I Made It! Level 100 At last!

Well, I finally made it to level 100 today, just 5 minutes before I was due to go to lunch with Mom! I have to say I really enjoyed getting there although I've still got a couple of zones to quest in! I've completed the Explore achievement and the Questing achievement for the first four zones so I'll be off to Nagrand next time I log in.

One problem I really must get around to fixing is my Iron Trap - I have it on the scroll wheel for speed but occasionally I forget and this happens!

I'm pretty sure Lieutenant Thorn was not at all impressed with my trapping skills! 

I have no clue what I 'should' be doing now I hit 100 but my guildie Set, has an alt that's just dinged too so he's going to show me around Tanaan Jungle this week. He's such a sweetheart and so patient when I mess up. It will be just like old times and that's what I was hoping for when I returned to WoW. Now I just have to persuade some other old guildies to pop in occasionally and we can all have fun together!

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How I Feel About World of Warcraft Right Now

DC Universe Online Character

I started playing World of Warcraft in the middle of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and played constantly until the middle of Mists of Pandaria. Somewhere along the way, I lost the first guild full of people I thought were friends but we rebuilt and I made a whole new bunch of friends. It wasn't the same though, the new bunch were lovely people but we didn't have an obvious leader so we just poodled along, doing various bits in game together in a very haphazard way.

Eventually I found myself so wrapped up in gold making and blogging about the Auction House, that I began to feel my guild obligations were intruding and I found more and more excuses not to do group content. I let my subscription lapse early last summer but I resubbed for a month just before Warlords of Draenor was released. I got my Paladin main to level 94 and my warrior to 92 before my month ran out and I've been meaning to resub ever since.

WoW just doesn't have the pull it used to have for me now though. I haven't played since before Christmas - not through any conscious decision but more because I am distracted by trying to build an online income for my future and if I'm not working or reading about that, then I'm vegging out in front of Netflix, crocheting like a crazy old lady!

My Baby Bank Alt

I thought I'd resub when the WoW tokens became available but I haven't yet. I begrudge paying almost 40,000 gold for a token when I can get one for 20,000 gold on my US account! Unfortunately, I don't have Warlords of Draenor on my US account and I really don't want to pay out for that until I know I am going to play! It's a catch 22 situation - pay for WoD on US account & use cheap tokens or pay out in gold instead to play on my EU account.

The other thing that's suffered by me not playing is my podcast with Marcus Ty (the Journal of Marcus Ty) - I just don't feel right being on a show about gold making in World of Warcraft when I haven't played for almost 6 months! I think I am going to bite the bullet and go with my EU account though - I love podcasting with Marcus and once I have the current crochet project finished, I'm going to have to give it a break. Anything can become an addiction for me it seems so I have to pull back when I start accumulating a stash of materials that I'll probably never get through!

Will I start writing again on my AH Addict blog? I honestly don't know. I haven't kept in touch with the current gold making situation but from the few tweets I see in my Twitter feed, it looks like a tough proposition these days. If I find that I am making gold fairly easily then I will probably write about it but I doubt I'll ever write as frequently as I used to. That's a shame though because I am proud of what that blog became for a while and it's sad to see it just sitting there, unloved by me these days.

I haven't stopped gaming completely though - I've been playing Heroes of the Storm with Cold on his days off and some of the free games I review for One Minute Gaming have caught me too. Whoever it was who suggested Cooking Fever has a lot to answer for! I just opened my 5th restaurant in that mini ipad game and I can't see me stopping anytime soon!

Cold and I have also dipped back into Titanfall and Path of Exile recently. Titanfall was fun again after 5 months of not playing - I cannot believe how quickly you lose the skills so I was absolutely awful at it! We've just downloaded DC Universe Online to give that a try later today. My superhero is gorgeous even if I do say so myself and I love the character build options. The fighting and movement stuff is going to give me problems though I think!

I'll let you know how that goes tomorrow probably!

(500 Words a Day challenge, Day 3 Word Count - 711)

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Return to Stormwind

Last week I finally caved in and bought myself a month of game time for World of Warcraft. I'd been seeing so many tweets about the pre-expansion patch that I just had to go and have a look for myself.

I logged each alt to see what they look like with the new character model and I'm ok with my Draenai's. My main definitely needed a new face though so I took her straight to the barber shop. Not sure the screenshot above is her best angle, I think she's half asleep but believe me, it's much better than the new version of her old face!

Two of my three gnome alts are lowbies so I've already deleted one and once I move everything over to another alt, my little banker gnome will be deleted too. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my level 86 Gnome Rogue though. I don't play my Rogue very often so I may leave her for now and decide later.

After scrabbling through all their banks and rearranging some stuff, I took my main over to the Blasted lands to have a look at the Dark Portal event. She's a Paladin and I've been struggling with her for quite a while but out of all my alts, her toolbar was the least empty so I did a quick shuffle to fill the gaps and headed out.

I'm pretty sure my DPS was rubbish but she felt more comfortable to play & I wasn't struggling to kill the mobs. I get the feeling that the mobs are fairly straightforward for everyone though so that's not really a good indicator!

I got a few gear upgrades too so her item level is around 500 now - I really hadn't done much gear chasing in the whole of Mists so it's nice to see it creeping up.

I've barely even looked at the Auction House either - I decided to make myself actually play the game rather than just one small part of it. I only have 30 days and I don't want to spend all of them in the Auction House! I am a returning addict though so this will be a good test to see if I can get back to enjoying questing, dungeons and maybe even some PvP.

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Warlords of Draenor & Other Games

It's been a full & exciting few weeks for me since I got my new PC and the super duper graphics card that came with it! Just last week, the NDA was lifted on Wildstar so I can reveal that it was that game that had me so fired up to get the PC! I've been playing it a fair bit but I am struggling with some stuff.

It's not an easy, stroll through zones, collect XP type of game by any means! Oh heck no, this game is making me work for almost every single thing and I'm actually enjoying it! It's taken me a few tries with different characters to find a class I like straight off - strangely enough, given my problems with melee in WoW, it seems the Warrior in WS is my best class so far! I've pretty much decided to buy the pre-order for Wildstar in the next week or so but I won't be giving up on WoW either!

Blizzard announced 20th December as release date for Warlords of Draenor but have set-up the free level 90 boost as available with pre-orders now. I won't be pre-ordering for a while yet as I have plenty of other options to be playing in the meantime. Maybe I'm in denial or just straight disbelief but December? really Blizzard? You rushed us through all those patches so fast, I got burned out & totally discouraged because I couldn't keep up and now you're going to make us wait almost a year for new stuff? And you have the nerve to ask me to pre-order now? Yeah right! We all know my answer to that although I'm too polite to type it out here!

You may have noticed my last few posts have been about free iPad games - this is linked to the One Minute Gaming segment I've been doing - and I have to say, I'm having a blast playing all these 'silly' little games! I've got a few really good ones coming up, thanks to some suggestions from Mike & Scott plus I've found a few myself.

Also this last 2 weeks, I've been in St Louis and the first week of my visit, we enjoyed the excellent company of Selltacular & his wife, Goooomba - they popped over to St Louis to see us & we pretty much spent our time eating or trying to decide where to eat! It was great fun though & was wonderful to finally meet some twitter friends for real.

I've also been having a little dabble in League of Legends - it's very different from anything I've played before and my first impression is that it's all my WoW PvP nightmares built into one game but I'll give it a bit more of a try before I decide for sure!

Another game I played quite a bit before my trip to USA is Path of Exile - it's a bit like Diablo 3 but it's totally free. I haven't played much Diablo 3 but if PoE stays free then I don't think I'll be worrying about buying D3!

I also managed to get into an  Elder Scrolls Online beta just before my trip - I think I managed a couple of hours before I had to do something else and the game grabbed me so much, I haven't even been back! I will give it another chance if I can but I won't be paying for it on my current impressions.

So yeah, lots of new games on my horizon, all opened up by the new PC but also by the possible really long wait for Warlords of Draenor - Fall? Really? Bah!

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