WoW – The World Within Expansion

After playing Dragonflight for almost two years, Blizzard released the newest expansion, The World Within, which is part of their Worldsoul trilogy of expansions. TWW was released this past August of 2024, and I know I’ve been playing it quite a lot. What made the gameplay even more time intensive was the 20th Anniversary of World of Warcraft and the 30th Anniversary of Warcraft celebrations taking place. Currently there’s a ton of content to work through not only in the new zones of Isle of Dorn, The Ringing Deeps, Hallowfall, and Ash-Kahet but also the anniversary content in Tanaris which includes dailies and weeklies for dungeons and raids.

I’ve really enjoyed the new expansion so far. The new zones are really well done with lots of quests and the lore has been very engaging. I’ll add more soon as I continue leveling my toons.

It’s been a long long time…..

Well, I can’t believe it’s been close to four years since I last posted on my blog. So much has happened, so much has changed, so much has been done and so much more needs to be done. Let’s go back first to 2020, where I last wrote about how I was doing. I last wrote that I was getting a new team of doctors as I needed more surgery. I had gone with a new team of GI doctors at Tampa General, which at the time were considered the best in the region. Confidence was high that my next surgery would go well and my Crohn’s disease would be in remission.

Needless to say, with the Pandemic going on at the time, and I having my surgery, it didn’t go as planned and my body was literally at war with itself. I was feeling so defeated, depressed and just wasn’t in a good place. I started researching where in the US I could get better care and I found that that the University of Pennsylvania Penn Medicine had one of the best GI teams in the country. We (my family), were also looking to move to PA because Florida had become so toxic. Having children in school we realized that the education system in Florida had become so politicized that our kids just weren’t learning. So in the fall of 2021, we moved to Pennsylvania, and I switched doctors to Penn Medicine and met with their surgical team. Being an extremely high risk patient, my new surgeon was patient and thorough and after waiting for my body to calm down, she got to work.

It took a two surgeries, but she was able to put me back together and close everything up. Of course my body was trying to fight it, but after many, many, many hospitalizations and several hundred thousand dollars of hospital bills, my GI system is relatively working the way it should be. I switched medicines from Stelara to Rinvoq, and I think the Rinvoq is working. In general, I have less daily pain than ever before and my quality of life has improved. My only major issue now is fatigue, and intermittent pain, but it’s a vast improvement from where I started when we first moved to PA and for the past decade.

Crohn’s disease truly does suck. The past ten years, it became so active and caused so much disruption in my life, that I truly hope I can be and remain in remission for as long as possible. The difference between when I was first diagnosed twenty five years ago to today is incredible. I’m glad that now I at least have the availability of so many medications to try. It’s certainly been quite the journey.

Hopefully, I won’t wait another four years to write an update!!

Chronic Disease and WoW (part 3)

Hello again from the world of Crohn’s Disease, this year has been one for the books so they say.  I spent way too much time in the hospital (6 hospital stays) either for a bad surgery, crohn’s flare, surgery to fix a previous surgery and my last stay, where I thought I had Covid-19.

That last stay was quite epic, I had developed a fever that started out low and controllable with Tylenol that grew to 103.5 and that’s when the wife took me to the hospital, where my temperature spiked at 107.6, which of course freaked out everyone in the ED (I was relatively calm, as they were pushing pain meds and all sort of fluids into me).  Then they covered me in an ice blanket for like 4 hours, I had the Rigors where my shivers were so bad that I couldn’t control them, I even managed to give myself a leg injury from it bouncing around.  I proceeded to spend three days in the ICU while they brought down my fever.  It wasn’t Covid (thank goodness), apparently, my line in my arm got infected and I had an infection in my blood, or better known as I was Septic, which also isn’t good to get.  They had taken the line out and after testing it for some days they found the bacterial infection and I was on Antibiotics for a few days.  Once they were certain I was ok, they moved me to a regular room (the only one available at the time, in the BURN unit).  Great nurses in the burn unit, but good lord, not a place I wanted to be.  I still remember the sounds of some of the other patients.

After a few more days, I was able to go home and finish recovering at home, which was quite a relief.  Amazingly, I had no Crohn’s symptoms at all through this whole crazy time.  Thank goodness, as I was afraid that the shivering and rigors were going to trigger a flare-up!

In the ten days I was in the hospital, I didn’t have my laptop and couldn’t play any WoW.  Because my wife wasn’t allowed in at first, we decided against it.  I surprisingly didn’t miss the game too much … I did play lots of stuff on my phone though.

Having a chronic disease truly sucks and in January, I’m scheduled to go back in for a surgery with an all new team of doctors.  I’m confident that they’ll be able to fix everything my last surgeon messed up.  Hopefully all will go well.  Until then, I’ll be playing the game!

Here I am again!

As it’s plainly obvious, I have had a difficult time keeping this site updated, but I’ll try to catch up to where I am in the game.  After several more hospitalizations from my Crohn’s Disease, things have definitely settled down.  I’m now on Stelara, a biologic drug that is working pretty well in keeping my Crohn’s under control.

I was able to pretty much complete BfA on Amphyx, my main toon and have been really trying to keep engaged with Shadowlands. There is litterally so much to do, I don’t know how anyone is running alts.

I’m not sure how I feel about SL, I love the storylines and the game is visually stunning.  However, I feel like the gameplay just isn’t comparable to previous xpacs.  This one reminds me of Cataclysm, which in my opinion isn’t a good thing.  I hated Cataclysm.  The new questing is pretty good and the quests do help to move you along and level quickly, which was nice, however, it’s the daily grind to complete world quests and dailies to get either anima or dust, or some other resource you need to progress.  It gets old after awhile, especially if you have lots of alts.

My biggest complaint so far is the lack of gear drops either in dungeons or in the world.  I’ve done a ton of dungeons and get nothing by gold, which is highly frustrating.  I’ll update some more once I get some better gear.

Because of the new xpac, I really haven’t had time to play WoW Classic, which is a shame since I really like it.  I also miss the simplicity of Classic.

Till Next Time and hopefully not too far in the future!
Amphyx

It’s been a long time!

As you can see, it’s been a long time since I’ve put up a post about anything!  As I mentioned in earlier posts, living with a Chronic Disease such as Crohn’s can really throw your life into crazy time.  I was barely able to play for several months since I was in and out of the hospital with multiple surgeries.  But, been feeling much better lately and have been playing and progressing on multiple toons in BfA.  I’m not sure if I really like the whole “Visions” concept for the cloak, it’s like we’re back in Legion doing the whole thing over again to get an epic piece of gear.  The grind is *yawn*ville.

Otherwise, I’ve been playing a lot on my Horde toon, trying to complete the storylines to get the achievements for the Alliance/Horde mounts.

I’ve been hoping to get an invite to the Shadowlands Beta, since it looks amazing.  Very curious to see how they implement the level squish/reset.

Since I have so much free time (not) I’ve also been trying to play WoW Classic, but it’s certainly been a challenge!

Till Next Time!
Amphyx

Battle for Azeroth – Release

It’s been quite the journey from alpha to beta and finally GA release. While playing through all the different stages I was very impressed with how they’ve changed the gameplay, mechanics and effects.

However, now that it’s been released I’m finding myself underwhelmed. Let’s see if I can break down the main complaints that I am having with BofA:

  1. Phasing – this is being heavily used in this release, but it’s interfering with the fun of playing. It used to be that when questing you would run into lots of other people doing the same quest, and if you wanted you could group up. That’s been drastically reduced. There has been practically few if any other players in all three zones during questing. In beta, there were many more people. I have 12 toons and I’ve noticed this in all the new zones at different levels on different servers. Maybe it’s just me, but I doubt it.
  2. Gameplay – while I have noticed great improvements, it’s like Blizzard takes 2 steps back for each one forward. The aggro rate in some zones is so ridiculous that it’s laughable. Some of the quest chains are very derivative, like they were placed there just to give the player a reason for being in the area or to connect two other quests, it just felt weak.
  3. Character trait nerfing – As my main is a mage, it feels like mages have certainly lost the love in the talent pool. Being a fire mage has become very weak compared to other DPS specs. I do however really like the graphical changes they made when the mage is casting and throwing spells.
  4. Too Similar – Maybe it’s me, but BofA feels like a cross between MoP and BL with some WotLK thrown in for good measure. It’s just not feeling “New”. Or, it could just be me since I’ve been playing this game for so freaking long🤪

So there you have my reasoning. I’ve just gotten my ilvl high enough for heroics and look forward to raiding soon. Look for a follow up shortly!

Battle for Azeroth – Beta

Hello!  A lot has happened in the past couple of months.  The new expansion, Battle for Azeroth, moved from Alpha stage to Beta stage.  I had the opportunity to play the alpha, and while it was pretty buggy, it was actually pretty playable.  The Beta is quite impressive.  Following is my notes about the xpac:

I created two characters, Zaradrel, a void elf warrior and Amphyx a Dark Iron Dwarf Mage (obviously).  Both started at level 110 using 185 ilvl gear.  This is different than what existing users will be playing with since most people will have an ilvl of at least 910~960 at launch.  Whenever Blizzard does a stat squish, things usually go wrong for the first week of the xpac release.

Getting better gear is pretty simple at first by doing the quests in the starting areas.  Playing as a warrior and mage has been pretty straightforward, although some talents are no longer available or changed, or not implemented yet.  What I thought was really odd was that they brought back arcane knowledge buff for mages for groups and raid groups.

I’ve reached level 114 on Zaradrel, and am hopeful I can get that character to 120 before they issue a new update and wipe the characters and we have to start over !!

Zaradrel is also in Drustvar which apparently is infested with witches!  While questing through Drustvar, it reminds me of a cross between Pandaria and Wrath of the Lich King.  The design is really nice, however, the NPC count needs to be increased as the zones look very sparse of people.

I’ll have more information as I continue to progress through the Beta.

I can’t wait to see what the final release will look like!

Legion

As I’ve progressed through the Legion patch and waiting for the final raid to go live for RaidFinder, I am finding myself in the same rut that I was in towards the end of Warlords of Draenor (WoD).  The constant questing, daily quests, and world quests really starts to get old after doing them constantly for over a month.

First we had to do them in the starting areas of the Broken Isles (Highmountain, Azuna, Stormheim, Suramar, and Val’sharah), then we had to do them at the Broken Shore and finally at Krokuun, Mac’Acree and Antoran Wastes.  So many dailies, so much time!

I am really hoping they do something different in the next expansion pack!

The factions for reputations arent too bad, except for the new fishing guy on the floating island next to Dalaran. Seriously, getting rep with him is worse that doing the old Ogri’la dailies from BC !!!

So, while I am randomly doing Legion dailies to get rep with the two factions on the ship, I am also going back and doing the old raids to complete them.  I just finished Throne of Thunder 10-man, and have to wait until next week to do it as 25-man.  No great drops like mounts, which is frustrating.

I’ve pretty much maxed out my gear score unless I do mythic dungeons and normal/heroic raids.  Something to think about, or ask in guild about.

Till Next time!

Amp

Chronic Disease and WoW (part 2!)

So my last post went into some detail regarding chronic disease and how it affects gameplay.  My trials and tribulations continued after my last post.  I was so lucky to get Pancreatitis!!  It seems that I had it for a little while which apparently was the root cause of my lower back pain and abdominal pain.  The pain was ridiculous and I was taking way-way-way too much pain medication.  So, into the hospital I went for 4 days until my pancreas was all better.

Once the pancreatitis resolved itself, my pain also went away, which was AMAZING!

I still have some minor pain, but it’s nothing like it used to be and I think that should be going away soon as well.

As for WoW, I guess you can say I am quite bored, especially with Amphyx, since I am pretty much maxed out without doing guild raids.  I’m still working on leveling some of my other toons, but doing the dailies gets quite repetitive after awhile.  I’ve gotten so bored that I just downloaded and installed Civilization 6 from the Mac App Store.  We’ll see how that goes.

Till Next Time!

Amphyx

Chronic Disease and WoW

Not sure if I had ever mentioned this, but I have Crohn’s Disease, a chronic condition that can be debilitating at times.  It’s also one of the reasons I haven’t posted here in awhile.  That, and I was laid off from my job.  So, life, as usual, likes to interfere with imaginary life in the game.

Crohn’s Disease, or CD, affects so many aspects of your life aside from the usual gastrointestinal.  Lethargy, tiredness, no energy are currently how I feel, which is frustrating because there are so many things I want to be doing… and yet, the thought of moving, or doing any of them is debilitating!

On top of all that, I have finally finished recovering from a case of Shingles which was hands down one of the most painful experiences ever.  Even with pain medication, it was ridiculously painful, so I am very glad to be over that!!!

As usual, I’ll keep trying to keep current on posting here.  Currently, in WoW, I’m back to being bored again.  so bored, that I created a new character, a driud!!  she’s at 25!