Stormtalon’s Lair

Sleeping Soundly

When my wife travels I always have trouble sleeping.  You get so damned used to having another person laying in bed beside you, that something just feels off.  The cats try really hard to make up for the fact that there is another person missing from the bed, but it doesn’t quite work the same.  When my wife is gone I end up with one cat pushed up against my face on my pillow… another one burrowed against me on the side my wife would normally be, and a third pretending the bed is lava by standing elevated on my legs.  The end result feels like I am trapped in place for fear of upsetting some crazy version of kitty jenga.

Last night however I picked my wife up from her latest trip, which should be the last of the season.  So when I hit the sack around 10:30 I conked out soundly and sleep that way for the majority of the night.  Its funny how amazing a good nights sleep feels when you haven’t been getting them.  I am still a bit groggy, but things feel like they just function better.  I should try getting this sleep thing more often.  By the time I finish this Monster Zero Ultra I should be feeling right as rain.  However it will never cease to amaze me what an effect having my wife home can have on me and my overall happiness and well being.

Nipplegate

So yesterday blizzard released the images of the new Male Human model as part of the reworking coming with Warlords of Draenor.  Overall I have to say they seem to have done a pretty good job of translating the original look to a more high fidelity version.  It has been compared to Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as well as the “Human” Shrek from the second movie.  I can definitely see the human shrek thing, but overall it doesn’t really bother me.  Belghast is a human male warrior, and I can see being just fine with the look and feel of the new model once you slap some facial hair on it.  The only thing I don’t get are the nipples.  What the hell is going on with those…  like I sincerely hope this is a texture mapping issue deforming them and not the intended final look.  They remind me somewhat of a pair of pepperoni slices glued to the canned ham like pectoral muscles.

It makes me wonder if the Dwarven male had the same issue, but we just didn’t notice because there was always a beard covering them up.  So I did some digging and the emotes manage to allow us to see the nipples on the Dwarven model.  Maybe it is just that they are smaller scale but they look less like something pasted onto the chest.  Yes I realize the irony here in pointing all of this out… because this is precisely the same sort of thing that women have had to go through every time a game releases a female model of anything.  Hell Wildstar as much as I love it… I am convinced the animators have never actually seen a female form, because the proportions for the waists especially are anatomically impossible.  Anyways…  twitter is freaking out.  Since I don’t tend to run around shirtless in an MMO, at the end of the day it doesn’t really effect me much.

Stormtalon’s Lair

WildStar64 2014-06-25 20-39-45-594 At this point we had run Ruins of Kel Vorath a few times, but there is a completely different level 20 dungeon that we had yet to touch.  So last night we managed to pull together a workable team and run Stormtalon’s Lair.  After the mess that was the last time I tried to tank one of these things wearing something other than tank gear, I opted to craft a bunch of new gear and augment it with a few careful auction house purchases.  The end result was that I had what felt like enough support power to do the job, and sure enough I had none of the threat issues that I had the last time.  It seems like if you are in tank gear, you will do just fine controlling the mobs in an instance, which is somewhat of a cool thing.  For awhile we had heard this dungeon was considerably harder than Kel Vorath, and by the difficulty we had with the first boss and some of the trash mobs I would have agreed with those people.

WildStar64 2014-06-25 21-18-38-440 However once we got used to the trash, it felt far more manageable than that of Kel Vorath.  While there were quite a few annoying things they did, there seemed to be far fewer of the “Random group wiping” type effects.  The first boss honestly was probably the hardest boss in the instance for us.  We managed to down the second boss in one try and the final boss I think took us two, and we finished it up with only three people standing.  As far as a dungeon to run multiple times… I would honestly far rather do Stormtalon now that I am used to it.  I don’t really want to give away any of the fight mechanics, because for us at least that is one of the most enjoyable things about going into a new MMO is hitting the fights completely cold and trying to figure out the mechanics on the fly.

WildStar64 2014-06-25 21-43-32-033 That said we did encounter an optional boss that completely beat our spirit down.  We made five or six attempts and never could quite land on the right strategy for dealing with it.  During the encounter he summons some adds, and if I try and tank both the boss and the adds I get absolutely wrecked.  I am wondering if this is going to be one of those situations where I have to kite the boss around while everyone burns the adds.  The problem is… the adds don’t go down terribly easily, and he summons more waves rapidly.  While we don’t have the answer yet, I look forward to going back in another night and trying to figure the encounter out.  Right now I am loving the feeling of the boss mechanics in these dungeons, because whoever did their encounter design is really doing some interesting stuff.

WildStar64 2014-06-25 22-03-03-871 For the longest time I have wished there was such a thing as 5 man raiding, and really the type of mechanics we are seeing are the level that normally accompany raid encounters.  I would say that the 5 man normal dungeons here are at least as difficult as LFR is in WoW.  I can see these encounters being an absolute nightmare to try and PUG your way through them.  There are moments where the entire group has to pay attention and do something or they die in almost every boss fight I have come up against.  While World of Warcraft tended to recycle boss mechanics from one expansion in the next expansions dungeon content…  this is something wholly different.  It is introducing a raid level of responsibility into encounters that I have not seen before.  The existence of Interrupt armor is going to be the death of many a PUG group.

#WoW #Warcraft #Nipplegate #Wildstar #StormtalonsLair

5 thoughts on “Stormtalon’s Lair”

  1. Men with extremely low body fat % sometimes have nipples like that.

    I only came here because the nipplegate tag on SCREE made me lol.

    😛

  2. We did that optional boss by interrupting his first add summon cast and then just blowing every cooldown ever and DPSing him down as fast as possible.

    Also I’m amused that you like Stormtalon better! I did Stormtalon first and then Kel Voreth, and I thought the latter was waaaaay easier. Very interesting.

  3. I have to say.. I’m confused by “nipplegate”. I didn’t even notice until they were pointed out and to be honest, some fellas do have nipples like that. As you say, you’ll only see them when you get nekked. :p

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