The year 2019 has been both the hottest year on record for Oklahoma and the wettest year on record. Generally speaking by this point in the season it is starting to calm down on the temperature front and I have a mostly brown lawn. However this year everything is lush and verdant and trying to kill me. Over the last few weeks my allergies and asthma have hit a critical mass and combined with the still 95 degree days and I feel like I am dying most of the time. I have my good days and my bad days, and the last two days have been bad days.
I wasn’t entirely certain I would make it through the day yesterday but I somehow managed my way through it. Today however is a day for staying home in the AC and taking periodic breathing treatments and lots and lots of meds to try and kick this whole situation in the bum. Sure it is a fine day for dinking around in World of Warcraft, but I also feel supremely guilty for sticking my three supervisors with having to attend meetings that I would otherwise attend. Responsibility sucks but what is absolutely worse is the feeling of guilt when you know you are pushing your responsibilities off onto someone else.
Last night however was a mostly good night. We ultimately pulled together a Razorfen Kraul group when the FFXIV raid night didn’t make due to lack of healers. Grace is mostly busy this week so instead we grabbed Eliyon on his Shaman and worked our way through the instance. Living most of my Warcraft life Alliance side this is an instance I do not know terribly well. I mean I have run it a handful of times, but due to the extreme distance you have to travel to get there it just wasn’t something that happened regularly.
I largely wanted the instance to finish out my Warrior specific Brutal Armor quest chain, as one of the drops came off a boss early in the instance. Past that Eliyon really wanted the Corpsemaker axe to drop, especially given that I am not interested in it as a warrior since I mostly level sword and board. What I wanted instead was to get the Pronged Reaver one handed axe seeing as it more closely fits my personal play style. Fortunately for me it did in fact drop… and unfortunately for Eli his axe did not. I am sure I will be back in there at some point and will try and snag him again so he has another shot and another person who might roll on it that wouldn’t.
Now I am in the awkward position of skilling up Axe from scratch, as I had never really used a one handed axe prior to winning this weapon. I am taking the opportunity however to farm cooking components and catch that skill up in the process. As a warrior I seem to go through an excessive amount of food and while Vernie keeps dropping his creations off on me, I feel like I should probably be more self sufficient. Right now I also largely treat his creations as a limited quantity and use them fairly sparingly.
The negative of last night however is that I dinged 32 and with it… went literally all of my money. I am down to 10 silver at this point, so I am not exactly sure where that 100 gold for the mount is going to come from. Maybe I should have been playing the market this entire time, but I feel like I lack the financial fortitude to really do that in Warcraft. Instead I will probably find something to grind and vendor copious amounts of it to make my 100 gold. I wish “tank for hire” schemes were more viable because I would absolutely tank for cash.
This was the weekend of the “great” Denial of Service attack against classic. Starting at some point Saturday afternoon there was a rapid sequence of attacks targeting a specific set of PVP WoW Classic servers. This then expanded to ultimately target all of the Classic servers, and seemingly the live servers as well. At the time of taking this screenshot I was not able to see any Classic or Live realms as being “online”.
A Twitter account spawned in the midst of this claiming credit and going by UKDrillas, seemingly starting as an attack on two WoW Streamers Asmongold and Sodapoppin. Asmongold was hosting an event on his Twitch stream for the final grind to 60, and seemingly whoever initiated the attack was attempting to stop that from happening. Things sorta get weird from there in that I also saw reports that folks from 4Chan doxxed the attacker, once the attack spread to a server that they were playing on. It was a pretty short time before the twitter account that was claiming credit had been banned and cut off that source of information.
Whatever actually happened, the servers were back up and playable by that evening and I spent the entirety of the Podcast on Saturday roaming around Thousand Needles knocking out quests and collecting much needed Iron ore. That is probably the biggest highlight of the weekend the fact that I am now sitting at 170 Blacksmithing, which is honestly way more tedious of a grind than I remembered the first time. I am slowly getting into the realm of being able to create things that are useful to me while leveling.
Bronze was a hell level, and I am finally happy to mostly be on the other side of that mess. Also Thousand Needles is deeply confused as to what level it is because of the weird range of ore nodes that spawn there. In my travels I have seen: Copper, Tin, Silver, Iron, Gold, Mithril and Truesilver. I am hoping to be able to harvest at least Gold nodes the next time I happen across one. Unfortunately that means I need to find a lot more Iron nodes because I am currently sitting at 150 skill and reportedly Gold is 155.
There were three dungeons that were needed to be run this weekend and due to the DDoS we only managed to squeeze in two of them. The first was another jaunt into Shadowfang Keep because Thalen had reached the point where he needed to clean up all of the quests associated with it. Unfortunately on Friday night neither myself or Grace had the oomph in us to run two dungeons back to back after you consider the standing around time as everyone makes their way to the instance portal in Silverpine.
The second was Blackfathom Deeps which we managed to knock out yesterday morning and offered up several upgrades for me personally, but additionally for the group as a whole. Unfortunately later in the evening we just lacked the critical mass of “almost 30” players required to do the third instance that was needed, aka Razorfen Kraul. In theory I should be hunting down the rest of the quests associated with that instance because it is my ultimate hope to be able to maybe run that night. If I can’t make a group materialize I might join on a PUG group because really at this point I just want to collect the component for the Warrior level 30 armor quest chain while it is still useful.
I close out weekend two of World of Warcraft Classic sitting a little ways into level 31. This is a reasonable speed I think and is way faster than I was leveling in Vanilla. I still feel like a reasonable and viable tank in instance… even though I have moments where I am just out of rage and things are going insane. Grace and her constant fearing doesn’t exactly help this because if I am going to try and lock things down they have to be sitting beside me. It however seems to bring her joy to grief me, and we haven’t died as a result yet… but we did come really close in BFD when her fear went off and grabbed another whole pack.
I am also having to relearn how to play with a proper trapping hunter, because I kept griefing Thalen while he was desperately trying to make the traps work. Additionally we had a Warlock dotting everything up which served to further grief him when the traps didn’t last. We will get this shit sorted out by the time we hit 60. The more pressing concern however is that I have a mount to buy in 9 levels and I have zero clue how I am going to get anywhere near the money needed to purchase it. The riding skill is 20 gold and the mount itself is 80 gold.. which doesn’t include the honored discount but regardless… it is a lot of money. I am just worried that I am going to be that guy without a mount that everyone waits on to get to instances. I have no clue at all how I am going to see the 1000 gold needed for the epic mount.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Last week we recorded our second half of the Shadowbringers spoiler show, but as a result it pushed a few topics off to this week. First we talk about Pax West and the experiences of Ash, Kodra and Tam as they roamed the show floor. After that we talk about the most recent Nintendo Direct and some of the titles that stood out. Lastly we go over our normal time talking about our most recent obsession World of Warcraft Classic. I am sure this will be a topic spread across many weeks but we at least start the discussion of our feelings about returning to a game that seemingly we still enjoy playing.
For those who are new to this blog, I run a semi-monthly column of sorts where I track what I have been playing over the previous month. This does a few things but largely it allows me to track over the course of the years what I have been into at a given time. My blog serves as a bit of a record to jog my memory and help me firmly plant when certain events are happening. Also it allows my readers a window into what I am up to and what my thoughts are about a thing in short form. I also generally try and use this moment in time as a point to “true up” my sidebar widget.
To Those Remaining
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC / Switch
This one is sorta hanging on by a thread at this point, not for want of desire but more for lack of time. I have however booted it up and made a bit more progress over the past month as well as starting the Switch version. Word of warning, I would say if you are ONLY going to buy a single version of this game, maybe don’t buy the Switch version. It has some slowdown issues and the graphical fidelity are not up to snuff from what I have been used to with the PC version. As it stands I own copies of this I believe for every platform… largely because I want to support the hell out of this title and see more games in this series released.
Destiny 2 – PC / Xbox One / PS4
I have been playing considerably more of Destiny 2 than I had in the months leading up to now. There is a bunch of exciting stuff happening not the least of which is the enabling of Cross Save. I can now play my guardian on every single console platform in addition to the PC and have gone through the process of moving my character from Battle.net to Steam. I am super pumped about the launch of Shadowkeep coming up in October. Of note if you have ever played the PC version then it would behoove you to go through the process of moving your character from BNet to Steam because after October 1st it will not longer be accessible through the BNet client.
Diablo 3 – PC
I legitimately thought this one would be leaving my list this month. A new season started at the tail end of August and with the impending launch of World of Warcraft Classic a few days later, I fully expected to just skip out on this season. However I found myself once again logging in on a Friday night for the ritual Grace and I have maintained for the last several seasons. It is enough of a thing that it felt weird NOT to be playing Diablo 3 on an opening night. I had a lot of fun and we ran Demon Hunters just to make the season a little easier to complete. I’ve made it as far as unlocking the seasonal rewards and I am not sure if I will push any further.
Dragalia Lost – Android
This one is going to likely maintain a permanent slot on my list. Unfortunately I don’t really have any new screenshots because I no longer play on my phone where it is super easy to take screenshots. On my Galaxy Tab S4 I have to do a complicated volume down and power button to take a shot so I never do it. On my ZTE Axon 7 phone it is a 3 finger gesture to take a shot, and I am wondering if there is a way to restore that functionality to the tablet with an application or something. This game keeps my attention because they keep rolling out new events, with either brand new or revisiting boss encounters for me to play with. I pretty much play enough each night to complete the daily objectives and then head to sleep.
Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers – PC
I went from hot and heavy to barely at all on this one. I got in, completed the Shadowbringers story and leveled the Warrior to 80 and my Samurai to 80 as well. Then I disappeared once again because other things released that pulled away my attention. I will continue to play this it fits and spurts for the remainder of this month I am certain, because my attention is being funneled super hard away from almost everything else that I have on my plate. I would really like to level a Magic DPS and a Healer so that I can see all of the Shadowbringers role quests. Still a great game I just am waiting on more story content to drag me back into it.
Magic the Gathering Arena – PC
My attention span for this game has been limited this month, but with the upcoming release content for Throne of Eldraine and the Brawl event happening right now I want to poke my head back in. I have to say though I would play this WAY more if I could play it from my Tablet. My winding down and bed routine would probably include a quick rush through Dragalia dailies and then a few matches of MTGA. I feel like they are missing out on a lot by not having a tablet client, though I guess in theory I could stream this from bed with Parsec. I should investigate how feasible that really is. I sorta wish that I could configure Parsec to work in a sort of console friendly mode where instead of my desktop I am presented with a board of icons of applications to launch.
To The New and Returning
Monster Hunter World Iceborne – PS4
I am a sucker. I did in fact buy this on the PS4 to be able to play it now… when I would way rather have just waited to play it on the PC. The PC version is so superior to the PS4 version for my purposes… however for some reason Capcom is maintaining a staggered schedule of releases. I still love the game and as a result they are getting two purchases from me. I am what is wrong with games and I know I should feel ashamed. I am honestly not sure how much time I will have to devote to this but I really want to poke around and try and get used to a PS4 Controller again.
World of Warcraft Classic – PC
This is the grand daddy of all things on this list and is consuming the most of my time. As of last night I hit 28 on my Undead Warrior and am about halfway to 29. I have plans already made to run Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deep tonight with guildies, and this game is dominating my headspace at the moment. I cannot fully explain why it feels so good but god does it feel good to be back in Vanilla WoW. I knew I would be playing it because Grace had never gotten to experiment, but on some level I fully expected it just to be the two of us running around and doing nonsense. Instead we have a legitimately large guild full of friends all seemingly digging this experience. Long live House Kraken!
To Those Departing
Final Fantasy V – Android
This one largely lost focus somewhere around the Earth Shrine. I probably will return to it because I really like the idea of legitimately playing this without the Four Job Fiesta rules. That said on some level I agree with Ash on this one that the rules actually improve the game. Right now I feel like I need to do all of the things to min-max my characters, whereas playing under the rules dictates my actions. It limits the scope of what is available and causes me to focus on specific strategies. That said now that I know this is a reasonable option I might sign on next year for the Fiesta from my tablet. I just wish this version synced with any other version of the game so I could pop between playing on the PC for example and the tablet. Everything should have cross save.
Summary
The last several months have been pretty stable to be honest with not a lot of changes happening. Mostly a few things shift into focus as a few other things fall out of focus. I expect this month will be about World of Warcraft Classic with a side dish of Monster Hunter World Iceborne and a little bit of Destiny 2 especially as we get closer to the launch of Shadowkeep. Destiny has made me wish that literally every game had cross save if not cross play. I am mostly fine with having to buy a client for each platform, but I would love to be able to carry my characters over to it. There is no reason why Diablo 3 on the switch couldn’t have connected to Battle.net for example, and I have zero excitement over Overwatch Switch as it stands because I fully expect that it will not be connected to Battle.net either. I want more ability to play with my friends on the characters I have already spent time building, because quite frankly I don’t generally have enough bandwidth to level something new.
