I am on the road again, and although I am sad to be away from my wife, I'm trying to make the most of my travels. I explored some new areas, worked in a military capacity, and had a few hours to play WoW and Hearthstone.
On the Hearthstone front, I can tell that it will continue to be a fun game to play, especially when the connection will not support higher level LFR groups in WoW. There is only so much WoW daily quest grinding you can tolerate, after all. Hearthstone is a great deal of fun, although it requires uninterrupted time to play each game. It is also a game that will require you to lose a lot before you have a decent deck, from what I can tell. I have probably opened 5 or 6 bonus packs of cards so far, using gold that I obtained from daily quests and victories. I am becoming quite familiar with the feeling of losing to other players, and even the NPC practice opponents destroy me quite often. Even with a deck that includes blue and purple cards, it seems to be a very luck-dependent game. An addicting and fun luck-dependent game which will probably consume some of my actual income for new card packs.
On the WoW front, I reached ilvl 488 by completing the Golden Lotus revered grind and running quite a few LFR groups. I finished Throne of Thunder today, concluding the list of available LFR instances, although I observed 75% of the Lei Shen fight as a corpse. I still have no idea what killed me. But I have put epic pieces in ever slot except trinkets...those simply elude me, and I anticipate more rep grinds to obtain those. I do not expect to have a good enough connection to continue running LFR groups, so my priest will likely remain my best geared character for quite a while.
I am bringing directional wifi antennae, and multiple wireless cards and connection points in hopes of developing a reasonable and reliable connection with which I can skype my wife and play an online game when I have time. Remembering my last two deployments, I am bridling my optimism so that I am not sorely disappointed when the internet sucks.
So, I'm preparing to shift to alt leveling and rep/heroic gearing. I have a goal to level some classes that I have not ever played so far, such as lock, pally, shammy, and monk. And, I am completely unfamiliar with my DK, druid, and hunter, which are all sitting patiently at 85. Smoogestab, my rogue, is now at 86. Icy veins seems to be the new go-to place for leveling and gear questions, and I have adopted their combat rogue leveling strategy, paired with a good leveling addon.
As far as UI stuff goes, I have experimented with quite a few addons recently. So far, I have settled on Dominos, Recount, Dugi, Atlas Loot, and a leveling addon. I am still looking for a good unit frame and cooldown addon for both my priest and all of my alts. I am tolerating Healbot and TellMeWhen, and I dislike the xPerl unit frames I currently have installed.
