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.

Class Previews

Media Consumption Hiatus

I always wondered which of my features I would break down and not do first.  I have a pretty bad habit of launching a series but only quitting doing it…  a month or so later.  I like the concept of a day like Media Consumption… but the truth is there are some weeks I don’t really consume much media.  This week for example I consumed a lot of Fallout 4 related stuff… because that is pretty much all I have been playing.  The problem is…  any videos I watched on how to get the most out of electricity or general base building theory…  aren’t really all that interesting to talk about.  Nor do I feel really compelled to talk about iZombie that we finally caught up with… or last weeks Walking Dead.  Literally two episodes of iZombie and a single episode of Walking Dead is pretty much all of the television I consumed this week.  So for this week I am cancelling this column, with the option to revive it as soon as I have movies, television or other media worth talking about.

Farwell to Gladiator

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This week the previews for the class changes in Legion came out… and for the most part there are two classes that I was really interested in… the Warrior and the Death Knight.  Two big things changed in Warlords that caused me to switch priorities a bit… firstly they made Death Knights feel like shit by making pestilence be part of the ability rotation… giving them a caster feel.  Secondly they gave me Gladiator stance… which pretty much was the thing I always wanted to do as a warrior…  be able to DPS with a sword and shield.  As a result I took Belghast my protection warrior off mothballs… and has quite a bit of fun raiding as Gladiator dps for at least part of the expansion.  Warlords however just didn’t have enough oomph to keep me going… even though I was playing the best possible player fantasy for me.  I guess part of me knew that it simply could not last past this expansion.  I watched as Blizzard developers struggled to figure out how to itemize tanking gear… but not making it insanely overpowering for Gladiators.  Part of this came from the fact that armor was simply a better dps itemization stat than strength.  I gained 1.5 attack power for each point of armor… whereas I gained 1 from strength.  So that mean’t for dpsing… I stacked Armor potions rather than Strength potions and did other fiddly things… like looking for +armor gear with crit on it.

It seems as thought my fears have come true and as they talked about the Warrior class changes I saw zero mention of Gladiator spec.  Even though I knew deep down in my heart that this was coming… it still feels a bit like a sucker punch to the gut.  I liked being able to play Belghast again and enjoy doing so… the problem being… that I still didn’t really feel like DPS.  My heart has never been in the DPS rotation… and as a player when it comes to DPS…  I don’t want to be last place on the meters, but I have zero burning desire to be first place either.  I feel like I am lacking the competitive nature needed to really excel at damage dealing.  Tanking however…  my deep protective streak over my friends always kicks in and I fight my ass off to hold aggro, or stay alive during this attack or that.  Basically tanking feeds off of my instincts in a way that damage dealing never has.  So while I hate the thought of not being able to deal silly amounts of damage as gladiator… and have relatively high survival…  I am totally see why they are getting rid of it for exactly that reason.  Regardless of the fight, I was almost always the last one standing because I had cool-downs a plenty to keep me alive during big problems.  There were numerous times where I could temporarily tank while we resurrected a tank, which tells me… Gladiator was just too strong.

Welcome Back Blood

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During the Crusaders Coliseum patch cycle in Wrath of the Lich King… I ended up switching mains from the Warrior to the Death Knight in theory… to give up tanking and do damage instead.  This didn’t actually work like I planned, and instead of DPSing I quickly found myself pressed into the role of Blood tanking.  This was fine by me because from the start of playing a Death Knight I had always been drawn to the high survival nature of blood.  As that turned into the official “tanking” stance I adapted quickly and came to love the class and the spec.  Through Cataclysm and Pandaria I was all about the Death Knight and it was always the first character I would level.  In fact until Pandaria my Warrior sat at level 80… and relatively untouched since I crated him up towards the end of Wrath.  When we were able to become Worgen, I race changed from human… and I felt like I was completely happy and set to be playing that class for the rest of my time in World of Warcraft.

Then Warlords came and made the class just “feel” wrong.  I have talked about this before… but it is more important how something feels to me rather than how numerically it works out.  Death Knights no longer “felt” tanky or even melee in general… but the constant pestilence and death coil usage made it “feel” like a caster… the absolute last thing I would want to play.  With the class changes it at least seems like they understand this problem… and with it is a return to mostly melee abilities for at least the Blood Death Knight.  So while I am losing Gladiator… it seems like I might be gaining back the Death Knight class as a whole?  Admittedly a lot of what harmed my enjoyment of Warlords beta… was how bad the Death Knight felt to play.  My hope is that at some point early in the beta cycle I can get my hands on some play time… and get clarification if this fixes the class.  I am getting more interested in Legion as a whole… but this is going to be absolutely crucial to my enjoyment.  I need my Death Knight back to have fun again.

 

 

Bun’Jitsu

Hexxen

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As you can see from the above image I am almost 80% finished downloading the Hex: Shards of Fate Alpha client.  Starting late yesterday Alpha invites began trickling out as the servers came up.  They of course are starting off with the highest supporters and working their way down the list, only allowing small bits in at a time to keep from cratering the servers.  As a result I figure it will take a few days for them to reach us plebeians that only supported enough to get INTO the alpha in the first place. 

However at one point yesterday they stated that it would likely take a few weeks to get down to the “slacker backers” aka folks who supported the project after the kickstarter finished.  If that is the case it should be a matter of days not a matter of weeks, which is good.  I know there were a large number for $250 backers and that is the tier that is starting invites now.  The majority of my friend are all like me and in the $60 mere-human range.

Bun’Jitsu

I have to say I am really looking forward to getting some playtime with this.  Everything about it feels like a different take on Magic: The Gathering for the online age.  I am already pretty fond of the Shin’Hare… which happen to be a combination of Wild (green) and Blood (black).  That was the deck combo I always relied on in MTG so here is hoping it will be equally effective in Hex.  Besides any race that has a card called Bun’jitsu has to be amazing right?  I just love the concept of these crazy twisted anthropomorphic bunny rabbits.

They released a PDF with all of the initial cards in it yesterday to backers and almost immediately someone took that and broke it out into an amazing deck builder site, so you should totally check that out.  Additionally on Reddit there is a Hex Alpha FAQ thread that is worth checking out as it has a number of useful links… including the downloader for the alpha client.  Like usual we have a pretty decent sized community that will be playing this off and on so I expect it to join the ranks of League of Legends as one of our regular non-MMO games.  If you are part of this madness as well let me know!  I am always looking for more people to hang out with while playing various titles.