Distractions, Distractions

Today has been a day for LoFi music.

Part of that is dealing with the unexpected stuff at work, part of it is the ice storm that's currently trying to switch over to snow right now. 

This is what it was like around mid-morning.
That's ice and ice pellets on the ground and
road. Not snow or slush. And I was not crazy
enough to go driving in it. (Photo from the
Cincinnati Enquirer.)

 

And part of it is just dealing with the hand I was dealt with in Classic.

***

I got on Card this morning, when nobody else was around (and at work there was a (very boring) all hands meeting talking about sales), and killed some mobs for the Frostsaber questline. I never really did any of those quests because I never really wanted a Frostsaber*, and to be fair there's a lot of quests up in Winterspring that I never did on Card, so there's plenty of quest opportunity there. Because of that, Card is about halfway to L63 right now, still not having gone to Outland, and at this rate I think she can make L64 fairly easily before the grind starts to get extreme.

But it's something to do, you know, when I'm not on Neve.

I did get on Season of Mastery for a bit, but I discovered that quick leveling does have one big problem: you outlevel your ability to make gold for training purposes very fast. Since you then have to spend time grinding crafting so you can sell it on the AH and make gold that way, it slows you down a bit on an artificial basis. Still, the pace of leveling is actually, well, fun. It's faster than the old Classic servers, naturally, but it just feels smoother, I guess. I haven't gotten to the mid-30s, which is where Classic really started to slow down (before TBC Classic gave leveling a boost with XP tweaks), so we'll see when I get there.

Those two things serve as a distraction, of course, because the big question mark is what to do with Briganaa. 

I've thought about taking her to another guild's raid that fits in more with my time slot, but some of the guilds I'd have considered either left the server or blew up and don't have much of a presence at all any more.

"What happened to Conquerors?" I asked when I heard that another guild, Midnight Souls, blew up a few weeks ago. "I haven't seen any of them around much lately."

"Oh, they imploded several months ago," someone replied. "No big loss if you ask me."

Considering I'd never had any bad interactions with them, I was kind of surprised.

So.... Scratch off two potential guild landing spots.

Even so, I'm not exactly sure if I want to just go raid somewhere else right now, anyway. I did raid with another guild's alts on Az for a while back in Classic, but when that raid stopped being able to down Ragnaros due to geared people leaving, I found out that other guilds don't have it as well as we did. And with people not really spamming LFG (or using the LFG tool) to set up dungeon runs as much these days, there isn't as much of a chance to get to know people before I'd consider joining a raid opening.

Plus, there's that little matter of running the gearing up rat race should I join another guilds' raids, and.... No. I'm good for now.

So I'll just pull Brig out of the garage on Fridays, and occasionally help out when my questing buddy needs a second for making spellcloth, but I think that Brig is going to just not be my focus for a while. I'm just not into the complexity of her rotation, and I'd rather not be told how to up my DPS by people I barely know. 

There's always the option of server transfers, but I'm not really interested in that right now. If I transfer anywhere, it's faction transferring rather than server transferring.

***

There is at least one option available that I've not fully explored: Final Fantasy XIV.

As nice as it has been seeing FF XIV kind of stick it to WoW without really trying, and that FF XIV has a ton of story that's (apparently) well done, there's a lot about FF XIV that makes me uneasy. The whole "stick a leaf on your name so people know you're new" does kind of bother me when you're trying to just kind of blend in and not be noticed. FF XIV does encourage people to help out newbies, but you know, I'd rather not be helped if it means everybody knowing you're new.

And there's the art part about FF XIV. You know, the part that screams "anime": bunny people, cat people, tiny people that have a vaguely childlike look about them. Thankfully, that last group don't make me feel as dirty as when I see the Elin in TERA.** There's the anime look of the humans too, which simply doesn't do it for me, because the little anime I watched were first generation anime, like Speed Racer and Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato. I don't have that generational connection to the genre and art that it seems a ton of people do now, so it's just not my thing.

Still, it is a possibility. If I can find a server that works for me. I already poked around enough to try to create a toon on my son's server only to find that they're not accepting new toons there now.

Oops.

*I did the raptor grind on Quintalan back in Wrath, so I knew what the grind meant.

**I still cringe when I think about it. The fanservice to the outfits in TERA aside, the Elin alone --as well as the players who "dress" their Elin in the most revealing outfits possible-- make me want to vomit. There's a reason why I uninstalled the game, and it has nothing to do with how my Elves looked while playing.

EtA: Frostsaber, not Wintersaber. Oops.