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Regularly Playing: November 2019 Edition

November 8, 2019 by Belghast

Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last Regularly Playing column. The idea behind this is that I throw out and update once a month talking about what I am playing and what has faded away. It also serves as an opportunity for me to “true up” my regularly playing widget in the sidebar of this blog. However had I updated at the beginning of October you would have largely just seen a single entry for Destiny 2. I was in a pretty unhappy place with Blizzard and it really made me not want to spend much time writing about what I was doing other than Destiny.

However we have a new month and with it comes some new perspectives. I’ve allowed myself to step back from that precipice even though I feel like a bit of a fraud for doing so. I was making myself unhappy by dwelling so much on the bad feelings. I am back dipping my toe into Blizzard things, but I am still largely feeling awful for doing so. However lets get to the list so I can start talking more about each one of them.

To Those Remaining

I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Destiny 2 and if you have read my blog over the last month or so you will have noticed this. Destiny is in a truly amazing state right now and the Cross Save functionality has created this hotbed of players on the PC platform. Over night it seems that PC went from the lowest population platform to the highest as folks are taking advantage of just how much better the experience is on the PC as opposed to the aging console generation. I still only have a handful of people regularly playing but it helps greatly to have Thalen who is also going through a similar renaissance. I’ve more or less given up on most of the AggroChat crew understanding or even latching onto how great this game.

This game was periodically off the menu… but as soon as I eased up on my stance regarding the Blizzard/Hong Kong situation it was one of the first things I logged into. With all of the news about Diablo 4 it has renewed my interests in playing some Diablo 3. I more or less failed miserably at this season but I did managed to knock out the cosmetics for it. I am hoping to get back on track with the new season starting soon and return to semi-regularly playing this with Grace.

This continues to be a nightly thing that I play as I am winding down from the day. I am not super active in it, but generally speaking I play enough each night to knock out the daily objectives. I am not sure what it is about this pattern that I find relaxing but generally speaking as I am wrapping up the last few things I am finding myself fighting to stay awake and can lay down the tablet and slumber peacefully. The release cadence as I have said before really is the piece that keeps me engaged, and the fact that I get a gacha summon pretty often through simply playing the game normally. They are not getting money from me, but they are getting a bunch of active usage.

I’m leaving this one on the list but I have to admit it is hanging by a thread here. I initially stopped playing Classic over the Hong Kong incident as I stopped playing any Blizzard games. However upon resuming play I am finding it exceptionally hard to get back into the slower pace of this game. I’ve become used to the run and gun pace of Destiny 2 and my brain is sorta fighting back against this. I had some experience with this when I came back to Classic after the launch of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep. In theory I probably need a bit more time to figure out how to slide back in and resume my path to 60.

To The New And Returning

While I am in a bit of a holding pattern thanks to activity in Destiny 2, I eased into The Outer Worlds a few weekends ago and am looking forward to maybe getting in and playing some more this weekend. This is pretty much the perfect logical successor to my favorite of the Fallout series, New Vegas. It is a weird remix of Fallout, Firefly, Bioshock and Mass Effect and were I not as addicted to Destiny as I currently am it would have become my primary game. I am sure I will get back in and play some more, hopefully prior to the podcast on Saturday.

This is one I did not expect, but after my ceasing of hostilities towards Blizzard… I am finding myself playing a lot more of Retail than I am of Classic. I got in the other night and did the 15th anniversary quests, but I am also finding myself just running around on the Demon Hunter a bit. The other thing I found odd was that I attempted to log into my Alliance characters and found myself turning my nose up at them because they just didn’t feel right. I guess I made a legitimate transition over to The Horde at some point? I blame Grace.

To Those Departing

I am sure I will pick this game back up at some point but I have had another things on my mind. In truth I will always be more of an MMO player than I ever am a purveyor of Single Player games. This one will get attention because I still have yet to beat it. I just haven’t been in the mood for it of late.

I am sorry Shadowbringers… you suffered a cruel fate at the hands of WoW Classic and never quite recovered. I know there is a new patch, with new content to experience… but I am also not exactly finding myself rushing back to play it. I am not exactly sure what it is with this game but I go through this cycle after the release of an expansion. I play it hard and heavy for awhile… level two characters… and then disappear. It happened to some extent with Heavensward but absolutely both Stormblood and Shadowbringers saw me in exactly the same pattern. Once the overarching story was completed, my desire to keep playing dissipated.

I’ve also found myself simply not logging into Magic the Gathering Arena. This is a game that desperately needs a tablet friendly version. If that existed I would spend way more of that “before bedtime” tablet gaming playing Arena. As it stands when I am at a PC there are just other games I would rather be playing. I’ve also not felt nearly as connected with either War of the Spark or the Eldraine expansions as I have with previous themes. I loved Ixalan, and I think it might go down as probably my favorite non-Dominaria plane we visited. Return to Return to Ravnica felt weirdly watered down as though it were a subject that had been just spread too thin. I am sure I will return at some point but for right now it leaves the list.

You just never had a chance did you Iceborne. You launched at a bad time for me when my attentions were drawn elsewhere to WoW Classic. Then you announced the release of the PC version and I more or less decided to wait. The PC version really is the best version of the game and I found myself just struggling to get used to using a controller again. I am sorry that we just couldn’t come to a workable arrangement. I will see you in January.

Summary

Hopefully I can get back on the wagon of keeping this updated at the beginning of each month. We have a lot of familiar faces on the list in spite of a few of those exiting. I am sure for example I will play through the new patch content in FFXIV at some point, but that point is not now and it is not even really on my radar. My goal is to finish up The Outer Worlds and try and ease back into WoW Classic. However I have a bad habit of abandoning my goals.

Mind the Defile

November 7, 2019 by Belghast

Last night with the assistance of my good friend Grace I did in fact get my World Destroyer mount that is currently available as part of the World of Warcraft 15th Anniversary event. It was nowhere near as painful as getting the Core Hound Chain, which required you to clear the level 100 version of Molten Core. That is not to say that this mount is a cakewalk, because it did in fact take far longer than I expected it to. You get the mount from the Memories of Fel, Frost and Fire Achievement which involves fighting a bunch of versions of classic raid bosses encounters. You have to do the following Encounters.

Defeat Burning Crusade Bosses
- Lady Vashj
- Kael’thas Sunstrider
- Archimonde
Defeat Wrath of the Lich King Bosses
- Heigan the Unclean
- Anub’arak
- The Lich King
Defeat Cataclysm Bosses
- Cho’gall
- Nefarian
- Ragnaros

The fights themselves are greatly simplified versions of the raid encounters. You also do not have to get the boss all the way down but instead to somewhere around the 25-35% mark before exiting and getting sent to the next fight. There is a chance at getting loot drops after each trio of encounters, and I managed to pick up a really nice ring for my trouble from the Wrath sequence. Grace picked up a modernized version of Cho’gall’s mace which was also really nice. There is one problem however that makes this whole process a little less nice.

If you wipe at any point you seemingly have to restart the entire sequence. So if you for some reach wipe on Archimonde… that means you will have to do Lady Vashj and Kael’thas all over again. You also have to mechanic. Moments into the Heigan fight we were down to I think five players given that almost the entire raid stood in the plague explosions and didn’t do the “Dance”. On the Lich King folks ignored Defile and as a result spread it across the entire platform wiping the raid and forcing us to go back and do the first two bosses again. We stuck through it and have our Deathwing mounts to show for it, but I doubt I will be farming for items.

Classic Doldrums

October 8, 2019 by Belghast

I feel like I am in a weird place right now with World of Warcraft Classic. Last week I allowed myself to take a break from the game for the launch of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep. Now that I have hit the light soft cap I have been trying to re-engage with Classic and it for whatever reason just hasn’t been taking. What has been happening is that I log in… run around a bit… and then log right back out and go over to Destiny 2 to play it some more. As a result I am in the woeful position of being out of the level range with most of the crew that I had been running with previously. I am sitting at a little over 44 and now folks are starting to ding 50.

I think I am more or less just lacking to find traction in a set of quests that are enjoyable to do. Right now Tanaris is a little over my level range, and what is left in Stranglethorn feels tedious and boring. Last night towards the end of the evening I moved over to Feralas and managed to make it through a few quest chains, so maybe just maybe this is going to be my home for a bit. I figure if I can somehow eek out 45 and 46 I can return to Tanaris and start to make some proper traction there. The benefit of Feralas is that there is plenty of meat to keep cooking up food… of which I go through a silly amount of because that is how I ultimately heal to lower downtime.

I am very much in the doldrums of the leveling curve and post 40 everything slowed down massively, which I think is part of the problem. It feels vastly different than the run and gun pace of Destiny 2 that I allowed myself to get used to. As a result my brain sorta rejects Classic each time I try and spend more than a few minutes playing it. What makes it worse is there is a tangible feeling that day by day people are getting ahead of me to the point where it will be super difficult to actually catch up. I could in theory run a bunch of dungeons, but the dungeons in my level range are not super exciting because there isn’t much more than XP waiting for me in them.

On the Destiny side of things I have stalled out a bit as well. I am starting to get pretty much exclusively 410s off powerful engrams, which is fine so long as they drop for a new slot. However when the same slot keeps dropping over and over there isn’t much gained by it. I probably need to spend a bit of time in the world grinding blues and legendary drops between powerfuls to try and keep pushing it upwards. I still have yet to beat the campaign… which I really should do soon.

I could also start an alt which would help with the light pushing a bit. For the time being however I am just enjoying the moment to moment game play so much. I am curious what changes the reset is going to bring today. Right now the activities seem to be dropping a fixed set of weapons, and I am wondering if that is going to rotate today.

Green and Orange

September 27, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I am struggling to come up with anything worth writing. Allergies are killing me and I am in sorta a histamine daze. We have a very lovely screenshot of what it looks like to be in Swamp of Sorrows… where everything is either orange or green. Were it not for my glowing eyes you would have trouble making out my facial details. This is an era in the game where objects don’t really throw off proper lighting, and as a result the campfire that I am standing beside is doing nothing to illuminate the scene.

Last night I more or less finished Badlands, minus all of the quests that involve Uldaman, which we still need to run. There are some quests in zone that I could do but they were higher level than was efficient for me to grind out, and also in a super dense and dangerous area of the zone. As a result I hopped a flight to Stonard and have been whittling through the quests that I had in Swamp of Sorrows. They also are largely higher level, but the zone as a whole is pretty spread out allowing you to keep from getting a bunch of multi-pulls.

That all may change as I am about to start hunting the murlocs along the eastern coastline, and we all know how they love to chain pull. In theory I really need to gather up a group of people and make an attempt at Uldaman, to knock out a bunch of the quests there. That might be an objective of this evening but the biggest challenge is the time zone thing. Last night was just a case of people logging in within a very staggered manner never quite giving us a party of five until Tam/Ash/Kodra had already committed to running some Wailing Caverns on their alts.

Forty really is about the halfway point in the leveling process not 2/3rds as the numbers would make it seem. Things have really slowed down significantly and each level seems to take way more effort than the previous one. I think this is around the point where I started to lose focus in the initial game launch, because I never quite made it to 60 at launch. I think I got to somewhere in the 50-55 range before wandering off originally and going to play Everquest II with some friends for awhile. I then came back and pushed through the rest of the levels and started the traditional level 60 activities.

I know next week my attention is going to start being split, and this weekend is the Tulsa State Fair, which means I am not going to get much leveling done on Saturday. The hope is on Sunday I can pour on a few more levels so I have a shot in hell of keeping up. Destiny 2 Shadowkeep launches on October 1st and I know I will start spending a bit of time each night in that as well. There is also Monster Hunter World Iceborne that I have yet to really touch. I don’t want to lose focus but we have officially entered the doldrums where that becomes a challenge.