Week in Gaming 12/27/2015

Holiday Lagged

There are some mornings when trying to think is a struggle…  this is one of those mornings.  Last night I suffered from a pretty bad bout of insomnia, and instead of just sitting in bed and hoping for sleep to find me… I got up and played PS4.  At which point I realized it was 2:30 in the morning and I really needed to try and sort out how to sleep.  The day as a whole today is rainy and nasty and the antithesis of just how delightful the holiday was here in Oklahoma.  On Christmas day I was running around in a short sleeved shirt, and were it not for the wind I wouldn’t have needed my hoodie.  We were warned however that just after the holiday the temperature would drop, and from the sounds of it the panhandle of the state is now getting lots of ice.  Thusfar it has been only rain…. but so much of it that sitting upstairs in my office it actually drowned out the sound of all of the various machines whirring away.  I finally got up around 8:30 and attempted to start the day, but the problem being…  that I have largely just been staring at the screen unable to get a post started.  Then suddenly I remembered….  it’s Sunday… the day I have a crutch to fall back on in the form of the week in review posts.  So I am hobbling along on this crutch for all that is sacred in the world… otherwise I have no clue what I would write about.

Return of Destiny

I guess Bungie got the message that it sucks when Xur does not have a weapon option during the Friday festivities.  The last four or five weeks he has brought some new weapon each time…. and this week was no different with the newly Year-2-ized version of the MIDA Multitool.  During this month he has also brought the Monte Carlo, Hardlight, and Telesto.  The only problem here is Friday I have to make a decision… do I care enough about getting this weapon to grind out the 23 strange coins needed to purchase it.  The Monte Carlo was a no brainer, because I have heard so many good things about this gun… that I just had to play with one myself.  Telesto was similarly a no brainer, because I have gotten two of these to drop… so had no need for it.  MIDA and Hardlight however I was left with the decision if it was really worth the needed grinding to pick it up.  With the Hardlight I decided… that I already have a lot of Auto Rifles that I really like… between my love of the Zarinaea-D, Zhalo Supercell, Monte Carlo and the newly improved Fabian Strategy…  I had no real use for a new Auto Rifle to add to the mix.  For the MIDA however I crowd sourced my opinion and got messages back from Sig and Squirrel both saying to pick it up… that it was both amazing in PVE and PVP.  So far I am liking it, but I am having to get used to using a Scout Rifle again.  I have largely just been using Auto and Pulse Rifles for awhile now, so it is taking some adjusting.  The truth is… for the most part there are very few weapons that I don’t like in Destiny.

Last night while dealing with Insomnia I decided to cast aside the Hunter and Titan briefly and instead focus on the Warlock who still need to hit the level cap of 40.  I realize I could be leveling through doing the Taken King content, but instead I just ended up clearing out my bounty log.  I am finally reaching the point where my Stranger’s Rifle is beginning to show its age, as I finally got some weapon drops that are technically higher than it is.  The problem is… I am so damned used to using the Stranger’s Rifle… and the whole fully automatic pulse rifle thing is so overpowered… that I am probably going to keep at it until I hit 40, or at least until I get a purple weapon to replace it with.  In the meantime I am left with the decision… do I grind my way to 40 like I am doing in a super chill and enjoyable way… or do I actually start with the quests.  On my Hunter I largely waited to do quests until I was at the level cap, so I could revel in the sweet sweet engram drops that seem to happen like candy during missions.  I still have all of the House of Wolves and Dark Beyond quests as well… and those in theory won’t be nearly as beneficial gear wise.  So I might just start on doing those and see how close to 40 I can get.

Another thing I did this week was get my Ace of Spades exotic on the hunter.  I am currently on the First Curse of the step of the Gunsmith quest on my Titan… and I have to say I am simply not looking forward to doing all of the bullshit you have to do to get it.  The only problem with Ace of Spades is just how crap hand cannons seem to be right now.  I am not sure which I dislike more… the absolute potato range of them… or just how small the magazine and ammunition pool is in general with them.  I run out of ammunition while using a hand cannon faster than almost anything else…  and I never seem to get enough normal ammo drops to be able to use these in strikes.  So instead every now and then I break them out while doing bounties when things don’t matter quite so much.  The positive of Ace of Spades however is that it just look bad ass.  So in theory it might get some use, but not really likely given all of the other exotics that I have and legendaries that are also equally well stated.

World of Warcraft

The other day I posted about my mission that level a Cat Druid to 40 all so that I could leave the 360NoMount club… and add the Christmas Yeti mount to my collection.  It has been two days and I am now getting close to the goal.  As of last night when I finally reached the point where I thought it was probably time to attempt going to sleep… I was roughly 2/3rds of a level from 40 and was just now starting Feralas.  It has been a fun ride pushing up a new Cow Druid, and went a lot faster than I might had expected.  I took a slightly different route than I did with my Warlock and the end result feels like I got a lot more straight forward Kill Ten type quests which I can burn  through insanely quickly.  The other thing that helped is the fact that my druid is a skinner… and I was constantly jumping random leather bearing animals along the way to level that.  Back the in the day all of the leveling guides used to tell you to always be engaged in killing something… like if there was a mob on your way to your objective to always kill it no matter what.  Having done that on the Druid and not so much on the Warlock… I have to say that yes in fact that is the superior way to level especially with all of the experience boosted heirlooms that I am wearing.  The question is… now that I have almost achieved my goal… do I hit 40 and quit… or do I keep pushing up the druid.  I am not a big fan of the server cluster I am on, and the people seem to be insanely rude compared to Argent Dawn so at some point I may transfer the druid over once I finish it.  I realize I can cross realm group…  but man…  some of the stuff I have encountered here I have never run into on AD.  That is saying a lot given that I used to always think of Argent Dawn as a pretty horrific place.

The other activity that I spent time this week doing was leveling my Warlock.  Basically playing her was my reward for completing my holiday dailies…  and in part the only reason why I made so much progress on the druid so quickly, is that I completely started ignoring that holiday dailies existed.  At some point I need to go through all of my characters and loot the presents in Orgrimmar and Ironforge before they poof, but I think once I get to 40 on the druid I am going to switch back to playing the Warlock.  It is funny how isolating it can be playing on a different server even though you have access to BNet and your friends list.  Facepull is just friendly and somewhat active green spam and I love having it around.  It is my hope that at some point soon we will get the rumored battlenet channels, which will hopefully let us have guild like chat spanning across multiple games.  If there was an addon that existed that gave me access to slack while playing World of Warcraft… I would be in a perfect place.