Some Quick Updates!

Wow, so, uh, hi.

It’s been a little while, in the lull of the pre-expansion period that brings conversation about WoW away from the present and towards the future.

I have a few ideas to write about, now that I think I can schedule it in better. Last time I wrote here, I was transitioning jobs in the real world, and now that I’ve kind of settled in, things are hopefully moving to push me towards writing and content creation some more.

But first, I think it’d be fun to recap my last few months in WoW, because I hit some fun, amazing goals.

For one, I am currently at 35/36 on Mage Tower challenges! I never, ever, expected that I would get bitten by these so badly, but I love them. I also hate them, because they raise my blood pressure and make me angry, but it has been a great challenge. As of this writing, I only have Subtlety Rogue to do – I’ve done every other challenge successfully! My favorite is probably the feltotem challenge – it is the easiest but also one that requires a lot of attention to detail to get right! My most hated is probably tied between Agatha and the Magespear Twins. Agatha because the myriad of mechanics is sometimes a bit hard to untangle, Twins because between doing that on Affliction Warlock and Frost Mage makes it so irritating that doing it as Marksmanship Hunter or Balance Druid is downright simple and easy.

I GOT BLIZZCON 2018 TICKETS! I enjoy the years without a big WoW announcement, because it’s more of a party and I don’t feel like I have to go to as many panels and demo playthroughs. Plus, thanks to my girlfriend, we also have a tour at Blizzard lined up for that week, which is going to be fantastic I’m sure. It’ll be my first time spending a full week in the area for the con, so more chances to hang out and see things outside of just Blizzcon and the immediate area/related parties.

My guild did Heroic Argus! We’ve got our purple birds and have pretty much stopped raiding, which is the longest we’ve lasted without hitting hiatus.

I got a Void Elf to 110! Only allied race I have leveled so far, but I did enjoy the experience of leveling and have resumed leveling a Lightforged Draenei today! I took the Void Elf through what I would call the fun zone path (20-60 in Eastern Kingdoms, 60-80 in Northrend, 80-90 in Pandaria) so the Lightforged gets to go on the path of drudgery, doing Kalimdor to 60, Outland to 80, and Cataclysm to 90. As the internet’s foremost Cataclysm apologist, I am sure I will love it though.

Before the BfA alpha rolled into Beta, I managed to ding 120 on a Demon Hunter. I have purposely avoided Beta to this point, because I do want to have a semi-unspoiled experience through launch, but I also read a lot about what is there, which to me doesn’t quite spoil it like playing the near-finished content. The Alpha was in a pretty barebones state, and it helped that I had that two week window between jobs to play it in!

Outside of WoW, I’ve been a bit busy too. The new job has an option for weekend overtime, which I have been using to my advantage to ensure I have the money I want stashed away for Blizzcon as well as the next item on my list…

My new PC! Originally, when I first wrote about it a few months back in probably my least popular post ever (except this one thing I wrote about tank design in BfA, which got a lot of angry comments on Twitter from one person who clearly hadn’t read it :)), my plan was to buy everything and have it by March. Well, between the job switch and the GPU market volatility, I haven’t been able to focus on it. Until now! I’ve got my final specs set for it, and have resumed buying stuff. For those who are curious, here’s what I’ve got coming:

AMD Ryzen 7 2700x CPU
Asus Crosshair VII Hero Wi-Fi motherboard (it’s complete overkill, but I can actually use all 11 standard USB ports it has!)
64GB GSkill Trident Z RGB DDR4-3200 RAM (it’s pricy but fast and pretty)
EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 TI SC2 Hybrid (it’s watercooled out of the box, so it’ll have a lot of headroom to run very fast!)
Samsung 970 Evo 1 TB NVMe SSD (for booting Windows 10 and my main usage applications like WoW!)
2x Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SATA SSDs in RAID 0 (using these as a scratch disk for video editing projects and capture)
2x Toshiba X300 5TB Hard Drives in RAID 0 (using these for a Steam library and bulk storage for finished projects)

This is the first new PC I’ve gotten to build for myself in 7 years, so I am really very excited. Plus, with it, I will be able to resume video production and Twitch streams, since my current system definitely hates both of those things a lot. I’ll have it finished with assembly and running about 1 week ahead of Battle for Azeroth’s launch, so I will get to level to 120, gear up, and enjoy the new expansion at a very high level of fidelity.

For good, but also not-so-good news, I’ve also resumed going to the gym and trying to stay healthy. This is a very good thing, but the reason I had to isn’t. I found out I am possibly pre-diabetic. In the very low range of it, which is very easily reversible with some effort on my part, but it was not a happy moment. My dad, who died when I was eleven, did so because of age (he was 53 when I was born) but also due to a litany of health factors that put me at higher risk – diabetes, heart disease, the full gamut of such things. I used to joke, quite often in fact, about how I would probably die at a similar age to him (64) and about how my last birthday (I turned 32 last year) was the halfway point of my life. Which…is maybe not a good joke to make to your mother or girlfriend, by the way.

Well, I’m not really all that happy with the idea that it might be realized, that joke, and so I’ve been training and dieting in the hopes that it’ll make things better. So far, I’ve lost about 5% of my total body weight in the last month, which is a great result, and one that already stands to put me at a better chance of reversing the diagnosis. Plus, I generally feel better, which is nice. With the stress at my old job, I kind of gave up on my fitness habits, which was an awful idea, and was one of the reasons I stopped streaming and making videos. You could tell I was out of breath and red-faced, moreso than usual, and I hated the way it came across so clearly on camera and even just in audio.

But enough bummer personal oversharing, I think we are in for a fantastic summer as WoW fans! Despite the lack of new content over the last 6 months, we are in a spot where we are lined up to get a huge amount of new stuff very soon. And for once, I don’t just mean the expansion!

Blizzard has lined up a pre-patch with what appears to be a very interesting series of events, yes. However, I am more fascinated to see what happens to truly cap off Legion. There are more quests that can be done in Silithus, and we have to reach the point where our artifact weapons are decommissioned, which, other than some cool visual flair and a cinematic found by Wowhead, hasn’t really been revealed yet! The Mage Tower will be up 24/7 soon, allowing us to grind out those last appearances before the doors close on them forever! And then, yes, of course, August 13-14, we’ll have a global simultaneous launch of Battle for Azeroth, meaning that individual regions won’t have to tune out of their favorite WoW sites because they can’t play yet!

Before that comes though, I’ve got a few things planned for right here on this very blog! Here is a short list of what I’ve planned, and let me know how these sound to you!

-A Legion Review
-Continued reviews of the Mage Tower challenges
-Leveling Discussions
-Additional WoW Retrospectives (there are still a few expansions and the base game I haven’t done that for)

And probably more, but these are ideas I have actually given thought to and could likely write quite handily given the time!

I won’t make any sweeping commitments to being back full time yet or anything – I’m trying to be real with figuring out how to fit writing in (in truth, when I was writing a lot, I was doing so at my old job which is not a luxury I can afford anymore :)). But I do intend fully to be more regular with posts again, not just in two months when BfA is live, but in the lead-up!

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