Slow News Day

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For lack of a better term, yesterday was a slow news day… at least in terms of me and gaming.  A handful of times a year I go out with some co-workers to RiffTrax and last night was the live show for Mothra.  I say live show… because in Nashville the Rifftrax crew genuinely is doing this live… and simulcast to the various theaters around the country.  We’ve talked about how great it would be to sit there in the theater and experience it in person…  but that would be like a nine hour drive.  Also the RiffTrax show is always on “a school night” which would make work the next day super awkward and staying over in Nashville even more bizarre.  The interesting aside from last night is that I apparently had either not seen Mothra… or did not remember it at all.  In truth when I think Mothra… I think Mothra vs Godzilla.  Growing up there was a local UHF channel that used to have “themed” weeks during the summer.  There would be one week where they played all of the Spiderman movies, or another week where they played nothing but Bruce Lee.  One of the weeks was always every single Godzilla movie, and I remember watching those as a kid and enjoying them greatly.  Mothra on the other hand…  was just way more bizarre than I ever realized.  Also as the RiffTrax folks kept pointing out… for a movie about Mothra she didn’t spend much time on screen.  The “Riffs” were of course plentiful and one of the more awesome things about going to several of these live shows… is that they keep making call backs to previous ones.  Both Merlin and the Ice Cream Bunny made appearances at least in joke form.

As far as gaming goes I did manage to get about an hour in before I finally collapsed, and during that time I mostly just worked on trying to get drops from the invasions.  Right now it seems like everyone is for the most part either finished gearing… or one slot away from it.  I’ve made a lot of progress in knocking stuff off in my spreadsheet, and at least feel like I am in a better place than I was earlier.  It does get frustrating when you need a single item… but keep getting nothing but bracers for example.  What I seem to be missing follows…

  • Exeter – Paladin – Gloves
  • Lodin – Hunter – Shoulders
  • Tallow – Shaman – Legs
  • Gloam – Rogue – Gloves
  • Belglaive – Demon Hunter – Grinding out Purchased Items
  • Belghast – Warrior – It’s Complicated

Right now I am mostly focused on that last one.  Belghast was my best geared character going into this event, so some of the items are simply not upgrades… unless I happen to warforge them.  Even then some of the slots are not worth it unless I get the 720 warforged versions.  The main thing for him however is gloves and a set of weapons because at least in my Fury set I only have a pair of 690 axes.  I am not sure at what point I call it “good” however, because really I feel like my 11 level 100 characters are all in a reasonable place for leveling in the Legion expansion, which ultimately was my entire point in doing any of the events.  At some point soon I am going to shift my focus over to the Monk and see how close I can get to pushing him over the level 100 line before the expansion actually hits.  I am not sure why but it just feels like it would be awesome to say I went into this expansion will a full stable of level 100 characters… at least on Argent Dawn my primary server.

The “Main” Problem

Shakes Fist

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Over the last few days my friend Grace and often times partner in crime in online games…  has been talking about how she should finish up her legendary ring.  I stalled out on both caring about this item and caring about grinding for it at some point.  I didn’t remember how many Chaos Tomes I had collected, but I knew it “wasn’t enough”.  I guess at some point they greatly jacked up the drop rate of these things, and I simply had not run any Hellfire Citadel content after this happened.  The problem is that this little back and forth planted the seeds in my head, that I too should go ahead and finish mine up.  This was only furthered when I noticed that I was sitting at 24 of 33 tomes in my inventory.  With each boss now having a nearly 100% drop rate that means that in a single night I could get enough tomes to finish up this step.  I thought surely I had to be close to the end by now, and could potentially push across the finish line for no reason other than to say I did it.  So for the bulk of last night I threw myself at the LFR system, sometimes it went well… other times not so much.  Namely when I zoned into Archimonde I had an instant 6 stack of determination, and for whatever reason on Bastion of Shadows the tank kept pulling before even half the raid was at a given boss.  However all of these things aside… I managed to get my tomes rather quickly and turned in the quest… finally now understanding what the hell happened to Cordana.  Side note I always read this as Cortana…  but I guess it really isn’t spelled that way at all.

I turned everything in waiting for my ring… only to realize that I was just about to get kneecapped by this quest chain.  You have to understand something… I hate the shipyard.  I have begrudgingly done a handful of quests to get my chest every few weeks, but otherwise have not really done shit in there.  I somehow knew in the back of my mind that this was probably going to bite me in the ass at some point.  Apparently to complete the legendary ring you need to have completed a series of 2 day long shipyard “legendary” missions, and while I am fairly sure I have run some of these….  I cannot for the life of me remember how many.  The only thing to do as a result is to just start running them now and hoping I can get through them in all before the 30th.   Ultimately this is going to be the bit that kills my bid for the ring, because I have done little to no effort to properly gear any of my ships.  So basically I am going to need a lot of luck going into these missions and just hope that I don’t have to repeat them.  So now I am shaking my fist at Grace for planting this damned fool quest in my brain…  because I suddenly apparently care about completing the Legendary ring.  If I am reading the quest line correctly… I am guessing I MIGHT be on the fourth part of the quest… the one that has to be completed before you do the mission to actually collect your Draenic Sea Charts.  So maybe this won’t be as bad as I am fearing in the end.

Abandoning “Main”

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Yesterday I talked a little bit about my dilemma of trying to pick a main.  I think that maybe the core problem is that I feel like I need to have one.  Mains have traditionally been a construct designed for raiding, so that you can focus your efforts on gearing one character to be the best you possibly can be in a raiding context.  While I might do some raiding, that is going to be far from my focus in Legion.  I want to do some of the mythic five player content, but even then I am not sure how serious I am going to be about it.  Maybe the construct of having a main is working against my enjoyment of this game.  I think back to the times that I enjoyed the most, and I absolutely had a raiding main character, but I also had an army of alts that I cared equally about.  Some of the most enjoyable times for me personally were farming these alts to friends raids, and getting to see content as something other than Belghast/Lodin/Belgrave depending on whcih my main was.  Hell Belghast was an answer to me not really liking raiding as a hunter, and I leveled it with the purpose of having cool stuff to do when not strapped to huntering.  So as someone for whom the alts have always been of the utmost importance…  how did I think I would ever be happy trying to focus mostly on just one of them.

That said there needs to be a sort of pecking order when it comes to leveling them.  I did not want to run LFR as a tank last night, that is a package of stress and frustration that I was simply not willing to take upon myself.  So as a result I figured out the new fury spec and spent the evening testing it out.  The end result is… that I think I like it quite a bit.  I have come back and forth on fury over the years… and the previous incarnation with Draenor was not really my thing.  This Legion version however is awesome, and I was having a blast playing it.  So much so that I think I might choose the Fury artifact weapon first, and then later pick up the tanking set.  I think for a lot of reasons Belghast is going to be the first character I level in Legion.  I mean he is the actual and for real “Belghast” not my army of “Belg” named characters.  Additionally Fury is a really fun DPS spec once again, and then Protection is a very familiar feeling tanking spec that I am more than comfortable doing content with.  So for the first we will honor tradition and for lack of a better term the warrior will be my “main”.  That said I plan on following it up quickly with several of the other classes that I have enjoyed like Demon Hunter, Warlock, Rogue and Shaman.

 

Elevator Broken

Fun While it Lasted

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On Monday I wrote about riding this new Legion Event to 100 on several of my characters, and how holding chests allowed me to instantly have viable level capped characters upon dinging.  At least the second part of that statement is true now, but sadly the first part…  not so much.  It seems yesterday they patched the servers to increase the spawn rate of events, but greatly decrease the experience gained from each.  While this is technically a net gain… it is also a whole lot of busy work to gain it.  Previously on my Monk in his 50s/60s I was gaining at least one full levels worth of experience from each event I participated in.  So that mean’t every four hours, I could run two events with him and then still have time to swap in some other alts for gearing purposes.  As of yesterday I was getting a little less than half of a level of experience per event participated in.  That means during the same four hour window, there are now a total of six events, instead of two…  and as a result if experience stays roughly half a level that means I gain 3 levels instead of 2 before.  The gotcha however is that you spend almost every second of that four hours either participating in an event or travelling to the next one, and in my experience I had no real time to swap in that many alts to also attempt to get gear.  Given how fast experience is gained through questing, it also feels like during that same four hour block I could probably do significantly better than three levels.

What made the “elevator” nice is that I could more casually swap in my lower level alts, and still have time to do the ones I was trying to get gear for.  Now instead I have to make a choice between getting the gear from the event, or leveling.  I mean I get why they did this, because they really want folks to focus on the gear and not the easy ticket leveling.  I am just glad that I managed to pull my Priest from 92 to 100, and my Mage from 90 to 100 before the elevator broke.  As a result I am tabling my Monk for the moment, at least until I finish getting all of the rest of my stable of 11 characters fully geared in 700 or better items from the event.  Technically Belghast my Draenor main has the least stuff from the event, but he also has 700 or better in most of his slots already.  Other than that my rogue really is the one missing the most gear, so I will be working on him next.  Exeter my Paladin is missing a weapon, Lodin my hunter Shoulders, and Tallow my Shaman a handful of items.  Instead of focusing entirely on the Monk I am going to work on getting these characters the last of the missing pieces so that they are in a better state to be prepared for leveling them in Legion.  I have this feeling that 700 is essentially the place they are expecting us to be at for the new content, and even though we will be swapping all of it out for better gear almost instantly it should at least ease that transition.

Unknown Main

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I am hoping over the next few days to be able to reach a point where I am completely okay hopping off the event train.  While it has been a fun ride chasing the skulls around the zones, I have to say I have neglected other important things during the process.  For example I have yet to complete the Broken Shore quest chain in live on any of my characters.  While I did it a bunch of times in Beta and have since seen the cinematics I missed… with the patching in of more quest content I feel like I need to get on the ball and start in with this.  More than anything this expansion feels really different, and in a good way.  I like the way that they seem to be easing us into the content with the invasion, and the head start into Broken Shore or the Demon Hunter experience.  It feels like we are having this rolling soft launch more than waiting for the 30th to flip the switch and have everyone rush into doing exactly the same stuff.  My hope is this is going to allow us to have a more staggered experience with different groups of people progressing through the content at different speeds.  I know personally I will likely be starting the new content in Stormheim, but that is largely because it feels like this great big love letter to Northrend.

The biggest challenge however still yet to be solved is… I have zero clue what my main is going to be.  There are a bunch of different classes that I really enjoy right now.  I love Vengeance Demon Hunter, I think in part because of its mobility and the ability to get places due to double jump and glide which comes in super handy in the new content.  I also am completely in love with Lodin my Hunter… because I am finally getting to play out that fantasy of being a melee hunter.  Belghast and Belgrave are both strong contenders because well… I tend to level tanks first, but in both cases they don’t necessarily feel that new or fresh but more the same.  I am also loving Tallow my Enhancement Shaman and Gloam my Outlaw Rogue… but they will more than likely be relegated to the back burner.  The character that I love that I am shocked to admit it though is my Demonology Warlock.  It is actually a really strong contender for getting leveled quickly, because I have enjoyed playing it so much.  Now however you can see the problem… I am loving this game at the moment because I am loving a lot of my characters at the same time.  There however has to be a first… and I am still completely up in the air as to who that is going to be.

Game Changer

In Another Castle

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Last night was my raid night in Final Fantasy XIV, but before hand my key focus was trying to get my Mage to 100.  I am not exactly sure what has lit a fire under me, but I am on this mission to have at least one server full with level 100 characters.  As you can see in the above image, I am actually extremely close to getting there.  Now granted I have the OTHER side of my linked server to start working on…  but Belgaoh my Monk remains the only sub-100 character I have on Argent Dawn.  The only problem there is he is SIGNIFICANTLY behind the curve sitting at only level 53 right now.  I keep thinking that if I can get on at the right time, and have at least one easy to get to invasion event I will be able to push him through to 60 so that he can fly, which is going to be the key to getting more events on him.  As of yesterday I thought I was nearing the end of the gear grind and even created a spreadsheet as an attempt to track progress in outfitting my characters in level 700 gear.  The take away from that process seemed like I was going to spend the next several days working on my leather wearers to catch them up in progression.

gamechanger

Then this happened.  I opened I believe 34 chests that I had gathered up on the mage in leveling from 90 to 100, and out of those chests seven different items came up as warforged.  Apparently yesterday during the day at some point they patched in the ability for chests to spawn warforged gear, meaning that all of those characters I thought I had finished with really have only scratched the surface.  I still think however my core mission is to get all of my characters outfitted in at least 700 gear, and if some of them get more trips to the candy shop in the hopes of finding warforged… then that is fine too.  Ultimately I realize that all of this gear is going to be replaced within the first few minutes of questing in the Broken Isles.  However for the time being I think this is probably a brilliant idea.  The longer they can keep players actively participating in this event the better, because for the time being it is an amazing source of leveling and gear for everyone involved.  I somehow doubt I will be able to get my monk all of the way to 100 in the short time available without focusing ENTIRELY on the monk, but I am definitely going to ride the elevator for as long as I can.

End of Expansion

One of the things I am realizing is that I apparently love the end of expansions.  Cataclysm was the expansion that broke me and my desire to be playing World of Warcraft, causing me to fade away and go play other games.  However I remember clearly that towards the end of the expansion I came back and really enjoyed myself.  There was so much to be doing, and everyone had a great casual attitude about it all.  For me personally I knew that nothing I was doing really mattered in the grand scheme of things, because as soon as Pandaria was released every last piece of gear I gathered would be replaced with greens.  So in this low pressure environment I allowed myself to piddle around without purpose and had a complete blast.  Similarly I remember coming back at the end of Pandaria and having the same fun experience, running around aimlessly on the timeless isle and doing all the little things that were fun but served no major purpose.  Here I find myself once again in a similar pattern with Draenor, and I feel completely in my zone.  The problem is that I wish I knew how to bottle this feeling and keep it alive during the rest of the expansion.

I am not sure how to take the joy that I feel at the end of an expansion when I am unfettered by expectations and pressures…. and keep that alive during the rest of the game.  There is a switch that flips in my brain when an expansion launches that says “okay Bel, you need to be useful… go grind your face off”.  I wish I knew how to turn that switch off completely because I think that is the thing that keeps getting in my way when it comes to enjoying an MMO for the long haul.  I essentially burn myself out, over and over… game after game… by focusing on some lofty goal that I cannot accomplish without significant help from others.  I end up ignoring the goals that are entirely up to me to complete, and those are probably the things that I technically enjoy more.  I have had a blast alting my way to 100 over the last few weeks and bringing my own personal army up to snuff.  As I look towards Legion, and Starfall Prophecy and whatever the Final Fantasy XIV expansion ends up being… I need to figure out how to keep this magic from the end of an expansion alive every single day I play the game.