What I had time to Fraps before my PC broke - again!

The title says it. Here are the most recent Menagerie raid videos from Siege of Orgrimmar. I would most certainly record more, as Menagerie is nearly at Garrosh, but Saturday morning my PC showed no signs of life. Therefore it's leaving home yet again to be fixed, if it can be fixed that is. It may be that they will just give me a new individual. In fact I hope they finally would.

Either way, I am working on building a supermachine of my own. My budget is around 1500 euros and I'll probably get around to buying stuff around the change of year. If you have any suggestions for what pieces I should consider, I'd love to know! I'll just say that I'd like to go for nVidia this time, instead of AMD Radeon.

Eleenha Newbury, how I have enjoyed leveling you

As I had run a good number of heroic dungeons on one of my 90s on Argent Dawn, I ended up with a silly amount of justice points. I had nothing to spend them on, so I thought I'd buy some heirlooms. Why wouldn't I expand my loomed empire to that server, too, after all? I bought cloth shoulders and later a chest, since I have two or three clothies to be leveled sooner or later. When Eleenha, the holy/shadow priest received those looms in mail, I felt very hesitant about equipping them.

Recently I've put a lot of value on not taking the easiest way up to the top level. Leveling with heirlooms is faster, for sure, and things die a lot quicker than with those quest greens... but I find that I become much better at a class, when I have to use a wider variety of my abilities to survive; when I don't just one-shot every mob I come across. After leveling so many characters, I feel like I want the leveling process itself to be more rewarding and more of a training, instead of a necessary evil. As usual, I've got a bit bored of the character after hitting 90, but I expect I will feel more inspired about gearing up after a while.

Her transmog is currently one item away from complete. I've been rather lazy with my Hillsbrad runs, but the awesomeness of Lordaeron Medical Guide keeps making me go back there until she gets it. Eleenha was also my fourth character to get her own Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade.

Breakfast Topic: How many characters do you actively play?

Lisa Poisso of WoW Insider asked how many characters one actively plays. My answer to this would of course include my main, who however suffers in the amount of attention when her only activity is weekly guild raids. As I am now able to work on my missing achievements on any character, the necessity to do it with Nicasia is no longer there, and some of my alts, such as Vladan, are much more suitable for soloing things. This I allow myself, because it helps me not get bored with elemental shaman after playing it as main since late Wrath of the Lich King.

In addition to Nica, I'd say I play 2-3 alts actively, one of them being Horde at the moment. But this varies greatly from day to day and week to week.

Breakfast Topic: Which playable race would you like to see come to WoW?

Here I present you with my thoughts regarding the WoW Insider breakfast topic "Which playable race would you like to see come to WoW?", asked by Elizabeth Harper. Recently I have felt like I haven't had all that much to say, so this'll probably end up being a short post, too.

Since I'm from the north, I've always felt that Northrend was my place on Azeroth. I'm very much at home there, and the Storm Peaks chose itself as my favorite zone in the game by giving me the Time-Lost Proto-Drake whilst I was digging, and the polar bear mount the first time I did the daily quest. Due to my nordic identity, I would really like to see vrykul as playable race. Whether it's been in Skyrim or Tyria, I've always chosen the nordic race. Another nordic race I could be happy with would be the tuskarr.

Ever since I met the Klaxxi for the first time, I've loved mantid. The mantid and I share a very good taste in music. I would totally make a mantid warrior if I was able to.

One of my favorite items ever

I've got Valor of the Ancients on Argent Dawn. For once. I don't think I've had it more than three times since Mists of Pandaria came out, and definitely not on AD. All thanks to the dream I had the other night: I was gearing up my rogue and got all sort of awesome loot on him. Well, the loot hasn't been exactly as it was in the dream, but I'm not complaining. Anyhoo...

Dragomirov was a couple of hundred valor away from his 522 tanking ring, so I thought I'd run a couple of heroics. While the healer was "getting bored with healing" and killing his boredom by running ahead whilst I was tanking the previous pack, and pulling the next one, sometimes dying doing so, I was close to leaving when we reached Armsmaster Harlan in the Scarlet Halls. I however stayed, unaware of the fact that I'd experience some of my biggest W00T moments ever in the game.

The item I have cried after the most since the pre-Pandaria patch, one of my favorite items ever, has made a comeback. Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade dropped and I won it. There it is, resting peacefully in my monk's inventory. Granted, Jester has nothing to do with the Crusade, but this makes me incredibly happy, for I thought the tabard was gone for good. The item holds incredible RP value for me, because many of my characters are somehow related to the Scarlet Crusade.

Despite the drop chance being as low as 0.08%, and the fact that you no longer have multiple mobs dropping it in the same dungeon, knowing that the tabard is back makes me incredibly happy. That is all I have ever asked. It is completely enough for me. Thank you, Blizzard, thank you!

Vlad, Eleenha and Angelus, you'll get your tabards now!

Aimless

Aimless is the best word I can come up with to describe the way I feel in the game at the moment, and have felt for a few months now. I thought I was just getting bored with the game, but as I've pondered my situation the past few days, I've come to the conclusion that I'm a bit lost and uncertain about my purpose in the game.

Raiding has always been my main end-game activity. I don't know how I should say this, but our raid group has changed a lot and after my three month break due to technical difficulties, I no longer feel at home in raids, despite the fact that I love raiding just like before. I've always been a lone wolf online and offline, and I find it difficult to integrate into groups. It's almost like I don't even want to. I think coming up with a new storyline with characters that I could play and level might help during these kind of times, but inspiration for that is also hard to find. I'm also relatively fed up with Moonglade, as I even transfered four characters over to Argent Dawn, but that's a whole different issue again. I can't leave Moonglade, period. Nor do I want to, since all the people I enjoy playing the game with are there. It's complicated.

With nothing better to update this time, I'll end the post with a couple of screenshots from Twilight Highlands. BioShock Infinite has been a huge deal in this house recently, and seeing those zeppelins and industrial pipes made me want to do something like this:

Happy news

I have finally got my good PC back. And that's not all! After getting a new fan, it runs WoW and other games a lot more smoothly than it did before - the same way as it did when I got it. No driver update or registry cleaning could match that, and it really made me understand how much effect the fan has on PC performance. I've been quite busy playing WoW and other games, namely Dishonored and D&D Neverwinter beta, so I haven't got back into blogging yet, but I was happy to sign up for next week's raids.

I also took advantage of the battle.net service sale that ended on the 10th of June. I threw my warrior Aleksej, my monk Dragomirov, my hunter Milkajelen and my rogue Desrosiers over to Argent Dawn. I had been considering such for a good while, and the sale was just what I needed to make the move, which really had two major factors behind it. For one, I wanted to roleplay those characters more and did not get the chance to do that on Moonglade. Second, I had run out of character slots on Moonglade, so I can now level more alts there. My main and guild still reside on Moonglade, so it's definitely my home realm, but I'm also getting used to dividing my time between the two servers. Life on Argent Dawn is a lot to get used to: high population and (E!)RP everywhere.