There Hasn't Been a Dragon in These Parts for... Uh... Two Days, Maybe?

The past couple of weeks on Operation Spread the Love have seen slow but consistent progress. 

Longtime SF&F novel fans may recognize the name
Ctuchik from David Eddings' The Belgariad. The so-called
"Magician of the Murgos" is the perfect name for
a Shadow Priest or a Warlock. In this case, a Shadow Priest.

I haven't jumped into any instances and I've kept mostly to myself while questing. Well, there's also the fact that I've not played altogether that much over the past two weeks either. An hour or two per day an average of 5 days per week doesn't exactly add up to much in MMO terms. Right now, however, that's good enough for me. 

The way I play means I don't really exit Rested XP*, so that's why my levels are as high as they are. 

Of course, something big did happen to one of my toons...

I'm going on an adventure!

And oh yeah, this happened too...

Uh oh. I think I must taste good with ketchup...

Yes, some Hunter thought it'd be a good idea to kite Teremus the Devourer to Stormwind, and a lot of lowbies (and higher level toons) got burnt to a crisp. And a bunch of bots around the Auction House and mailbox, but that goes without saying.

So, things are progressing. Sorta. Kinda. Maybe.

*Except for Hoots, who left Rested XP close to leveling to L25, so I figured I might as well finish that up before moving to other toons to play.

Meme Monday: Grumpy Old Man Memes

I was, well, a bit perturbed while driving this weekend by some of my fellow drivers. When you combine that with some grumpy old man memes that I'd been saving, we have a recipe for a Meme Monday.

Ha. There have been days like that at work.
From Imgflip.

Or if you go by the SWTOR method, you head to the fleet
and you start there at a shuttle bay. From Pinterest.

Good ol' Dana Carvey from his Saturday Night
Live days. That this rant was about redheads made
it even better. From Imgflip and SNL.

Ah, Burgess Meredith from one of the Grumpy Old
Men movies. Of course, I know him as curmudgeonly
Mick from the first three Rocky movies.
From Imgflip.

I know it's from Space Battleship Yamoto 2199,
not the original, but to me I saw the English version,
called Star Blazers. The captain of the Argo (seen
above) was named... Captain Avatar. From Imgflip.

It's not a grumpy old man per se, but you
becoming enough of a grumpy old DM
that you pull out one of the iconic encounters,
dating back to AD&D 1st edition.
From imgflip (again).

Meme Monday: Cold Temperature Memes

Yesterday I was sitting at an intersection, waiting for the light to change, when I espied this little quip on the sign in front of a local salon:

Yes, I was amused.

That inspired this weeks' Meme Monday. It's not that cold right now, in the 20F/-7C range, but compared to two weeks ago it's pretty cold. This winter in general has been much colder and wetter than usual --hello, extreme weather-- and so it was simply low hanging fruit for me to harvest.

Thank you, Ron Swanson.
From Thunder Dungeon (and Parks and Rec).

That's not spooky, that's just sad.
From Cheezburger.

Well, that doesn't make me feel any better.
From Funny-as-fuck via Cheezburger.

I can sympathize, Wyoming Police Department.
From the Wyoming (MN) Police via Cheezburger.

Again, I can sympathize.
From Imgflip.

This is the most accurate statement here, but...
thanks a lot, Einstein.
From Dailymeme-noah via Cheezburger.

Enjoying the Ride

Last night I spent some time doing something I've not done since November: actually playing in-game with friends.

Oh, I've been online at the same time they are, and even been in a group together, but either they were doing their own thing, doing boosting/getting boosts, or doing group content of some sort. Since they mostly were rushing on ahead in the Anniversary servers, there really wasn't much in common for us to work on at the same time. Even when they had gotten toons to L60 and were working on alts*, I'd kept a distance because they were frequently doing boosting of some sort.

However, last night was a respite from that because my Questing Buddy was playing with one of her kids**, and I noted that her kid had died. 

"Need a healer?" I asked.

"Not a bad idea," my Questing Buddy replied, so I switched to a Priest who was close to Darnassus and went up to Teldrassil to help out.

I spent the next hour or more following them around, healing and shielding them, while they quested inside the Ban'ethil Barrow Den and against the Furbolg encampments nearby. Once in a while I would pull threat due to the heals, so I had to use wands and the occasional attack spell, but I was perfectly fine providing a minimal amount of support to keep them upright. I had no skin in the game, since I wasn't trying to keep up with quests or catch up with leveling. It was simply something that I could do without disrupting their enjoyment of the game --or making it all about me-- so I could enjoy the ride for a while.

*At least one has an alt closing in on L60 as well. Go figure.

**The kids play on a free account, which works well since they only tend to play in the starter and adjacent leveling zones.

A Bit of a Shakeup

Having a week off was good for the soul, and as a consequence I've decided to make a few changes in my current stable of toons for Operation Spread the Love.

Hoots was named after Hoots the Owl from the
children's television show Sesame Street. Here's
a link to a clip of Hoots with John Legend. I think
I ought to work on a backstory for a bit, just to make
Hoots' name a nickname due to her obsession with owls.
This listing was as of February 2, 2025.

I'd originally intended to get all of the toons to at least L30 before I would begin to put in some separation, but I've decided to leave two toons behind at L20: the Shaman and the Warrior.

The decision to leave the Shaman is kind of self-explanatory: there was just too much mental baggage dealing with a Shaman, even 3.5 years after TBC Classic. I'm still going to keep that Shaman around in case I want to revisit it sometime in the future, and I'll hold onto the name Briganaa as well, but I doubt I'll be leveling a Shaman anytime soon.

As for the Warrior, it was a struggle for me to actually want to play one. I'm used to having a full mana bar or energy bar to work with and have it gradually get depleted, but the Warrior plays in exactly the opposite manner: you have to build up rage before you can expend it on various abilities. I've frequently found myself struggling to get enough rage going for me to actually, you know, DO something interesting. And if I can't get that rage up, the Warrior doesn't really feel fun to play. 

Maybe it's a matter of not getting high enough in levels to make a Warrior fun, but to me it certainly doesn't check any of those "fun" boxes on my "things to do" checklist. Warriors may be extremely popular to play because they're so overpowered in Vanilla Classic's raid scene, but I wasn't ever planning on taking this toon into any group content. There's too much pressure to tank in that scenario, and I wasn't going to deal with that.

So going forward I'm focusing on 8 toons instead of 10. I don't expect my leveling to speed up very much, given that the leveling curve itself is flattening out significantly, and I'm also planning on leveling professions along the way. I've never really leveled Leatherworking as part of my actual leveling process itself, because Briganaa was my Leatherworker and I only began working on that after she got to L70. I simply couldn't focus on professions until after I got to max level for the raid. Same thing goes for Blacksmithing; I've leveled it typically after a toon got to max level (in both Retail and Classic), so any bonuses from making my own armor kind of went out the window.

Tailoring, on the other hand, I've done numerous times, so I know how to fit that into my leveling process and take advantage of inherent bonuses available to a cloth wearing profession. Leveling a profession along the way also has the advantage of slowing down my own leveling process, because I have to divert attention to collecting materials necessary to keep my gear up to date, in as much the same way that a Rogue will work on opening lockboxes to level their Lockpicking skill.

***

Okay, that's out of the way. How's everybody else doing?

Uh... Well... I think my Questing Buddy's raid issues got straightened out, because she's had a few weeks' worth of pleasant raiding in Molten Core. Now, her issue is getting a Healing weapon that she doesn't have to fight all the other healers for in raid, so she's set her sights on PvP gear by getting to a high enough PvP ranking. I can only shake my head, because if it's not one goal, it's another. In her defense, she is significantly younger than me (still technically under 40!) so I salute her drive and focus. Me, I couldn't do that anymore, but she apparently can. I think she's also been listening to the audiobook version of Onyx Storm, the new Rebecca Yarros book, which apparently has yet ANOTHER cliff hanger ending. I guess for my sanity's sake, I'm going to hold off reading the series until it's finished, something I learned the hard way by reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time back in the 90s.*

As for the rest of the gang, all except for two have a toon at max level. Of the two, one still raids regularly on the Classic Era servers (hence the reason why she doesn't have a max level toon) and the other is busy with other non-WoW things, so she doesn't have a lot of time to get on and play. 

Of the players in my friend group, I am the farthest behind, which suits me fine. I think they've finally given up trying to talk me into accepting boosts, but even if they haven't, having 8 toons means I can let them run me through a dungeon and then I can park that toon for a week or more while I level something else. 

***

For a Sid Meier's Civilization fan, I'm simply not interested in Civ VII that is coming out right now. I'm happy that Christopher Tin came back to compose more music for the soundtrack, but I play Civ IV almost every other day, and I really don't have any interest in moving on to something new at this time. What I have seen of Civ 7 is that it is a lot more tactical and wargamer-ish than previous installations of the game; fine for some people, but for a grand strategy type of game that Civ once was, it isn't for me. If I want more wargame in my Civ style game, there's Rome: Total War or Medieval: Total War 2 to whet my appetite.

Anyway, that's where Redbeard's WoW Classic Anniversary is currently at.

*I never finished reading The Wheel of Time, as I threw up my hands and gave up on the series after A Crown of Swords. I bought The Path of Daggers, but when I sat down to read it, I just couldn't. I was tired of Robert Jordan never really moving the plot along and simply adding more and more complexity without getting anywhere. Apparently I wasn't the only RJ fan who jumped off the bandwagon during this time, but we were more than offset by an influx of new fans.

"It's Disney's Lawyers on Line 1..."

This email arrived tonight:

Yes, there's a bunch more after this part, but I didn't
screencap it.

Somewhere, I can hear John Ratzenberger's voice as The Underminer from The Incredibles: 

I'm just going to assume that Micro-Blizz intentionally named this Undermined just for that association. Well, that and The Underdark from D&D's Forgotten Realms setting.

All I can say is that I hope that Micro-Blizz vetted this properly with their lawyers, because Disney's own legal team is no slouch.

Meme Monday: Valentine's Day Memes for 2025

Yes, I know, Valentine's Day is on Friday, but I'd rather be early than late. Therefore, here's several Valentine's Day memes for gamers, both tabletop and video game variants.

The top right one cracked me up,
because our D&D group is in the middle
of the classic AD&D Drow modules.
From the Facebook D&DMemes Group.

Technically this is from Final Fantasy XIV,
but the "twink" moniker works for any MMO,
really. From Reddit.

Zug Zug!!!
From Dashiana's ArtStation website.
Seriously, go check out her artwork.

Given how often I watched my kids play
Breath of the Wild, I thought this highly
appropriate. From Reddit.

A Friday night? Probably just staying in. The weather
is predicted to be bad, and my wife will be returning
from a visit that evening, so likely not much going on.
From Reddit.

I thought this really cute.
From Memebase.