I'm Not Your Stepping Stone, Except When I Am

Note, this was written on Dec 21, 2009. I'm not sure why I didn't publish it at the time. It's still rather poignant and relevant, at least to me, so here you go...

*melancholy face*

(and sorry about the short, choppy "paragraphs", but this is how my brain is "working" today...)

I get the new LFG system.

I get the use of emblems, instead of (only) dropped loot and a DKP system.

I get chain running Heroics for emblems.

I get it, but I don't much care for it.

I don't have much chance to run "real" raids (10/25 man), simply because they can easily take a couple/few hours, not to mention the fact that I am barely geared to run most of them.

I've been a part of a couple of them, and they're kinda neat. (we killed Sartharion *no drakes left* and started running VoA not long before the timer reset) But these are kind of rare happenings...

Other than that, I'm going to have to run 5 man Heroics, which isn't very fun right now. Overall they feel awfully grindy and seem to be groups of 5 people using each other (as briefly as possible) for loot. Minimal conversation, planning or anything else.

First it was a bunch of over geared folks blazing through them so fast you could hardly keep up. Now it's mostly a bunch of under/moderately geared folks trying to blast through. (great for writing failpug blog stories, but useless for anything else)

I have had a couple runs that werwe fun, where we had (and DID) take it slow, look around, plan things out a bit and actually kind of enjoy the process.

Unfortunately, those runs are the rare ones, and with the cross server pugs, but no cross server chat/parties, you can't "keep" those fun players. At most you can run another instance with the same group, but even that rarely happens, even if you are interested.

That leaves the other sundry non-raid related things to do:

fish

cook

rep grind

rep grind

maybe a little questing

(Speaking of quests, the quest line to get the Winter Veil achievement "Fal-la-la-Ogri'la" has to be one of the most frustrating I can remember. That "Simon-esque" thing you have to do in Blade's Edge - The Relic's Emination is pure frustration)

Or you can

Go explore all of Azeroth

Play the auction house

Create interesting shapes on your fingers with papercuts

Or maybe level an alt.

*sigh*

*note as of Feb 18, 2009, I think the "Honor you Elders" questing is rapidly earning my least favorit holiday quest thing. It isn't as intensely nasty (except all the death runs into Org) as the RElic's one above, but the sheer number of annoying places you have to trudge to is just mind numbing...