Setting Priorities

Return of the Deathknight

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I’ve already talked at length about how we know without a doubt that Gladiator will be dying with the launch of Legion.  As a result this will greatly hamper my enjoyment as a Warrior since in truth I have never really liked Fury or Arms that much.  Sure I could go back to tanking full time… and that would be pretty awesome…  but my prospects for returning to a main tanking role are not entirely that great.  I mostly shifted to DPS so that if I missed a night… it wouldn’t be the end of the world.  Missing a night as one of the primary tanks however…  that is a big deal and causes great hardship on whatever raid you are part of.  That said…  everything I am hearing about Blood Deathknights is telling me that they are returning to the awesome feel they had before Warlords turned them into finger wigglers.  I mean there are lots of people that don’t get my complaints about the class… but having a lot of caster animation abilities in your standard rotation ended up making them feel less of a big sturdy melee class.  I mean I play Blood when I need to survive, especially while questing on Tanaan but I pretty much hate every moment of it.  The class has always been tied to that spec for me.. and even before it became the main tanking tree…  I was a blood Death Knight.

Granted there were times I flirted with Unholy for DPS, and Dual Wield Frost for Tanking…. but in each of those times…  Blood was still my other spec, the one I never got rid of because it just felt awesome.  With it returning to glory, I have to say I am kinda excited about dusting off Belgrave again.  The problem being as you can see above… he is wearing this horrible mishmash of whatever gear I happened to find along the way.  So one of my goals over the coming weeks is to get him as geared out as I can given the meager scraps he has access to through Hellfire LFR, Kazzak, and Tanaan jungle drops.  I figure whatever effort I put into gearing him now… will only serve to make him easier to level in Legion.  I am still not giving up hope completely on getting in Alpha, because there is honestly just a bunch of stuff that I want to test out.  However in the meantime there is a bunch I can do to improve his status in life, and some of that might even mean pugging a normal Hellfire raid at some point.  The thought of that scares the shit out of me, but if nothing else… I want to get to a point where I could survive tanking a Mythic Dungeon.

The Hunter

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The second goal is to find some time and get Lodin my hunter through the Shipyard quest and unlock that part of the garrison.  There is an absolute certainty that when Legion comes out… I will be switching him to Survival hunter and never looking back.  My main character in Everquest was a cleric, but my primary alt… was a Ranger…  a dual wielding melee ranger.  So when World of Warcraft was released, I absolutely tried to make Hunter into a melee ranger class.  I’ve posted plenty of screen shots of me “tanking” early dungeons as a Hunter, and to be honest… when I found out that the class was never going to be viable as melee…  I lost interest in it as my main.  Other circumstances however lead me to raid as it in Vanilla… which by default turned it into my raid main.  However from the moment I had to abandon survival and hitting things with big two handed weapons…  the class just wasn’t for me.  Now I have played it off and on since then, and I really enjoy Beast Mastery and the aspect of taming interesting creatures to fight for me.  But the player fantasy of being a badass ranged character… has never been one that I shared.  In preparation for my eventual spear wielding days as Survival, I want to spend some time gearing up Lodin and getting him ready for the expansion.  Right now he has a pitiful smattering of gear out of gear from Highmaul, augmented with a handful of Baleful shipyard drops.  It is my hope to get him into fighting shape soon, or enough of a shape to be able to survive farming Tanaan.  Right now however…  he is sub 640…  which greatly limits my options.

The Dwarflock

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The other character that has been calling my name lately is my Dwarf Warlock Belganon.  He is currently somewhere in Northrend in the mid 70s, and represents one of only two characters Alliance side that are sub level 90 and that do not already have a Garrison.  It is my hope to push him up, because of all of the finger wigglers… the one I am most likely to play is the Warlock.  I feel like the lessons that I learned playing an Arcanist/Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely make me a better warlock player.  I’ve always leaned heavily towards Demonology… because just like Beast Mastery…. they have the really awesome pets.  Especially now that all of the Warlock pets have been updated with higher quality Warlords/Legion era models, I think its time to revisit the class and see if it works for me.  I will never likely main a caster of any sort, but from time to time I have fun playing them.  If I can manage to get this guy up… that just leaves the Monk…  which I have admittedly struggled with.  In both cases I am kinda hoping to be able to dungeon most of my way to maximum level.

Old Friends

AggroChat #37  – Games of the Year: Part Two

Last night I uploaded the second half of our Games of the Year broadcast, finishing out our pseudo countdown with the game that four of us voted for.  However while that might have been the game of the year through consensus, it just did not feel quite right to declare an official game of the year for a podcast with so many disparate voices.  As a result each of us gave our own game of the year, and you will have to listen through the podcast to see what my pick wound up being.  I have to say we had an interesting round of discussions about this one and I hope we end up doing this as a yearly thing.  With the end of the year closes what I am calling “Season 1” of the podcast.  I only started classifying things by season because there was a place for that in the ID tag within Audacity, and I figured what the hell… might as well.

With the new year will bring a new season, and at this point I am not quite sure what it will look like.  Right now we have a cast made of of myself, Ashgar, Kodra, Rae, Raven and Tamrielo but I sincerely doubt that most shows will have all six of us.  That seems like a rather large group to podcast with, but hopefully we can muster four to five of us on any given night.  The biggest regret for season one is that we had Tam has a pretty constant part of the show but we never actually updated the logo to include his chibi…  even though he has had one for quite awhile.  Ultimately I figure we should get Rae to draw up a Raven chibi as well just to have it at the ready.  I would love to revamp our homepage a bit to have bios about each of the podcasters.  I would also love to bring back in Dallian on occasion, who filled in quite regularly as this podcast was getting off the ground but we have not had to tag in for awhile.  Hopefully you enjoy this second part of our Games of the Year show.

Old Friends

waitingfornaxx Yesterday I had an excellent surprise when I saw what character a good friend of mine was playing.  She has favored the horde for some time, and when her guild over on another server went belly up I sponsored hr membership to the guild horde side that I have my alts in the Bloodmoon Chosen.  While it sucked to have her over on the other side of the faction wall, it made me happy that she at least had a good home.  Yesterday however on a whim it seems she decided to play her hunter AIlah.  The above picture is of me and Ailah waiting for the Naxxramas 1.0 raid to start one night, to my left is Saracell another good friend, and hanging out in the background I realized was Vexa.  The Late Night Raiders Hunters were an especially close knit family, and there is not a single one of them that I still do not talk to regularly.  Ailah however was one of the founding members of House Stalwart, and for the most part my right hand woman back then when it came to guild organizational things.

Like happens so many times she became the mommy of two awesome boys, and lost a good chunk of her disposable play time.  I always enjoy seeing her on when she has the time to play, especially now that she seems to be interested in her hunter again.  Thankfully I had been playing Lodin my hunter, so that I could give some basic knowledge about how hunters work these days.  It seemed like she had not actually been touched since vanilla because she was wearing all of the same gear we raided in…  for the most part everything you see in this picture.  I hooked her up with a crafted set of gear that will hopefully ease her transition into Northrend, and some quick advise with at least how I have my bars, talents and glyphs set up.  Thankfully huntering is super easy so I am sure she has picked it up quickly.  I have to say it was an awesome surprise to see an old friend show up like that, and hopefully she will be around more often.  I doubt she will ever have time for raiding and such, but will be nice to run the occasional dungeon together.

Bad At Casters

Wow-64 2014-12-28 09-44-58-50 I have traditionally been horrible at playing casters, that said the warlock feels familiar enough hat this point that it would likely be my caster of choice.  While I knew I would never end up leveling a mage, so I used my free boost to 90…  the Warlock on the other hand I actually enjoy leveling.  He has been sitting at level 75 for quite some time however, so when Ailah started working on the Northrend content I grabbed him to hang out with her for a bit, since he was the only character in the level range.  It took me a bit to get used to the controls again, because warlocking feels nothing like huntering, and that is the pet class I have been playing most recently.  The only problem with leveling these days is that you really don’t need to use any of your abilities, since things die so quickly.  I still have yet to figure out how the whole demonic transformation business works and how best to trigger it.  I know it is a thing I can do every so often, but the mechanics behind it are still pretty opaque since things die so insanely quickly.

At some point I really want to finish leveling my Warlock to at least 90.  I feel like it might be a caster I would actually enjoy playing, since the Mage is most definitely not that.  My biggest problem with the mage is how weak it feels.  I hate playing classes that cannot take a hit, so this is why I tend to play Discipline priest over shadow… because the shielding ability gives that class some serious survival.  Similarly I like Demonology Warlock because the pet is nice and sturdy and can keep me alive through almost anything.  When I say I hate “finger wigglers”, I guess you can more correctly narrow it down to me simply hating the “glass cannon” archetype.  I favor survival over damage any day, which might be why I almost always level in tank mode regardless of the class.  That is one thing I would love to see them add to the warlock, a caster tank mode since they get called on to tank things already in certain circumstances.