Less WoT, moar WoW (and some L4D2)

I spent ages grinding XP for a nice shiny new KV tank. It took the best part of a week, scooting around in my T-28 boat tank, until FINALLY I had both enough XP to research the KV, and enough credits to actually buy one. Hooray!

Then I started to play with it. Good grief it’s slow, taking about half an ice age to turn 180°, and getting overtaken by SPGs. Plus, since it’s the stock KV and is a Tier 5 Heavy tank, I often get matched up against Tier 8 and 9 tanks against which the best I can do is fire puny 75mm HE shells and hope I don’t attract any attention, which is unlikely because even if the enemy tanks don’t spot me, the artillery certainly do. I imagine them rubbing their hands with glee as their aiming reticules slowly gather around my turret.

Now the KV is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth I will meet equally well armed, and probably better armed tanks. It will be a long grind.

In the meantime, I also managed to get myself an A-20, which is like the opposite of a KV: it appears to have armour made of cardboard, and a gun that might as well not even be there. Despite these flaws, it does have one thing going for it: it’s really really fast. Like, 72 km/h fast. This is greatly entertaining, zooming about on the battlefield being eyes for the tanks and artillery that have guns that can do more than ping uselessly off the enemy. It’s fun enough that I decided to go for a second light tank, the Leopard (from the German tech tree). It’s slightly slower than the A-20, but it turns more like a Tron lightcycle. Excellent for confounding one’s foes.

And then… and then I stopped playing. I think the prospect of the gigantic grind required to make the KV competitive is putting me off.

Left for dead tank

Just as I was trying to come up with an alternative to shooting tanks, I get an invite to a game of Left 4 Dead 2. Golly gosh that game is exciting! I am distinctly average at it (actually more towards the ‘crap’ end of the scale), but it’s the kind of game you can still have fun in despite that. It’s also completely lacking in grind: you start, you get good weapons, and you shoot zombies. Lots and lots and lots of zombies (including one called a Tank!).

I discovered I rather like the auto shotgun, even though the combat shotgun is ostensibly better (it definitely has a better sound, and looks more badass). Swinging a fire axe about is also tremendously fun.

Mine!

Just as I am starting to enjoy L4D2, I’m also reading people discussing Minecraft, and now I want to play that again! Man, so many games. I played Minecraft a while back, when it was v1.3, but not since. Now I am feeling the urge to dig and build in 1m³ blocks.

Overall effect

AND! I bought Mass Effect, after reading a blog post on FemSheps and then remembering that the game sounded interesting. It was only £10 on Steam, too, which was nice. I haven’t actually played it yet, though, because by the time it had downloaded it was about 1 in the morning.

Wow, seriously

Yes, srsly, I am playing WoW a bit more now too, still on Zoe’s account. I daren’t install the game on my own PC. Still, what limited time I play, I’m back to shamaning it up. The shaman originally had an Elemental spec, and a Restoration offspec that neither of us ever used. Then I read an blog post by someone talking about Enhancement and wanted to try it out, so we dumped the Resto spec and changed it to Enh, and hoo, it’s fun! Fists of flame!

So anyway, I then wrote/adapted/ripped off a Resto Shaman Guide and since I’d done a fair bit of Restoring in WotLK, I got curious, and 57 gold later the shaman re-acquired a Resto spec to replace the Elemental. I’m such a goblin.

I’ve not tried it in actual real instances yet, as I did the spec and associated paraphernalia (glyphs, UI setup, gear) on my lunch break. I’m gonna dive in tonight though, and since the shaman just hit 80 I’ll be trying to fill green bars in Cataclysm instances, of which I have somewhat limited experience. Fun times ahead. Still, at least shaman healing is fairly unchanged from Lich King, so at least I won’t be totally clueless as when I tried to heal Zul’Aman on Zoe’s Discipline-spec priest. That wasn’t fun.