Posts with tag storms

Weather has been kind of a big deal this week, at least if you live in the eastern U.S. Though it's an essential part of the planet, weather can be devastating.

Azeroth, like Earth, has dynamic weather. It's a feature that makes the game world feel more alive, and one of the few that players love almost universally. Even so, Blizzard's commitment to the immersion of dynamic weather has been up and down over the years.

A static start

Eight years ago, WoW launched without any weather at all. The game had a day/night cycle, but no other changing conditions. Hillsbrad was always sunny, with no rain to dampen the constant Southshore/Tarren Mill PvP battles. It never snowed in Winterspring, despite the heavy snowfall in evidence.

Blizzard was working on weather. Like many aspects of WoW, however, it would take a long time for them to deliver it.

The thing I love most about summer is the thunder storms. Forget the constant days of 90 degree weather making my apartment bake even when the air conditioning is on, it's those storms rolling in with lightening striking a few hundred feet from me that I love. My guild-mates are going to love that too, especially when I'm raiding with them.

We've had our first couple weeks of this in game, and already I've heard "Be right back, Tornado," from some guildies living down in Kansas. Luckily everything was okay and no one got hurt, but the fact still remains – we lost our head Mage for 30 minutes, and that's 30 minutes of our life we can't have back!

While a Mage having to take a break in the middle of raids isn't a show stopper, having the main tank (my role) go offline is. I've had the unfortunate situation of having that occur a couple days ago. The computer I was raiding on wasn't plugged into my UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply), so I was disconnected from everything when we lost power for about 30 seconds. However with a bit of tinkering around, I was able to put myself in a situation that lets me stay on even when the power hiccups.

As I've mentioned before, The Darkmoon Faire is currently in Terrokar Forest, just outside Shattrath City, so if you have decks to turn in or need to refill your private stock of Darkmoon Special Reserve, now's the time to get on it. But if you're still a little bit taken aback by the prospect of gathering all those cards, or wondering if the trinket at the end will really be worth it, we'd like to help you out.

In this post, we'll be looking at both the old and new decks and listing some pros and cons of each deck so you can figure out if you want to spend the next month tracking down cards before the Faire shows up in Elwynn Forest in March, or even if you just want to blow your epic flying mount fund on getting a deck before it leaves for the month.

We'll start in on everything after the jump.