Space Wolves: The Primarising

Fall of Theremore: the tipping point Blizzard DIDN'T intend

I'm not being melodramatic when I say this may be the tipping point for me not pick up MoP and possibly quitting altogether. I have played continuously since I first started in early BC, and have never gotten the burnout that most players do, I've always found something in the game to interest me and occupy my time. I love the game, the setting, the lore, and my characters.

Many people have now experienced the theramore "event" and the outcry is both terrible and deserved. How blizzard can put this piece of  crap out the door as-is is completely beyond my comprehension. It's terrible. It's worse than terrible, it's a slap in the face. A giant "F-U, go buy our book"  from blizzard. And it's either a sign that they just don't understand how to tell a good story anymore, or they just don't care. Or both. There's no context, no preamble, no setup, no resolution. It's like reading chapter 13 of a 25 chapter book without even a summary page, you'd have to go online and read the sparknotes to make heads or tales of it. And it wouldn't have been so bad except for how much HYPE blizzard has generated for it! It's a bigger disappointment than the so-called "epic" Thrall questline that consisted of " go kill 20 elementals without getting ganked, repeat 3 more times"

Cata shook my faith in Blizzard and for the first time, I nearly quit the game. It was not burnout, I HATED cataclysm, hated the changes, hated the stories and the new races (well, goblins). Hated how long everything took, how hard quest/daily mobs hit and how slowly they died, how difficult the dungeons were. Especially hated how silly everything was, between rediculously over the top goblins (who are now EVERYWHERE) and silly quests with non-stop pop-culture references with the on-rails storytelling. Hated that all my favorite quests were removed and all my favorite places gone, and hated doing hours and hours of archeology for a troll sword I never got, a long boring new "feature" that only succeeded in giving me plenty of time flying over the world instead of experiencing it to think about how much I hated the changes. Only transmog kept me playing, it was announced the day after I decided I would let my account slip and it saved the game for me. My raid team is the only other reason I still play, they're all kinds of awesome.

But MoP looks terrible. It's like they read my psych profile and set out to make the worst possible expansion  for me, tailor-made. I hate pandas. I hate that they're called panda people, and that they come from panda land, and that they know kung fu and are chinese. Some aspects of the xpac look neat, but the core doesn't engage me at all. I was willing to give it a chance despite my complete lack of excitement over it, but now? Blizzard has cemented the fact that they have lost the magic they used to have. The game is nothing like what made me love it, what made me want to lose myself in it. I don't feel tired of playing it, I feel copletely let down and abandoned in favor of what Blizzard thinks will somehow be "fun" and I just don't see it at all. All I see is a bunch of developers REALLY excited about everything I don't care about, and everything I care about gone or back-burnered or de-emphasized. Talk about a sad panda.

We interupt this broadcast...

Not exactly Warcraft, but it is elves and it does have a war- prefix. Besides, it's my blog and nobody reads it anyways, so there's that. Anyways, I've been working on my old love again: miniature wargaming. Specifically some Warmachine stuff for the first time in a very long time (basically since the mk2 edition change). Retribution of Scryah was the last faction to come out, hitting just before mk2 released. I had thought about it at the time since they're elves, but was pretty heavy into Cygnar  (despite them being pretty distinctly not-elves) and didn't want to jump on the new hotness bandwagon, despite my predilection for elves (I don't think I mentioned elves enough yet). Plus the army seemed like a bit of a pain to paint, lots of large, smooth, white armor that would require lots of layers and blending to look right.

I did pick up a warjack and a solo to paint up, and they turned out fantastic, but sure enough took forever to paint and that's about as far as I got with them. Mk2 really turned me off from the game, all my awesome Cygnar stuff became mediocre, all the mediocre stuff I never bought became awesome, and all my medium sized (now mediocre) units I needed to get more guys for (and match 5 year old paintjobs) since in mk2 you can ONLY have minimum or maximum units. Add in having to relearn all the stuff that had changed and I lost all interest. But a leaked version of the new Warhammer 40k edition got me interested again, and since that's months off I decided to go back to Warmachine and get back on the scene. I sold most of my cygnar to a sucke...friend amd used the money to get Retribution stuff.

I  like the standard scheme for Retribution, but I don't have turquise ink so I used purple for the weapons and arcane effects. The green and black I may go back and highlight more, it looks fine up close but kinda blends in too much on the table-top. Here's the finished Warcasters I picked up, Ravyn, Garryth and Kaelyssa

 

The original Solo I painted up, a Dawnguard Scyir (who isn't that great in game, it turns out). I originally went with a n ivroy instead of highlighting to white, so he may get highlighted a bit more or left as-is since he's a solo. The green is much brighter than the other models, and I'm still debating bringing the rest up to that color. His base is a rackham base, and I was going to use that style for all my Retribution, but then I realised my mercenary units wouldn't match, so I dropped it for the same style i used with my Cygnar. He will need ot be rebased if he's going to see any in-game use.

 A WIP shot of what's on the bench, some nearly finished solos. An Arcanist, a Soulless Escort, and 2 Mage hunter Assassins

   and the original Manticore I painted, which now has to be lightened up to white, and a Gorgon that needs a lot of work. A Pheonix and a Griffon are on the bench too, as are a unit of Dawnguard Sentinels and Officer, all at the same level of paint as the Gorgon.