Raiding, drops, and a look back

Things continue to be busy with me on a personal front so I am glad that I'm at least able to post once a week! This week I got an apartment in Seattle and accepted an offer on my condo in Chicago. Woot! Anyways, I have still been raiding, though I will probably be out towards the end of this month when I make the final drive from Chicago to Seattle.

Last Thursday we had one of our more amusing raids in quite a while. I'm not sure what was in the water, but it was clear from the beginning that it was going to be quite a raid. During the raid Jess said something about tanks staying alive through some skill of their own or some crazy talk like that. Of course I had to chime in and tell him whose skill it really was that was keeping him alive, which led to these comments:

Tree of keeping people in line... I like it! Then later in the night we had one of the most amusing comments I've read/heard in a long time. I can't even recall why we were talking about tramp stamps, but Jess and his statistical self shared this:

OMG Sam and I just about lost it. Hilarious. I'm not even sure exactly what it means... but hilarious. Now it also seems that during our raids someone will discover about 4 or 5 bosses in, that they are missing something:

People are in the wrong specs, wearing Wraps of Unity, or other similarly wrong gear. I guess this tells you how nerfed the content is. Anyways. Let's talk about drops for a second. Majordomo is back to dropping the pally priest warlock shoulder token, though he did drop mage druid rogue dk for two weeks. I wonder if we got that different shoulder token to drop because I bitched about here enough.

So here's my next bitch. Why the hell hasn't Smoldering Censer of Purity dropped? It is on the shared loot table, but with all those times I've killed those first 6 bosses, I have yet to see it drop once. At all!!! Gah! Even worse is that my arch nemesis Lorosia has enough healy axes to dual wield them:

Finally a look back. I know there's been a lot of posts in the blogosphere for a while about the game and perhaps the decline of the game. I haven't really blogged about my thoughts on that yet.

When I look back to BC or Wrath, it's not so much that I miss some aspect of the game or game design from back then. I'm definitely nostalgic for the raids and the people that we ran with. So I miss those folks and those raids that we had, but I also think that we are also establishing memories with our raids and raid makeups now. Memories to look back on with nostalgia in another year or so when who knows how our raid makeups will have changed.

Ultimately, I guess game design or specific features means less to me? Or affects me less? As long as I have the people I want to play with, however the game changes, whatever Blizz does, I think I can adapt to it.

I just don't think that a game like this can be static. It's going to change and evolve, and I think it sort of has to. Whether you want to adapt to those changes or whether you need to move on either because this game is no longer for you, or because your real life has changed where the game can no longer fit in it, that's a decision everyone has to make for their own.