I will be off-line for an indefinite (but hopefully short) period. The AC adapter plug on my laptop appears to be caput and the laptop isn’t charging. I have about 20 minutes of battery left.
I will be investigating getting this repaired, which hopefully won’t take long. While it is possible to do things on WordPress with a phone, it is neither easy nor relaxing and besides, you definitely can’t play World of Warcraft on a phone (yet) so the whole project is on hold anyway.
More later.
As has been mentioned, Midnight, the next expansion pack, comes out in March. One of the highly anticipated features is customizable housing for players. This is something that has been on the wish list since the game first launched and Blizzard finally decided to put it in.
Aby of the above pictures should be clickable to enlarge. If they aren’t, too bad. On the left is my little piece of the world… of Warcraft. The middle is a wider view showing the surroundings, and on the right is a map of the neighborhood where my house is (look for the little silver arrow)
The guild I am currently part of is named Fallout, and the guild neighborhood is, of course, called Fallout Shelter. There are also public neighborhoods for people not in a guild, or who just don’t want to live in a guild neighborhood, and you can also create private neighborhoods for just yo and your friends.
At this point there isn’t much to do with housing. This is the beta version that they’re calling “early access” but it’s obvious there are already other features that will be added. For the time being I’m perfectly happy playing The Sims of Warcraft.
Edited to add – Of course after introducing all of the characters I’d been playing more actively, I picked up playing someone completely different.
I promise you there is an Orc Mage under that turban and those ridiculous shoulders. Guede is a Warsong Orc, one of the tribes that… blah, blah Black Portal… blah, Kil’jaeden and Gul’dan, blah, Demon Blood of Mannoroth, etc. The point is, he’s an OG orc as opposed to a Mag’har orc who only became a playable race much later. He is pictured wearing the Breezebinder’s Vestments from Mists of Pandaria (ca. 2012) which I have always kind of liked. I started Guede with a level boost from pre-ordering Legion? Maybe? Anyway, he is not one that I started from level 1 and played from the beginning but I’m still quite fond of the little guy.
People familiar with the Shaman class in Warcraft will see what I did there. I did, in fact, forget someone and it is a little shocking since this is another character I have been playing pretty regularly since the Old Days – my Bloodhoof Tauren Shaman
Yes, he is riding a tame water elemental in this picture. I felt he deserved something for being overlooked. Shaman and Paladin were originally faction-exclusive classes. The Horde had Shaman and the Alliance had Paladins. Shaman is another class the developers have struggled to get right over the years. I will opine on the glory days of playing an Enhancement Shaman, wielding the biggest, heaviest two-handed weapon you could find, and destroying the world with it but that will be another day.
Of course, in spite of the fact that Shaman have two perfectly viable damage specializations, I nearly always play mine as a healer. Odd that.
The last character I want to introduce individually is my Undead Warlock. That’s him on the left in the picture below, along with his demon minion Flaaroon. This little guy was the first character I ever made in World of Warcraft, and the first one I got to the original level 60 cap.
There’s a lot to unpack in that picture, especially for people unfamiliar with the game and I’ll try to get to that. First, I want to start at the beginning. As I said, this is the first character I created in the game. His name was originally Deadline, but with name changes required by changing servers a few times he has settled on Khabit. I’ve been leveling him and my Priest side by side for 20 years, on and off.
Like any good role-playing game, Warcraft has a crafting system. There are a long list of crafting and gathering professions you can choose, and Khabit is a miner and an engineer. The engineering profession allows yo to craft all kinds of interesting gadgets, including the goggles Khabit is wearing in the screenshot. A lot of the engineering gear has a strong steampunk-like aesthetic that I have always found appealing. It isn’t always the most useful of professions but it is fun. Mining, of course, allows me to gather all the ore and raw materials needed to craft all the insane creations.
Warlocks are a DPS class and have long been a trouble spot for the game developers in terms of balance and playability. The short version is, Warlocks have generally been pretty terrible right from the beginning, with the exception of some very bright spots for a specific talent specialization that I never use. In spite of that, they have so much cool-factor as a class I have never given up on them. The good news is, as a class, they appear to be in a pretty good spot at the end of The War Within, which means they are getting torn apart and completely redesigned in Midnight, the expansion coming out in March. This is a very Warlock thing to have happen; you spend all your time calling upon demonic forces, eventually it will bite you in the ass.
Whatever happens with the Warlock class in Midnight, I’ll be playing mine to the level cap sooner or later. He’s not a serious contender to be a Main, but he’ll always be around somewhere.
While the group below is far from the all of the rest of my Warcraft characters, these are the ones who seem to currently be along for the ride. Pictured, from left to right are: Whitelilly (misspelling unfortunately required by the curse of “That Name is Unavailable”) my Darkspear Troll Death Knight; Thornhelm, my Bloodhoof Tauren Paladin; Ragehorn, my Highmountain Tauren Warrior; Definitely, my Highmountain Tauren Rogue. The little hourglass near Definitely’s name indicates that he is a Timewalker character, which is to say he was created as part of a special event in the game and hasn’t merged with the regular timeline yet. In terms of the roles they perform in the game, and honestly I’m kind of noticing this theme for the first time myself, we have (again from left to right) Tank, Tank, Tank, and Pirate.
Anyway, that pretty much introduces everyone. I will now start throwing around names and jargon as if this brief series of posts has explained everything.
See, it’s working already. Give me something to talk about, and I’ll talk. Right now what I’m talking about is my second oldest surviving World of Warcraft character, my Priest.
Pictured above is my Darkspear Troll Priest. This is the character I have spent a cumulative 173 days sitting at a keyboard playing over the years. He was the second character I got to level 60, back when that was the level cap in the pre-expansion WoW days. He has always been a healer, even when it was completely insane for him to be a healer. Back in the day, when you chose your character’s talents, that was it. Changing them was possible but it quickly became prohibitively expensive. This meant that if you assigned your talents to be a healer, you were sacrificing the opportunity to take talents that would allow you to do more damage. A reasonable tradeoff until you start thinking about the fact that people playing Holy Priests (the most healing-focused of the talent choices) were occasionally going to be on their own and need to kill something. The benefit, of course, was that for any group content, you get an instant spot because no one played pure healers.
Anyway, I played this little guy exclusively as a healer from the base game, starting in 2005 until they started allowing characters to have two talent specializations you could switch in and out of in 2009. This also has something to do with why I ended up playing so many other different characters as well. Sometimes the grind as a Holy Priest got to be too much and I wanted to do something the easy way.
He was my Main (character) all the way through the Legion expansion and up to the Battle for Azeroth expansion in 2018 when I finally succumbed to the lure of expedience and started playing my Druid as my Main. Druids are also excellent healers but they have a great deal more flexibility in other roles and, in general, are much easier to play in solo content. It was with no little regret that I made the switch but I haven’t abandoned my Priest. He just follows a bit behind my Druid now.
Edited to add – Alert readers of my previous post may have noticed something of a curious discrepancy. I can practically hear my audience; “Hang on there, Matt the YakBoy, how can your Druid be a Zandalari Troll when you said you started playing him in Burning Crusade? Zandalari Trolls didn’t become a playable race until years later in the Battle For Azeroth expansion. What gives, yo?” Right you are Alert Reader! My Druid started life as a Bloodhoof Tauren which, prior to the Cataclysm expansion in 2010, were the only members of the Horde faction that could be Druids. When I got the War Within expansion several months ago, it came with a couple free “Character Services”, including a race change. He now identifies as a Zandalari Troll and I think we should all support him.
Edited further to add – Feel free to draw whatever conclusion you like from the fact the first two of my characters I introduced are both Trolls.
I constantly forget people actually look at this, and not only look at it but expected it to contain some evidence that I’m still alive. Among the difficulties of making this happen is I have managed to achieve a state where I’m not on fire, and my day-to-day activities are pretty repetitive and not at all interesting. With the goal of putting something up here more regularly, and also maybe accidentally saying something about myself and how I’m doing, I am going to start posting updates on my adventures in World of Warcraft1.
This year, in fact this month, marks 21 years since World of Warcraft launched. Since then there have been ten expansions, with the eleventh coming out in March, which is the biggest reason I decided to pick the game up again. The other reason is that it is difficult to beat when you look at it from a dollar-per-hour of entertainment perspective. A monthly subscription is around $30, and on the most active of my original characters, I have 173 days played2, plus or minus. Anyway, the point is, I have some free time, there is a social aspect to the game3, and this will unquestionably give me something to do that will relax my brain somewhat.
With the preliminaries out of the way, I am going to now dive in to my long and rich history with the game World of Warcraft. If this does not interest you, too bad, this is what I have right now.
We started playing World of Warcraft in 2005, not long after it first released, while it was still on the upswing of becoming the biggest multiplayer game in the world. The history will jump around somewhat as various characters move in and out, and I would like to think that some kind of coherent narrative will result but it may not, and I kind of don’t care. My first two characters were an Undead Warlock and a Troll Priest. When the first Warcraft expansion, The Burning Crusade, came out in 2007 I decided to level up a Warrior just for something different.
At this point I want to take a small detour into multiplayer online game mechanics. The traditional format for group content has three roles that a player can fill; the Tank, who stands in front, keeps the attention of the bad-guys and absorbs all the damage, the Healer, who makes sure the tank doesn’t die, and DPS (damage per second), who kill the bad guys. All 12 player classes in WoW can fill one or more of those roles, depending on what talents you give your character, etc. The point is, even though multiple classes can all fill the same role, the game-play mechanics of how they do their job are quite different. Balancing these classes and roles is a constant juggling act for the developers, trying to ensure that all the classes who can be tanks, for example, are actually viable as tanks, and also fun to play. Unfortunately they sometimes get it wrong and the Warrior class in The Burning Crusade was one they got wrong. Playing a warrior as a tank at maximum level was so bad I started an entirely new character at first level, and played them all the way up to the level cap just so I could play them as a tank and not have to do it on my Warrior anymore. It is this character I am here to talk about today.
Pictured above is my Druid. He is level 80, which is currently the cap. He is a Zandalari Troll4. He is named Orzabal because I was scraping hard to come up with a name and a Tears for Fears song came on. Being one of the names I am least satisfied with, Orzabal is one of the few of my characters who hasn’t had to change their name at one point or another. Druids are very versatile characters; depending on how you set their talents you can be a tank, a healer, close-combat DPS, or long range spell-caster DPS. The overwhelming majority of the time, I play as either a healer (my preferred role), or a tank (if I want a break from healing). I will be speaking more about Orzabal and his adventures as I get him tuned up for the release of the next expansion and, as I said, I might even accidentally talk about my own life every now and then if I’m here anyway.
On Monday, October 6, 22 months since I started the process, I became officially disabled. After all the endless fields of red tape, bureaucracy, and non-responses, the money showed up in my account. No fanfare, no notification that I’ve seen yet just, *poof*, direct deposit.
The implications of this are still sinking in. This has been the overshadowing issue in my life for two years and it’s over without even a party popper going off. I’m not complaining about the lack of fanfare, mind, it’s just adding to the stunned disbelief I’m feeling right now.
This is unequivocally good news, something that has been absent for a long time.
I think I probably haven’t mentioned this anywhere else – after something like two and a half years in the process, I have my final1 appeal for Social Security disability later this month. The irony is, the anxiety produced by the hearing may very well prevent me from effectively communicating why I need disability. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I can be dysfunctional enough to demonstrate how dysfunctional I am but not so dysfunctional that I botch the whole process. This is a delicate balance I refer to as the Nugent2 Point.
Anyway the whole thing has kicked me right back into survival mode, which means I’ve been spending as much time as possible hiding from everything. I’ll try again later.
Please allow me to fill in the blank space between early July and late August. First off, I have to say I thought it had been much longer than that since I had written anything here. This last month was a long year.
Sometime back in June we learned that the mega-pharmacy chain we had been using was going to close and all our prescriptions would be shifted to another mega-pharmacy chain unless we specified somewhere else for them to go. This would have been our third mega-pharmacy chain, and really there isn’t much difference between them, but this one was a bit further away than was convenient so we instead had all our prescriptions transferred to the pharmacy at a mega-grocery chain that is closer to where we live. The kind of choice in the consumer market our government’s economic policies have worked for years to achieve.
I want to take a moment here to talk about the Swiss Cheese Problem. This is a topic of frequent conversation in health care and, I suspect, management circles in other high-risk professions as well. We’re all human and everyone makes mistakes, like the holes in a slice of Swiss cheese. You’re never going to get rid of those holes in the individual slices so what you do is, you build systems that stack slices on top of one another. If something falls through the hole in one slice, it gets caught by the one below it. The difficulty is, every now and then, by sheer chance all the holes in the individual slices line up and something drops clean through. This is the situation I found myself in over the last month.
The pharmacy that was closing was supposed to transfer my prescriptions. They didn’t. The new pharmacy insisted that I had picked up a refill of my medication. I hadn’t. During all this, Dr. Psychiatrist was out of the office and unavailable. The result of all this was that I was out of my heavy-hitter antidepressant for about a month, and out of all my medications for 2-3 weeks. I have been on at least one antidepressant for at least ten years so facing reality without any kind of chemical filter was challenging. Also, in addition to two different medications that help turn down my sympathetic (fight-or-flight) nervous system, I have been taking a combination serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) / norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitor (NDRI). The physical withdrawal symptoms were rough.
The good news is, all the medication issues are resolved and I have a reasonable supply of everything again. The automatic refill service at the mega-grocery chain pharmacy even seems to work, which is nice. The bad news is, I have essentially been starting from zero with all my medications again. I am feeling much better and much more stable than I was but Dr. Psychiatrist estimates I have another couple of weeks before I’m back at a steady state.
Best healthcare system in the world.
I am not going to delve into the irony of celebrating the independence of the United States from England while the country is busily installing our first king ourselves. Anyone likely to be reading this shares the same existential dread I do but that is a different conversation. What I want to talk about today is explosions.
I don’t know if the brain-stem level enthusiasm for blowing things up is uniquely American or something that is just a product of the recklessness of youth but either way, people just don’t let up. Fireworks are, as far as I know, illegal county-wide now but that doesn’t really seem to have discouraged anyone.
The hypocrisy coming off this post is obscuring my screen, so allow me to justify my change of stance. Not just change, I suppose, but polar reversal. I was as mindlessly enthusiastic about blowing stuff up in my youth as anyone and, like most American males, the recklessness of youth lasted well into my 30s. Since then, however, I have had a number of experiences which have led me to change my position. The key experiences, unsurprisingly, were working in an ER, developing a hyperactive startle response1, and owning a dog. As I have aged the risk to my own personal fingers, toes, ears, and nose has diminished considerably of course but one still has a certain sympathy for the people who will spend the rest of their lives, starting tomorrow, unable to count to twenty unassisted. The startle and the dogs continue to be an issue in the household. Having a ninety pound dog trying to hide underneath you because some yabbo in the street set off a firecracker is a unique experience.
I suspect nothing is going to change how my fellow Americans choose to celebrate their rapidly vanishing freedoms so if anyone needs me I will be hiding under the bed with the dogs.