Month: September 2018

I want to start off this mornings post with a business note.  Yesterday I wrote about the RoboSquid Armada initiative that we have started, and there was a problem with the Battle.net social link.  For whatever reason the first one I generated didn’t seem to work for anyone, so I have since replaced it with one that is actually working.  We didn’t do a lot last night other than run the Sethrak Temple dungeon on heroic real quick to complete the world quest that awarded a weapon for us Demon Hunters.  That has been a weird point of contention this expansion, is that the look feels really off for whatever reason.  Weapons are far harder to get to drop than they probably should be which means that I have been running around using some jank for most of my mythic dungeon running.

In truth the whole loot drop experience feels weirdly limiting, and it is starting to cause some pretty negative behavior in the dungeon finder.  There are a number of times where we have been doing a heroic and see a player drop immediately after getting a piece of loot, since it is highly unlikely that you will walk away from any dungeon with more than one item.  This ends up feeling horrible, but in a way I absolutely get why they are doing it.  Especially as a dps your queue is insanely long, and the sooner you drop out and get in another queue… the sooner you get another piece of gear.  However for the players running the instance it feels like you are constantly adjusting to the revolving door of players.

At the beginning of the expansion we were able to bolster a little bit of in dungeon chatter with a simple “Hey folks!” as soon as I zone into the instance.  However lately that banter has turned to complete silence as we all sort of go through the motions required to get to the end of the dungeon.  Now for me personally most of the time when I am running a heroic I am running it with at least a handful of people I know, and as such we are often talking back and forth on some sort of voice.  However I keep trying to prod text chat and make comments when something odd happens, trying to draw players into actually having a conversation.  The loot grind however is in full force and everyone seems to be falling back into the gulf of silence most expansions turn into apart from the occasional person asking for something that just dropped.

I realized while running the heroic last night that I was way too out of it to run a mythic.  I was weirdly tired and additionally we were down a person from our normal group mix, which could have of course been remedied…  but was even more stacked against me running something.  Instead I focued on cleaning up some of the quests that I had not completed… and finally getting the Zandalar Forever achievement required to unlock King’s Rest.  When I dinged 120 on the Warrior I largely stopped questing in the zones entirely and started focusing almost entirely on dungeons and World Quests.  You have to realize… I am not really a quest motivated player and while I really enjoy a good story… it isn’t something that has to be there to make me enjoy myself.  I can spend countless hours in a game like Minecraft with no story and be perfectly happy.

As such I always seem to be behind on quests because if there is an option that is not running quests I will almost always choose it.  Each time a new expansion comes out in World of Warcraft, you see me deleting a long sequence of abandoned quests from the previous expansion.  I’ve already found myself with a stack of quests gathering here as well, and I really should get in the habit of taking an evening here or there to burn through them.  For example… I only ever completed the Nightbourne quests on one character, because why would I even bother with that mess a second time?  For other players that is the highlight of their experience… for me quests are an easy way to level so that I can start gearing up to do the more interesting things like dungeons and raids.

While I seem to be having decent luck on getting things to upgrade…  I am still seeking a couple good weapons and am annoyed that the best fist weapon I can craft is 300.  I am stockpiling my Hydrocores from Mythic runs in an attempt to maybe craft some upgrades, but I will need 15 per item crafted and that means a significant number more mythic runs that I have currently done.  We all have some keys for Mythic +2 and I am wondering if we are at a gear level where we can give that a shot soon.

After our success the previous night with Freehold, we decided to set our sights on a new target.  We had heard one of the next easiest mythics was Waycrest Manor… aka the Haunted House.  As such we made our way over to Drustvar and zoned in hoping to have the same sort of luck we did the evening before.  So things I noticed… firstly that we had gotten a bit more gear since the last outing and the trash packs specifically felt much more manageable.  However several of the boss encounters caused us to attempt them multiple times to finally sort out everything that needed to happen.  It was a longer run than Freehold, and I am not a huge fan of the layout of the zone given everything feels super claustrophobic.  The other issue is both times I have been here there have been issues with the Z Axis… so it was feeling very reminiscent of old school Everquest runs of Castle Mistmoore or Kedge Keep.   There were several times when a mob literally warped up through the floor and came charging at us, and I feel like this isn’t necessarily something that is supposed to be happening.

The hardest encounter was the three witches, largely because of the sheer amount of damage we were taking.  I finally decided to use one of my Drums of the Maelstrom, which effectively gives me a one time shot use Bloodlust /Heroism.  We waited for the second boss in the sequence and used it to burn most of its life away.  However largely I think it was Grace carrying us all with her healing because it still seemed like we were taking copious amounts of damage.  I believe we all walked away with a shiny epic bauble to show for our effort.  I managed to pull two items, but the second was a pair of shoulders roughly the same as the ones I was currently wearing so I traded them over to Tam.  I guess that is the positive about running the mythic with the comp we were… because it was four leather classes so ample opportunity to swap gear around.  Unfortunately Grace was the odd player out as a cloth wearer, but the other night she was swapping stuff with the Mage so I guess it all shakes out in the end.

RoboSquid Armada

This is sorta a name we continue to flock back to because it is amazing…  but has shifted focus a number of times over its life span.  At first this was the guild we formed on Eonar to start running dungeons grossly undergeared and at the minimum item level available to zone in.  We managed to make it through Gnomeregan before we sorta petered out.  We intended to come back and start it up again, but a handful of us were not actively subbed to the game… and then the world scaling patch sorta killed this notion.  During late Legion we revamped things and started using the Discord attached to it as a home base for a group that was attempting to push Mythic+ encounters.  This went well for a period of time..  but I sorta had a bout of crippling self doubt and anxiety due to some external stresses that were happening in my life and flaked the hell out.  Since that point it has sorta been a neutral ground for making groups happen, and the discord we hand out any time we have folks who don’t all have access to the same locations.

Are you Horde and play on US servers? Are you willing to do things with zero prep time and also be super chill about failing miserably over and over, chuckling while you wipe in style? Do you know that transmog is the true end game? Let me know… nonsense planning.

— Bel 🆚 I WAS A FROG! (@belghast) September 4, 2018

Yesterday I tweeted the above message out… which was immediately mistaken for me starting a transmog farming group.  So maybe I should have worded things a little differently.  Essentially one of the things I miss is the early days of World of Warcraft before the looking for group tool.  In that era we had tons of social channels run by different raids or community organizations and they served as the basis for forming groups by hand.  Hell the entire reason why this blog got any readership at all I feel is because of my early “Groupcraft” guide series that got picked up by WoW Insider at the time.  When the dungeon finder was introduced during Wrath of the Lich King…  all of those social networks started to atrophy and decay away.  When I came back after leaving the game in Cataclysm…  almost all of my social channels were completely empty.  People just stopped joining them anymore since they had the group finder to lean on and since Cataclysm largely destroyed the concept of non-guild based raiding.

The primary reason why Mythics have felt awful is that it forces players to rely on either guilds… or complete strangers to make them happen.  The social network and infrastructure that Vanilla to Wrath players used to rely on to make things happen… is just flat out gone.  The other huge problem is that players are now spread out among countless smaller servers with a hefty $25 per character tax if you want to remedy that fact.  So to move my 14 Horde characters from The Scryers to some other location (not that I want to)… would cost me $350 which is not at all reasonable.  Cross server grouping is awesome… but also sort of unmanageable just through a friends list because again… not all of your resources may be battletag mutuals and you sorta have to get different people to invite different folks to the group/raid.

With this expansion however Blizzard introduced the ability to join Battle.net and WoW Social channels and have them piped to in game chat.  The “Social” tab was mostly a useless thing when it was first introduced but now that you can actually use it while playing the game… it suddenly becomes way more useful.  It is going to allow us to rebuild that sort of infrastructure that we once had and provide a bridge to help connect players scattered throughout multiple servers and guilds.  I was a huge fan of the concept of having a raid completely separate from your guild, because it allowed you to hang out and get green text with the people you felt comfortable with…  and have a similar but different group of people you got things done with.  There are a lot of players that are simply not comfortable being in a mega guild, and during the Duranub Raiding Company days we basically had House Stalwart as the large guild… and a bunch of smaller satellite guilds that all joined together to do stuff in the world.

So ultimately… yesterday Grace and I got to talking and that almost always lends its way to nonsense.  The idea is that we start trying to use RoboSquid Armada as a vehicle for binding together all these pockets of people who want to do stuff… but also are not willing to pug.  This of course is what spawned the tweet above.  Effectively what we are looking for in players…

• Horde NA Server Players.
• Willingness to Roll with the Punches and Attempt things with little to no prep time.
• Being super good-natured and willing to accept that we are going to fail an awful lot in some of the things we try.
• Willingness to help out players that need help.
• The ability to ignore all of those ways that players prove themselves to be better than others, and just be part of the group all working towards the same goal.
• Willingness to work hard and improve your own game play when the challenge arises, and come up with creative solutions to work around group composition weaknesses.
• Being open to passing along gear to help out others that might not be as well geared as you are yet.
• Folks that simply want a comfortable and safe place to hang out while playing World of Warcraft.
• Being able to laugh at your own mistakes and pick yourself right back up and face the nonsense all over again.
• Being able to mentor other players when they ask for help, but not being a know it all and forcing your opinion on them when they didn’t.

So that isn’t really a list of guidelines or rules, but more something to think about when approaching this group.  We do silly things and it is okay if we fail… but at least we tried really hard to make it work.  We will have fun and learn together and sort out what we need to do to make the bosses fall down.  For the time being… it is largely just a group for getting normals/heroics/mythics going or just having a fun time while leveling your hundredth alt.  In the future it may coalesce into a non-guild based raid if we have enough people interested and something resembling a workable group composition.  Essentially…  I am looking for a few people willing to fail hard and laugh about it.  Are you interested in nonsense?  If you have any questions ping me along the many many avenues of contact I am sure you have with me.

The details…

• Discord Server Link – https://discord.gg/FtNePF9
• Battle.NET Social Link – https://blizzard.com/invite/M4Y7bPpsA27

Some rules that should be obvious but I will state them anyways:

• This is a positive community so please respect each other so we can go off and do awesome things together.
• No religious or political chat please.
• Racism, homophobia, sexism or any other abhorrent behavior will not be tolerated.
• No Posting of DPS Meters or any sort of that behavior.

If all or any of this sounds like an awesome idea then I really hope to see you as part of the RoboSquid Armada.

[EDIT]  Updated the link to the social group, because for whatever reason the first one was not working.

So in the past I have talked about how our middle cat, Kenzie…  loves to play fetch.  This originally started with her stealing the rubber bands that occasionally bind together bundles of hangers when we get dry cleaning.  This escalated to her swiping the elastic string that holds together shoes sometimes when you buy a pair at the store.  One day while roaming Dollar Tree we noticed these hair bands and thought…  this is a thing that Kenzie would love and would also be easier to tell when she has dropped one on our head.  So we picked up a package of them and at the same time my wife swiped one for herself to use as a binding strap for one of her notebooks.  Over the weekend Kenzie found this hairband…  and pulled the notebook off of my wife’s desk in her office…  somehow figured out how to get the band off the notebook… and by the time we got up that day was playing with it downstairs.

She has a special proclivity for this one that is sorta light pink/mauve-ish, and if you happen to be holding it…  she stops whatever she is doing and goes into seek and retrieve mode.  This is actually rather handy in the mornings when we want to shoo her out of the bedroom… all you have to do is toss it down the hall.  The other side effect of these bands is she does a much better job of carrying them back to us…  whereas with rubber bands they almost never made it back for tossing/flinging again.  She is a crazy cat, but also mostly awesome for her weird little quirks like this one.  The photo is a stash of them we have hidden on top of the entertainment center, because occasionally she misplaces them.  I think she can smell the rubber honestly, and for whatever reason likes it…  because that is the only common thread behind all of the things that she seems to want to fetch.  Our eldest cat though…  her thing is bread twist ties so maybe all cats have a “thing” that they are super passionate about.

Today is maintenance day for World of Warcraft and I feel like the game definitely needs some tweaking.  A curious thing started happening over the weekend…  where a lot of the spawn rates for world quests went completely out of whack.  This for example is an Azerite Mining area in Vol’dun that went from near instant spawn Sethrak to single spawns every few minutes.  As a result it was a free for all match of trying to get a tag in on a mob when it spawned so that your faction could get the credit for killing it.  I apparently was fairly good at tagging things with my thrown glaives and then would sit back and ignore the mob hoping to let as many players get a tag in as well as possible before it inevitable evaporated.

Similarly there were other world quests that had near instant respawn rates…  or faster.  There was a quest in Stormsong Valley where I would often end up with five copies of the same mob as it would keep spawning over top of itself before I could kill the first one.  There was an Azerite Mining area in Nazmir where I just straight up got overwhelmed because I ended up with five of those golems on top of me from the same spawning node and simply could not keep up with the self healing.  My hope is today’s patch will sort all of this out and tweak the respawn rates back to normal ranges.  In truth the servers have mostly been doing excellent until yesterday… when all of this nonsense started showing up so I am wondering what tweak behind the scenes brought it all about.

Lastly we ran our first Mythic last night, and chose to go after Freehold…  the super awesome pirate dungeon.  In truth it was far easier than we had expected it to be… especially given that a couple of our players were just barely heroic level… let alone mythic level.  At this point I am 324 on the Demon Hunter which is not that far off from the 330 I managed to get my warrior to before shifting focus.  I have for all purposes “caught up” and over the weekend chain ran several heroic with Grace healing at the helm.  Demon Hunter is an excellent tank with the one slight problem…  they lack the wide variety of “oh shit” buttons that many of the tanks have.  Essentially I have Demon Spikes as a frequent use little burst of survival…  which helps take the edge off things but isn’t going to really keep me alive for long.  Then I have Metamorphosis that acts as my major survival cool-down and turns me into a big damned demon.

That is pretty much it…  I can roam around some and pick up souls that I have not managed to suck back into myself yet…  but the class lacks the wide variety of survival tools that say a warrior has.  This means that if everything is going well I am super easy to heal because the sustain that the class has all by its lonesome is phenomenal.  However if the Demon Hunter tanks starts to really take a damage spike… there is going to be nothing they can do themselves to pull back out of it and save the day.  Basically after playing tanks that have a deep bench of abilities they can pull in to save themselves from things going south…  it feels sorta helpless to have nothing much in reserve.

As far as the Mythic itself… we took it slow and over cleared just to keep from things going south…  but things did in fact go south at a few points when we had chain aggro… or someone back into a pack of mobs… or a runner go grab something.  That said we managed to whittle our way down through the bosses and the only one we actually wiped on was Shark Puncher…  which gets WAY nastier on Mythic.  I am super amped to get in and try some more Mythics tonight if we can assemble the same strike team as we had last night.  I’ve been contemplating pulling together a horde community of folks who want to do Mythics to sorta make the process of building them a bit easier.  I am not sure however if I have it in me to do much group organization these days…  if it happens however you will likely hear about it here first.