raiding

Raiding Upkeep

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This is not exactly a topic I planned on talking about this morning, but in truth it is a pretty fresh one for me as well.  This morning while doing my early morning trying to find excuses not to start blogging thing… I encountered this topic come across my feed.  The interesting thing about it is that I am currently living on both sides of this statement.  Firstly…  I have lived most of warcraft life in a perpetual state of poverty.  For years I dealt with tanking repair bills, and even then never really got used to using the whole making gold off the auction house thing.  My preferred method of earning gold is laying waste to zones… but that has never really been that lucrative.  By now any profits that I gained from the era of hot and cold running garrison gold is disappearing rapidly.  On the other side of this coin I am part of the leadership of a fledgling raid, and our folks… myself included are running into the same lack of ability to really afford the normal trappings of raiding.  For now we have been eating up the stock of Warlords era flasks… just to feel like we are doing something, but those are not that useful with the mudflation of this expansion.  Right now in theory every raider needs cloak, ring and neck enchants, gems, flasks, and if we want to get really serious about things two potions per attempt.  At this very moment the prices for these items on my server are kinda madness.

  • Good Ring Enchants – 10,000 g (each)
  • Good Neck Enchant – 25,000 g
  • Good Cloak Enchant – 2000 g
  • Primary Stat Gem – 25,000 g
  • Secondary Stat Gems – 2,000 g (each)
  • Flask – 2,000 g (each)
  • Potion – 1,000 g (each)

So to walk into a raid night as good as you can possibly be, carrying a single stack of potions you are well over the 100,000 gold mark.  I have long since ceased to have that sort of money, and am presenting sitting around the 17,000 gold mark on my Main, with a few other characters that I could potentially steal gold from in the 20,000 range.  In theory I should be selling enchants to make money, but getting the materials has been its own challenge.  With everything functioning off of personal loot, the only way I get materials is if something is simply not an upgrade for me.  Now my guild is pretty awesome because it has been tradition lately in runs that they trade over anything that cannot be used for me to disenchant.  The challenge there however is that I have gotten enough materials so far to do one and a half neck enchant.  The material cost for everything is just insane right now, and as a result…  since we are not really a progression raid we have not pushed the point.  I personally have gems and enchants on everything, and have been using last generation flasks just to feel like I am doing something.  I am passing out as many ring enchants as I can since that represents the cheapest thing I can do, but even then…  a single ring enchant is 10 dust, which represents me eating 3-4 green pieces of gear or shattering 3 blue crystals.  My stock of materials is pretty much spent at this point, and I have only outfitted a handful of people in enchants.

We are in a similar boat with wishing the raid bank could be chipping in more.  We just are not getting enough of anything to be able to pass it around freely so right now…  folks are largely dipping into whatever profession they have on their alts.  Traditionally when a new expansion launches I play through whatever characters interest me, leveling alts as a method of relaxation.  This time around… I am absolutely leveling whichever alt has the profession I am finding myself really needing.  I pushed up Exeter my Paladin because I felt like I needed a miner to feed engineering on my main…  however I am wishing I had instead pushed up either my gemcrafter or my alchemist.  Presently I have been working up the alchemist, but so far it feels like there are just so many other things that I need to be doing, especially considering we are under a world quest faction bonus event.  More important than that… I through some strange string of luck have managed to get two legendaries already… so I absolutely need to have that 15,000 order resources ready and waiting in a few days for me to start researching that final trait that will allow me to equip both of them.  Ultimately it feels like there is simply too much to do right now, to shift into the mode of trying to find ways to make money to be able to afford your raiding upkeep.

The real challenge is of course this is the sort of expansion that brings back folks from the mists of time.  We have had so many people renew their accounts that have not touched the game since Cataclysm, or at least since Pandaria.  The problem is these folks did not have a pile of gold built up from the era of free garrison money.  I admittedly did not milk that as much as I should have because I was off playing other things.  Alt proposed that if it is that important that we have the Token system, but that seems horrible.  Not that she said it, because I don’t necessarily think she was being completely serious, but that it is something to consider.  The problem with this theory however is that right now those tokens are only going to get a player about 35,000 gold which seems insanely low when confronted with the price of things.  That would be able to afford you a neck enchant and a single ring enchant at the prices things are going for your $20.  My personal theory is that all of the crafting materials are purposefully painful, as a way to soak up all of the excess gold that is floating around on the server from the garrisons mistake.  Then at some point in the near future, be it 7.1 or a hotfix…  across the board crafting materials are going to be reduced making literally everything easier to create.  As a long time enchanter, I have seen this happen so many times over the expansions where enchants are mindboggling insane at the launch and then are later tempered considerably.

Where the real pain is happening is that those of us who did play Warlords are going through a bit of whiplash.  Tradeskills in general have gone from a complete polar shift, going from being extremely casual and something that everyone can do…  to being something extremely difficult to even get materials for.  As an example… even after crafting goblin gliders for basically anyone in the guild who wanted them this expansion…  I am sitting on a stockpile of over 2000 True Iron Ore on Belghast.  Comparatively I have less than 300 Leystone Ore so far… and that is from both my miner actively mining anything I come across in the world, and my main running the salvage armor shoulder enchant.  This post might be coming off  as complaining at the current state of things, but in reality I am mostly okay with it.  That said I have just had to come to realize that we are not going to have a raid of fully flasked players every single week.  If I cannot bring myself to spend that kind of gold just for the privilege of raiding casually…  I am certainly not going to expect anyone else to do it.  Similarly I also remember a time before flasks in raids was an expected thing at casual levels.  Hell our progression vanilla raid maybe had a flask on the tank, or on a handful of overachievers… but the other 34 of us seemed to get along just fine taking bosses down without consumables.  I realize fights are scaled completely differently now… but my ultimate hope is that consumables become an edge that players can use if they choose to afford it, but less of a hard requirement.  I realize this is going to mean we are progressing slowly, and I am largely okay with that… given that I am raiding this expansion to hang out with my friends more than anything.

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.

Imaginary Band

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Yesterday a good friend of mine from my Wrath raiding days, showed back up in my life suddenly.  Now this isn’t exactly a strange occurrence because folks know that I tend to be the ring leader of a network of gamers.  I am the one that tends to be good at maintaining connections with folks regardless of what game we happen to be playing.  So an attempt to get in touch with me, generally also means an attempt to get back in touch with a gaming core of friends.  The strange part of this whole experience however is when a few years pass between speaking.  In this case, it seems like every few years our paths cross, the challenge being that large swaths of time pass between and my memory is often times spotty at best.  Thankfully most people are super forgiving about me remembering the super granular details…  and I seem to be relatively good at the large picture as a whole.  The thing with the impending release of Legion next week is that this has been happening an awful lot in my life.  Running around and doing Events, means that I have casually bumped into a lot of folks from my past…  some of which I was interested in rekindling friendship… and others not so much.  We talked about the mixed bag that playing World of Warcraft since launch is on the podcast this weekend.  There are friends that I adored, and would still do damned near anything to help…  and then there were folks who were super toxic influences and lead to a lot of the anxiety ridden struggles I had as a raid leader.  Coming back to this game… and the server I have played on since the beginning of it all…  means I am ultimately going to confront a good deal of both.

I remember thinking yesterday how cool it would be to “get the band back together” because I miss raiding with some of these people.  The key word being “some”, because ultimately I don’t really want the band back together at all.  I want a revised image in my head of the band.  I want this amalgam of a bunch of different raid teams, from a bunch of different eras of the game.  I want to create the “All-Star Team” from my memory, but the thing is…  my All-Star team is not really the best players.  I found out my ideals for who I wanted to play with were vastly different than that of my friends during Cataclysm.  We built what we supposed to be the “best” team to raid with, for 10 man…  but my best was completely different than their best.  Ultimately when creating my team I would want to play with the folks I had the most fun with…  some of them were also the absolute worst at standing in fire.  They were fun to be around and invigorated my enjoyment of the game, and I didn’t give a damn if we had to take forever trying to learn this fight or another because their presence made me happy.  It is moments like these that I realize I play a vastly different game than most people do.  I play a game made up of the people sitting behind the screen at their keyboard, hanging out with me on a nightly basis… and not a game of abilities and number crunching.  At the end of the day for me at least, playing for victories is ultimately a hollow experience unless I did so with the people I enjoy playing with the most.

In a lot of ways this is what makes the Final Fantasy XIV raid group so special is that it is a bit of an amalgam of the two.  These are all people that I greatly enjoy playing with, but at the end of the day are also extremely good at the game.  Hell there are so many nights I feel like I am the “bad” that is being carried to victory.  While I largely said I would swear off raiding in Legion…  there is a big part of me that wishes he could form this same sort of group in World of Warcraft.  I want raiding to be a focus on having fun with friends and doing something together that we can’t necessarily do apart.  By the same token though, I don’t want to be concerned with damage meters, or reviewing the logs after the raid.  I don’t want to care if someone stood in the fire too long… or if we could do something more efficiently.  I want to just have a night hanging out with friends, talking on voice chat and killing bosses…  hopefully getting some sweet loot in the process.  The problem being that I don’t think World of Warcraft is that game, or at least its raid game… isn’t that game.  Final Fantasy XIV I can go into a fight not knowing anything about it… and learn everything I know from a series of attempts because it messages the mechanics extremely well.  World of Warcraft, I realistically need to read the dungeon guide and some third party sites to fully understand the mechanics of the fight and what I am supposed to be doing to counter them.  That is a huge difference, because one I can discover the fight with friends… and the other feels like homework.

Legion launches next week and I really don’t know what it has planned for me yet.  I am enjoying the game, and I am enjoying making my own way through it.  I am not sure if raiding will be part of that greater picture, but in the end I am going to try going with the flow.  So many times I have had a raid that I knew I was gearing for, when an expansion launched.  As a result I felt like I needed to push through the content to get raid ready within a weeks time.  This time around…  I am more focused on which character I am going to level first and which zone I am going to start in.  I have never gone into an expansion before with a complete set of characters, and ultimately liking something about each and every one of them.  If enough of these old familiar faces stick around… then I think I might want to try my hand at raiding again.  I am not super concerned with doing much more than 10 player/flex raiding if I do however.  Another thing that I would really like to do is set up a night to work on older raid achievements and get folks some awesome mounts.  I know there are several tiers where I am one or two achievements away from my own mounts.  The problem being that there just are not enough nights in the week to try and schedule things on, and continue to play other games.  Whatever the case I am trying my best to go into the Legion expansion with an open mind, and not really focused too tightly on what I am going to do… and when I am going to do it.  This is undiscovered territory for me, and it is going to be interesting to see what comes of it.

 

Toasty on MMORPGs

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The Decline

One of the more interesting trends that I have picked up on, has to do with my own blog.  It feels like the more I talk about Destiny, the lower my reader numbers dip.  I guess it makes sense, as I started this blog out with World of Warcraft and moved towards other MMORPGs as well.  Destiny has a slightly different audience and not necessarily the sort of one that really reads blogs.  The Destiny community is largely contained within a combination of Reddit, Twitch and YouTube.  I don’t have a lot to say about this, but I just found it interesting.  On one hand I hate that I am alienating a bunch of readers, and on the other hand in order for me to keep doing this daily blogging thing… I have to be writing about what is interesting me.  At this very moment that is Destiny and Diablo, and nothing much in the traditional MMO camp.  Now I have logged into a bunch of MMOs in the last few months, but none of them really seemed to hold my attention past that initial login.  Each time there was something that would ultimately cause me to log out.  It might be that my bags were a mess, or that I couldn’t remember what I was last doing.  Ultimately I found a ready excuse and used it to “nope” the hell out of the game.  The problem however I think is somewhere in me.

Right now I am finding myself enjoying games that shower me in loot, and games that allow me to have engaging solo experiences.  Granted I have been spending a lot of time mooching off of folks as they run high end content in Diablo 3, but when I log into that game I can go off and do something by myself that feels like I am moving towards some goal.  In Destiny no matter what I do I can always be working on getting that next faction package, or even spending time in the crucible hoping for that next 335 item.  These two games specifically play extremely well by myself or with friends, and that is just something that I can’t say for MMORPGs right now.  In most cases the only real way to get good gear is through raiding, and that takes a time commitment I am just not willing to do right now.  There is no path for me to piddle my way to victory, and at the moment I don’t want to commit to much more than that.  Raiding in Destiny has felt far more “à la carte” and I think the small six player raid size helps that.  It seems easy to pull together a raid group, and even easier to pull together a three player team.  For example we spent last night doing Challenge of Elders and it honestly felt just as engaging and rewarding as doing an MMORPG raid group.

Burnt Out Genre

For awhile now I have kept thinking that sooner or later I will get over this funk.  That I will get that drive to go off and play an MMORPG.  For example I really want to have the desire to play Final Fantasy XIV and to “get the band back together”.  However there is just some wall keeping me from getting back into it and enjoying it.  I’ve patched up the client a few times, but I know when I do log in… someone is going to do the “Bels Back!” thing and I will feel guilty when I log out a few minutes later because I and confused as to what to do.  It is not a time issue, because I still have the same amount of time I ever did… it seems to be an attention span issue.  Diablo 3 and Destiny both reward me for spending ANY time with them…  and there is always an explosion of shiny colored loot just waiting on me around the corner.  The grind of an MMO is a much more slow burn, with large gaps of time between those moments of excitement.  For years I played MMORPGs as a way to hang out with friends, but thanks to tools like Slack, Discord, and Band… I can take my group of friends with me wherever I happen to go.  I no longer need to rely on the MMO as a chat client, and when that happened I guess the games lost a part of their hold on me.

I guess it hit me last night when technically I was scheduled to be raiding in World of Warcraft, and I didn’t even remember that it was a thing I was supposed to be doing.  The leader said over chat that I was just burnt out on WoW, which is a bit true…  but its more than that.  I feel like I am burnt out on MMOs in general.  I’ve been rabidly playing this one genre since 2000, and I feel like maybe I just need other types of games in my life.  The parts of the MMO that I really liked, which were the acquisition of new stuff and the feeling of constantly evolving your persistent character…  those things have been exported to pretty much every single genre out there.  I guess I realized this was happening when nothing that was coming out, that actually excited me… was an MMO.  There are plenty of things to be excited for out there, and I think Black Desert is one of those games that I would have loved…  were I not over-saturated on MMORPGs.  I am not really sure if I have a point this morning.  It sucks that I am driving away readers, but I just don’t think I can write with the same love and excitement that I used to about MMORPGs right now.  I keep hoping at some point I will climb out of this hole, and be able to log into Final Fantasy XIV and be excited again for story and world building,  However in the meantime… you are probably going to see a lot more talk of Diablo 3 and Destiny because that is where my attention and excitement has landed.