Arbitrary Gates

thundergodsvigor

Yesterday I talked about my feelings regarding Destiny and the Rise of Iron Expansion.  However I could have just as easily have talked about my insane good luck.  What I mean by that is to the best of my knowledge I am the only person to get one of the new legendaries in my guild, or at the very least only one in as far as the guild activity log on the armory scrolls back.  I managed to pick this up Monday night during a Mythic Maw of Souls… and I am still insanely pumped about it.  The Thundergod’s Vigor works nicely for me… considering how damned much I love to thunderclap.  Similarly I really need to get better about using Demoralizing Shout at opportune times… so Thunderclapping my way to more casts of it also seems awesome.  Then again there is the simple fact that all legendaries seem to drop at 895 item level, which serves as a nice boost for me in that department as well.  Then there is also the added benefit of it being an item from Diablo 3 which only adds to the coolness factor as far as I am concerned.  What I was not however expecting is that it apparently sends out an alert to the entire guild when a legendary drops…  which is in part what makes me think that I might legitimately be the only person in guild with one so far.  I feel extremely lucky, but at the same time sort of sad that these are not dropping for everyone.

A huge chunk of what makes Legion interesting to me is the interaction of these legendary items with the rotations of the characters.  That is the part that I love about Diablo 3, the way a certain item you pick up can completely change how your character functions.  It was my hope that the new legendary system would add some of this element to World of Warcraft, and at least it seems it might.  However if they remain super rare items that you may or may not see ever during your play of the game…  it takes one of the cooler items and locks it away behind at gate that few players are ever going to breach.  For as awesome as Legion has been, there are a lot of items that just feel odd.  For example last night I participated in the first of the LFR content associated with Emerald Nightmare.  I went into it expecting that nothing that dropped would actually be an upgrade for me, but I was however hoping to maybe complete a quest or two.  Now my friend Grace said she was able to complete her skinning quest without issue, however for me… I was not able to loot the item needed for In Nightmares.  Which seems a bit crappy, and has caused Blizzard CS to come out and state that this is “working as intended”.  However it feels like a massive let down to those hoping to complete the Balance of Power quest line and get that item appearance… but that cannot realistically do anything other than LFR.

Granted I am not necessarily in that category, because we have a raid group that is planning on working on this stuff tonight in fact.  It just feels like an arbitrary bar given that for many of us at least we have been working towards that item appearance since the moment we knew it was a thing.  Hell I am even considering pushing my way through some of the PVP objectives just to unlock those appearances and that feels significantly more casual friendly than this one does.  I mean I guess in some way it makes sense, there are large groups of players that seem to want some visual representation that they are “better” than other players.  At the very least this seems to be a vocal group on the forums and twitter, and represented the large chunk of the opposition to the Friendship Moose community and the practice of dragging friends through getting their special mounts.  It is my only hope that we can do some of this for my own guild once we have the bosses needed for the Balance of Power quest line on farm and can realistically pull random people in to get quest steps unlocked.  Arbitrary gating of content and sitting it up on a shelf just too high for players to ever reach… is one of the things that frustrates me about the MMO design.  LFR used to be this happy medium that let people see the storyline, and complete quests associated with taking out these bosses but I guess with Legion that is changing.  While so much of Legion has been this great step forward, this feels like a stumble backwards.

The “Main” Problem

Shakes Fist

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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”

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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.

 

Sleepy Raiding

Bleary Eyed

For whatever reason this week has been significantly more difficult than most.  I’ve been struggling with maintaining consciousness, and by that I mean it feels like I have just been dragging my way along through slowly drying concrete.  I am not sure if this is still a side effect of letting me get completely out of my sleep schedule  over the Thanksgiving break… or instead just that I slept horribly on Sunday night.  It might also be that I seem to be fighting some cold like crap that just doesn’t seem to want to let go of me.  Whatever the case, I’ve been tired enough to sleep at 8pm most nights, and generally finally give into its sirens call around 10pm.  Since getting the new Kindle I end up reading for a bit until my eyes are too tired to keep propped open, and then finally I sleep.  From everything I can tell I am sleeping extremely soundly because I when I finally wake up it feels like I’ve slept the entire night through.  The only problem is I have been waking up 20-30 minutes ahead of the alarm clock.  I know I should just get on up… but its cold out in the real world and the bed is so comfy.

I keep thinking at some point I will have repaid whatever sleep debt I have built up, but then again…  I’ve never slept the supposedly needed 8 hours a night.  Maybe I have decades worth of lost sleep waiting to be repaid and it is finally catching up with me.  Whatever the case, I am struggling…  which means that when I am actually online I tend to be wandering around aimlessly.  Over the last several nights I have missed message after message in game by friends, and I always feel horrible when it happens.  Sometimes it is simply the scroll of combat, other times I am alt tabbed out looking at something else.  In any case right now in this current daze I am struggling to keep moving forward, let alone be functional when it comes to interacting with others.  I seriously feel like I could take the day off… and sleep literally all day right now.  Unfortunately I am not sure if that would do me a world of good… or simply make this whole situation worse.

Heading for Burnout

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Last night one of my friends commented that I was probably heading for a burnout by trying to raid on both Horde and Alliance…  and there is at least part of me that absolutely believes her.  While I intend on making the Wednesday night raid tonight, I know at some point there is going to be a place where I simply cannot make both raids each week.  In truth I have been feeling the desire and need to go off and level something new, instead of doing nothing but level capped content.  Right now however it seems like all I have time for is to attempt running LFR on Belghast and Belgrace… and that simply doesn’t leave much time left for the rest of the activities.  At least on Belghast I managed to pick up a 695 warforged baleful weapon, which gives me something decent to move forward with.  On the cow I have a 690 two hander that has been valor upgraded twice, so once again a completely viable weapon.  There are technically slots where LFR gear would potentially be an upgrade, but I am starting to question the logic of running it just for those handful of potential upgrades.  I need to run Highmaul on the Cow for abbrogator stones, and Hellfire on Belghast for tomes…  but past that I think I am going to cut out the rest of the LFR unless I am literally gearing a new character.

Looking for Raid is cool in the aspect of being on demand raiding with zero commitment.  The problem being… it always feels like slamming your face against a wall even when it goes smoothly.  Highmaul was really fun to LFR because it went so quickly, and you could pretty much ignore all of the mechanics.  Hellfire however… the bosses just feel like drudgery when doing it with a group of randoms.  Don’t get me wrong I love the feel of that place when I am running with players that are going to do the things they need to do to make it through the fights.  But both Hellfire and Blackrock are both “real enough” to make them frustrating when folks are attempting to faceroll them.  I seriously have yet to get a group that has a shot in hell of doing Archimonde.  Generally speaking I get grouped into a raid that has already failed a few times… as a replacement, and we then wipe five or six times… and ultimately end up leaving because over half the raid abandons ship.  I really think that the perfect LFR fight takes no longer than five minutes to kill, because that seems to be the absolute upperbound of PUG attention.

Timewalking

I noticed this morning that the Burning Crusade era Timewalking event has started, and I have to say… I am kinda amped.  Granted I would have rather they simply made Timewalking a permanent part of the game, but I left the game before it actually went in.  So I am hoping to be able to do several of the dungeons to get the feel of how they work.  I have a whole bunch of nostalgia about the Burning Crusade dungeon running experience, and the thought of getting modern versions of the items I used to love… seems pretty awesome.  Then again at the 675 ilevel cap… the items will pretty much just go in the transmog bin.  I am not sure which side of the fence I will focus on, but whatever the case I just want to see some of the dungeons.  Similarly I really want to experience the Mythic dungeon content, but in order to do that I really want to find a group to go in with.  That does not seem like something that would be fun in any fashion to pug.  Mostly…  I am hoping I get over whatever thing I am going through, and can remain awake enough to function at a high level in content.  Today already seems like a pretty sleepy day… so I am not holding out much hope.  I guess my general answer is to feed myself enough caffeine until I begin to function appropriately.

Monday LFR

A Good Show

I have not been in the habit of linking AggroChat in my blog lately, but I am going to do it this morning.  It took for freaking ever for the YouTube version of the podcast to finally upload yesterday, but I feel like this weeks show ended up really good.  There were a bunch of topics that branched out but the big one and the one I chose the name the episode was over a discussion about Otome.  A friend of mine Pizza Maid and her equally awesome named friend Sushi Geisha have this podcast called Heroines of the Cherry Blossom, where they talk about Otome games.  This was not a term that even exists in my vocabulary before this week, when they referenced our Hatoful Boyfriend episode on the podcast.  Essentially the side discussion that spawned was about how Tam was impressed with the quality of the writing of these various relatively low budget dating sims that he played in preparation for our Hatoful Boyfriend show.  The general consensus was that we would all like to see this deeply nuanced writing make its way into more mainstream titles as well.

Another interesting side discussion centered around the point in which we all tune out when it comes to an open world or sandbox game experience.  For each of us there seems to be a point where we are just “done” with the game even if we are not truly finished with all of the content.  For me personally I am never really “done” but I reach this point where I have to take a break and play something else for awhile.  But then by the time I return to the game I rarely remember what I was doing at that point and end up having to restart the game…   usually going in a slightly different direction than the original play through.  I know this past week with my focus on trying to chew through the quest content…  I am enjoying Fallout 4 significantly less than when I was just wandering aimlessly.  For others on the podcast they found themselves HAVING to focus on the story, to keep from losing interest.  In any case… we recorded a really content dense episode… which then surprised when editing that it ended up being a fairly short episode at only an hour and fifteen minutes.

Monday Night LFR

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I find myself once again in the unfortunate position of needing to run LFR on a Monday night.  The last chance crew in any MMO seems to always be the worst crew… and unfortunately due to the push in Fallout 4 I didn’t get any of this done earlier in the week.  There are a bunch of reasons why I am pushing last minute raids, but not the least of which is…  I am still trying to build out a tank set on the Cow.  There was a point in last nights raid where they absolutely would have used me in a tanking capacity had I a set of gear.  The problem is largely that I have plenty of armor… but since the Cow was a boosted character… I only went into level 100 with a single set of gear.  Normally as I level up, I pick up both a mix of two-handers for dps… and sword and board options for tanking, but I have had zero luck in getting anything I could use for tanking.  So I quite literally have a full set of gear that would be viable…  minus the sword and shield.  So tonight part of the plan is to run through Blackrock Foundry since it mostly features gear lower than what I need… and set the loot preference to protection, hoping that maybe just maybe I end up with a one handed weapon of some sort and a shield.  I technically have a 650 shield banked that would work well enough for the time being.

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On the other side of the fence I am still using the 670 Blackrock Foundry normal mode weapon that I have for ages… because I never could get any of the heroic bosses we were downing to drop me a weapon.  Similarly I have opened dozens of Garrison boxes… all with zero luck in finding a damned weapon to use.  So in addition to running Blackrock, I also really need to run  through Hellfire Citadel LFR on Belghast.  While I feel like BRF is probably going to go smoothly simply because most people have the gear for it…  I have a feeling that Monday night Hellfire is going to be pure hell.  The only thing that I maybe have gone on my side… is that there are generally more active alliance players on my battlegroup than there are horde, and I can definitely see that still is the case in the difference in my queue times between the two.  At very least I am going to struggle through the first few rounds of the raid because that seems to have the best chance of dropping me a weapon.  I have a pretty decent shield now, so really all I need is that main hand.  I even went so far as to purchase a Baleful Armament with some of my excess stones…  and only managed to get a 650.  In theory if I save up for a bit I could maybe manage to push that to a 695.  The other option is to have my blacksmith start trying to craft me one, but given the silly amount of materials it would take to make that happen…  I am hoping I simply have some decent luck this Wednesday during the raid.