The Most Expensive Post On The Blog

This post’s going to be almost entirely a bells and whistles-free one, since I’m writing it from my hotel room in New York on the iPad while simultaneously grappling with the WordPress app.

Ouch.

But anyway, a very quiet month on the blog front, due to a number of reasons. First and foremost I’m in the process of retiring from the Royal Navy after 22 years of undetected crime. In a related issue, to celebrate over two decades of state funded, all-expenses paid tourism (with the occasional war thrown in to keep me on my toes) I’m taking it easy at the Peninsula Hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Which is nice. Actually it’s really REALLY nice. The kind of nice where breakfast costs you sixty dollars. But screw it, it’s only money after all. And since as far as I’m aware there’s no prize for best-looking corpse I’m seriously over-indulging in an effort to die fat and exceptionally happy. Fuck you, Royal Navy Fitness Test, your power over me is broken! Broken, I say!

Also I’ve been getting seriously hooked on World of Tanks (no clue how to add a link in the iPad app, just Google it) which is a Russian multiplayer tank battle sim that pretty much does exactly what it says on the box. Shortly leaving for New York I unlocked my PzKpfwVI Tiger, and it’s a lot like driving a huge, angry house around the battlefield.

But Warcraft, wherefore art thou? Well it’s all about the Firelands at the moment, obviously. Our 25 man raid team were 5/7 when I left and according to the website loot links it looks like Majordomo Staghelm just got put on his ass this weekend, too. I have a few reservations about Firelands raid boss difficulty, though. Shannox seems a tad overtuned given that we’re all dripping with heroic Tier 11 gear and we’ve not yet beaten him with less than half the raid dead. The idea of trying to take him on in regular Tier 11 gear or even worse, Zul Gurub/Aman gear, makes my happy parts curl up and shrivel. Of course, as with pretty much any boss in the game, raid or dungeon, most of the difficulty in successful execution comes from how you do it, not what you’re wearing. Getting it right relies more on just pulling him again and doing it rather than whether or not you should have gone for the socket bonus in those new legs. All the same – Shannox – a teeny bit trickier than you’d expect to do right, but (almost) entirely optional so that’s ok, and at the end of the day, he’s dead and most of us aren’t.

The Molten Front dailies present me with something of a conundrum. I’m doing them first and foremost on Calli, my raiding main, which of you think about it, is doing it completely arse about tit (back to front, for those of you whose colloquial English idiom dictionary skipped the last update). Calli has access to raiding 378 gear, and most of her existing gear is 372 from Tier 11 heroics anyway. Molten Front reputation and quest rewards are 365s, so she already outgears them. Even if she didn’t she’s raiding Tier 12 content and by the time she unlocks anything beyond the initial quest rewards she’ll have better raid gear. No, scratch that, she already has better Firelands raid gear. What I should be doing is the Molten Front dailies on characters like Galadan or The Mighty Jingles, toons who actually need the loot. But Blizzard are too clever for me once again. They tied cool mounts and pets and ooh look, a pony, into the Molten Front meta-achievement, and I cannot resist the lure of The Shiny. Curse you Blizzard, you know me too well!

So. What to do? I need the rewards on my myriad of alts but I need the Flamebreaker title and stuff on Calli too. How will I ever find the time?

Oh hang on… I’m retired now… 🙂

(Sections of this post were written while having lunch at Fives Restaurant at the hotel. This post cost me $110, hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed lunch!)