NOT SHOWERED RECENTLY OR ARE NOT WEARING DEODORANT AND SMELL A TAD RIPE I WILL NOT SHAKE YOUR HAND OR GIVE YOU A HUG!* Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Now if I smell a tad bit ripe, you will have to put up with it as I am an internet celebrity!(in my own head)

It's going to be a fun time and I m definitely looking forward to it. Hope to see some of you there!

*Tongue in cheek btw, while I would prefer nothing but nice smelling people around me, it's a con and things like that are out of my hands.*

Virtual Flexing

A little bit ago I wrote about my low population server and I listed out a few things that I felt that Blizzard could do to help out not just my server but all low pop servers. Included in that list were the suggestions to merge servers and to open the current tier for cross realm raidability. Two weeks ago Blizzard released not just one but TWO things that I feel will help out all low pop servers when they go live in the 5.4 patch. The two things: Virtual Realms and Flexible Raiding. Do Blizzard developers read my blog and think I have great ideas? Probably not but at the very least they are finally doing something to help low pop servers.

Blizzcon Feels

Blizzard has announced the dates for this year’s Blizzcon: November 8-9. What does this mean? It means that this year there will be a Blizzcon in Anaheim where hopefully we will get all sorts of new info about the next expansion for WoW/Starcraft/Diablo/Lost Vikings. I have always wanted to go to Blizzcon and see all the cool stuff in person but logistics have made it extremely difficult. However this year is different. I turn 30 this year(I know I’m a baby to some and old to others) and my lady love asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate and I told her I wanted to go to Blizzcon. She has agreed to make it happen for us so if we can get tickets we will be at Blizzcon in November!! We booked a room and once the tickets go on sale we will be camping out in the online queue to get tickets.

Of course immediately after reserving the hotel room I looked at twitter to see who was planning on going to Blizzcon. There were several people made the decision to go and there were some on the fence about whether they could go or not. Sadly there were a few people who either couldn’t make it or were choosing to not attempt to go. I was excited about the prospect of meeting some of the people who were going to try and go to Blizzcon when suddenly my brain decided to be a scumbag.

For those of you who are new around these parts, I have made mention before that I am an introvert (shocking I know) and while I tend to have a few extrovert tendencies I tend to have social anxiety hit me often. It’s why I have been on twitter for 2 years now and I barely have 5000 tweets compared to people who have been on for a quarter of that time and have triple the amount of tweets. I tend to spend most of my time watching the conversations going on between people and often I don’t see any place where I can join the conversation. Most times I see an opening I the conversation where I can join in, I stop and think about what I’m about to say and over think it. What if what I say isn’t relevant? What if they hate what I said? What if they just keep on talking and ignore what I said?

Well I started thinking about Blizzcon and possibly meeting some of the people I interact with on twitter and the social anxiety started kicking in.

It honestly reminded me of a scene from the movie “How the Grinch stole Christmas” when the Grinch is debating showing up to the Whoville Whobilation:

Grinch: (after standing grumpily with his arms crossed) All right. I'll swing by for a minute, allow them to envy me, grab a handful of popcorn shrimp and blow outta there. (heads for the door, then stops abruptly and returns nervously) But what if it's a cruel prank? What if it's a cash bar?! How dare they! (scowls, then calms down) All right, I'll go. But I shall be fashionably late. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes! (groans in frustration) Definitely not. (firmly, heading for the door with his hand behind his back) All right! I've made my decision. I'm going, And that's that! (shows his hand) Ah! Had my fingers crossed.

My brain started asking me similar questions. What if people don’t want to meet up? What if I meet them and they hate me? What if I make an ass of myself? What if I do or say something that causes a large number of people to unfollow me on twitter or stop reading my blog or listening to my podcast? Damn it brain why can’t you just let me be happy????? My brain had me thinking that maybe I might have made a huge mistake in wanting to go to Blizzcon.

Thankfully the awesomeness of actually being at Blizzcon outweighed all the things my brain thought up. I will be at Blizzcon and I will see all the cool panels in person and just maybe I might even participate in a lore question thing or a contest or something. I will be at Blizzcon! If any of my readers are going to be going as well and want to meet up and hang out at the bar, let me know! I plan on having a great time and if I can meet people that’ll be awesome but if I don’t, I’ll still have a great time.

Have Jed, will travel

Well the last post I had written decided that when I sent it to myself it was NOT going to send and so I lost what I had written so far for this post. I think it is a sign that what I had written was crap and that I shouldn’t force anyone to read what I had written. Point made universe, point made.

Here is the basics of today’s post:

Who: Me, possibly you, maybe you, definitely you, oh and you.

What: I’m a bored 90. I like helping people. I’ve decided to offer my services to the WoW public! This means that if you are a lowbie trying to run instances, I can help you out. If you’re coming back to the game and want to know whats changed, I can help you. If you are a healer and want to run old raids but can’t solo them, I can help you. If you don’t know what to do at level cap, I can help you. In a group with friends and need a tank for something, I can help you. Can’t quite solo a difficult quest mob/rare, I can help you.

Where: Thanks to cross realm zones, it can be on my server or your server or that other server over there.

Why: I like helping people and along the way people have helped me with things so I have decided to pay it forward and help others. I get nothing out of doing this other than the satisfaction of knowing that I have helped someone. You aren’t obligated to help anyone else out along the way but if you did it’d be neat.

The details:

I decided to do this one day after spending a few fun hours in Ulduar with a cool Disco Priest and her husband. They had been trying to solo Ulduar for achievements and the mount but they needed a little boost. Having both the 10 and 25 man achievement mounts from Ulduar, I can say that I know my way around that place so I offered up my dk to help out and we managed to get many of the achievements that they needed. This got me thinking about how many people in game have the desire and drive to do things like old raids or rep grinds but have no knowledge about how to go about them.

My guild raids one night a week and the rest of the week I am usually putzing around on alts either leveling them or working on their professions. This causes me to have a lot of time in game where I am bored and looking for something fun to do. Most things are more fun with friends after all. I tend to run parts of the LFR on 3 different characters and always love having someone I know along with me to make it more interesting.

I have a few alts still at 85 that I wouldn't mind leveling through instances/questing with friends. Currently sitting at 85 I have an enh shaman, resto druid, ele/resto shaman, warlock, warrior, spriest, guardian druid, and windwalker monk. At 90 and looking for gear I have a frost mage, frost dk, brewmaster monk, combat rogue, and fire mage. These are all alliance BUT for my horde readers, I have an 86 frost dk that I'd be up for questing/instancing with along with several lowbies from level 20 to 70.

I know to some of my readers this may seem like an elaborate scheme to do something nefarious...but it isn't. I have amazing people in my guild who will gladly help me with stuff when I ask and I know some people out there don't have access to this level of support. I want to help people in the hopes of bringing balance to the force only without the dismemberment and large scale genocide.

In conclusion if you want some help with stuff in game, add me to your friends list: Jedem#1828 and let me know who you are so I can make a note next to your name. Then as long as I'm not in the middle of an instance or on limited time, I will be more than happy to help out. If you want to just chat about stuff in game, I am also down with that. If this is all for naught and no one friends me, well at least I will know that I have tried to do something good for the community and I guess that'll have to be enough for me.

Thunderous Fury

This is a post that I have wanted to write for two years; in fact it’s something that I’ve been working on for over 5 years. What the hell am I rambling about you may be asking yourselves. Well I’m talking about [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]. The very same item that is often linked by trade chat trolls. Now I am not just linking it because I want to troll you all. I am talking about it because a week and a half ago this happened:

Days of Future Past

Today I am going to talk about several different things and hopefully it’ll seem like I have coherent thoughts when I write (I don’t) and it will all blend together to make a good post. (it won’t) So buckle your seat belts boys and girls and prepare for the trip of your life!*

*Trip of your life may not actually be the trip of your life. Mileage may vary. If this is the trip of your life…you may need to have more fun in your life!*

To celebrate WoW’s 8^th anniversary Blizzard released this video that mashed up a lot of the previous game cinematics and to me it is awesome! If you haven’t seen it yet you should open up another tab/window and watch it right now. Go ahead I’ll wait.

Bad World PVP

Let me start this story by stating that the server that I play on is a pvp server. I’ve played on this server since it opened up in 2005 and as a result I’ve seen my fair share of world pvp. When I was a young mage questing in Redridge, it was a common occurrence to have high level horde raid the town and gank every poor lowbie alliance person they saw. On a pvp server you often get used to such douche baggery happening and when you are higher level and able to do something about it, most people often do. I can remember several pvp battles in Lakeshire, Menethil Harbor, and the ever famous Southshore. Sometimes the pvp fights were a nice distraction and sometimes they were a rather large annoyance but being on a pvp server, you knew what you could expect at any time. To me this made the game a little more deadly and exciting. Not everyone’s cup of tea I suppose.

Sadly as the years have gone by, my server population went from medium in vanilla to low in BC and has stayed there since. Every now and then it’ll pop up briefly to medium before sinking back into its usual low pop status. What does this mean? Well it means that while leveling a lowbie alt you’re more likely to see a group of mobs having a naked dance party than seeing a horde. In fact that’s one of the biggest selling points I tell people on twitter when I tell them to roll on my server to play with me! This is mostly true except for poor Megs who kept running into horde who managed to kill her often.  Anyway, because our population is so low, world pvp doesn’t happen that often. This is great for leveling alts but bad for people who want to pvp.

Pandarian Shenanigans

The Mists of Pandaria expansion has been out about a week now and I’ve been very busy in game seeing what it has to offer. I think that after all I’ve seen so, I am loving this expansion. The first day I might have caught a 24 hour type of bug that forced me to stay home…and play a lot of WoW. Damn those strange and random illnesses! (/shifty eyes)The first day I said forget leveling I’m battling my pets and so I ran around leveling up a battle team. I have yet to name my battle team or even the pets in said team but they are around level 10/11. I have collected a lot of new pets and currently I am under 50 pets to the 250 unique pets achievement. Woots.  

After a while I decided to go quest for a bit in Pandaria and see what else the expansion included. I had quested in the Jade forest on the Beta back before they changed the whole zone. Because of this I had seen what the starter quest lines were like and I think that the new starter area is a ton better than the old area. In the old starter area you would find yourself in the Jade Forest under attack from Hozen and you would have to defend yourself. The new zone has you take the fight to the Horde and their base on the island. I much prefer the new quests as they definitely convey the “we are at war” concept that blizzard has been pushing on us for this expansion.

Legendary Encounters

6 months of spending Saturday nights raiding, about 20 actual raids, countless wipes. In the end what did I get out of it? Well that’s easy to answer. I got to spend 20 nights have a great time with some really fun and awesome people. Oh and I also got a legendary staff that is full of awesomeness and win.

Why did it take 6 months to get a legendary for my mage? Well I went through the Twitterland Raiding community which is composed of people from twitter. We didn’t always have the same raid roster every night so we had to spend a lot of time explaining fights and figuring out why people were dying. Sometimes we didn’t even have enough people signed up so we had to spend time trying to pull people into the raid from twitter/real id friends lists and that ate into the raid time. Both of these reasons caused us to not always down every boss each raid night which led to not getting the maximum number of eternal embers/seething cinders/smouldering essences.

I decided to go through Twitter because one night in February(the 18th to be precise) someone else was running a Firelands run and I wanted to join it. Sadly I did not but while I was waiting to hear back I was in the Twitter Mumble server talking to Oestrus who decided that we should just organize our own group. This led to a lot of tweeting and real id friending and before I knew it, we had a Firelands raid. We had a great time and I met a lot of new and fun people who wanted to run Firelands with me whenever I ran it.

I wrote a post about running Firelands with Twitter people back in February and how much fun I had. Looking back at it now, I have had even more fun since then. Not long into the Firelands runs I decided to take a page from my vanilla playbook and spend the night drinking and killing fire bosses. Back in vanilla, I ran Molten Core with the guild on Saturday nights and several guildees and I would drink together and have a great time killing stuff. With Firelands feeling like Molten Core 2.0 I clearly needed to drink! This quickly spread amongst some of the raid members and became our Saturday night tradition. I would drink and some people would join me and we’d have a good time. If we didn’t down everything, well at least we had a damn good time.

I definitely could not have done this alone and so I get to the most important part of this post. This is the part where I thank everyone who showed up to the raid whether it was just once or whether they were there every single night. A big thank you to the following: Rowann, Oestrus, Poneria, Hestiah, Asherrylie, Hempia, Velidra, Rooster, Dee, Lemon, Sidecar, Rofer, Rilandune, Exlucis, Ekinara, Aero, Pix, Kia, Saz, Munificence, Thyro, Penguin, Stellery, Megs, Haitia, Askevi, Lurien, Matticus, Macaroni, Kitsuno, Sikaros, Finalflame, and everyone in my guild who tried to down rag for me. If I missed your name please let me know and I will gladly add you to the list!  

If anyone would like to watch the Livestream I did of the turning in ceremony you can click here.

Community Fun

Back in July 2011 Blizzard announced that they were activating the much talked about Real ID grouping feature that would allow you to group with your Real ID friends for random instance fun. When I heard about this feature I instantly though "Sweet I can run randoms with twitter friends so they can see how awesome I really am and want to be my friends forever!" Blizzard then decided that they would make the Real ID system use your real name and verily the twitter community took up arms against this invasion of privacy. Some of my readers will remember that I posted about the Real ID feature when it was first announced, along with the huge controversy that came along with it. I honestly didn't have a problem with it but I also don't have a one of a kind super unique name like some people out there.

Well the Real ID announcement was pretty cool but you could only run random 5mans with Real ID friends, which was nice and all but the system was a little lacking. Yes you could get a full group of RID friends and not worry about having to pug in randoms but you couldn't run a raid with them or even run a battleground with them. As someone who grew up in one city in one state and then moved to a different city for college and finally moved out of that state, I tend to have a few friends that I am too far from seeing without much planning and travel. Real ID allowed me to be able to talk to my WoW playing friends regardless of the faction that they were playing. This alone was a pretty sweet feature.

When I was young

I came up with this post idea and decided on a title and since then I have not been able to stop thinking of this clip from The Lion King. You've watch it, you can't unwatch it! Anyway...moving on. Since summer started I have been working long hours, dealing with the frustration from recruitment, threatening guildees to get them to log on for raids, putting the finishing touches on my wedding plans to my Lady Love, and sacrificing gnomes to the Bioware Gods to let me into the Star Wars: The Old Republic Beta. After a while, all of these things tend to leave me drained and feeling a little burned out.

Sad I know. *Cue Sad Keanu picture*

Now normally this would be the part where I go on and on about how the game has changed and no longer fun for me and I am debating quitting for TOR. BUT thankfully for you faithful readers, that is not what is going to happen!

There have been a couple of things that have happened to me that have helped me cope with all of the above reasons to quit and I got to tell you, I actually am feeling recharged and ready for more WoW.

First off I decided that I would level a horde alt to see how different their horde quest lines were while leveling up. Since I'm sadly maxed out on character slots on my main account I decided to level on a different server (with no heirlooms/guild perks) and I looked around for a good place to call home. I ended up on Drenden, which is the home of Rades, Miri, Liala, and Narci, all of whom I enjoy talking to on twitter. After a little while I decided to transfer an 80 horde DK over to this server since he had been sitting around collecting dust for years. I'm not joking when I saw that his gear was appalling. He was leveled around the time when TOC was released and he had a lot of 5 man heroic/non-heroic gear from there. Looking at his gear was kind of like opening a time capsule and looking through it to see all the stuff that was cool at the time.

I server transferred him over and set about leveling him. Even with horrid gear, he was able to kill stuff rather quickly and I only had to spend a few gold on the AH to get him upgrades. While questing and running instances I was able to enjoy being in a guild without having to be the leader. I was just a regular member and it was a welcome change of pace. After 6 years of being the guy everyone in guild looks to for answers, comments, or anything and everything they need help with, it was nice to log in and not have to deal with that stress/pressure. Not that leading my guild is a huge source of stress, I just stress myself out and over think things. I am my own worst enemy. : /

Just wanted to make a note, I love my guild and wouldn't trade it for anything but like in real life sometimes you have to take a vacation to get away from things so you can appreciate them more when you return.

Well back to the story. It has definitely been a nice change of pace to just be one of the crowd and that has helped me relax a little. Mind you I don't just log on and head to that server right away, I play my mains first and if we aren't doing anything too exciting I switch to the horde server. It is a nice way to unwind.

Another thing that has helped rejuvenate me is all this talk of transmogrification. I know for some people out there, the game has taken a turn towards World of Dresscraft and honestly, I couldn't care what other people say. I've been playing for 6+ years now and some of the gear that I had previously worked so hard for can now be shown again without suffering dps loss. My mage will be proudly sporting his old MC raiding gear because that set was in my mind so awesome. My first raid experience was in MC and like they say: You never forget your first. I will be sporting the ever so sexy 6/8 Arcanist set, 1/8 Netherwind set (Helm), and 1/6 Field Marshal Regalia(gloves). For his weapons, I haven't quite decided what I will be wearing but since 4.3 isn't going live any time soon I have some time to figure it out.

Some of the chatter about the whole mogging experience is about how instead of giving us new content we are getting something so silly and useless. I for one welcome our new Mogging overlords. Why? Because this has been something that many vanilla veterans have been asking for since forever. We worked hard for our gear and to replace it with greens and have it sit around collecting dust or being vendored just seems wrong. I really wish I had raided Naxx because they had some of the coolest gear around and the level 80 Naxx just doesn't compare. I know some people will say that it is just a reason to show off E-peen or to brag about how great you are at the game but that isn't why I am looking forward to it. I will be the first person to say that I am not the greatest WoW player out there. But as I mentioned, I have been around for a long time and have had many memorable moments that I treasure and look back on fondly. Being the DPS who got the killing blow the first time we downed Ragnaros, being the person who could kite General Drakkisath to the Beasts room because we didn't have a hunter who could do it (and living through it), these are just two of those memories. If I can wear a mogged set that looks like the gear I wore then, it will remind me of why I play the game: to have fun and do crazy stupid stuff to enjoy the game.

Thats all Mogging is: a different way to have fun. The people shouting out against mogging seem to have forgotten that they play a game with millions of other people and not everyone has the same idea of what fun is. I can't wait.

It seems that talking about the olden days always make me ramble on a little too much and I think I strayed from my original topic. Well than, back to making me enjoy the game again!

The biggest reason why I am really enjoying myself again is a person. No it isn't my fiancee, my Lady Love who is awesome and all, but it is actually a new member of the guild. This person is a cousin of a guildee and this is his first MMO. Having him in vent and listening to him talk about the game, you can hear the enthusiasm and pleasure he gets from the game. This enthusiasm for the game is really contagious and after listening to him, you can't help but feel happy with the game. It reminds me of when I first started playing the game and how I felt like the world was so amazing and new and I could do whatever I wanted. An example of him being giddy and happy with something so simple: My Lady Love was running him through a lowbie instance on her mage and at the end she made a portal to Stormwind for him. He was in vent with us and he had no clue what the portal was and when he took it, he literally was speechless for a few seconds. He was awed by a portal. This was something so routine to most players that we don't even give it a second look. My fiancee and I laughed for a few minutes about that and we both felt a little special that we were able to make his day with something as simple as a run through of an instance and a portal afterward.

My Lady Love and I grouped with him several times along the way on our level appropriate characters and we ran instances together. Every time he ran an instance he was in vent with us and he could not believe the game was as cool as it was. We giggled and talked about when we felt the same way and for both of us, it had been a while.

When the world of Azeroth was new, everything was awe inspiring. From the sheer size of Ironforge to the fun escort quests where we felt like we saved an NPC's life and made a difference. Somewhere along the way we lose that sense of awe and we start becoming jaded about the game. We no longer look at the game as a game but as a job. Sometimes it takes a change of faction to appreciate the game, sometimes it requires playing dress up, and sometimes it requires a new person to remind you that the game we choose to play is pretty damn awesome. I have always liked WoW but there were times when I felt drained and just didn't want to deal with the trolls both in instances and in trade. But after all this, I feel like I am ready for more and I can handle anything thrown my way. It is a game after all, a truly awesome, fun, and magical game and I'm glad I was reminded of this.