Post 701 - My 9 Year WoW Anniversary & Where I do a little reminiscing.

Joralin - my 1st toon - now sporting some heirloom gear.
Still level 12.

October 7, 2006 - 6 months after my second child is born, I accept a 10-day free play pass from a co-worker saying "You should play, we can go do ___ this and that together. They'll be launching a new expansion soon...". I logon that night, and he takes me through level 1 in the human starting area. On the 18th, I plop down the credit card, and start paying into my little bit of Blizzard.

About a week later, that human paladin stalls at level 12. My friends have gone and swapped servers and factions so I follow. Elkagorasa the warlock is born. It takes me almost a full year until I level up to 60. Dad with a 3 year old, 6 month old and just don't have enough time (or pull with my wife) to raid when my guild does. I'd LOVE to, but that doesn't happen for a few more years. In the meantime, I run dungeons with them (being dragged through vanilla content is more like it). My big achievement, running the warlock quest chain for my felsteed. I never got all the the 'materials' required for it, luckily a warlock in the guild helps out..

January 2007, Burning Crusade's launch 

I am now 10 more levels behind my friends. I have to level up the traditional means, questing.. Unfortunately, I didn't take the day off from work, so my co-workers all level their mains up through the starting area of BC. 

December 2007 - Felstead

October 2008 - In a pre-expansion patch to Wrath, Blizzard introduced us to the Achievement system. This scans our bags for odd items we've held onto and then gives us exciting points! Elkagorasa is immediately honored by having:

• Clockwork Rocket Bot (from December 2007)
• 2007 and 2008 Brewfest Stein

November 2008 - The Wrath of the Lich King arrives.

March 2009 - With Cataclysm, Blizzard announced the end of 'weapon skill'. Now you no longer needed to level up your 'wand' skill as a warlock, as you were already proficient at it. This helped in that you could easily swap to a new weapon you picked up. Unfortunately, back in Wrath, I took it on myself to level up the 4 main warlock weapons (dagger, sword, staff and wand) plus the unusual 'unarmed' weapon skill. As you can imagine, a clothy hitting with fists looks about like:

mage vs warlock in unarmed pvp

April 2009 - Elkagorasa.info is registered with GoDaddy.com for a hefty annual price of $6/year. I spin up this blog using what was formerly blogspot.com. The landscape for 'warlock bloggers', included such names as Nibuca, Fulguralis, Hydra and few others. It was a busy blog space with quite a few active raiders.

I work on leveling, and gearing up through 3.0 to 3.2. By TOC (3.2), I actually find myself getting into raids. I am able to squeeze in a hour here and there a few nights a month. I get a few pieces of 'normal' tier gear. My guild was able to get me up-to Arthas, but we only really got him down once or maybe twice.

The jousting in TOC pointed out how badly I need to upgrade my computer. I couldn't seem to win fights and when a friend watches me one time, he says I lag. The opponent charges me, then a second later I react. This encourages me to purchase some new parts, and I see a direct correlation to an increase in my DPS. It's amazing!

April 2010 - First year blogging. Over 100 posts on the blog. My 'anniversary' post is about getting into PVP in preparation for children's week. In Wrath, it wasn't impossible to get started using crafted PVP gear + building a small chest of gear using pvp tokens. Wintergrasp was active and you could get tokens just for showing up.

May 2010 - It's during this expansion, that I really started to make gold in game. Coming off BC, we transmutation alchemist would still proc extra gems. Using a couple addons, I found the right red DPS gem that everyone wanted, but not many people made. By the end of the expac, I had what seemed like a lot of gold, probably almost 25,000g.  Of course, then I spent it on the mammoth mount and the broken hilt.

The rest of the year, I am mixed between leveling my priest via the new dungeon finder (aka LFG tool), PVP with my warlock and exploring the Cataclysm beta.

December 2010 - Cataclysm happens.

Elk's on the midnight launch boat and there's no LAG!!

This is a happy moment for warlocks as we see our first major revamp of our class. We no longer have to maintain enormous bags of soul shards. Warlocks are now a pure resource DPS class that is able to generate and then use the resource as we fight. Honestly, I love this change. There was nothing more devastating that showing up for a dungeon or raid and not being able to summon a minion because "i don't have a soul shard"..

Free'd 24 bag slots of dead enemy souls!

This is the first time that I am feeling the pain of an expansion.  Goodbye raid tier gear, replacing quickly by questing greens. Sure, I was able to hold onto some of my gear until Hyjal, but it was still disheartening to replace my sword in Vash'jir. For example, while running the Cata beta, I found a weapon upgrade with epic stats, but the model was an old board. This was replaced with a shiny sword before release.

Before Cataclysm

After: Epic Board with Nail.

April 2011 - 2nd Anniversary Post - I've reached max level for the expansion, not yet into raiding, but burned out from DPS (queue wait times!), I revisit leveling my priest using heirlooms. Later that month, I was interviewed on the Twisting Nether Blogcast.

Look for the one without a nameplate.

During Cata, I actually make it to about a dozen guild raids. We work on the air raid, we work on that fiery one in the big mountain, sadly it dies before we ever get to the end boss.

October 2011 - Blizzard announces Mists of Pandaria and their attempt to keep subs, the Annual Pass. One of my co-workers made the trip down there and sends pictures from the event. Like many, it felt like a total surprise that they would go this route. New monk class sounded like a total rip-off of the Kung Fu Panda movies.

November 2011 - Last patch of Cataclysm introduced. Patch 4.3 brings about transmogrification. That's when I realize that I need to run some old raids in order to get the malefic helm for the 'warlock wings'. We organize a guild run, and happily they drop in the first pass. What I really, really wanted? to transmog my warlock weapon into Coren Direbrew's dagger (aka broken bottle). Sadly, Blizzard blocked that decision. Now I don't even carry a dagger or sword.

In addition, the Looking for Raid (or LFR) system was introduced. This works out well allowing my warlock to get into raids when it's best for me. Raid at midnight local time? OF COURSE!

April 2012 - Third Anniversary post - Like everyone who signed up for the annual pass, I explored, a little, the Mists beta. My next few posts dealt with my explorations of the panda starting area and the warlock class changes. I found the new resource model for warlocks a refreshing change. Now each build of warlocks has it's own resource.


For the rest of Cataclysm, I am either playing the beta, or playing our free copy of Diablo 3.

September 2012 - Mists of Pandaria is released.

Sadly, Pandas killed the guild. Membership was fairly active until about 5.1 Landfall. Soon after, my guild quickly started to disappear with only about 4 of us actively still playing.

April 2013 - Fourth Anniversary Post - Middle of Pandarian rep grind for Dominance Offensive. I am complaining about not able to find the next quest in a chain that was blatantly obvious when I looked for it in the right place.

Later on that month, I finally get the token to start the new Warlock Green Fire quest chain. This epic quest chain has you following the steps of two other warlocks and eventually fight them. Unfortunately, I could never get the spell rotation down quite right in order to down the final boss. Happily when I came back at level 100, it was much easier!

Minutes played per level 

April 2014 - Fifth Anniversary Post - I've started leveling a druid in anticipation of the 'boost'. As I level up to 60 (to take advantage of auto-max level profession boost for 60+ characters), I kept track of the amount of time each level I spent. This was enlightening in that how quickly it's going post-cataclysm revamp. While wearing full-heirloom gear with a few enchants, leveling from 0-15 took me no more than about an hour. When leveling my warlock, that took probably 2 weeks (but I also didn't know what I was doing 9 years ago...


June 2014 - I get into WOD Beta. (Post 601) Unlike the Mists beta, I didn't explore this one as much. I ran through some of the basics of the garrison building, but I don't want to spoil it, so I don't go much further.

July 2014 - Because of an inheritance I got, I was able to plop down almost $2000 (USD) on a brand new PC. This was a dramatic increase in my quality of game play. I finally replaced a 10 year old HP with something actually advertised as a gaming PC.

August 2014 - My first Legendary item acquired!

September 2014 - Start playing Alliance again. In the office, I find another WoW couple. They both play alliance and are heavy into PVP. They help me start off a new night-elf druid. Using heirloom gear that I was able to mail cross-realm, I start playing on a PVP realm. It's a major change of pace to play both alliance and have the constant threat of dying because my beloved orcs. 

November 2014 - Warlords of Draenor is released.

For a few weeks, 3 of my guildies/RL friends re-up their subscriptions and we start leveling up in WoD. I even manage to drag in a co-worker who joins us cross-realm! We make a perfect 5-man dungeon team. It was gloriously fun. Sadly, we soon get to Gorgrond and pick different outpost buildings and get different quests. He's now phased on his quests, and two of us are can't see him at all. The main driving player slowly disappears and never gets his main to 100. At the end of the 3-month sampler, it's back to just a few people in guild logging on again.

April 2015 - Sixth Anniversary Post - WoD 6.2 is announced and everyone is feeling content envy. 6.1 was a major drought as we didn't get any new dungeons, battlegrounds, raids or even a scenario. OK, there was a new raid, but it dropped earlier, so no one really associated it. Call it bad marketing Blizzard.

June 2015 - Blizzard announces that they are happy with current travel model. Players are more engaged while traveling on the ground and they don't plan on adding flying back to the game. The outrage is palpable. Personally, having spent $50 on Blizz store flying-mounts and having just finished running ICC for the Glory of the ICC Raider achievement, I was devastated. Did they REALLY think about the implications of a statement like "no flying in Warlords or any future expansion".

I sure hope the decision to drop flying completely for Draenor and beyond was not taken lightly.  It's not only a game-play mechanic, or 'quality of life' item (like no more soul shards), but also an integral part of the game from BC to Pandaria. In addition, there's the business perspective of real-money flying mount sales. I've heard, you are investigating changing that to gold also, but for many that's still WowTokens. Which, personally, only makes it feel more despicable.

About the same time, I made and published my first WoW howto video. I am planning to keep adding videos as we go into Legion. Maybe have to make a flashy intro sequence or actually use the mic and talk to you as I play. Or maybe not.. :) I personally prefer the game sounds.. Makes it easier to 'learn' from.

That brings us up to today. At this time, I am getting burned out with warlock dps again. I still need to run HFC for the last 6 Tomes of Chaos for my legendary ring. I am not sure if I'll run the quest chain again with any other toon.

I have started leveling my priest from 90 up; now at 96. She's running a shadow priest build and only sporting 2 full time pieces of heirloom gear (I do have an outfit containing 4 pieces that I'll swap into for turning in quests). I still play my horde druid, sometimes. She's currently sporting Highmaul LFR gear plus a piece or two of crafted leather. My alliance druid has just got into cata dungeons. Maybe some alliance feral druid pvp coming soon..

Blizzcon 2015 is a little over a month away. I am really hoping that there are some nice surprises in store for us, like a new beta released by EOY. If they do it right, we should have the next expac before the summer movie release.

Thanks for reading,


Elkagorasa the Casual

Elkagorasa just finished first
warlock quest chain for staff.

Here is my "Over 1,500 Readers" List..
Typically my posts get less than 100 readers, but the following posts have over 1500 readers, with 6 of them even exceeding 3000. My guess is that these posts were linked to someone much more visible than myself. :) Not bad considering this is a spare-time project. In chronological order:

• 8/2009 - Get Your Very Own Ravasur Mount... - Explanation of the dailies involved in getting the venomsaur mount.(3020 hits)
• 5/2010 - What am I Doing to Prepare for Cataclysm - (3597)
• 6/10 - Playing the Naming Game - Breakdown on my process for picking a name for my goblin in Cataclysm [now bank alt] (1903)
• 9/2010 - I thought it was a joke, but ... Cataclysm Beta exploration found disturbing news about flying! (2207)
• 9/2010 - Where Will You Be When Disaster Strikes? Cataclysm Beta write up of some of the major changes around Orgrimmar. (6333)
• 10/2010 - Wrath Honor to Cata Honor - Cataclysm Beta review of 'beta' prices on new PVP gear. (3415)
• 2/2011 - Ask Mr Robot - My initial impression of the first draft of AMR. Now my goto site for all upgrades, gemming and enchants. (4497)
• 6/2011 - Dying (4004)
• 7/2011 - Positive Platitudes for RL Vacationing - My casual perspective on gaming and the importance of taking family vacations. (2216)
• 11/2011 - Giving Thanks to My Fellow Bloggers - Thanksgiving post listing off several of the most popular bloggers on my reading list. (1678)
• 11/2013 - BlizzCon: Warlords of Draenor Comments - My first (and probably last) Blizzcon virtual ticket review of the announcement.  (1665)
• 5/2015 - Liebster Award Post - Answering questions and passing the buck to other bloggers. (1591)