Some years are just perfect copies of each other, fast-forwarding you through time with a feeling that not much is happening. Then, some years are so different, you feel like you’ve just been spat out of a washing machine, and you can barely recognize the world around you. Well, 2023 feels like the latter. It’s not as if we’re powerless and the things that are happening are out of our control. I think that we both needed a change, and we created voluntary chaos around ourselves. Maybe we feel like this because this year marks our 20th wedding anniversary, or maybe we’ve spent too long sliding down the same quiet river… Maybe both. Time works in mysterious ways…

So, what’s changed? Well, not that much. However, it has only begun.

Living in Brussels

Nine years ago, we moved to Brussels to live closer to work. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to enjoy this town. We’ve really tried, but it didn’t happen. So, for several months, we’ve been searching for a house around Liège, my hometown. Despite our best efforts, we didn’t find the right place… The apartment we purchased when we moved here is gorgeous, which made it even harder to find a house – we don’t want a downgrade! Also, searching for a house made us realize how convenient living in Brussels really is. Mobility is fantastic, and there’s always a grocery store within walking distance. Not depending on a car is amazing, especially for our budget. This may sound like our brains trying to rationalize the fact that we’ll have to stay in Brussels, and perhaps it is, but having searched for a house made us realize that we’re actually pretty good.

Dragonflight

Our end-of-the-year 2022 holidays were kinda underwhelming. The launch of Dragonflight was a flop, and we didn’t find a way to replace it. So we started the year not knowing which gaming direction to take.

We’ve tried several times to get back hooked to WoW, but the direction they took with the game is horrible. It’s almost as if they took all we disliked in the game and packed it into an expansion.

I could talk for hours about all I dislike in retail WoW. Forbidden Reach feels so dead, Dragonflying being mandatory, world quests that don’t reset fast enough, the lack of quest hubs, crappy events like the community feast or the great hunts, the professions that I don’t even feel like leveling anymore… Each expansion always had a thing or two that we disliked; it’s hard to please everyone. However, this is pure garbage.

The problem is not only that we hate the expansion, we hate the general direction of WoW’s development. If this is indeed the third phase of WoW, then the game is dead to us.

We’ve been playing that game for 17 years, so it takes some effort to get out of our routines, get used to new games and change our habits. That alone kept us very busy, finding new games isn’t as simple as it sounds. Luckily, Diablo 4 got released, but that will be part of a dedicated post.

20th wedding anniversary

On the 7th of June, we were married for 20 years. Soforah is the best partner that I could ever dream to have. She’s always there when I need her, she brightens each of my days, and I only wish that I had met her sooner because it feels as if I only started to live from the day I met her. So, Hon’, if you read this: thank you for everything. I hope to be the man you deserve!

We’ve been back and forth between a few ideas for our celebrations: a short trip to the Belgian Ardennes, a trip to the US, two new huge PCs. We finally decided to do it all; we’ll be celebrating the whole year. So far, we already traveled to the Ardennes, and it was great. Rochehaut is very beautiful, even if a bit difficult to reach by public transportation.

We ate really well, and it was great to be together, far from everything for a few days.

We almost drowned in the Jacuzzi. Believe it or not, but it was our first time enjoying a bubble bath together… Jeez, that thing made us sleepy. However, we survived. Only to be drowned once more by the most overwhelming shower I’ve ever had. I’m not sure if we’re really good candidates for spas.

We’re planning our trip to New York, which will be followed by building the most badass PCs we’ve ever owned.

Voilà, this post was long, but it covers pretty much the last 6 months of our lives.

TLDR: We spent a lot of time searching for a house, but we’ll stay in Brussels. WoW sucks, and we’ll be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary for a full year.

Last week-end, following the huge trend, we both tried Hardcore Classic WoW. While we had fun in the starting zones, our nostalgia trip was brutally interrupted by death. I understand the excitement around Hardcore but I personally don’t enjoy to delete a character that I’ve been levelling for hours. I can’t imagine the feeling when your character dies after level 50, I would be devastated.

However, this little adventure made us realise how great vanilla WoW was and how bad retail has become when you play the game the way it was meant to be played. It was a game made by roleplayers for roleplayers while retail feels like a phone game ported on PC.

So, thank you Nostalrius for having made Blizzard consider creating Classic servers. And fuck you, J. Allen Brack, You were dead wrong!

The best time of the year has officially started. It’s a very busy time for us, we have so many movies and TV shows to watch that, just like last year, we had to create a spreadsheet.

We have built a few new Lego ornaments for our tree and two small trees for our desks. But the greatest new piece is the Christmas train (featured picture). It isn’t complete yet, we’re taking our time, building it while watching the TV Show The Santa Clauses, which is surprisingly good.

We won’t have much time to post in the coming weeks but we’ll try to catch back later. Meanwhile, enjoy the season, get fat, spoil yourselves and have fun.

The new expansion releases in less than 2 weeks, so there’s no time to waste.

The Search For A New Main WoW Character

For a few months, we’ve been using all our gaming time trying to decide which class could replace our Hunter as main characters. Here’s a little break down of our research:

Elemental Shaman: You like casting Chain Lightning? Because you have to cast it 12263737 times/hour which makes it very dull.

Balance Druid: The spec we’ve tried the most. It could have been nice, wouldn’t it be for eclipse… We both get very nervous after a few hours keeping track of the short duration dots, full moon/mushrooms, astral energy and being in the right eclipse. I thought that it would all become muscle memory. It doesn’t.

Shadow Priest: In dungeons, in raids or in the open world, the game has become an AOE fest. So, having to use Mind Sear as main AOE ability easily becomes easily frustrating. Too bad, we really enjoyed this one.

Destruction Warlock: The lack of mobility, in and out of combat is very frustrating. Burning Rush isn’t enough, if you even talent in it.

All those hours spent trying other classes were kind of hardhat they made us realise how much we enjoy our BM hunters. I guess that using the same rotation (give our take a few minor changes) for a decade becomes a bit old at times, but it remains the most fun for almost every aspect of the game. So, we’ll keep maining our hunters in Dragonflight, without any doubts in our heads.

WoW’s 18th Anniversary

Happy Birthday to the best game ever created! I’ve been playing it for more than 16 years and I can’t imagine a world without it anymore. Sharing the adventure with Soforah is also one of the best thing ever.

Unfortunately, the celebratory event isn’t too fun. It could have been if these damn Dragons would chain stun us until oblivion. So, event complete, let’s move on.

Dragonflight’s Pre-Launch

The first phase was filled with classes and specs experiments (hundred of hours). The new talent trees are great but we’ll only get to experience the real thing when we’ll be 70 and geared.

The second phase got us really hyped for Dragonflight. We’ve created two Drachtyr (even though we don’t plan on playing it) and we went through their starting zone. It gave us a taste of the Dragon Isles which really look awesome! The pre-launch event is also pretty great, we especially enjoy the revisited version of Uldaman and the huge chaos surrounding hundreds of players simultaneously farming the primal invasions. Is it me or it feels less laggy than Shadowland’s pre-launch event?

After the fun we had completing the “Breaking the Chains” meta achievement for Korthia, Sardoken and I started working on the one for Zereth Mortis, “From A to Zereth”.

Until now, we’ve downed all the elusive rares, found all the remaining treasures,… the only thing left on the list is to reach exalted with The Enlightened. Since this is fairly easy by just doing world quests and killing rares, it’ll happen soon. 

Compared to other meta achievements (think BfA) the Shadowlands ones are pretty easy and fun. The only part that I thought would be hard to get was “Dune Dominance”, even that was completed in the blink of an eye. The screenshot below portrays perfectly what I love in WoW, the huge amount of people for one rare. What a lightshow! I hope this’ll never change!

Right now, I’m searching for all the schematics for protoform synthesis to craft all Zereth Mortis’ pets and mounts. Before Dragonflight comes out, I want to have completed all that Shadowlands has to offer. We need a lot of special materials to craft protoform creatures, and even these are fun to farm. The LFG tool always has farm groups up to get Genesis Motes, and they drop fairly easy.  I think we’ll still be spending quite some time in this zone, if not for the crafting, there are also other fun achievements to complete like “Apocopocolypse Now”.

Now, if the summer heat would calm down again, that would be great. I have other places to be than in my living room. Even though, having more time to work on the blog is a great thing.

That’s right, we’ve done it! We’ve purchased Dragonflight.

At first, we were really not hyped, the announcement was underwhelming (those scripted discussions around a table, yuk!), the Drachtyr looked (and still do) ugly and we didn’t catch anything exciting.

During the last months, we’ve learned more about the new zones, dragon flying, the extra mat stash, the new UI and the return of the Kalu’aks. Now, the hype is real.

Also, don’t think that we could ever skip a World of Warcraft expansion, especially if it’s set to be released by the end of the year. Christmas trees and new stories really make the best time of the year.

See you in the Dragon Isles!

If you didn’t see the 50 millions Proto-Drakes flying around, then you probably still don’t know about the free mount offered to your retail account if you create a Death Knight on a Classic server and walk him through the starting scenario.

We did it together and, while we were doing it exclusively for the mount, we had a ton of fun following Arthas’ commands, killing innocent people, stealing horses and torturing crusaders, a real blast from the past!

While it made us very nostalgic of our favourite expansion, I don’t think that we could go through it all over again. The past is the past and I would be afraid to spoil a perfect memory. Also, we love what retail has become and we’re both looking forward to Dragonflight.

On Saturday evening, we’ve also connected our Twitch accounts to our Amazon Prime and Battle.net to get the Crown of Eternal Winter for free. So many blue/white transmogs could benefit from that awesome crown, we didn’t want to let it pass.

Last week, we wanted to test the Elemental spec, but the only high level shamans that we have are Dark Iron Dwarves. The spec didn’t really work well for us, but the race was so awesome that it became impossible to go back to our Blood Elves.

After a few days of hesitation, we finally changed our main characters’ faction, joined the Alliance and became Dark Iron Dwarves.

We already wanted to change our hunters’ race for a few weeks. We both tried Orcs, but it was too bulky. I tried Goblin, but I really didn’t have the click. Finally, we went back to Blood Elves but we really weren’t happy… After a few minutes as Dark Iron Dwarves, we knew that we had made the right choice. We’ve had a blast the entire week-end!

Now, we need to find a new server because Draenor is almost exclusively Horde and it’s not easy to tag mobs when you’re the only one from the Alliance. The most Alliance populated European server is Silvermoon. I think that we would jump there without hesitation, but I ‘m not sure that it’s a good idea to choose a full server before a release. The other option is to go to Argent Dawn, where the queues will probably be shorter, but it’s a bit too quiet there lately.

Decisions, decisions,…

Throughout the years, I’ve swapped factions and races. So, the time has come to re-introduce my hunter as she is nowadays.

Her name is Snory, she’s a Void Elf BM Hunter on the EU server Argent Dawn. You can follow this link to visit her armory page and better see her transmog gear.

I’ve been mainly playing this character for all post-Cataclysm expansions and I can say that Beast Mastery is my favorite hunter specialisation. The rotation makes sense, it’s fast, it’s ranged and it remains fun even when a fight requires to move a lot. It’s a real jack of all trade since you can easily top the meters in group content (LFR hero lol) and solo pretty much anything in the game.

Her professions are Mining and Engineering, which explains why she’s transmogrified as “techno” Hunter with Mimiron’s Repeater as weapon. my greatest wish in the game would be to get Mimiron’s Head as mount to complete her style (yep, back to Ulduar).

My total /played time with my hunter is over 152 days, which means 3642 hours and that’s only one of my characters. I could calculate my total WoW /played time, but some things are better left unknown…

Since we’re trying to complete each day all the Pet Battle World Quests that award Polished Pet Charms, I have created a page with all the pet battle strategies that Soforah and I use in Shadowlands. They are not always the most optimal strategies, but they work even with a rooster of not-so-rare pets. So far, all the battles from Shadowlands are covered and I’ll soon add the strategies for BFA. That page is accessible via the “Links” menu located in the brand new top bar of the blog (ooh, shiny).