The Burning Crusade

I didn't start with Vanilla. I know that's practically heresy in some circles, but it's the truth. The expansion that actually pulled me into World of Warcraft and never let go was The Burning Crusade.

Picture where I was. Everybody I knew was already max level, already geared, already talking about a game I'd never touched. So I rolled a character and started the long grind to 60, through the same Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor zones that hadn't really been touched in a while by everyone else. That part wasn't glamorous. It was a slog, and plenty of people bounced off the old world before they ever saw the new stuff. But then you hit 60, stepped through the Dark Portal, and dropped into Outland. Hellfire Peninsula is not most people's idea of beautiful. Red dirt, broken rock, a sky the color of a bruise. I loved it. After all those hours in the old world, it felt like somewhere new, and new was exactly what I wanted.

Then came the thing TBC is remembered for most, at least for me. Flying mounts at 70. The first time you lift off in Netherstorm and realize you can just go anywhere, the whole game cracks open. Of course, you needed a ton of gold to buy it then, so that piece took a while too.  There were also the two new races too, Blood Elves and Draenei, and half the server rolled one. I didn't. I stuck with my undead warlock, the character I'd started on and have mained ever since. The Blood Elf paladin didn't show up until Wrath, once the altoholism really got going.

I wasn't raiding Black Temple or anything close to it. I did a little Karazhan, mostly with a guild that had more patience than I deserved, and I'll get into why the high-end stuff was never for me another day this month. But TBC is where I learned the loop that's kept me here for seventeen years. Log in, chip away at something, fly somewhere new, log out a little more attached than when I started.

People argue endlessly about which expansion was the best. I won't pretend TBC was flawless or would even make my top three. The attunement grinds were brutal and I bounced off a couple of them completely. But it's the one that turned me into a WoW player instead of a guy who happened to own WoW, and you only get one of those.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Blaugust 2026

Good morning, Friends. Belghast opened that way, most mornings, for as long as I can remember. Felt like the right thing to borrow for day one.

Thirty-one posts in thirty-one days. That's the plan, and I'm starting today.

If you've spent any time in the gaming blogosphere, you already know Blaugust. Every August, the people who write about games try to post every single day for a month. I've never come anywhere close. Some years I manage a decent run and then fall off, some years I barely show up. Posting all thirty-one days would be a huge stretch for me. This year I'm going to try anyway, and I want to be clear up front about why.

Blaugust was Bel's. He took a small annual blogging challenge and grew it into a real community event, dozens of people posting all month, cheering each other on, dragging the quiet blogs back to life for a few weeks. He died in July, in the middle of another round of chemo. I wrote about that already and I'm not going to do it again here. What I'll say is this. The best way I know to honor a guy who wrote nearly every day of his life is to sit down and write.

So that's what August is. Thirty-one days, one post a day.

I've got a rough map. Eleven posts on WoW expansions, one for almost every one we've had, from Burning Crusade all the way up to Midnight. A handful on writing and the blog itself. Six on the other MMOs that grabbed me over the years and then let go. And nine on the habits and confessions of being an altoholic who's been at this game for way too long.

Really?  We're doing this?

Some of these posts will be good. Some will be four hundred words I bang out at eleven at night because I refuse to break the streak. That's the deal you sign with Blaugust, and honestly that's the point. Show up, say the thing, hit publish, do it again tomorrow.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Back to Playing A Little

I've found myself with a little bit of playtime again this week, but I have remained focused on my warlock.  Still no leveling of alts.  I managed to max out Zul'Aman renown this week, so I just have Voidstorm and Harati left.  They're both relatively close, but probably still a few weeks away even if I do continue to have some decent amount of play time.

The switch to herbalism and mining is working out pretty well so far, as there always seems to be stuff to do there as I'm knocking out events or doing other stuff.  I'm still only around level 30 in both, but I'm feeling pretty good about the choice.

I also finished up the new campaign quest line with the trolls.  It's an interesting story so far, and I'll be curious to see where they end up going with it. 

I've also gotten back to working on Loremaster and am continuing to progress through the Harandar zone.  I'm probably about halfway done with that one now.

Finally, I still have no pants!  I have yet to get a set of purple pants from chests, from my vault, or from anywhere, so I'm still wandering around rocking a blue set of pants.  It seems absurd, but that's just where my luck is.  It's my only piece of non-Champion-level gear at this point, and they're still blue.  

That's the update for this week.

Cheers,

Joar

June Month In Review - Way Late

June came in at 5 hours and 5 minutes. All of it on WoW. If May's 7 and a half hours felt like an all-time low, June looked at that number and said hold my beer.

And honestly, I'm amazed I got even that much. June was the moving month. I drove DJ up to Boston the 8th through the 11th to get him settled for the IBM job. Turned around and drove Jake out to Phoenix the 15th through the 21st to move him into ASU. The movers loaded us up on the 22nd, and we hit the road for Arizona with the dog on the 23rd. Somewhere in the cracks of all that, I logged five hours on the warlock.

There isn't much of a progress report to give. A few weekly faction events for renown, a couple of delves when I had twenty minutes and a working brain, and that was about it. The warlock didn't move much, but it didn't go backward either, which, under the circumstances, I'll take as a win.

Now for the part where I usually promise next month will be better. I did that in May. I said things should settle by July and I'd get reacquainted with my warlock and maybe remember which buttons do damage. Well, it's July, we're in Arizona, we're settled in to our first AirBnB, and I'm still not playing. So I'm going to stop making promises the calendar keeps breaking.

That said, I do want to get back to it. The setup is here, the warlock is waiting, and the only thing missing is a stretch of days where nobody needs to be driven across a state line. Those days are coming. Whether they come in July or spill into August, we'll find out together.

That's it for now! 

Cheers!

Joar

For Belghast

Belghast died on Thursday. He was in the middle of his seventh round of chemotherapy, one year to the day after his wife died from her own cancer.

I have to be careful writing this because I never met Bel in person. Our relationship was the kind that only really exists now. Mostly Mastodon these last few years, Twitter before that, comment threads on each other's blogs going back further than I can properly account for. And yet the news landed hard enough that I have been sitting with it for two days, not sure what to say, not sure if I have any business saying anything at all. That last part is the piece I want to talk about.

The last time Bel meaningfully changed my thinking, he told me that my blog wasn't just me typing into the wind. He said it had value for the broader gaming community, that people were reading and getting something out of it, and that the writing was worth continuing. I don't remember the exact wording. I remember how it felt to hear it from him. Bel was the kind of person whose opinion on gaming blogging carried real weight. He had been doing it since forever. He had built Blaugust from a small annual challenge into an actual community event that runs every August with over a hundred participants. He podcasted on AggroChat every week. He wrote nearly every single day, across MMOs, ARPGs, and just about every game genre that mattered to him. If Bel told you your blog had value, it had value.

His last post went up on July 1st. It opens with a quiet apology. He apologizes for not blogging enough, because the seventh round of chemotherapy had wiped him out in mind and body, and he was honestly barely holding in there. Then he wrote nine hundred words about Path of Exile 2 mapping being kinda broken. That is a nearly perfect summary of who Bel was. Whatever was happening to him personally, his default was to sit down and write about the games he was playing, because that was the shape of his life and he was going to spend it the way he wanted to spend it.

His site tagline read: Life and times of Belghast: Blogger, Podcaster, Tank, MMO Gamer, Widow, and Cat Dad. He added the Widow himself after his wife died last July. He was open about the grief and open about the diagnosis that came right after, and he kept blogging through all of it. That the two dates ended up matching to the day is the kind of coincidence I would not believe if it were fiction. It is not fiction.

I did not know Bel well enough to write a proper eulogy. I do not have first-name stories. I do not have voice-chat memories. What I have is what a lot of us out here have. A shared blogosphere for years. A few Blaugust seasons where his encouragement kept me going. A Mastodon feed where his cat photos and his POE screenshots and his hard chemo weeks all showed up alongside each other, treated with the same steady voice. He made online relationships feel like real friendships instead of the thinner one-sided thing they get written off as. He treated the people who read him like actual people, he responded when we wrote to him, and he took our writing seriously in a way that most of the internet does not.

I keep coming back to the fact that he sat down on July 1st and wrote about mapping in Path of Exile 2. Not a farewell. Not a legacy post. Just what he had been doing for years. That is the version of him I want to remember.

Good morning, Friends. That was how he greeted us, most mornings, for as long as I can remember. It landed differently than a greeting was supposed to. I am going to miss reading it.

Joar

Happy 17th Blogoversary to Me

Tuesday was the 17th anniversary of this blog, so happy blogoversary to me!  It's kind of crazy to think that I'm posting about the same game, 17 years later.  I've played a bunch of other games in between, but it always comes back to World of Warcraft.  Crazy.

While traveling across the country to Phoenix this week, I've actually had a little bit of play time in the evenings.  I've still mostly been working on renown and running delves on my main.  I tried switching to Destro and ran one delve in that spec to see if I liked it better.  I did not.

I'm back to working on finishing up the Loremaster stuff as well.  I have Eversong Woods done and am working my way through Zul'Aman now.  

My main gap on gearing now continues to be legs where I'm still rocking a blue piece.  I can't get a set of legs to drop for me anywhere.  I'm actually tempted to just drop a bunch of gold on a crafted set, but I'm pretty sure as soon as I do that, they'll drop in the next vault.

I may play a little bit of Guild Wars 2, as I don't think I'm quite up to date on content on that one.  I'll probably go back to Machinist, which I've generally been enjoying more than my Reaper.

That is pretty much the update for now, since there hasn't been much play time.  My wife arrives tonight, which will kill any further play time.

Cheers,

Joar

May Month in Review

May came in at 7 hours and 30 minutes. All of it on WoW. That has to be an all-time low for me, and honestly, I'm not sure how I even got that much in.

What time I did have went into the warlock, since that's the plan I committed to earlier this month. A little more Zul'Aman and Harati renown, a handful of delves, and a few short sessions of poking around to make sure I still remember how everything works. Nothing dramatic. Nothing finished. But the time wasn't wasted either. The warlock kept inching forward, which is about the best I can ask for right now.  I need to figure out how to work on Voidstorm/Singularity renown at some point, because the event there that used to give out decent amounts no longer seems well attended at all.

The rest of May was family logistics. DJ graduated from Carnegie Mellon. Jake graduated from high school. Two graduations in two states in the same month is a fun puzzle to solve when you're also trying to sell a house. Jake's graduation party was on the 24th. The movers arrived on the 28th. The truck delivered to storage on the 29th. We vacated the house on the 31st and moved into our temporary apartment that same day. None of that left much room for grinding renown.

June isn't going to be any better. I'm driving DJ up to Boston June 8-11 to get him into his place for the IBM job. Then I turn around and drive Jake to Phoenix, June 15-21, to get him moved in for ASU. The movers load us up on the 22nd, and we head out to Phoenix on the 23rd with the dog. That's not a play time month. That's an everything-else month.

So expect another light one next time around. Things should start to settle by July, at which point I plan to get reacquainted with my warlock and possibly remember which buttons do damage.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Simplifying the Warlock

After talking about it for the better part of a year, I finally pulled the trigger this week and dropped tailoring and enchanting on my warlock. Mining and herbalism are in. The crafting professions are out.

Here's what really drove it. Every expansion, I finish with tailoring and enchanting parked somewhere around 75 out of 100. The last 25 points come from content I don't run. The rare recipe drops, the specific mats that only show up in places I'm not going, the patterns gated behind the higher-end stuff. So the professions just sit there incomplete, every cycle, while I look at them and feel mildly annoyed. With mining and herbalism, I can actually get to 100. Fly around, hit nodes, finish the tree. That sense of completion matters to me a lot more than whatever spread I'd get on a stack of cloth on the auction house.

The gold side is a bonus. Mining and herbalism are perfect casual-player professions because the demand never really dries up. I don't have to log in with a plan, chase a recipe drop, or wait on a cooldown. I just fly past nodes while I'm doing something else and turn the materials into gold at my own pace. That fits the way I actually play.

The other call I'm making is that I'm going to stop pretending I'm going to level alts between now and July 1st. The druid at 82 can sit right where it is. The plan is warlock, warlock, warlock. Keep grinding renown, finish replacing the last few blue pieces, and stick mostly to delves. The new ritual site is on the list to try too. LFR and normals don't really fit my playstyle anymore. Even queued group content needs more coordination than my schedule can promise right now. Delves I can drop in and out of without burning anybody else's evening.

And there's a lot of move logistics on the way. DJ just graduated from Carnegie Mellon and is heading to Boston for his job at IBM. Jake just graduated from high school and is coming with us to Arizona for ASU. We're closing on the house, packing the truck, driving the dog out, finding temporary housing, scouting Prescott Valley, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, Brandon and Lindsay are expecting their second baby this summer. None of that leaves a lot of room for a serious altoholic agenda.

So the warlock gets all of it. The whole idea is to finish things for once instead of accumulating half-done projects across a stable of characters.

That's it for now! Cheers! Joar

April Month in Review

April clocked in at 21 hours, 30 minutes, and 45 seconds across all games. That's well under my usual, and the move continues to eat my schedule. 23-minute average sessions and a 5-day streak. I'm playing in slivers when I can find them.

WoW took 20 of those hours, which is basically all of it. I kept grinding renown across the various factions, and Silvermoon is running away with the lead. I'm not sure if it's the rep mechanics or just where my dailies have been pointing, but the other factions are crawling by comparison. On the gear side, I finally rounded out the 4-piece set bonus on my warlock main, which felt good after weeks of waiting. I still have a few blue pieces hanging around that need to be replaced, so the upgrade grind isn't quite over.

The druid hit level 82. Progress, even if it's slow progress. Leveling a third character at this play rate is more long-term project than active work.

Elder Scrolls Online showed up on the report at 33 minutes. I'd love to claim that was a meaningful return to Tamriel, but no. Blizzard kicked me off for maintenance one afternoon and I needed something to fill the hole. That's the entirety of my ESO career for April.

I haven't touched any of the new patch features. None of them. With everything stacking up on the move side, I just haven't had the bandwidth to learn anything new in-game, and the stuff I already know is what's been getting played. May and June probably aren't going to be much better either. Closing on the house, the actual move, all the related family logistics. That's the next two months before any real play time comes back.

That's it for now! 

Cheers!

 Joar

Hunter Hits 90 and Thinking About FFXIV

I finally managed to hit 90 on my hunter over the weekend, with a leveling time that was about 5 1/2 hours faster than my warlock as the first character through.  It came in at 11 1/2 hours, which still feels very long.  I'm now moving on to starting on my druid, which I'll be doing as balance, as usual.  For this particular druid.  The 2nd character that I finished in War Within was 9 hours and 45 minutes, so it's not a ton longer than that.  And my 2nd character in Dragonflight was actually the exact same time, so maybe I'm overthinking things a bit.

By comparison, when I go back to Cataclysm, my 2nd character took over 25 hours of play time, so we've streamlined things quite a bit from there. 

I knocked out a bunch of the side quests in both Harandar and Void Storm, so there was good progress there.  At some point, even though it won't be super efficient, I'll need to go back and finish up the rest of the side quests to get Loremaster knocked out.

I'm hoping they do something to speed up the leveling process a little bit at some point, but I don't think I'm anywhere close to what I would consider a fast casual leveling speed yet, so we'll see.

I was also checking out the FFXIV announcements from FanFest.  I'm definitely interested in the new expansion.  With my play time being so limited right now, I'm hesitant to dive back into getting caught up on FFXIV, but I will admit that I'm intrigued.   Maybe once we've moved out of this house, I'll resub and get through the rest of the Dawntrail content.  

That's pretty much the update for now.  

Cheers,

Joar

The Tub Is In, The Ceiling is Getting Fixed, and I Have a Bat Door!!

 Quick update for anyone following the ongoing adventure of trying to sell a house while simultaneously dismantling a life in Ohio and rebuilding one in Arizona.

The soaking tub went in yesterday with one little issue around a missing part on the faucet, because nothing in this process can ever go right the first time. The drywall and ceiling repair is happening today. If that sounds fast, it is — we've been pushing hard to get the inspection clock moving again, and our backup buyers have been patient and cooperative throughout all of this. Once the ceiling work is done, we're looking at opening the inspection window as early as this week.

Closing has also moved. We're now looking at a May 15th closing date rather than May 6th, but we still have occupancy through May 31, so it doesn't really have a ripple effect on other stuff. 

On the driveway situation: we made an offer of a 50% credit to the buyers, which they have accepted, so that's good news. And it will be on them to take care of the actual driveway replacement after we're gone!

We also discovered bats. It's not a crisis, but enough that we brought in a remediation company. They sealed everything up last week and installed a "bat door" so the little guys could get out but not back in, then they're coming back on Thursday to clean up our attic from all the bat droppings. So that's fun.  My realtor didn't think we could charge extra for having a bat door, although I'm not sure she understands the coolness factor.

The bigger picture, if you're new here: this house sale is part of a full relocation to Arizona. We've got transitional housing lined up, AirBnBs booked across a few areas we're considering settling in, and a moving truck that needs a confirmed pickup date. Between DJ's graduation in Pittsburgh in early May and Jake's graduation here later that month, the next six weeks are as full as any I can remember. Moving is never clean. This one is particularly not clean.

---

On to gaming news.

The warlock is my main focus right now. The gear is coming together though — starting to see the build perform the way it's supposed to, which makes all the work so far feel more worth it.  I'm still grinding out renown and doing delves when I can.  I need to try out the new Prey thing as well, which I haven't quite gotten too yet.

The hunter hit 88 and I'm working through Voidstorm. I tried to hit some of the side quests in the last two zones that I missed on the warlock, but I'm guessing I'll need a few more toons to finish them all up.  But I'll be interested in seeing what the hunter's leveling time looks like.

More updates soon, on all fronts.

Cheers,

Joar