Timeless Isle
I admit it: I gave up on the Timeless Isle pretty fast. Actually, really fast. I would’ve given up on it even sooner if it hadn’t been for Cav, who insisted we kill some things and at least do some of the quests. It’s not a “I QUIT THIS FOREVER” sort of thing. As others have said, it’s a great way to gear alts, and Gawd knows I have a lot of them. It’s just that … there are problems. WRA is a high population realm, so what with the coalesced business and everybody and their mother being at the new Isle, I didn’t have a sense of “THIS IS AWESOME” so much as I had a feeling that was like, “holy crapbuckets, all the lag!” I had maybe 10 FPS at best. Elegon, is that you? Oh wait, no, there aren’t any sparkly star people around.
It’s Either Determination or Stupidity
Since I could click on a flagged Alliance instead.
Problem number two: sure, seeing others in an MMORPG makes you think that the game’s still alive … I guess. It’s just that, there’s practically nothing left alive on this island … oh wait, there’s a yaungol right there! Nobody’s tagged it! I’ll kill that! Well, that turned into “OH CRAP FIRE HELP OW BAD,” especially when three more yaungol spawned right there and aggroed on me. I guess that’s why the yaungol are still alive but hardly anything else is.
Problem number three: HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING FROM THE COMMANDERS IN THE BARRENS, BLIZZARD!? For eff’s sake, I am SO SICK of trying to loot and having to wait for like two minutes while everybody else does the same, because “That object is busy.”
Problem number four: I am also sick of specialized currencies and charms and crap, enough so that I’d shove my Timeless Coins in somebody’s eyeballs if I could. You want how many of these damned things again? Oh, I’ll give them to you, all right. IN THE FACE.
So basically if I’m going to keep my sanity, I gotta wait until the place cools down and becomes less “OOOH SHINY NEW” to people. Or go there at like 6 a.m.
I’m quite behind on the legendary questline (hey, at least I got my 40 trillium bars even if I haven’t done anything with them yet), so I haven’t paid much attention at all to the latest and greatest installations of it. At least, not until all my guildmates started showing up with WEIRD SHINY WINGS. Crap, man, weird shiny wings! Now I GOTTA finish this. A cloak alone is like, eh, even if the item level IS really high. Insufficient motivation there. A cloak that gives you WEIRD SHINY WINGS, though? Oh yes, oh yes, I’m interested in that! (FYI, if you are a tree, your wings will be on sideways. Sorry.)
Flex Raiding
The guild started the flex raiding for funzies, and we pretty much facerolled the place until the third fight.
Immerseus
Lightning Shield + Water = Volatile Toaster-like Goblin
Immerseus: easy as hell on Flex, although probably a nightmare on normal mode. I really don’t like mechanics that force healers to heal NPCs (in this case, good, purified, innocent and happy blobs) in addition to their team. I feel like, what with the sheeyit-ton of damage a raid dishes out, healers got enough trouble to deal with without having to nurse some NPC back to full health. Give me more than 300k mana, and then maybe I’ll change my mind.
Fallen Protectors
All the sads, not feelin’ ’em.
The Fallen Protectors: harder than Immerseus, but still not bad on Flex. I dread this fight on LFR, because you really do need to coordinate targets based on their HP, and Gawd knows that LFR’s not really all that hot at coordinating. In any case, we wiped them all out uh, I mean, we released them from their suffering. Right. I know that I’m supposed to feel bad about what happened to the Golden Lotus. But I don’t. It’s possibly the goblin in me saying, “You had it coming” for all the times they tortured me.
One of the things I like about this guild is that one of our raid leaders is British, so you get to hear him give commands/curse/whathaveyou in what is possibly the best accent ever. Getting told to target This Thing or That One becomes twice as awesome when it’s said in a British accent, trufax.
Amalgam of Wait, What Just Happened?
We were facerolling so well.
Norushen Amalgam of Bad Things: Oh man, I do not look forward to this one on any mode ever. EVER. I really don’t know why they say you’re fighting Norushen here, as he just sticks you in a shiny box that he may or may not blow up if he determines that the Amalgam is Super Bad or something. You’re actually facing the Amalgam and the adds.
This fight comes down to holy crapbuckets, puddles of something somewhere are hurting us bad but where are the puddles!? CAN’T SEE AND WE’RE DYING. Also, there’s an enormous rotating death beam, which is slow (and that’s nice), but which also seems to pop randomly, sometimes on your head (and that’s bad). And adds. Lots of those. Oh, and for some reason you start off at 75% corruption, which reduces your DPS quite a bit …
You’ve gotta work out who soaks up the evil bad puddles of hurtiness, as well as who uses the shiny golden orbs to reduce their corruption. Reducing the corruption means you do more of whatever it is you do, as well as enabling healers/tanks to soak up said crap. We did get it down, but the fight was definitely a sudden stop to the facerolling party we had been having up to that point.
That said, Flex raiding is pretty much the difficulty I imagine “normal” ought to be. But my standards are low and I like things easier than most, because I really don’t get what’s attractive about wiping 20+ times to any particular fight just because of one stroke of bad luck here or one bad choice there.
[Edit! I want to add an illustration of bad luck.]
Example of Bad Luck
YEAH, LET’S STACK GUYS
I got a shiny ring, and I almost cackled with glee – until I remembered that I have like, 900 gold total after my LAST round of reforging/reenchanting/regemming. It’s time to make all the alts donate every last spare piece of gold, man.
That Was an Accident! 
All I can say, is lol. 😀 This was an awesomely funny post!
Thanks! lol is all I say about a lot of things, actually.
Heh. Yeah, did Flex last night and I made an actual effort NOT to think about “oh god, what’s this going to be like in LFR?!” as it went, figured I had enough else to worry about. Boss #2 will be the big issue if the 66/33 phases happen as they do on Flex+ but then again, if there’s one thing LFRs are good at, it’s AoEing down stuff even when told not to. Problem I see if that the spawned adds won’t be clumped. If they’re clumpable, should be doable. Boss 4 may be an issue with prisons, too, if that mechanic survives, I wouldn’t be shocked if it doesn’t, though. Adds and puddles should be enough. #1 shouldn’t be an issue in LFR and I’m not sure about #3, LFR eventually figured out Durumu so it’ll just be a matter of what’ll happen when all 17 dps go into the phase simultaneously, I’m guessing there’s a limiting factor (portals only good for one person per phase, maybe). In that case, it’ll just be “if there’s a portal AND YOU HAVEN’T GONE IN ALREADY, go in.” Hopefully there’s something preventing someone from going back in, too.
Gah. You made me think about those fights on LFR. Mean.
YOU’RE WELCOME. You can sign up for therapy later.
“LFR eventually figured out Durumu”
Dude, what LFR do you do? You must be goin’ on Tuesdays only or something. PLEASE LET ME COME WITH. Usually by the time I wind up on the Durumu fight in LFR, the group is relying on a small core group with sufficient DPS to cover for the half of the raid who went down on the first maze phase. On the other hand, even I did finally figure out how to do the maze phase, and sometimes the majority of people do live! Maybe you’re just a lucky, lucky soul and you get groups that are more of the latter type.
“it’ll just be a matter of what’ll happen when all 17 dps go into the phase simultaneously, I’m guessing there’s a limiting factor”
I read somewhere (probably Wowhead) that there won’t be portals to click on, period – random players in the LFR will be randomly selected to Look Within.
What, you mean they’ve finally started to accept that LFR players can’t co-ordinate? Thank fsck.
I think they’ve started to grudgingly accept that reality. It’s kinda like how, for the longest time, they were like “HUNTERS ARE NOT POKEMON COLLECTORS” and refused to add more stable space – until they suddenly did an about face and were like, “WELP, GO AHEAD AND BE POKEMON HUNTERS” and bam, 50 slots.
I guess everybody’s forced to accept at least a little of reality if said reality persists long enough.
Good christ on a drumstick, Norushen in any form can DIAF, get a brez and DIAF again. Yay for spending both attempts never getting sucked away to Narnia to cleanse my buff! \\[T]// Priase the sun!
He’s just a total jerk, being all judgey about inner corruption and crap. Nobody’s perfect, Norushen! :<
I was starting to think he just hated Moonkin, but apparently he hates DPS Monks too as my friend never got sucked away either.