Darth Scrapheap

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If appearance systems are the “true” endgame… them I am woefully losing right now.  Last night I managed to push my Deathknight across the line and ding 110, to which I immediately abandoned all attempts at questing and instead focused on World Quests.  For those who do not know when you hit 110 all you need do is walk over to Khadgar and you can start up the madness on your alts without needing to do the faction grind.  Now I look like a random assemblage of crap…  or very much like a raiding dps warrior did in vanilla.  I know that helm is supposed to be menacing and Deathknighty… but it just keeps reminding me of a lizard or turtle… or something similar.  After a round of “complete the gear quests” I am sitting at 795 and I absolutely plan on exploiting the hell out of the Timewalking dungeons this weekend to help push that higher.  As much as I wanted to like the Paladin… it was mostly just a choice to push up so that I could have a miner to feed my engineering.  Similarly I started the Rogue with the thought of pushing up a Herbalist/Alchemist but stalled out because Rogues are squishy and annoying.  Instead I started working on my Deathknight because deep down inside I still have a lot of love for the character… the fringe benefit however is that now I have a reasonable Herbalist as well to at the very least feed my Seed-Battered Fish Plate habit.

In other news we had a pretty good night of raiding with us coming in and killing Odyn once again after a weird off week thanks in large part to Thanksgiving.  It still took a few tries and there are a lot of fiddly bits we can improve on to make it less horrible at the end.  From there we had a crazy pull that never ended because we did not learn our lesson properly and or they said they patched something they didn’t actually patch.  From there we set up and changed a few things on Guarm and had an amazingly smooth one shot…  which is pretty damned awesome considering this was only our second night of attempts.  We then continued on to Helya and by the end of the we were pushing her into phase three and phase two was seeming less suicidal.  All in all I will count that as significant progress, the only negative being there just aren’t that many gearing options yet from this raid.  I am super bummed that I am going to have to miss our now “a thing” Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear this week.  I have a family thing that happens once a month, and this just happens to be that Friday.  Thankfully I think we have more than enough reasonable tanking options to make something work in my absence.  I am just bummed at losing a shot at maybe just maybe getting those last three corrupted essences.

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I also played a significant amount of Final Fantasy XV, and I have decided it is far less a boy band simulator and more Final Fantasy Entourage.  All of that said… I still like it quite a bit and it is absolutely priceless when Prompto sometimes hums the class FF battle victory theme after you finish a combat engagement.  Right now I am heavily engaged in a life of murder-hobo-ry as I am roaming the country side looking for baddies to vanquish and looting interesting cooking materials.  The key take away from yesterday however is that I gave the official Sony PS4 Remote Play a shot and man…  have they seemingly improved it greatly.  Sure there are still moments when it wigs the hell out and you are best to simply hold still until it stops struggling.  Those however are few and far between and for the most part the end result is an extremely smooth play experience.  For reference my PS4 is hard wired into my router, and I was connecting into it from my laptop over the wireless network.  I did some tests in Destiny to see if this was simply a “good enough for an RPG” thing or if it really was reasonable for playing other games.  I could notice a little bit of controller lag while running and doing some patrols… but it was more than reasonable enough for me to play.  I am not sure if I would be willing to go into the Crucible or something extremely difficult, but I had a good enough time killing random splicers in the Plaguelands remotely.  In truth it is “good enough” for 90% of the stuff I do in Destiny and I would absolutely be willing to try something like farming Archon’s Forge while remoted in through the laptop.  It is definitely good enough for Final Fantasy XV which greatly increase the range of play options I have…  and I am going to want to test this theory out on the Vita pretty soon.  I still think the performance of the unofficial “Twisted” Remote Play was better… but he has just been unable to keep it updated to function on the latest version of the PS4 firmware… and the bonus features of playing with a keyboard, mouse and xbox 360 controller simply are not worth being behind in the firmware version especially given that it will bar you from accessing the PSN store.  I am super happy though to see that Sony seems to continue to improve performance.

Trials of Valor

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Last night was a raid night… and I failed to take any screenshots so you are stuck with an image of me in the order hall.  After having cleared Emerald Nightmare a few weeks it was decided that we would instead poke our heads into the Trial of Valor.  The goal set out by the raid leader for our group was to attempt to stay current with normal mode progression, so instead of spending several weeks farming Emerald Nightmare it seemed reasonable to just jump straight into the Trial content which has a much higher item level.  That was a big part of the decision factor in that the baseline for gear is 850… and literally everyone in the raid last night has 850 or better.  All of that said though… there are several of us who still want to keep clearing the Nightmare in the hopes of getting specific items or for no reason other than the try and complete that Balance of Power meta achievement step.  So I think in the coming days/weeks we are going to try and sort out a secondary night with a clear purpose of farming the raid.  I mean back in the day we used to have a Molten Core night even though we were actively progressing in Blackwing Lair…. and for that matter also had a Zul’Gurub Night.  Karazhan is somewhat taking the place of ZG however as far as gear progression goes, but still I want to finish out some quests.

As far as the raid itself, it went fairly well but it is a big of a punch in the gut going from killing eight bosses in a single night to struggling to kill one.  All in all it took us around six attempts to work out the mechanics for Odyn and largely sort out how not to have the tanks die during the final phase.  The fight reminded me so much of Binding Coil Turn 9 in FFXIV, in that the really rough part was at the very end…  but you had to wade through a bunch of mechanics that were more tedious than difficult to get there.  This is very much a learn the mechanics fight and less a gear check in the traditional sense of damage output.  For some however it is likely a bit of a survival check in that even if you are doing mostly everything as intended you are still going to take the occasional damage that becomes hard to control.  We however pushed through and got a kill… and by kill I mean we pushed Odyn to 10% where he once again congratulated us on our performance.  What is it about this guy wanting us to beat him up…  is this a fetish?  In any case a lot of gear dropped, but I got double gold both off him… and off the world boss that I attempted right before the raid.  That leaves me with a single roll token for the week that I am going to need to use judiciously and determine what exactly I want to spend it on.  Largely nothing from mythic+ is really worth it apart from the occasional trinket.

We put in several attempts on Guarm and that fight feels like a pretty hard gear wall the way that Patchwerk used to be.  It has a very short enrage timer, and a oneshot kill mechanic that you need to avoid… while juggling even distribution of the colored debuffs.  So there is a lot more going on than there was with Patchwerk, but it is no less of a hard dps race trying to kill him before he enrages and kills us.  Last night was largely Art and I figuring out the tanking, and placement… and learning how to avoid the charge attack and get through it without taking much in the way of damage.  It also very much felt like the healers were desperately trying to sort out all of the details because there were so many times where I was painfully low and straight up out of cooldowns to mitigate that fact.  A little gear, damage output optimization, and some practice and I am absolutely certain that we will get that fight to farm status before long.  We also have an alternate path open to us of trying to push through Heroic Emerald Nightmare, but with a brand new raid open that hasn’t seemed that compelling.  In truth I hope we get to a point where we can easily clear Trial of Valor and then go back and worth on Heroics all in the same night.  Of note however… “ToV” will always be Temple of Veeshan to me and never Trials of Valor.