It’s been one hell of a first 6 months for the Zergdins.  2012 brought with it a focus on Dragon Soul Raiding and a new MMO, Star Wars the Old Republic.  Let’s not forget Diablo 3 Mania and the ever popular “Grokk’s Pic of the day” post on the Official Zergadins Forums.  Going back and looking at the first half of 2012 will help us better focus on the second, juicer half of the gaming year.

January 9th, 2012 marked our first Madness of Deathwing kill.  Blowing through the first part of Dragon Soul, it took us two weeks of raiding to down the final Boss.  I blame the Holidays being smack in the middle of my prime time raiding. Panzer passed the reigns of Zergadin WoW raiding over to Gnomeganker, who has been hammering out Heroic kills regularly to our kill-shot gallery.

SWTOR launched, officially, on Decembe 20, 2011.  We’ll just say it really got started in 2012.  Wait, what am I saying?  The real launch date of SWTOR is June 26th, 2012.  The first six months was just a pay to play Beta model.  It’s been a rough ‘patch’ throughout this launch.  Read up on my thoughts about the dynamic between WoW and SWTOR, post your feelings as well.

Diablo 3 launched on May 15th, 2012.  Trade chats across multiple platforms went silent for weeks.  It was the fastest, and largest grossing, Game launch to date.  It will retain this title for the foreseeable future.  You might as well refer to game release sales goal as “Going Diablo.”  6.3 million copies sold the first week.  That’s not counting the ‘Free’ copies that Battle.net subscribers got with the year long commitment.  I don’t even want to look up how many they’ve sold to date.  What stuck with me the most was a comment made on the WoW Insider Podcast about D3.  It was Matt-Mat the Ogre that said what impressed them the most about the game was it’s timelessness.  “The game looks like a watercolor painting.”  I agree, that style will always look amazing.  When Blizzard looks at a games life span they must think in Decades, not years or months.

I’ve been slacking on my “Grokk’s pic of the Day” fix.  It’s good and good for you you people!  The thread has reached 54 pages and just passed the 1337 post amount!  We’ll have a retrospective of the thread once it’s OVER 9000.

That’s what in our rear-view, but what’s in our headlights?  Mists of Pandaria is a big one.  SWTOR has big year planned as well.  I feel the real question is this… what are the individual Zergadins planning for the next 6 months gaming wise?

I’ll be the first to say, I want to be a part of Zergadin MoP raiding.  I’m don’t deserve a raid spot up front, but rest assured Zyley will be there with a sack full of Hate and a fist full of Heals to welcome in this new xpac.

Concerning SWTOR we are at a Hyperspace Crossroads.  The guild there is on Life-Support.  I can perform a full suite of surgical moves and place us in another guild, but that’s not our family.  Chatting with a drunk Blarghe, Grokk, and Kildara last night over vent it made me miss the old days of 25 man raiding.  Not only did we all fill our raid roles, but we also filled our community roles.  Dave’s ‘Skipper’ to Jeff’s ‘Gilligan.’  Grokk’s ‘Kramer’ to Kildara’s ‘Elaine.’  Calindril’s ‘Silent Bob’ to Mappy’s ‘Jay.’  That’s where the magic happens.

Here’s to the Magic friends!

/Salute

Serawk the O.G. Healer of Hate