Space Diablo

Last night was a good night.  It was a fairly crappy day at work because we were still dealing with the ramifications of events that happened over the break.  Nothing says excitement like an 8 am conference call.  That said I had an amazing bowl of chicken noodle soup waiting on me when I got home.  Sunday during the day we made a batch of soup in the crock pot, and for whatever reason soup is all the more amazing on day two.  This time around I added a little shredded cheese to it and it was insanely good and the perfect thing to at least in part make me forget the day that lead up to it.  As far as my evening the bulk of it was spent hanging out with Grace and Mor in Destiny.  While I consider myself still very much a fledgling player, they are more so… and as a result it was kinda fun just to ride along as Mor experienced all of the content for the very first time.  The big take away from the night however is that the year one strike bosses are still insane bullet sponges.  I kinda find it sad that they never went back and updates these strikes, when much better year two versions exist.  The walker in the Devil’s Lair normal difficulty strike… is quite possibly the hardest strike boss ever… or at the very least the one that takes the most time to bring down.  I solo walkers out in the patrol zones for fun…  and this one just would not die.

Mor calls the game “Space Diablo” and it is fitting because really in the end we are all after tasty loot.  Since I had already done most of this content before a bunch of times, I opted to play my Warlock which is generally my least progressed character.  On the Stormcaller spec for example I only had the base abilities unlocked that you exit the mission with.   By the end of the night however I had a significant amount unlocked, and gear wise my Warlock has suddenly pulled out ahead of my Hunter.  The thing with Warlock is that I like literally everything about it… except the jump.  Squirrel will probably fight me on this one, but it just feels wrong.  It doesn’t work the way I want it to work… and in truth if I could just give my Warlock the Titan jump… everything would be peachy.  Then again I would give literally every class the Titan jump, and part of me hopes that they introduce a second round of artifacts that do just this… allow you to customize each character by giving them a different class jump.  I don’t think that is likely ever going to happen, so in the meantime I will have to console myself with having permatracking thanks to Memory of Gheleon on every character.  If nothing else that artifact is amazing for finding chests… which considering just how many there are in the plaguelands greatly increase how much glimmer I am getting.

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Once things wound down in Destiny, I disappeared downstairs and worked on my Deathknight for awhile.  Sunday with the start and stop nature of work, I didn’t get terribly far in knocking out some of my dungeon quests.  In fact there was a point where I had queued for a dungeon, and shortly after the second boss had to drop group to hop on a work conference call.  Were it a guild group this probably would not have been a show stopper given that I could alt tab back and forth as needed, however I excused myself from the PUG and became resigned to not actually finishing up Stormheim.  So last night I started off by running Halls of Valor, which went extremely quickly and allowed me to move on in good conscience to Highmountain.  Right now I am largely just focusing on the main story of the zone and ignoring any offshoots for the moment, because it already seems like I am going to ding 110 well before wrapping everything up.  At the moment I am sitting at 60% into 108, and have just started the quests in High Mountain meaning I have most of an entire zone to level through.  I will absolutely ding before leaving this zone, and then I can begin the slow process of gearing through World Quests.  I have to say that I love Frost Deathknight for both a leveling and dungeon running spec, and it is going to dethrone my Paladin as my primary alt.

All of this said… I am not likely to work on my Deathknight tonight because I have a date with Final Fantasy.  I am too old to stay up and play at the official launch of a game but instead have it sitting waiting for me on my PS4 for when I get home.

A Busy Weekend

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Mondays are always a challenge.  I realize that is the understatement of the year but there is just something extra heinous about trying to revive your week day routines after happily nuking them from orbit over the course of Friday and Saturday night.  Sunday night is always the roughest night of the week to get to sleep, because my body is not quite ready to relinquish the last vestiges of true freedom.  Similarly since giving up the whole weekend blogging thing for lent….  or whatever I did to actually give it up…  rebooting that process each Monday morning is an equal challenge.  This morning for example I have logged in to “check on” several things, all the while happily avoiding actually sitting down to put thought on paper or at least virtual paper.  This weekend was an odd one, but a good one.  It started off Friday night with House Stalwart my guild throwing together an impromptu raid into the Emerald Nightmare.  We did not really have a lot of time, since it was literally thrown together over the course of that evening, but we did manage to go in and one shot the first boss.  From there we started work on the spider boss, but given its moving parts I am wondering if that was the best choice.  In truth ALL of the next bosses seem to have their own madness going on and with it a challenge or two that will force us to shift and adjust to the fight.  We managed to get spider to phase two, which isn’t much of a challenge but at least I can claim it was progress.

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Another thing we attempted this weekend was our very first Mythic+ dungeon… because well Grace and I had keys burning a hole in our pockets.  However after attempt number one, I think we are going to wait to do number two… until we know the dungeons better.  Mythic Plus Halls of Valor… also happened to be the very first Halls of Valor Mythic run for most of us.  As a result we were less than efficient at a number of the fights and failed to get the timer.  That said given the number of wipes we had I think we did fairly well in that our timer ran out around the time we crossed the glowing bridge of nonsense.  So while we failed… we at least failed in style?  The truth is all of us just need a lot more normal mythic runs before we start burning any more keys.  None of us have any of the magical legendary drops that our UI tells us we can currently equip one of….  but I hear they absolutely maybe sometimes sorta drop in mythics.  We were maybe unprepared given that we were also dragging Ashgar into his first mythic ever…  and we went for a timed one.  The truth is I think we just wanted to know what the challenge looked like so we could prepare for it.  I know personally I find it hard to wrap my head around what is needed until I have failed for a bit at doing something.  Similarly we had to fail at the spider boss for me to be able to wrap my head around the videos that I will ultimately watch before we make another attempt on Wednesday.

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Finally I made a significant push on Exeter my Paladin, who is now 108 and about halfway through it.  Not shockingly I ended up dropping Retribution around 102 and have been leveling as a Protection Paladin the rest of the way.  This has allowed me to do things like tank for friends when they need to run lower level instances.  We pulled together an Eye of Azshara for Thalen over the weekend… and I happened to need it as well.  Now I have several more dungeons waiting in the wings for me to do that I may or may not wait for friends to get to as well.  Now that I am so close to 110 I sort of want to push across the finish line so I can start doing world quests and such on this character too.  Similarly I want to get in some Coren Direbrew runs for trinkets before those things go away.  So at a minimum I am probably going to finish out the rest of 108 because 109 allows me to start queuing.  I still think that is a major missed opportunity, in that they should have allowed the Direbrew event to scale with players.  At this moment I have finished Azsuna and Highmountain and have just trudged through the faction bullshit in Stormheim.  The first part of that zone feels so unlike the rest of this expansion, I can only hope in the future they are going to realize that this game feels so much better when you give us an interesting place to explore with its own story… and quit trying to force everything into a dated red versus blue narrative.

Short and Long Game

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Last night is a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me.  When I first got home I piddled around for a bit doing the few world quests that actually had upgrades for me.  I managed to pull out another 835 trinket, and a 830 Iron Relic which combined with a 830 necklace that I got much later in the evening takes my overall item level to 834.  For the most part every single night I am doing two things.  Firstly I am knocking out the four quests that are required to get me the emissary chest with whatever faction is highlighted.  After that I check World Quest Tracker to see which rewards might be upgrades, because as my gear level has gone up… the sorts of rewards available to me has also increased.  For example when I checked a few minutes ago before sitting down to write this blog post I had an epic chestpiece somewhere in Azuna with roughly 20 hours left on it.  For those not familiar with the addon, it gives players a similar view to the mobile app in game and allows for the tracking of individual world quests.  This is super handy because when you are tracking one… it then also shows up on your flight map so you can see pretty easily which location is the closest to the quest you are trying to finish.  It also color codes the quests so you can see which ones are expiring soon.  This way if you are trying to complete every possible quest, you can make sure you get those with a short timer on them done so you don’t risk them expiring.

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After hopping on voice chat we organized into a group, because in part we were looking for something to do with Tam who has been working on a Monk healer.  I needed a quest for enchanting from Halls of Valor… because even though I have done this place five times now the staggering of quests meant I kept needing something from it.  The positive is that we could run a dungeon with him… the negative is that because of his “just boosted” gear score we had to zone in manually.  What was awesome about the run last night though is that Grace has done quite a bit of healing on the Monk, so Tam and her talks about which abilities work for which fights as we went through the dungeon.  By the end Tam was Mistwalkering like a pro, and I went from having to largely keep myself alive with Ignore Pain to not really even getting close to dying at all.  The other thing we noticed is just how ridiculous the range on the Monk healing statue is.  It seems to be most of an instance worth of distance… and I am not entirely certain that when it finally stopped healing… that it was due to range and not due to line of sight.  We finished the dungeon successfully and it broke up the logjam that seemed to be my enchanting progression.  After completing that one quest I got four other quests that unlocked a series of endgame neck enchants.  Grace and I were talking a bit about this problem last night, that while I really enjoy the quests… it is going to make tradeskilling on alts a pure nightmare.

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After the dungeon run, the group broke up as Mor and Ashgar needed to go off to bed… or whatever it was that they actually did.  From there Grace and I decided to work on some of the Gold Dragon Wardens quests.  These show up on your map with the traditional elite boss seal around them, and represent tougher group content.  Sometimes these are reasonable to solo… other times they simply hit too hard or have too much life to be reasonable.  While they are not often soloable, they generally speaking can be duo’d with my protection warrior and her mage.  I can keep myself alive mostly long enough for her to burn it down and more often than not when we actually get to a given location… there is already a group starting the fight that we just hop in on.  So I started the post with a statement about last night being a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me, and all of these examples are why.  I started off the evening soloing, then pulled together a group and ran a dungeon… then continued the grouping in a much smaller scale with tracking down a bunch of elite world quests.  I went from solo, to group, to duoing… all in the same night and it felt seamless and largely effortless to find some objective that felt valuable to do in all of those cases.  Eventually I am sure raiding will be added in to that mix giving me a whole new level of things to do with friends, all the while constantly feeling like I am moving the needle forward.  Legion is doing an excellent job of giving me small term gains, but still keeping extremely long term goals present and making me feel like I am constantly inching forward towards them.  Now I just want them to keep this  up for the rest of the expansion and continue this feeling into the next.