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.