When we started playing World of Warcraft Classic we were suddenly reminded of all the ‘error’ phrases that characters say if they are low on resources, you know the ones: “My mana is low”, “Not enough energy”, etc. They were phrases that came to haunt us the first time we played retail back in 2007, as we didn’t learn how to turn them off for an embarrassingly long time after starting.
My first character was a Balance druid and my husband’s was a rogue so those two phrases were very, very common – as confirmed in our time in Classic Balance druids need to drink all the time, and rogues hear that phrase a lot.
I’m still sporadically questing away in Shadowlands and thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve not made much progress compared to most, since real life has gotten in the way rather of late. It’s a running joke in my household that a WoW expansion launch always heralds my being away on work for at least a week (fat chance of that in 2020!), my being super busy in the office, or some other event that drags us away from actually playing.
This year it was the combination of French language exams (two different attempts at the same 4 hour set of tests), plus work being extra busy in the Autumn despite the pandemic. The exam stress on top of being busy has left me feeling almost permanently drained though. I spend enough time in front of my desk to not want to game as much as normal, at least on MMOs. Thankfully, I found out this week that I’d passed the second set of exams with flying colours: the first time I just missed out on the grades I wanted in just one of the four categories. So that’s behind me and we have the Christmas holidays rapidly approaching, in whatever form they will happen this year.
I certainly hope there’ll be time for virtual tabletop gaming to come, we’re playing in my Nephew’s campaign of Curse of Strahd at the moment. It’s great for me to get to be a player since I mostly DM games, plus we can play via a laptop connected to the TV so I get a much needed break from my work/gaming PC. I’m also running a Starfinder game on the side, and I’m just starting to feel that itch to write my own Eberron module series. Hopefully I can pick up where I left off on part three in the New Year.
So blogging has been, and will continue to be, on a bit lower gear for the rest of the year. I need time away from my PC more at the moment, and I’m not playing MMORPGs as much so there’s a lack of material / inspiration. With much of Shadowlands still to explore, and the Everquest 2 expansion coming out just before the holidays start, I’ll certainly have plenty to write about in 2021!
GamingSF 