Welcome to World of Wasteland

I sat down last night with a few blog post ideas bouncing around in my head.  Most of them revolved around Blizzcon (six weeks and counting), but when it came time to type them out I couldn’t get into it.  I’d lost that loving feeling.  If anything relevant was to come out of that post, it was this:

Blizzcon Tip: Book your flight now.  The prices have gone down from last week, but will only increase from here to Blizzcon.  Seriously, they were a hundred dollars cheaper than they were last week.  Get on it.

There I was, spinning my wheels as to what I should write about.  It’s like I asked on Twitter once – if you don’t raid, and you aren’t in the Beta, what are people blogging about?

Aha!  Zalazane’s Fall dropped on Tuesday.  There’s a World(ish) event I could get involved with, grab some screen shots, and post about it.  After all, you help the Trolls reclaim their land.  That’s pretty epic, right?  The Battle for the Undercity was impressive, so rocking it out with Vol’jin should be equally entertaining.

Let me say this about the event:  Fury Warrior was Furious.

I didn’t hate the event.  What didn’t I like about it?  For starters, it was pretty quick to do.  It couldn’t have taken the Dev’s very long to come up with that.  I was hoping for something that took longer than thirty minutes.  Really?  Catch frogs, talk to tigers, and toss bags of frogs off the backs of bats?  It made me want to get on my alt, come back, and kill every tiger I saw.  Second, it was very crowded.  During the epic final battle, I may or may not have been attacking Zalazane with great vengeance and furious anger.  I just kept checking my action bars until the little red dots on the icons turned white.  I’d unleash Hell until they turned red, then watched to see if the rest of the crowd had noticed that Zal had moved away.  I still have no idea what Zalazane looks like, it was that crowded.  A Fury Warrior that can’t see what he’s hitting isn’t that effective.

I may or may not have been naked in that picture.

Once the Achievement had been unlocked, I couldn’t even get myself to run this quest with anyone else in Team Merc.  I logged off, slapped Modern Warfare 2 into my 360, and killed a whole lot of people.  Even helping the Trolls couldn’t get me motivated to write.

However, that all changed.  During my morning commute to work, I happened to be listening to the latest episode of “The Instance”.  During said episode, Scott & Randy stated that they felt WoW was now in what they called the “Lame Duck” mode.

“Amen,” I preached to my steering wheel.  In fact, that very thought motivated me to post about Five Reasons You Shouldn’t Be Playing WoW.

• Your Class Doesn’t Matter – Take a look at your toon.  Now back at me.  Now back at your toon.  Now back at me.  Sadly, neither one of us will be the same when Cataclysm releases.  Between the changes to the Talent Tree for every spec of every class, Mastery Points, and in some cases changes to the entire class mechanic, the class you know and love will not be the same as it is now.  There’s no point in sweating theorycrafting your Wrath-build, because everything goes to zero once Cata comes out.

There are big changes coming.

• Your Gear Doesn’t Matter – Gear upgrades.  While this does little to put the lead in my pencil, and by that I mean my penis, most folks run their heroics and raids to improve their gear.  They’ll put up with stupid people, stupid mechanics, and banging their heads repeatedly against an encounter just for the chance to get some purple upgrades.  But now that word has come down that you’ll be replacing these worshipped purples with quest greens almost right off the bat, the balance between aggravation and reward flew out the window.  Raiding or running Heroics simply wasn’t worth doing, and ePeens across the game went flaccid.

It’s not the size of your Gearscore baby.

• Your Alts Do Not Matter – When the end game has you bored to tears, the advice that is often given is to roll an alt.  Try a different class / race / faction.  Cataclysm will offer new experiences for the 1 to 60 crowd, including new zones (North and South Barrens, double the fun), improved quest hubs, and an overall smoother leveling experience.   Plus, new starter experiences as well as new races.  Why would a person bother leveling now when it will be so much better when Cataclysm rolls out? There’s no incentive to get to 60 in the present content.

• There Are Other Games To Play – Want to get together with your friends for a social experience that involves shooting things in their face-hole?  Well there’s no shortage of that – Red Dead Redemption, Halo – Reach is coming very soon, not to mention a little title named Starcraft 2.  Still want your Fantasy Game?  Lord of the Rings Online has gone to the Free to Play mode!

• Real Life Rep Grind – Do you have a significant other who sighs when you sit down in front of the computer, and not in a good happy sexy kind of way?  Have you forgotten birthdays (like this idiot did) because you were too busy raiding?  Have relationships crumbled around you because you were chatting it up with that Night Elf chick in Goldshire (spoiler:  she was a dude)?  If so, you might have a problem. Even if you don’t, now’s the time when you should step away from the game and reconnect with folks.  Spend time with your partner.  Call up friends and hang out.  Unless they game as well, they’ll have no idea that the game is in a lull and you aren’t doing anything in-game anyhow.  They’ll think you can walk away any time you want.  Build those bridges, because Cataclysm is going to have you burning those bridges faster than you can light the matches.  You will disappear into your gamer hole for another few months.  But it was fun while it lasted.

EXTRA REASON:  Cataclysm Beta – If you have access to the Beta and you’re playing WoW instead, stop.  Go back to the Beta and get busy testing that thing.  You opted in, right?  Well get in there and start fixing the game.  If you signed up just to play Cata before everyone else, you’re a sucker.  The game is borked from here to Tuesday, so get in there and test it.  In fact, if you’re in the Beta and you’re not submitting some kind of feedback every hour, you’re doing it wrong and you fail at testing.  I don’t want to play a buggy game, so the quicker you testers get your thumbs out of your butts and get some actual testing done, the quicker the expansion will go live and I won’t have to make blog posts about why you shouldn’t be testing.

Are there more reasons not to play?  Are there reasons TO play right now?  Leave me a comment letting me know!

This is Herculano.  Bring on the Cataclysm.