"Beros, you haven't blogged in a week! What's up?" asks Mandie. Well, I took a few days off and went to Las Vegas for non-MMORPG game playing (playing near the WSOP, not in the WSOP, ftw). We've been ramping up the raiding again since I'm back and I was wondering too -- haven't we done anything exciting lately?
Actually, I've been spending a lot of time in game in the past week fishing. Yes, fishing. And yes, it's about as exciting as it sounds. Endgame is all about the raid and those high-pressure, high-teamwork moments. But you only get so many of them a week.
World of Warcraft gives you lots and lots of ways to spend lots and lots of time online. Grinding reputation with various groups, farming gold, earning honor points for PvP combat, raid prep. One of the big time sinks that I'd avoided was learning to cook or fish. These are the generic skills that anybody can learn if they are willing to invest the time.
Fishing in particular can eat up lots of time. Once you invest it, though, it gives you access to special types of "food buffs" that can give you another small edge in those high pressure endgame raids.
By the time I figured out that those food buffs were really handy, I was stuck looking at starting at skill level 1, going back to the newbie areas and grinding the skills all the way up. Every time I considered the prospect, I'd go farm some gold and buy the food instead, or beg it from friends who had put in the effort to skill up.
But I like to be self-reliant and therefore, there comes a time in any toon's lifespan when it becomes clear that you need to learn to fish. So, I headed over to Elwynn forest got myself a fishing pole and started casting & clicking.
Oddly enough, it was kinda soothing. The skill up points come quickly at first, but then much more slowly until by the time you are trying to get your fishing skill up over 250, it's a lot of casting and clicking. A few people warned me that they tried to catch up in fishing and by 150 skill, they were ready to pry their own eyeballs out. But I fired up iTunes, put on the headphones and found it was ok. And I also found that hanging around online fishing meant a lot of people came to me to talk about various raiding issues. Our plans, bosses to target, issues about progression, issues about loot, people who had issues with each other. Sometimes people need an outlet to vent to. I often get to be that outlet. It's just part of the role of helping hold the raid group together.
So that's where I've been. Fishing. And chilling out listening to music, with some minor soothing over other people's drama mixed in.
I suppose I could have done a raid report on Tuesday's run into Black Temple where we got our first kill on the extremely large demon Supremus. Honestly, it'd be pretty short, though: "went to Black Temple, didn't stand in the fire, got phat lewts, tyvm."
