It’s pretty common that no posts in a while = I’ve been playing too much of an MMO.  The recent one has been WoW, and I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been up to.

The game got its version 10.1 patch back in early May, bringing with it a new raid zone and a frankly rather-forgettable outdoors zone full of mole people with Minnesota accents.  They sit firmly on the bad side of the line that separates “cute and charming” from “grating”, so the less said about them the better.

Instead, I have been playing a tiny fox with a big sword and took over one of my guild’s two tank spots, which has been a real change in terms of responsibility.

Also adorability.

I’m not in a terribly hard core raiding guild.  We try to get the “Ahead of the Curve” achievement for any given patch, which consists of completing the current raid zone on Heroic difficulty.  That’s the third of four difficulties and is usually challenging without being guild-breaking.

It took us about three months to complete this goal, after which most of the guild stopped logging in. Historically they’ll be back for the next patch, which will likely be in late October/Early November.  Until then, they are presumably experimenting with Man-On-Bear action in Baldur’s Gate 3.

I’ve been plugging along to knock out a few more accomplishments.  In addition to collecting seasonal armor appearances (fashion is the true end game), I managed to knock out this season’s Keystone Master achievement for running Mythic dungeons and run through the newly-introduced Dawn of the Infinites dungeon.

Last season I ran something like two hundred and forty Mythic dungeons.  I have been considerably more casual this season, and managed to pick up KSM with just over 20 dungeon runs.

I also got into a group that went through the raid, on a slightly lower difficulty, while knocking out some optional achievements along the way.  These were a lot of fun.  They included challenges like killing a boss at the same time you have a massive frog jumping around to disrupt things and getting an entire raid group to deliberately stand in front of a dragon while they did their Godzilla-level breath weapon attack.

There’s one of these meta achievements every season, and this was my first time completing it.

Now that I’ve finished my major goals for the season, I’ve been goofing around on a couple of other characters and have picked up some new friends to do casual raids with.  I haven’t been a terrifically-social WoW player previously, but I’ve been kind of adopted by a couple of different late night raid teams and it’s been a super relaxed, super friendly time.

Apart from WoW, I just picked up “Lifeless Moon”, the sort-of-sequel to “Lifeless Planet” and I’ll probably post my thoughts on that once it’s wrapped up.   My wife is also getting me caught up on Star Trek: Discovery – very good so far – and I have been going back to watch the recent Marvel movies on Disney+.  Without saying anything here to make any enemies, I’ll just say that everything since Doctor Strange 2: Strange Harder has kind of fallen a bit flat for me.  I’m trying real hard not to be one of those curmudgeons who rants about how the MCU should have ended with “Endgame” but it’s a difficult thing at times.