waaagh, tuppence a bag, lame dance party, blizzcon, etc
We've been playing Warhammer intermittently, and it is fantastic in many ways and horrendously unpolished and painful in others. As one of those masochists who loves healing, I started out Disciple of Khaine, because what could be cooler than healing people with stabs? Well, apparently, a lot of things, because I neither heal people terribly effectively, nor stab people any more menacingly than a toddler brandishing a toothpick. Jason was playing a Chosen alongside me and we'd had great success duoing Public Quests with this combination, and joined up with friends from WoW to take down a few T2 Keeps, but quickly realized that as fun as Warhammer's RvR is, and as vastly superior as it is WoW PvP, it dries up pretty quickly when Order doesn't ever bother to take anything back.
Jason rerolled Marauder and I rerolled Zealot. What can I say, I missed they hair-pulling frustration of trying to play my Holy Priest in WoW PvP. (Have I mentioned that I haven't enjoyed a single thing about PvP in WoW ever since Burning Crusade came out and the whole introduction of the bullshit resilience statistic? Nothing saps the fun out of healing in PvP like being expressly forbidden from healing in PvP, and instead having to spec and behave like some sort of ridiculous healer-tank who "heals" by living long enough to distract the other team from your members while your team picks their members off. I threw out all my arena gear after season 2 and haven't entered a BG or arena since. But I digress.)
And holy hell, is Zealot fun. I heal people by throwing smoke bombs at them, for god's sake. Sure, I look like a hobo harlot, every time someone hits me I lose all my mice (no idea what the hell that's all about), and my spell cast animations look like the pain of disco, but it's 100% no bullshit no Blizzard catering to everyone and nerfing PvE for PvP and vice versa pure, unadulterated, RvR joy. I'm a crazy bird lady who can't kill anything on her own, but I like it just fine.
Warhammer on the whole is still extremely rough. The Public Quest system is great in theory but not always so hot in execution. If it could scale the difficulty based on the number of active participants it'd be far better, but I can just see a couple months from now the middle-level PQs being impossible to complete even at peak hours. The instanced dungeons are laughable, and from what I understand (my highest character right now is R20/RR16 so I can't speak to this myself) there is no PvE content at the endgame and no plans to change this, so once you take Inevitable City/Altdorf once, you've done it all. But maybe this is far more insurmountable a feat than I give it credit for. The achievements/tome system is wonderful; the XP scaling is abysmal. Some of the artwork is really nice and some of it is crappy (like the entire dwarven race, but then you can't top WoW's dwarves). The macro system and mod support is pathetic too. Not being able to see target of target or macro your spells and abilities sucks. But they do seem to be listening to a lot of feedback and acting on it quickly, so that's encouraging. Right now all of its pluses seem to coincide perfectly with WoW's minuses for me and vice versa so I see no reason to quit playing either. Greeeat!
Also for the lose: having to boot up into Windows XP to play Warhammer.
I've been running a "Retro Raids" group on Cenarius the past few months, which has been an equal mix of nostalgic, easy-going fun and the tiresome feeling of the chaperone who's taking the retards to the zoo. I completed my Atiesh staff though!!!, only two years late and on a different character/class than I originally set out to do, so there's something! Cerinne now looks like a crazy bird lady as well when ghost ravens randomly circle her head every five seconds:
Feed the birds, tuppence a bag.
Slowly but surely, I'm whittling away at all the achievements on her in preparation of 3.0.2 and Wrath of the Lich King. It amazes me that I've been playing WoW off and on for nearly 4 years, both factions, and I still haven't done everything in the game there is to do. Our guild is thisclose to defeating Kil'Jaeden, so at least there will be the relief of having cleared all available raid content before the expansion this time (last time round we hadn't even killed C'Thun, much less the better part of Naxx) but there are factions galore, obscure and exciting questlines, vast and remote zones still unexplored, tricky random non-combat pets that apparently only appear on the third new moon after Russia declares war on Georgia, the AQ scepter journey that I'm undertaking with a few friends in guild... WoW is unbelievably vast in scope. Some people hate it for this, and I can't blame them there. When my current hobo county courthouse records research lifestyle is over and I'm a workaday commuter I'll probably be right there with them. I guess that's why I'm enjoying knocking out all these achievements out while I can.
My migraines have intensified considerably in the past year; whereas I'd get one or two a year, I'd started getting three or four a month, and they'd started converging in a particular spot above my right eye, and even when I didn't have a headache, I still had a strange tightness above that eye, almost as though I were constantly in a Joan Rivers facelift "Surprise!" raised-eyebrow look (without the actual look; it just felt that way). The doctor prescribed a new preventative daily medicine and signed me up to have an MRI done. Side effects of new medication, he said, may be that carbonated beverages would taste slightly flat.
Oh, and a few other things. I checked the website for the medication and it contained the usual rundown of psychotic episodes, internal bleeding, death, permanent paralysis, etc. But more commonly, difficulty concentrating on tasks and the feeling that a word or concept was always just out of your reach. Well, that's fantastic. So far my only real episode was going through the drive-through with Jason and he asked me to grab some change for him from our change dish. I grabbed a fistful and stared at the coins in my hand; they were different sizes and shapes and colors, and I knew that these indicated different denominations, and these denominations were intended to be combined to form different amounts of change, but I'd be damned if I had the slightest clue how to design an appropriate algorithm for doing so.
The MRI a couple of weeks ago was just plain bizarre. After stripping down and inserting myself into a deep plastic cavern, I became host to the world's lamest, loudest techno dance party inside my skull. We're talking beats that made Wesley Willis' Casio presets sounds like overwrought Bach fugues. "All right, this test will last for ten seconds." Beep BIP beep BIP beep BIP. Okay, I think I can handle this. "This test will last for eighteen seconds." beep bop BIPPITY bop BIPPITY bip bop BOP bippity BOP Yeah, this isn't so bad "This test will last for four minutes." BONK BONK BONK BONK BONK BONK etc, for the next four minutes. Ouch. Was the test to see if they could give me a migraine? If so, congratulations friends!
Regardless, the medicine has greatly reduced the frequency of migraines, and the MRI returned nothing abnormal thankfully, but I'm still having to be extremely cautious around my triggers--a list that seems to be growing by the day. Red wine, my drink of choice, will sadly have to go back on the shelf, as even the mere smell of it--along with the smell of many things, I seem the be extremely sensitive to smells lately--sets me off on a tension headache that threatens to meander into migraine territory. Cigarette smoke is also extremely dangerous, but so is the air freshener that I use to douse it. TU's Homecoming game last weekend set me off, so I guess loud noises or possibly the artificial flavoring in popcorn are to blame there (or maybe both). And if GenCon was anything to go by--and this does not bode well for BlizzCon this week--I may be allergic to fat chicks in chainmail. (I kid, I kid, it was probably the unfortunate wine tasting at 10am that did me in.)
We leave for BlizzCon Thursday! Already planning on a full day at DisneyLand, which I'm pleased to see Lileks is featuring in The Bleat all this week. We've been watching lots of L.A. Confidential, The Shield, and Black Dahlia lately, which further adds to the excitement about seeing Anaheim/L.A. Well, maybe not The Shield, but the others. Jason instituted the Strike Team approach to shopping when we went to the mall in preparation of our trip: I get three wishes, and each store I want to go into is a wish. If he doesn't have to enter the store, it doesn't use up a wish. If he has to hold stuff for me, though, that's an extra wish. As soon as all the wishes are used up, we get the hell outta Dodge. I badly needed clothes since everything I own is now way huge on me and falls off my ass every time I move (no complaints there!) so I spent far more than I should have, but I at least have a bit of fall clothing to tide me over till after BlizzCon expenses are settled, and as long as I look far more fabulous than the slew of Fat Sylvannases and Fat Succubuses that'll be prancing around, then my work is done.
I'm still townhouse shopping off and on, but twiddling my thumbs only bides so much time. Hoping for New Year's now.