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!

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

Welcome, Hello and You’ve Got to be kidding me!

I’m writing this because I just don’t feel like doing more garrison quests today.

Seriously, doing these garrison dailies is becoming such a chore!  Can’t we have our followers just do the dailies for us???

That’s what I’d like to see in the next patch!