Long Break Is Long

Herein I quote myself:

"Let's see if I can sustain Step 3 longer than a week. I'll shoot for two for now."

Well, despite my best hopes, Step 3 lasted about a week. This somewhat coincided with my decision to take an almost complete break from Live WoW, which included discontinuing my raiding schedule. When one creates a blog that is at least in part designed to discuss current and past raiding, and then one quits raiding, it makes it rather difficult to comment on those topics, no?

However, while my break from WoW is not over, my break from this is. I've got a bunch of plans for beta-related content to post in the next few days, stuff that should be interesting and relevant, at least to me. If I'm the only one reading my own blog, well... fuck the rest of you nonexistent people.

On my break in general - I've done the raidleading, guild officering thing for over 2-1/2 years now. I've taken some periodic breaks before, most notably at the end of the old game and the very beginning of The Burning Crusade. Since then, I've been consistently active. I've helped strategize and defeat, by my count, 44 bosses in 10- or 25-man content. I've coordinated resist gear and consumables for dozens of raiders, managed the bank for a couple months, calculated DKP, blah blah blah blah. I did a lot of shit for a long time. Everyone needs a breather, and this is mine.

I can say with complete confidence that I don't miss raiding one bit at the moment. I'm also smart enough to realize that this won't last forever; I'm already itching to run Naxxramas on the beta realms, and am looking forward to the other raids in store. However, current content, mechanics, and ways of doing things are boring, irritating, and generally distasteful at this point. Thus, I choose to distance myself from them and focus on something I think I'm relatively good at - objectively evaluating upcoming content and design. I take this beta shit seriously!

Now, with that little anecdotal blurb out of the way, on to my plans for the immediate future:

1. Reviews for each and every 5-man instances available in Wrath of the Lich King. I'll include a few prettified screenshots for each, and some ratings and discussion about the pros and cons of the instance. I was also planning to have some spoilered stuff that covered the place more in-depth, but Blogspot sucks at that, so you get the very basics until I find a better way to go about that.

2. Assuming those of us KKW folks in beta can get a run going (we had one planned for last night, but the new beta push and resultant server downtime precluded it), I'll have a similar review up for what I can experience of 10-man Naxxramas. Comparisons between old and new Naxx will be tossed in where appropriate.

3. A video tour of Icecrown Glacier, since it's now open and seemingly stable, similar to the one I did of The Storm Peaks. I've already got most of the footage I need recorded, so I just need to finish that up, edit it, and add some music. Expect this in a day or two.

4. Plenty of humorous looks at the beta forum goers. The most recent patch brought a lot of changes to almost every class, and almost universally every class got something "nerfed." I use quotation marks because, for fuck's sake, it's beta, everything's always going to be in a state of flux, so calling changes buffs or nerfs is missing the point. Trust me when I say that there are plenty of instances of people going positively apeshit. I'll do my best to find the cream of the crop.

There are definitely some other ideas germinating as well, so we'll see what else I can dredge out of this brain of mine. In the meantime, hello again, and welcome back to my shitty blog. More content's in store, I PWOMISE.