Author Archives: Thyanel

I’m Not Dead! I Swear!

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Hey there, folks! How are all of you doing on this fine day? I hope the answer to that question is “awesome”, because I certainly am!

I know, I know. Long time, no see, right? There’s really no excuse I could give all of you that would even be remotely adequate. I could claim real life had eaten my soul, but that would be a lie. I could tell you all that the search for a new home in WoW has taken up a lot of my time, and while that would be true, it would also be a horribly inadequate response. The good news is that I think I have it narrowed down to two places. However, at this point in time, I can’t afford a character transfer, so it’s really just a lot of waffling right now.

Regardless, though, I’ve still been having fun with RP! Some of us ThoBro folks have claimed a corner of Wyrmrest Accord for ourselves and we’re rolling baby alts and running dungeons together, which is kind of fun. I even went on and on about RP over at WTT: [RP] today, because I’m such a good sport and Bricu made me. (Well, no, not really. It was entirely my choice to answer his questions.) If you want to check it out, swing on over to WTT: [RP] and give it a look. I mean, you should, anyway, because that particular blog’s run by some pretty kickass people, and they deserve more views. ;)

So what exciting things have you been up to these past few months, my friends? Share with me!

Sad Realizations

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It’s a sad thing, seeing your server die.

I’m not saying it’s an official death sentence for my home server of almost four years now, of course, but I have the feeling it’s coming close. I took a hiatus for about a month in an attempt to try to straighten things out for myself and explore a few other games. When I came back, I was saddened to discover that the usual chat channels, once full of life and happy conversation, were dead. In fact, most of the time, it seemed like I was the only person in them. To say it broke my heart was an understatement. I love Thorium Brotherhood. It’s where I met a wonderful group of people, people I’m proud to call my friends to this day. Unfortunately, it seems as though most of my friends have moved on to other games. The majority of my friends list haven’t logged on in months, and while I still love my characters, I’m slowly realizing that I don’t think Thorium Brotherhood might ever be server that I knew again.

As a result, I’m server shopping once again. I haven’t done this in years, and it’s a little scary. As a roleplayer, I’m really only looking at RP server, maybe even RP-PvP. I know the “standards”, of course. Moon Guard and Wyrmrest Accord are certainly viable options, and the servers I see lots of people recommending, but at the same time, I’m a little worried about this. For one thing, I left Moon Guard to escape some particularly bizarre drama after I left my old guild. For another, Wyrmrest is where a couple of the dramamongers went to. If I went to WrA, would I run into them again? Would they even remember me? Also, I’m in Eastern Standard Time. Would going to a Pacific-based server throw me off too much? WrA does have a few points in it’s favor, however, as a few of my friends have gone there.

If not either of them, though, where do I go? What do I do? Do I just abandon the thought of RP entirely? The thought of that kills me, to be perfectly honest.

So, fellow Warcraft players, help me out. Any recommendations?

Happy Panda Day!

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Hey, WoW players of the United States! Guess what? IT’S PANDA DAY! Mists of Pandaria is finally here, and today, I want to know all about your panda plans. I, for example, will be making the slow level push to 90 and doing a lot of exploring out in Pandaria. I shall also (maybe) be rolling a panadaren shaman. But what about you?

Are you planning on rolling a pandaren? Or a monk? (Or a pandaren monk?) Are you going to set forth and explore Pandaria? Try to get a server-first level 90 character? Craft like a fiend? Roleplay your heart out?

Leave a comment below and let the world know!

Tales From the Front

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Hello, everybody! Long time, no see! It’s been about a month since my last post. I hope everybody’s doing well and hasn’t given up on my little corner of the internet.

Since I last posted, things have taken a much different turn than I expected. Race changes went on sale (GASP!), and Adaret, whose story has been done for quite some time, got changed into a blood elf as opposed to a pandaren like I had originally planned. The short version of the story is that Thyanel, my old main, lives again, though as a priest and not a paladin as she was originally. I missed her so much, and I’ve slowly been getting back into the swing of playing her.

On the roleplaying front, chaos has occurred amongst the Harbingers of War (my beloved RP guild). ICly, we’ve been stationed in Hillsbrad Foothills, supposedly helping the Forsaken as punishment for something that happened long before any of my characters joined up. None of us have been particularly happy about it (the majority of the unit consists of trolls; what did we honestly expect here?). However, finally, we were supposed to move to Hammerfall out in the Arathi Highlands last night so we could help slaughter the Alliance out there. While the trek went without incident, we were greeted at the little Horde outpost by a trio who promptly arrested our guild leader. While it was planned OOCly (I can only assume), I completely didn’t see it coming at all, and felt just as outraged as Jinaki, my druid, did. Currently, we’re trying to figure out what’s going on, and one of our officers has temporarily been appointed guild leader, so we’ll see what happens there. Needless to say, however, I’m excited. RP again!

The trek, however, made me realize that I never actually obtained the raptor Jinaki rides ICly in the course of me rerolling her multiple times. Thyanel has, once again, been running the Argent Tournament dailies to fund it, since mounts are account-wide now and she’s been exalted with the Crusade for ages.

Speaking of account-wide mounts, however, patch 5.0.4 dropped when I wasn’t looking! It’s taken me awhile to figure out what talents work best for my playstyle, and while I still haven’t quite solidified them, I’ve found a workable set for shadow priest PvP. Thyanel has been participating in a lot of that lately, mostly to fund obtaining a Swift Warstrider and a set of armor for transmogrification purposes.

Also, the Glyph of Shadow Ravens is best glyph ever.

I think I’ve waited my whole life for this glyph to exist.

Guild Wars 2 also came out, but I’ll be touching on that in a separate post entirely. Today, this is all about World of Warcraft.

How about you, my dear readers? What have all of you been up to lately? Any game… anything at all! I want to hear all about it!

The Cinematic Has Come

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Today was going to be a different post. However, today Blizzard unleashed the Mists of Pandaria cinematic and I was so thrilled by it that I had to share it with all of you. It would have been nice, at least, to see the monk be a female pandaren, but I still enjoyed it.

Other people have said that the cinematic is missing the epicness from previous cinematics, and while that’s technically true, it fits into what seems to be the general theme of Mists of Pandaria. For once, there’s no major villain we have to worry about here (that I know of, anyway, though I will maim people if Blizzard throws one in at the last minute). It’s just the game getting back to it’s roots, with the Alliance and the Horde fighting each other, and something new getting a starring role (in this case the pandaren). The cinematic itself also emphasizes the pandaren and their initial neutrality by having the monk fight both the Alliance and the Horde, which, I have to admit, is pretty cool to see.

It might not be as epic as seeing Deathwing break through Azeroth, or watching Arthas raise an undead army, or even seeing what we could be depending on the classes we choose. However, I really don’t think the cinematic needs to be. It is what it is, no more, no less. That in and of itself seems to be what the pandaren are all about. They aren’t flashy. They are practical, in my experience, and this cinematic captures that from the minute the pandaren enters the picture.

Also, would you just look at the backgrounds in this one? They’re gorgeous!

Getting Back in the Groove

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So quite a few of you, dear readers, follow me on Twitter. As such, most of you have been subjected to my ongoing tweets about messing around with Alliance-side RP. See, the majority of the people I know on my home server of Thorium Brotherhood have been taking a bit of a break due to various reasons. While I hope that things pick up come Mists of Pandaria next month, I did miss RPing with people, and with my druid almost at 85 and my other characters on standby until Mists drops, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try something new. After all, none of my Alliance characters have ever lasted very long. When I mentioned this on Twitter, Bricu of WTT: [RP] naturally suggested Feathermoon. I do follow a good number of Feathermoon people on twitter, and they all seemed ridiculously awesome. I figured that if I was going to try this anywhere, it should be on a server that I knew had awesome people. I was even told there was RP happening Tuesday night!

I had a bit of personal drama regarding what character I was going to roll (the race remained consistent, but the class changed several times), and, unfortunately, twitter got the brunt of it. (I do apologize for that, guys.) Ultimately, I went back to a dwarf priest, one I spent all of Tuesday leveling like mad so she could at least look decent for when she made her appearance. Finally, six p.m. server time rolled around, and I made my way to the Pig and Whistle in Old Town of Stormwind. I was all excited on the way there, and a little bit nervous, but it wasn’t until I got to the door of the inn that I realized something.

I was completely and utterly terrified.

I could see Tarquin and Threnn and even Aelflaed (whose blog, Too Many Annas, I also follow) already inside, and these are people I’ve spent at least two years reading about through various blog posts. And then I saw Bricu himself walk in, and I panicked. I couldn’t even get my little dwarf through the door! Yeah, suffice to say that I was incredibly starstruck already.

Eventually, I decided I just had to get in there, similar to ripping off a bandaid, so I just ran inside and hid upstairs for a few minutes before sneaking downstairs and hiding at the table under one of the staircases. Bricu, however, saw me, and he was nice enough to provide me with a way into the conversation. Everyone was wonderful, and even though I may have botched the dwarf accent horribly, I really did have a lot of fun. I didn’t say much, no, and I spent a good chunk of the time thinking it would probably be easier if the character was a hunter or some other class (and I did have to admit that a priest drinking seemed a little odd to me), but I still had a great time. So much fun, in fact, that I’ll probably be back next week, if the Feathermoon crew will have me.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

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Today, ladies and gentlemen of the internet, I would like to tell you a story. This happened after I had rolled a little dwarf hunter on the Feathermoon server in World of Warcraft. Why I rolled this dwarf is a story for another time, unfortunately. What is important to today’s story, however, is that Feathermoon is a roleplaying server.

Like many (if not all) of the roleplaying servers out there, Feathermoon has it’s share of people who have rolled on the server, but have no desire whatsoever to roleplay. I could see the majority of them in trade chat while I ran my little dwarf around Ironforge, loading things up onto the Auction House and training some new abilities. And, as is bound to happen, many of the people going on in trade chat had characters with names that violated the naming policy (as well as the roleplaying policies that Blizzard has in place specifically for roleplaying servers, but that’s neither here nor there). However, in the course of my running around and trying to ignore trade chat, someone spoke up with something that wasn’t the usual trade chat fare.

“Oh my God. There are people RPing in the Blue Recluse!”

This was, of course, inevitably followed by comments along the lines of “lol, people RP here?” and other such things, along with some questions as to where the Blue Recluse actually was. People were very polite and even gave those asking directions the exact location of the Blue Recluse in the Mage Quarter of Stormwind. But then the person who had made the initial observation about the roleplayers said something that promptly startled me and nearly made my jaw hit the floor:

“Please don’t troll them, guys. They’re nice.”

Now, you guys have to understand that I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with non-roleplayers who roll a character on an RP server. After all, I’ve convinced a friend who doesn’t roleplay to come join me on a roleplaying server before. However, when it comes to those who do not roleplay, I just have one main rule: respect me and I’ll respect you. Yes, this means do not troll the RPers, and not just because it will “mess up a little storyline”. You chose to roll a character on a roleplaying server. That means that many of us are there for the roleplaying. Believe me, we would all really appreciate it if you did not troll us.

So when this person who was very much a non-RPer begged those in trade chat not to troll the roleplayers, well, it warmed my little heart. I’m not just saying, either. Their name might not have been the sort of name one might expect to see on a roleplaying server, no, but that one individual understood the concept of respecting the environment in which you rolled your character. They did not troll. They simply observered, and then asked other people to be respectful of the roleplayers. Needless to say, this made my night, and it pleased me so much that I had to share it with everyone else.

I wish I could remember the name of this individual and I wish I had thought to send him a whisper thanking him for being respectful, but I am ashamed to admit that it didn’t occur to me until after I had logged off for the night. Instead, I say to all you respectful non-roleplayers out there? Thank you all so much. It really means a lot to me, especially after seeing how hard people can troll the roleplayers of Azeroth.

Decisions, Decisions

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Today, ladies and gentlemen, it is with a heavy heart that I must confess something to all of you. This hasn’t been an easy decision for me to make, but, unfortunately, it’s one that has to happen. No, this isn’t as serious of a decision as, say, closing down this blog. That’s just not going to happen. I love gaming and talking about it when I can too much to do something like that. However, your intrepid author is going to have cease coverage of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

It isn’t a problem with the game, it’s mechanics, or the content that I never saw. I want to get that out of the way right now. The game was entertaining, and my guildies are all fantastic. However, I’ve hit a point where I’m just not having fun with it any more. I’ve seriously been coming up with ways to avoid the game because of that. It isn’t anything that anybody’s done, mind; it’s just that I’m not having the fun with it that I thought I would.

Not only that, but finances are a little limited for me right now. In the real world, I work a part-time job that currently does not give me a lot in the way of hours and I consider myself lucky that I get the shifts that I do at all. I’m looking for a second job right now (or at least something better), but until that happens, I’m limited in my funding and can only maintain one game subscription at a time. I figure that subscription should belong to a game I still actively enjoy.

So, as of today, I cancelled my SWTOR subscription. Perhaps I might pick it up again in the future, but, for right now, that’s just not in the cards.

Pandamonium: Shadow Priest Edition

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Everyone, meet Thyanel’s beta panda shadow priest, Hahani! Say hello, Hahani!

Unfortunately, despite her happy-looking face, Hahani is incredibly disappointed with me.

Why?

Well, thanks to a comment left on my previous post regarding the Mists of Pandaria beta, I realized I had been incredibly remiss in my shadow priestly duties. Pictures of the adorable pandas are all well and good, but how do the priests look in Shadowform? As a shadow priest, you spend the majority of your time in Shadowform. It’s not enough to like how you look outside of it; you have to like what you see in all your shadowy glory, too!

So, Marc? This is for you.