Good Morning Folks! I had a very weird evening in Pandara Remix. I’ve basically reached the place where I have only a handful of vectors to scale up my character. I could pour copious amounts of bronze into upgrades… but I would FAR rather have a fat stack of mounts than buy temporary power in a game mode that has a shelf life of 80 more days. This means that in order for me to fill out my character I am going to need to knock out some achievements. One requires me to do all of the Raids on Normal Mode… which admittedly feels like a bad call from Blizzard on this one. The other steps of this progress are governed by “Finder” tools, but this step requires you to wade knee-deep into the scary realm of the Group Finder.
Weirdly however this was for the most part smooth as heck for the first bit of my evening. I ran through Mogu’shan Vaults, Terrace of the Eternal Spring, and Heart of Fear and it was an extremely delightful proposition. The groups assembled quickly and the only time I took a death was a some point during Terrace where I pulled aggro on one of the trash mobs that a tank had not picked up yet. This success story however ground to a halt as soon as I started shopping for a group for Throne of Thunder or Siege of Orgrimmar. This is where the tropes I had feared were starting to come out… where group leaders were asking for unrealistic gear scores or were “full on DPS” and were looking for a “pumper” or “frogger” for their last slot. I could have shifted over and tanked but honestly, I don’t remember half of these fights anymore.
I spent about an hour applying for groups, joining groups that never went anywhere because they had no tanks or healers… and generally just flailing around in hopelessness. The only thing I can think is that my luck was so smooth in those first few groups because it was extremely early in the evening. The Sweaty McTryhards of the world had not woken up from their slumber and all that were available were us casual scrubs who go to bed at 9 pm. So tonight I am going to set my goal to attempt to get in a Throne or Siege group first thing and MAYBE get my way through both of them if I am lucky.
I know one of the things that currently makes my character look bad is that I don’t have my Rings or Necklace. Admittedly I need all of the raids to get the damned necklace but given that I did not start on day one and I am not as far along in this curve as some players… it does not really seem to matter. So when I could not get the raids rolling I decided to take a step back and chip away at my heroic dungeons. This is the point where I realized how much I have missed this. Heroic Dungeons were always super fun and something that you could smash mindlessly for fun and profit. I’ve missed this game mode being relevant. Mythics came along and largely destroyed any purpose for running Heroics but also made them a bit too sweaty to be truly enjoyable in mass quantities. I get that in their hunt for more competitive game modes they can attempt to monetize into an esport… Mythics made sense… but I still miss heroic smashy fun.
My goal tonight is to knock out the last two dungeons that I need and then start chipping away at the fat stack of scenarios that I need for that ring. Currently, I have only run two of these on Heroic mode and there are so many freaking Scenarios. This is honestly a game mode that I would love to see make a return because it allowed for something similar feeling to a Heroic Dungeon… but that had little to no mechanical requirements. It also served as a way to allow them to pour more story bits into the game which is always good. I feel like World Quest Chains probably replaced these, but does anyone pay attention to the story bits attempting to be told through those? Probably not. Anyways my focus right now is on completing out the missing gear slots, because this will also help any alts that I decide to run up during the event.
The last bit for today is that I am legitimately contemplating changing mains for War Within. Hume Belghast has had a good run and I still like the character quite a bit… but Dark Iron Dwarves. Dark Irons have been something that I have loved since Vanilla World of Warcraft and Blackrock Depths in its original weird twisting form is probably my favorite dungeon. I loved that there was this entire Dark Iron City down there and I loved knowing my way around it. I also kind of love that they have a racial teleport around the world via Mole Machine. I am just having way more fun with this character than I expected given it was only ever intended to be something throwaway for the event.
Anyways! I hope you are having a wonderful week. Are you playing Pandaria Remix or PMIX as I have taken to mentally calling it? What are you playing? Drop me a line below.
I’ve slowly been wading into Group Finder myself as well, but in Destiny 2. Mostly for lower-stakes content like Exotic Missions and Normal mode Onslaught. So far it’s been a lot less toxic and cruel than I was expecting it to be, but when I put up a listing myself, I specifically put in that I don’t want any toxicity. My self-esteem is already pretty fragile, so, getting chewed out when I’m trying to run something in a game I play to have fun is pretty disheartening.