A Fond Farewell

To our fabulous readers.

It is with a heavy heart that I write this to you, our loyal readers and friends.

We created this blog not long after we had married, around 5 years ago. It has had periods of silence, when our beautiful babies were born and when we de-subbed to find the love of the game again. It has seen ups (MoP expansion anyone?!) and downs (WoD I’m looking at you!). It has been joy… through our friendships, the community and the community projects. 

Sadly, our marriage was not meant to be, and we will now be going our separate ways. 

I do not wish this pain on anyone; so live fully and honestly, cherish those you love and enjoy every minute.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for supporting. Thank you for being you.

To those wonderful souls who have helped me through the last few weeks… You know who you are and I can’t thank you enough.

I have set up my own Twitter, it would be great to keep in touch: @MageLouloutte. Hope to see you there.

Be kind to one another,

Laura ❤

Couples Who Slay Together – Rinike & Cepheus

Welcome to our Community Project of 2017 (you can see our last one in 2014 here)!

We propose to do a series of – fun and lightearted – interviews which help us learn a bit more about our awesome community, and hopefully unravel some juicy details about our readers. 

If you would like to get involved, contact us.

I’m so pleased we managed to get you guys to interview because I think you were some of our first followers! Can you introduce yourselves?

Hey I’m Rinike, catgirl from Eorzea, in Azeroth some might know me as
a Worgen Druid.

Hiya! I’m Joey, but I usually go by my nerd name Cepheus on the internet.

Could you share a pic of you together – either IRL or in game, we don’t mind!

You know how when you chat with people and form and picture in your mind? You guys totally smash my mental picture!!! Love this more though, gorgeous.

How long have you been together and where did you meet?
We’ve been together almost 5 years. We’re acquaintances from the same guild in Vanilla but not until later we started talking and well here we are, married 😀

Show us a picture of your setup – do you have a cute couple thing going on, all cosy?

Space is an issue. We don’t have couple gaming space, but we both have our own nerdlairs 🙂

So, do you tend to play the same games together or prefer to keep gaming life separate?

Rinike: We play together and separate. I prefer to do things alone as I’m more into story and exploring side of the games 🙂
Currently though we have a new project in FFXIV where we are playing
the story together.
Cepheus: I love playing with her, but our interests sometimes differ. In WoW for example, I like PvP, which she doesn’t. We do try to do things together as well though. It’s a great feeling to be able to share a big interest like games with her. 

With the current political situation it’s only right we ask your affiliation: HORDE OR ALLIANCE?

Rinike: FOR THE HORDE! But I’m currently more on Alliance because most
of my friends are on the ‘wrong’ side 😉

Cepheus: I tend to play where my friends play, since I don’t want to be stuck somewhere all by myself. This means I’m usually playing both factions. However, if I had to choose, I will always choose Horde.
POWER TO THE FORSAKEN!

Spill the beans: what’s the most fun activity you like to do together?
GAMING ACTIVITY… naughty! 😉

Old dungeons / content is always fun 🙂

As a couple, do you find sharing your gaming hobby helps your relationship?

Rinike: It does and as Warcraft is how we found each other? it makes it a little bit more special 🙂
Cepheus: Absolutely, gaming is a big part of our relationship. If only
one of us had that interest then I think it’d be more of a problem. We
both understand and respect each others need to play games.

*ahem* who rides who on the two seater mount?

That depends, we take turns 😀 (but in-game only Cepheus has two seater mount!)

Who is the raid leader in your relationship?!

Rinike: I’d have to say me, I’m quite bossy 😀

Cepheus: We’re more like the tanks in a raid, she’s the main tank, I’m
the off tank. We compliment each other well and can’t really do
without the other. But she’s more of a leader than I am 🙂

What’s been the biggest, how can I say this… marital dispute…
whilst gaming together?

Well, I (Rinike) tend to get quite competitive and I’m a sore loser so
I want things done in a certain way and it sometimes comes out as not
in so good way 😀

One of you has to kill 100 kobolds and one has to collect the 100 shiny beads they drop… who does which task and why?

Cepheus has that slaying down, I always have to remind him to loot the
corpses 😀

Where do you see your future in gaming?

Hopefully still going strong. Our dream is to go to Blizzcon one year
(let’s hope they still organize it when we get to do that :D) Us too, it’ll take a while though…!!

Ok, the million pound question. You’re farming a rare mount. Neither
of you has it. It drops. Who gets it?!!

We both would probably roll on it, but Cepheus would give it to me
as he is nice like that 😀

Cepheus: As much as I love games, she’ll always come first. A cool mount is nice, but making her smile is worth so much more. Awwww!!

Feel free to add twitter/facebook/blog bios below!
@LadyRinike (main Twitter), All things Blizzard @DruidRinike and @Cepheus

rinike.com is my blog but currently I haven’t written much about games
but the plan is to start writing again.

My Frosty Mage

I KNOW I said I wasn’t going to transmog myself anymore… mainly because I was spending near 400g a day on it and that was stupid when I’m not actively trying to increase my gold amount.

HOWEVER, I couldn’t help myself last week, and a few days ago I was complimented on it (Thanks Martin!), so I thought I’d share it.

I’m not very good at doing original things with transmog. I’m also not very good at putting my Frost mage in anything other than blue or white. Or a witches costume, because, yanno… spells. But here it is, I’m quite proud of it:

I know the front view isn’t very clear, I got carried away with spell effects (ooh, pretty snow!) and didn’t realise.

I ain’t hiking all the way to Mount Neverest for another photo. #SorryNotSorry

The main components are as follows:

• Shoulders: Slaughterhouse Spaulders
• Chest: Glacial Robe
• Hands: Moonfeather Handwraps
• Waist: Nethershard Girdle
• Feet: Treads of Alacrity
• Cloak: Fen-Yu, Fury of Xuen
• Weapon: Karabor Starsinger’s Staff

I hope you like it! 🙂

 

Suramar? Nah!

I’ll categorise these posts as resub, as I’m still totally overwhelmed with things to do, where to go, new quests etc. It’s all a world of discovery. 

I’ve actually spent a lot of time since ding just wondering around like a crazy person with no direction. Upon ding, you get given reams and reams of quests… class hall, order hall, research, Suramar, professions, Legion quests… The list goes on. I accepted them all going on the premise that I could pick and choose which to do. 

After not having a clue, I got Mr B to do the opening quests for Broken Isles as I didn’t understand what the hell I was meant to be doing, then destressed by fishing. I like fishing. 

I was following a quest line yesterday which sent me into the sewers. Promptly died. 

My lovely new guild informed me that actually, this is now a free for all, but it’s ok you can hire a bodyguard…!!!!????? 

I gave that up as a bad job and went to Suramar to are what all the fuss was about. Got squished immediately, couldn’t find my body after what felt like 4 hours of searching and decided never to go back. 

I rage quit at least twice yesterday. 

Mr B: I’ve had a pretty eventful few days. I’ve finally finished the class hall quests and I’ve been pottering around doing world quests and rep things towards pathfinder. Of course, sorting her out took most of my time, I don’t know how she can have played the game for 5 years and still be such a noob /sigh 

23%. TWENTY THREE.

Level 109. Day 15. 

I’ve had to stop 23% off ding. I would have stayed on and taken the sleep deprivation if my son hadn’t got me up at 2am for a night feed then up for the day at 4.53am. Damn kids.

So I’ve come to bed in a grump. Firstly because I finished Val’sharah and I really enjoyed it. Especially the Darkpens  (the prison place) in the last half hour. That was cool. Secondly, because I didn’t ding. Thirdly because my class hall quest thing (garrison missions 2.0) hadn’t yet completed so I couldn’t set the next one off. Pff. And fourthly because I had to listen to Tyrande’s irritating voice for an hour. I felt sorry for her til she started going on. Poor Malfurion.

I took an awesome screenshot but it’s on the pc and I’m not at the pc so I’ve had to borrow this from gamepedia. It’s exactly the same though, they were obviously as impressed as me. I genuinely don’t profess to know lore, and I don’t fully understand what happened to Ysera, but this brought a tear to my eye. 

Mr B: I got my first legendary today. Wooooop!

(He calls it a “leggo”. Lol. Nerd.)

I’ve been doing class order quests and tying up loose ends really. Working through world quests. The rep is going to take forever, I know you know. She’s better at the grindy stuff to be honest but she’s slacking with her levelling so it’s up to me. As usual!

First Legion Experience

Day 1 of Resub

These are the things I have learnt so far:

1. Everything has changed – no flying in new Dalaran (this shouldn’t have taken me by surprise but it did!); Class Halls (wut?); talents; Artifacts…
2. There’s much more storytelling. I’m not a lore-buff and I must admit I may have gone to get some more Easter chocolate through some of the longer cut scenes.
3. Artifacts are confusing. I need to read.
4. I lag a lot. Note to self: get Mr B on the case, see if he can fix that.
5. What the hell is “shimmer”?! It took me about an hour to find it because of its stupid name. I don’t need to have pretty Princess spell names, thanks.
6. I need to remember I’m bottom of the food chain again and stop running into massive packs of Demons thinking I’m invincible. Note to self: this causes you to die. A lot.
7. I must buy a more comfortable office chair… numb bum experience is not pleasant.

That’s all for now, I’m going to go cram a year’s worth of MMO Champion!

Oops…

Hi everyone.

*ashamed face*

I know we totally said we would try and blog more, but not long after our last post, lots of stuff happened all at once and it has been a crazy few months.

First of all, let me introduce you to Felicity…

This little girl was keen to meet us, and arrived unexpectedly 3 weeks early. Unfortunately, she caught pneumonia and needed a stay in NICU, but we are happy to report that she is now a happy and healthy 4 month old who keeps us on our toes. As you can imagine, we have barely had time to breathe, let alone game.

However, for about a month she has started sleeping 7pm-5am, so we are hesitantly starting to pick it up again. Most evenings, we collapse in front of the TV and don’t move much further, but occasionally (like now!), Mr B is on Destiny and I am adding some to my latest Minecraft venture.

Sadly, we cancelled our WoW sub a few months ago as we begrudge paying 2 subs for only a couple of hours a week of gaming. I think as we settle into parenthood, we should be able to start back up at least one account… especially with the exciting new expansion that’s on its way!

We hope you forgive us for the long silence. We lurk on twitter in the background as much as we are able, so please do prod us every now and then.

Love and hugs,

Mr, Mrs and Mini B 😉

Community Project 2014

The Community’s list of the best things to do before Warlords of Draenor is now live!

We would like to momentarily direct your attention to the top of the blog, next to the “About Us” section, where you will find a static page for this project entitled “Community Project 2014”.

There has been such a fantastic response that we will not be able to publish all ideas together, so over the next week, I will try to complete one category per day until each link in the tab is filled. Owing to the nature of the open ended question we asked, we have had to summarise some responses (e.g, casual raiding and killing Garrosh into “raiding and PvP), but each can be found in more detail on the suggester’s site or twitter. I urge you to read the original posts for their full and intended comments.

We can’t thank you enough for the suggestions that you have submitted. It might interest you to know the following:

Category                                                          Votes

Achievements                                                  31

Areas and Exploration                                        6

 Blizzard                                                              14

Characters and NPCs                                        5

Community                                                        23

Gold Making and the Auction House                  5

Mini-Games (pet battles etc)                            10

Quests and Questing                                         9

Raiding and PvP                                              20

Other                                                                 42

The biggest individual vote within the categories overall was for the Lore of World of Warcraft. I will touch on this more later, but I was astounded at the response. It just goes to show how connected the community is to the characters and their story!

Geeking Out

So after the very exciting announcement yesterday, we’ve had a few hours to ponder over the news. As I’m sure everyone else is doing, dissecting the little bits of information we have (honestly, we haven’t received that much ‘new’ news) and picking apart our favourite bits.

13th November 2014. Will you be there??

How good was that cinematic (click here for the link)?? If the movie is anything to go by, it’ll be amazing. Shame about the lag on the stream, but we’ll live. We also enjoyed the short animated movie-thing… excellent introduction to lore and gives some brilliant info behind the expansion.

There are lots of awesome things to look forward to, many of which we already knew: Garrisons, new models (those Gnome eyes!), lots of lovely new scenery – how beautiful does Shadowmoon look?? – plus lots more. The quality of life changes such as the transmog collections, stats, item squish, toybox are all very promising, as are the new dungeons which look pretty epic! Finally…. ASHRAN BABY! As a non-PvP-er, it sounds pretty fun as an experience at least. I’m not going to list anymore, as I’m sure nearly all of you are fully aware of the new stuff and would /yawn.

However, certain aspects do make us feel a tiny bit meh – “orcs orcs everywhere and not an Alliance in sight” for one. Lots of tusks, ick. I think people taking the “Horde are the favourites” standpoint do have half a leg to stand on – although we don’t particularly share the same view, we understand where they’re coming from. I’m also not too happy being stuck near Ashran on a base – I’d rather be out the way somewhere (doesn’t matter where!). It feels like I’m being forcibly encouraged towards the content which is… not nice. However, Mr B can’t wait so what can I say??

The Anniversary event looks AMAAAYZING.

I can’t wait to experience Molton Core 40man! I don’t care it’s as an LFR, makes it accessible for people like us which as a one-off can’t be bad. Mount and pets and 100man PvP. Awesome. All this amazing-ness makes me question why they are banging Blizzcon, WoD release AND Anniversary into the same time frame. For people who can’t take time of work for the release, or those of us who have other commitments…. eesh, not easy to experience all the awesome.

It was announced on MMOC today that we will get ‘plenty of time’ to get to 100 for the Anniversary. This is excellent. However, with the amount Blizzard change their tune, I’m going to hold off getting too excited until I see numbers. 

I did have a discussion on Twitter about why people are cross about not having content for so long. At the risk of repeating myself, I’d really prefer they release a quality product that I have to wait for. We took a 4 month break which was more than enough to refresh us ready for release. We may take another one in September until 6.0 comes out, but folks… if you’re bored go do something else and don’t moan at me. I won’t sympathise ^^

Let us know what you’re excited about. Or not. Whatever :p 

Getting Excited… Or Not…

We’ve been keeping up with the Warcraft news (or lack thereof) and the newest patch hit today… if you could call it that. I was really surprised actually to see how excited people were getting over the smallest of patches. Perhaps I’m being cynical, but being happy at being able to upgrade again? More upgrades means more valour means more LFR or more Timeless Isle…

Yay.

I think Blizzard is being very savvy – by giving people a small patch, making it seem like there’s something newer to do, whilst also pushing those newer level 90’s into the current content. It should also make LFR easier with higher item levels…. in theory anyway. Well, we’ve all been moaning about that, right?

It doesn’t excite us at all. As much as we enjoy the Artcraft posts, all they’re really doing is giving us concepts to try and whet our appetite and keep us playing those boosted 90’s. By dripping in the odd screenshot of a new zone with a paragraph about creating the plants, it stops the masses from rioting. It feels like a game, and I don’t like it.

The lack of real Warcraft news speaks volumes. I would much prefer them to make a statement saying: “We’re really sorry, we know we said we’d try and get it out quicker but there’s been delays and we want to give you a great product”. Their “we never said it’d be out quicker than before” is rubbish, as we all know it was implied at Blizzcon. When we add this to strategic release of information to co-inside with other game releases (I’m looking at you Wildstar!), the sneaky business strat becomes ever clearer.

We love Warcraft and we are loyal to Blizzard, but we’re getting so sick of the “soon”… it’s not funny any more, guys. Just give us a straight answer and give us something proper to be excited about.