Well! Since the last time I wrote a proper blog entry with a theme and everything, we’ve gone 7 of 7 bosses in normal-mode Firelands, and I finished off the Molten Front quest line. I was about a week behind the main wave of people finishing that, in part because I went on a trip in the middle of July, and in part because there were some days when I just couldn’t bring myself to do the dailies.
I started out doing the quests on more than one character, but by the end I was just doing them on Leafie. It was taking me the better part of an hour on Leafie, and she is overgeared for simple dailies. She goes feral, smacks something until she has 5 combo points on it, Ferocious Bites, and it’s dead. All of the other characters I do the quests on take much longer to kill things. (Poor Aegidius takes forever. He has crap gear. He needs the Molten Front items far more than Leafie does.)
By the end, the dailies were soaking up all of my non-raiding play time. I am aware that if I let it, the game can occupy every single waking hour I have. So I have some rules: I don’t log in before 4pm on the days I’ve set aside as project days. 45 minutes to do unstructured stuff, four and a half hours of raiding, then my husband is usually home from work and I feed him & spend time with him. Those dailies ate every single one of those 45 minutes. I couldn’t do anything else.
Each individual quest was probably fun only the first two times I did them. By day 30 I was loathing them.
I finished them this weekend and then relaxed into some truly fun old instance running with my guild mates. We set out to get the dungeon master achievements for the guild. I had fun working on some Wrath reputations with Leafie and smacking things around. It was fun to visit old once-familiar content and chat about silly things that happened in it with my guildies. And what’s more, thanks to the RealID cross-realm grouping feature, I could do with with Trax! Yes, I was once again terrorizing innocent dungeon NPCs with my pancake-loving erstwhile partner in crime.
All this relaxation, possible because the dailies were no longer hanging over my head.
I realize that is a self-inflicted wound. A more enlightened person could have ignored them from the start. I wanted them over with, however. Yes, indeed, I am the sort of person who eats all of the vegetable on her plate that she doesn’t like before moving on to the one she does like.
Oh crap. That was what I was supposed to do this weekend. I was supposed to restock the guild flask factory with cauldron mats. Gah. Well, tomorrow is not a project day. Tomorrow I get to binge and do silly things if I want to.
On the topic of Firelands… Tier 12 is a lot easier than Tier 11 was. A lot. The only truly annoying boss is Alysrazor, and she can be learned in a single evening. (Executing perfectly takes longer.) Ragnaros isn’t all that difficult until phase 3, and no, I’m not just being an epeen-waving eleet raider there. Ragnaros requires careful planning from your raid leader for the transition phases, then a solid algorithm that everybody understands for phase 3. It’s a dance but not a hectic, stressful, unforgiving dance the way, say, Nefarian was. (The incoming damage on the phase 2 pillars was, pre-nerf, ungodly in the 10s. And no, I don’t mean the 20% nerf, I mean the nerf earlier in patch 4.1.)
I healed all of normal T12 with exactly two pieces of heroic T11 gear. The gear requirements are not stringent. The execution requirements are (with the exception of Alysrazor) not stringent. The fights are actually fun. There are no interesting characters among the bosses and the scenery is bleah, but you can’t have everything. The dance you execute every week doesn’t make you curse the Blizzard designers. That’s a major improvement.
I’m okay with T12 normals. I’ll let you know some time this week what I think of T12 heroics.
I still understand completely why WOW has lost a million subscribers since Cataclysm, though. Tier 11 was with us for seven long months. People who’d been enjoying an accessible raiding game through the last half of Wrath were slapped in the face by T11. An accessible T11 that everybody knows has been nerfed is too little, too late.
