I signed up for the annual pass thing in WoW a little while ago…  At the time, Terri and I were both playing WoW and it seemed like a no-brainer.  We were going to be paying for the WoW subscription anyway, why not get a copy of Diablo III and beta access to Mists of Pandaria as well?

But, only days after signing up for the annual pass, Terri got her latest character up to max level and lost interest.  She enjoys leveling alts, but doesn’t enjoy the high-end raiding.  So there’s always a feeling of pointlessness to leveling a new character all the way to the cap, then throwing it away and starting up a new one just to throw it away in a few months.  This time around, however, she discovered Skyrim during the WoW lull.  And she hasn’t been back to WoW in months.

I kept playing WoW for a while…  Grinding dailies in the hopes of eventually getting into a raid group…  But I had no guild, so it was all PUGs, which gets a little tiresome…  And then The Old Republic came out, and my D&D buddies were raving about it, and I started playing it…  And now I haven’t been back to WoW in months either.

Which makes the whole annual pass thing seem like a waste of money.

We’re still getting copies of Diablo III, but they aren’t exactly “free” at this point – since we wouldn’t currently be paying for a WoW subscription if we hadn’t signed up for that annual pass.

And then there’s the Mists of Pandaria beta…

Terri and I both got beta invites today, and the timing couldn’t be much worse.

I’ve just rolled up a new character on a new server in TOR, and just finally managed to get into a decent-looking guild.  I’ve got very little inclination to go try out MoP right now.  I’m far more interested in pushing my new character through those first 20 levels or so, to get back to where I was before I re-rolled.

There’d certainly be interest in playing MoP with Terri…  But she’s going away for about three weeks, and won’t be able to play.

Been playing a good amount of WoW lately.  And, since I’m not really part of an active guild, I’ve been running dungeons with a bunch of pick-up groups.

For a while there, I was having great luck with my PUGs.  Could burn through three or four dungeons, back-to-back, with no trouble.  Decent gear, no real drama, more-or-less competent players…  Really had no trouble clearing a dungeon – either normal or heroic.

Sure, there’d be the occasional fuckup and/or party wipe…  But folks would just get back up, dust themselves off, and charge back into the battle.

Then something happened.

I’m not sure if my luck changed, or a people suddenly got stupid, or what.  But I suddenly find myself constantly grouped with moronic prima donnas.

I’ll wind up in a party with one or more incompetent players – a tank who can’t hold aggro, or a healer that just can’t keep people standing, or a mage who simply can’t control his aggro…  And we’ll wind up wiping on something…  And then folks start bailing.

We’ll have a single bad pull, and all of a sudden the tank leaves the party.  Or the healer runs for the hills.  Or a couple of the DPS’ers leg it.

Depending on who leaves, it might be possible to queue up again, find someone to fill that role, and continue through the dungeon…  But unless someone is found very quickly, more people start leaving…  And before long I’ll find myself standing alone in some dungeon wondering where the hell everyone went.

Seems like I’m only actually clearing a dungeon about a third of the time.  It’s getting pretty discouraging.

Today is finally Friday.  It’s been one hell of a week…  Feels like I somehow wound up with an extra day or two, like I’ve already worked six or seven days.  All week long it has felt like it should be later in the week – Tuesday felt like Wednesday, Wednesday like Thursday, Thursday like Friday, and today I’m just glad it is Friday.

Work is still consuming most of my life.  Every day is very busy.  And then I’m coming home exhausted, and going to bed early.

I’ve pretty much stopped playing Skyrim.  I’ve got over 80 hours logged, haven’t finished the main storyline, and I just can’t find the time to devote to it these days.  I’ll wind up going back to it eventually…  But, for now, I just don’t have the time.

I’ve been playing WoW again.  It’s easier to log in and waste ~30 minutes in WoW than it is in Skyrim.

I’ve pushed my huntress up to 81, got her out to Vashj’ir and I’m playing with sea creatures.  I also rolled up a priest and I’ve got her to 31.  Took her to the Darkmoon Fair a few times and ran a bunch of dailies around Stormwind.

Dammit.  I feel so dirty…

I’m actually going to re-subscribe to WoW.  Again.

Terri’s been playing WoW again for a little while now.  She’s been leveling up a little gnomish rogue.  And I’ve been playing EVE, shooting internet spaceships and cruising around nullsec.

But I miss playing with Terri.  I miss wandering through a game together, being able to share the experience with her.  And she’s running into trouble with some quests…  Having a hard time getting some things done by herself…

Then Blizzard went and announced the new expansion – Mists of Pandaria.

I’ve thought the Pandaren were cool ever since I saw them in WarCraft 3.  Been waiting for them to show up in WoW for years.

And I thoroughly enjoyed my monk in EverQuest.  And again in Dark Age of Camelot.  I’ve been wanting a monk of some sort in WoW from the very start.

So this expansion seems like it was made for me.

But then they announced the annual pass…  A year of WoW, plus access to the next beta, and an in-game mount, and a copy of Diablo III.  How could I pass it up?

So, I canceled EVE last night.  And I’ll be subscribing to WoW and buying an annual pass just as soon as I get home tonight.

Been playing some more WoW.  Making some more progress on my huntress.  She’s up to 76 now, and I just arrived in Sholazar Basin.

The XP is actually going by fairly quickly…  Seems like I can do half a level in a night without really trying.  And maybe even a full level if I pushed it.

The problem is that these quests aren’t all that engaging.

I’ve run through these Northrend quests twice now – once on my warlock and once on my death knight.  And everyone is playing around in the new Cataclysm content, so it’s hard to get a group or anything together.

I keep wishing I was out in the new content…  And wanting to log in my warlock or death knight and play around in the new stuff…  It’s just hard to stay on-task with my huntress…

But I’m still making progress.  Only 4 more levels before I can hit the fun stuff.

Not real happy with WoW lately.

I’m stalled-out on my huntress.  What I’d really like to be doing is playing through the new 80+ content…  But my huntress is only 71.  So I’m still out in Northrend.  It’s slow going, and I’m really not interested in doing these quests yet again.  So I’ve been having a hard time actually feeling motivated enough to log in and play on that character.

I was having fun playing on my warlock for a while…  But then I ran out of quests to do.  I’ve done literally every quest in every zone except for the new PvP zone.  I’ve done some random dungeons…  But the queue takes forever when you’re DPS.

And then I started running into problems running heroic dungeons…

I queued up one time, but gave up after waiting over 20 minutes.  Then I tried to queue up with a guild group, and was told that my gear wasn’t good enough.  Then I queued up again myself, and zoned into a heroic Deadmines instance only to find that all my macros had disappeared.  So I dropped the group and had to re-type all my macros.  Then I tried to queue with another guild group, and was again told that my gear wasn’t good enough.  Finally, last night, I finished my first heroic instance.  Ran through Shadowfang Keep with a pickup group.

Was a fun run.  The dungeon itself is different…  No longer filled with werewolves.  And it was all heroic and stuff.

But that one run was the end result of roughly a day of trying to get into a heroic dungeon.

I have to assume that it was some kind of rounding error.  My gear was reporting as an average iLevel of 329, which is exactly what you need.  I’m guessing that I was teetering right on the brink.  I got some new gear on that heroic run though, and now it’s reporting an average iLevel of 330.  So maybe I’ll have an easier time in the future.

Maybe.

Took my warlock out for a spin last night…  Did some more questing in Uldum.

I was working my way through Uldum when I hit 85, and I pretty much dropped everything and went back to my huntress at that point.  So my warlock has just been sitting out there, twiddling his thumbs, waiting for me to pick up where I left off.

Did some more quests with Harrison Jones.  Good fun.  They all loosely mirror the Indiana Jones movies, which I’m a big fan of.  Got to uncover some relics, solve some puzzles, and thwart some Nazis.  Good stuff.  Lots of little cinematic cutscenes, too, which were fun.

Then I got in a group and we ran through the Halls of Origination, which was my first trip through a Cataclysm dungeon.

The dungeon run took surprisingly long.  I’ve grown more accustomed to quick runs that take hardly any time…  But we were in there for over an hour.

None of the fights were especially hard, but there was some interesting stuff going on.  Actually had some CC going on…  It’s been a while since I’ve seen a basic dungeon run require any CC.  We had a mage polymorphing critters as we made our way down the halls…  And I had to banish a few critters as well.

The encounters weren’t terribly complex.  The bosses weren’t all that amazing.  My instructions basically consisted of “don’t stand in the fire”.  But there were some neat looking critters to kill…  And the bosses looked cool…  And there was an awesome elevator thing in the middle…

So I had a good time.  Got some reputation, some coin.  Didn’t get any new gear though.