Fighting the ennui

Okay, so rather a long gap between posts. To some extent this is because the Guild Drama of last month rather took the find out of my sails with regard to WOW. There's been some raiding byt the remaining guildees pulled back from Zul Aman and retrenched in Karazhan, gearing up alts and taking a potshot at the bigger badder bosses .

For example, last Thursday we killed our way through the tower, downing Moroes, Opera, Curator, Hoofie, Aran and Chess before finally giving up after a couple of goes on the prince, not because we couldn't but because it was late and people were tired (and we had some seriously bad look; an infernal on top of Prince at 1% ...). However, that's really only once a week (getting 10 people is more of a struggle than before) and with the emphasis being on gearing up "youngsters" Andro's usually only on the reserve list (and not even that for the next couple of weeks as the raids are on days I can't make). Thanakfully, Brewfest gives me a little something to do, but Andro is now mostly cruising unil Wrath arrives.

I did a measure of levelling up an alt (my Paladin is getting to the point he could join in the Kara runs) but I've also been playing some hordeside, levelling a Blood Elf warlock and getting to see bits of Azeroth I've not seen before. The chance of playing in some old-world 'classic' dungeons at the right level is a novelty (we did Shadowfang keep a week or so back, and plan to hit BRD or Razorfang). Its a leisurely pace and quite refreshing, though even this has begun to wane a little.

I've never been one for playing just one game (though I'll focus on one) and initially played EQ2 alongside WOW (so when I was frustrated by WoW I switched to EQ, though I found it a much more frustrating game). For the last year or so my 'secondary' game has been LOTRO, though that didn't really get much play until the start of this year then for a while almost became my primary game (save for Wow raiding) until I reached the level cap and found options more limited again. I tried Age of Conan for a while (and hated it) and always had a mind to play Warhammer Online (growing up in Nottingham, the Games Workshop culture was ingrained in the gaming community and the boardgames club I played at included people like Jervais Johnson and various other staff). After Conan I was wary of starting up another game, but I preordered anyway and to date have been pleasantly surprised. A detailed review will probably be the basis of another post, but in short its the first post-WOW game (other than LOTRO) to draw me in and to just work. It still needs work, but it'll probably sate my desire for new gaming content for the next few months until Wrath appears (though some alt-levellign will still go on). It remains to be seen if its a game to stick with though ..

But what about the Wrath beta? As I mentioned a while back I have a key (two in fact, though I passed the second to Altmeister) and played it for a while. I found logging on to be a very frustrating process (getting stuck at login, or once in game) so its pretty much been unplayable. I guess with only having a single European beta realm (and that on a US server) it was always going to be over-subsribed, but I'd hoped to be able to do more than I have. Ho hum.