legendary ring Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Shakes Fist

Over the last few days my friend Grace and often times partner in crime in online games… has been talking about how she should finish up her legendary ring. I stalled out on both caring about this item and caring about grinding for it at some point. I didn’t remember how many Chaos Tomes I had collected, but I knew it “wasn’t enough”. I guess at some point they greatly jacked up the drop rate of these things, and I simply had not run any Hellfire Citadel content after this happened. The problem is that this little back and forth planted the seeds in my head, that I too should go ahead and finish mine up. This was only furthered when I noticed that I was sitting at 24 of 33 tomes in my inventory. With each boss now having a nearly 100% drop rate that means that in a single night I could get enough tomes to finish up this step. I thought surely I had to be close to the end by now, and could potentially push across the finish line for no reason other than to say I did it. So for the bulk of last night I threw myself at the LFR system, sometimes it went well… other times not so much. Namely when I zoned into Archimonde I had an instant 6 stack of determination, and for whatever reason on Bastion of Shadows the tank kept pulling before even half the raid was at a given boss. However all of these things aside… I managed to get my tomes rather quickly and turned in the quest… finally now understanding what the hell happened to Cordana. Side note I always read this as Cortana… but I guess it really isn’t spelled that way at all.

I turned everything in waiting for my ring… only to realize that I was just about to get kneecapped by this quest chain. You have to understand something… I hate the shipyard. I have begrudgingly done a handful of quests to get my chest every few weeks, but otherwise have not really done shit in there. I somehow knew in the back of my mind that this was probably going to bite me in the ass at some point. Apparently to complete the legendary ring you need to have completed a series of 2 day long shipyard “legendary” missions, and while I am fairly sure I have run some of these…. I cannot for the life of me remember how many. The only thing to do as a result is to just start running them now and hoping I can get through them in all before the 30th. Ultimately this is going to be the bit that kills my bid for the ring, because I have done little to no effort to properly gear any of my ships. So basically I am going to need a lot of luck going into these missions and just hope that I don’t have to repeat them. So now I am shaking my fist at Grace for planting this damned fool quest in my brain… because I suddenly apparently care about completing the Legendary ring. If I am reading the quest line correctly… I am guessing I MIGHT be on the fourth part of the quest… the one that has to be completed before you do the mission to actually collect your Draenic Sea Charts. So maybe this won’t be as bad as I am fearing in the end.

Abandoning “Main”

Yesterday I talked a little bit about my dilemma of trying to pick a main. I think that maybe the core problem is that I feel like I need to have one. Mains have traditionally been a construct designed for raiding, so that you can focus your efforts on gearing one character to be the best you possibly can be in a raiding context. While I might do some raiding, that is going to be far from my focus in Legion. I want to do some of the mythic five player content, but even then I am not sure how serious I am going to be about it. Maybe the construct of having a main is working against my enjoyment of this game. I think back to the times that I enjoyed the most, and I absolutely had a raiding main character, but I also had an army of alts that I cared equally about. Some of the most enjoyable times for me personally were farming these alts to friends raids, and getting to see content as something other than Belghast/Lodin/Belgrave depending on whcih my main was. Hell Belghast was an answer to me not really liking raiding as a hunter, and I leveled it with the purpose of having cool stuff to do when not strapped to huntering. So as someone for whom the alts have always been of the utmost importance… how did I think I would ever be happy trying to focus mostly on just one of them.

That said there needs to be a sort of pecking order when it comes to leveling them. I did not want to run LFR as a tank last night, that is a package of stress and frustration that I was simply not willing to take upon myself. So as a result I figured out the new fury spec and spent the evening testing it out. The end result is… that I think I like it quite a bit. I have come back and forth on fury over the years… and the previous incarnation with Draenor was not really my thing. This Legion version however is awesome, and I was having a blast playing it. So much so that I think I might choose the Fury artifact weapon first, and then later pick up the tanking set. I think for a lot of reasons Belghast is going to be the first character I level in Legion. I mean he is the actual and for real “Belghast” not my army of “Belg” named characters. Additionally Fury is a really fun DPS spec once again, and then Protection is a very familiar feeling tanking spec that I am more than comfortable doing content with. So for the first we will honor tradition and for lack of a better term the warrior will be my “main”. That said I plan on following it up quickly with several of the other classes that I have enjoyed like Demon Hunter, Warlock, Rogue and Shaman.

Bridge Refresher Course

With all my recent posts about World of Warcraft, you would think that I had switched allegiance entirely, but this is not the truth by any means. Right now it is new and shiny and I am attempting to claw my way to a reasonable foothold of raid preparedness. That said I am still very much playing Final Fantasy XIV, and for the last few weeks we have been pulling together “raid” content on Monday nights. We really want to see the new Ultros fight, but unfortunately Thalen still had yet to do Battle at Big Bridge, so last night we started the evening off knocking that out of the way. It made a rather nice high point to start the evening on since that fight is so amazing. The majority of us are Final Fantasy V fans, so seeing the fight is like watching the bridge fight play out in that game.

The strange thing is that as many times as we had run it, I had never actually tanked it. Not that there is actually anything to tanking the fight. For the tank at least it is as tank and spank as they really come in Final Fantasy XIV. The only challenge was the various adds between the two phases of the boss, and even then it is was only because we have some extremely overgeared dps for the fight that just melted them. While I attempted to hold aggro it was pretty much futile. In any case it knocked that out of the way so that hopefully this week the folks that needed it can catch up on the Hildebrand storyline and get ready for Ultros. I would really rather do that fight for the first time as a guild, so we can have the experience of figuring out the content on the fly.

Angriest Red Ball Revisited

Turn Five of Binding Coil of Bahamut has been looming over our group for some time. I have to admit there has been a sense of fear about it, because in truth it has been content than killed many a static raid team on our server. It is the notorious gatekeeper to turn 2, and there are many folks that have cleared one through four never to actually manage to get in a turn five kill. The fight itself just has this insane array of mechanics that are almost impossible to memorize before going into the fight. Since it had been months for us clearing the first four turns we opted to start with those as a fresher course. Overall it went nice and smooth and we burned through the first few coil instances getting the folks who had not been there realm exploration achievements. I managed to get the Heavy Allagan chestpiece to go with my other two pieces of Allagan gear.

When we downed turn four after a few baubles here and there we decided to use that momentum and push us forward into a couple of attempts at Twintainia the boss of turn five. There is a lot of stuff to focus on during this fight. However we did manage to get to roughly the halfway point in the fight after a couple of attempts. I mark this as pretty damned good progress, and a pretty good night overall for us to down Big Bridge, four turns of coil and make that much progress on five. I feel like as a whole we have way more confidence in regards to our success chances at turn five. It is no longer this looming and scary target that we have not actually experienced. Folks talk about it with so much frustration and reverence, but I feel like we can totally down this. Now after seeing the fight I also feel like I have a far better point of reference for doing my own research in the coming week.

Up Too Late

After our evening of raiding in Final Fantasy XIV, I popped out and got into World of Warcraft in an attempt to find a group to run Auchindoun with. Much like there was a legendary cloak chain in Pandaria, there is a legendary ring one in Warlords. The first phase is actually relatively simple and only actually requires that you run Skyreach and loot and item off the final boss. This nets the player a really nice ilevel 640 ring for there troubles, which is a much needed gear level boost for getting into content. The next steps require you to clear four heroic dungeons, gather up a silly amount of apexis crystals and then complete a solo event of sorts. Last night I was up to the final step in this sequence which requires a trip into Auchindoun to loot an item off the final boss. However there was another player that required one more “core” the step before Auchindoun, so I agreed to run that heroic first before we ran the one I actually needed so that both of us knocked out the final step at the same time.

The end result was that I ran two heroics back to back and did not actually make it to bed until almost 1 am. The other result however is that other than 100 apexis crystals and a solo event, I am really super close to the next step in the ring quest chain. As a result in theory I should be able to knock out the 680 ring before we step foot into Molten Core as a guild tonight. I am really looking at venturing forth into Molten Core, it has been years since I last experienced the raid “for real”. I remember there was a time where a “good clear” took about three hours of my life. I am hoping we can manage to do it in a far shorter time. That said I have prepared myself for the potential of it taking that long if not longer. I know we are going to try and go into it with as many tanks and healers as we can so that we can potentially control the pace of the run. If everyone other than a handful of dps are with us on voice chat… hopefully things will go more smoothly. In any case hopefully at the end of the night I will have a spiffy mount.

Furry Children

I’ve always had a soft spot for animals. In this age of global strife and suffering, I’ve become rather accustomed to it… but the moment that Sarah MacLachlan animal charity video plays on the television… and it is like a sucker punch to the gut. There has never been a time when we have not had several furry children, and each of them is unique and special. This morning I am thankful for all of them that have shared our life. Presently we have four cats, which I think officially qualifies us for “crazy cat lady” status. Our eldest came home with me years ago on a Thanksgiving day, so this time of year is all the more important to me. She is getting up there in age and has many issues but I am so thankful for each year we have with her. In addition to our cats we also have two amazing ferrets, that are both as sweet as can be and are always clamoring for our attention. They both know exactly what it takes to get daddy to play with them, and they are the source of many delays while getting ready in the morning. Animals enrich our lives in ways that I cannot fully account for, and this morning and every morning I am thankful to have them.