Alas Troll Side

Changed Plans

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Yesterday morning I had every intent of coming home last night and pretty much playing Street Fighter V the entire evening.  During the day I did a bit of googling and found out that Game Stop apparently carries the Hori Fight Commander 4 controller for use with PS3/PS4/PC.  The Game Stop website indicated that a store not terribly far from where I work had “limited” stock so I decided to pop by over lunch.  I’ve been bitten by the whole limited stock thing before, but since this was a wild goose chase anyway… I didn’t really mind it much.  The last time I was in a Game Stop was to snap up $5 physical copies of Wildstar to convert into play time and digital goodies.  When I got there, it took me a bit to locate the controller… and they did in fact only have one.  The goofy thing however is that it was being closed out for $20 unlike the almost $50 price tag on Amazon.  This seems like some horrible timing, considering that Street Fighter V was just released… and that folks will be seeking out fight pads…. but whatever…  their loss and my benefit.  I have to comment that this controller is really damned comfortable… way more so than the default PS4 controller when it comes to dpad and face button feel.  If you can find one anywhere near as cheaply as I picked mine up… I highly suggest grabbing it.

When I got home from work I hooked up the new controller and booted into the game, where I honestly was undecided what exactly to do.  The game reports cross console play, but as of yet I have yet to find anything even closely resembling a friends list.  There is the ability to create a custom lobby of sorts… and in theory that might be the compromise.  I know you set up a Capcom ID when you first boot the game, and if anyone needs mine it is once again “belghast” but you will have to be smarter than me in figuring out how to actually friend someone because I could not.  For the most part I started working my way through the story mode, which unlocks alternate costumes and color schemes for the various characters.  I made it roughly halfway through this when my wife got home from work with a friend of ours… and the three of us decided that the priority was to go find food.  After eating silly amounts of Mexican food, I never quite made it back upstairs once we got home.  So in theory I will pick up tonight when I first get home and continue unlocking the various story modes.  All in all I like what I have seen of the game… which admittedly is not a lot.  The game feels more deliberate and less twitchy than many of the other Street Fighter entries, so if you are someone who cut your teeth on Marvel Vs Capcom…  you might find the game a little sluggish.  For me who started on the original Street Fighter, the less frenetic pace is a big plus.

The Mission

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Last night once I got back from eating…. I was a man on a mission.  The mission was actually something that evolved over the course of the day, but the goal was pretty simple.  Help Grace catch up and level her druid on Argent Dawn.  Originally my thought was….  lots and lots of Hellfire Ramparts because well…  when I was dual boxing WoW this was pretty much the go to instance for me when it came to pouring on some quick levels.  So the first step was to hop on my Mage and port her little druid to Pandaria so she could bind someplace with portals.  From there we met up in Shattrath and I flew her on my Obsidian Nightwing over to Hellfire.  The only problem… at level 50 she could not zone in…  and this is the point at which I remembered that World of Warcraft instances have level caps.  So we ported to Stormwind since apparently they closed off the Dark Portal…  because our original thought was Sunken Temple.  From there we flew over to Blackrock Depths because in theory she should have been able to pick up several of the quests.  We proceeded to lay waste to the Dark Iron empire, and through the course of that one instance she managed to pick up three levels.  When we got down to the Molten Core gate, on a whim we tried to zone in…. and sure enough she was able to.  Thinking “surely a raid gives good experience” we proceeded to lay waste to the entire place, and I did some of my most careful pre-clearing of a zone ever…  shockingly she did not die once.  Bad news however…  she made like 2/3rds of a level in there but did manage to pick up some “moggy bits”.

From there we did in fact head towards Sunken Temple…  which is now a completely nerfed joke.  Firstly we completely missed the entrance because apparently at some point they moved it up near the top of the sunken pyramid instead of deep down inside the base.  We did two clears of the place, and I would say that both times it took well less than ten minutes to clear the entire place.  They apparently jettisoned “Troll side” of Sunken Temple and all that is actually there is the Green Dragon Flight stuff upstairs.  We also noticed that none of the events actually required you to do anything… like I remember summoning Hakkar required you to drag snakes into the braziers or something of that sort… but this was a simple “click the pile summon a boss” scenario.  From there we flew over to Lower Blackrock Spire thinking she was right about the appropriate level, and on our first clear…. I screwed up and forgot to grab the pike… meaning we couldn’t actually summon the optional boss. So we went out, reset and I managed to get that sequence of events right the second time.  All in all the night took a little less than three hours, and we got the druid a total of seven levels.  In theory… dungeon finder might have gone quicker.  I have another theory, that is my Panda Monk is just slightly lower level now than her Druid… so I am wondering if we would be better served with me going Tanky and her going Healy and getting pretty much instant queues all the way to 100.  Regardless it was a fun night… there is something relaxing about curb stomping old content and venturing back down nostalgic avenues.