MMORPG

Mind the Defile

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Last night with the assistance of my good friend Grace I did in fact get my World Destroyer mount that is currently available as part of the World of Warcraft 15th Anniversary event. It was nowhere near as painful as getting the Core Hound Chain, which required you to clear the level 100 version of Molten Core. That is not to say that this mount is a cakewalk, because it did in fact take far longer than I expected it to. You get the mount from the Memories of Fel, Frost and Fire Achievement which involves fighting a bunch of versions of classic raid bosses encounters. You have to do the following Encounters.

  • Defeat Burning Crusade Bosses
    • Lady Vashj
    • Kael’thas Sunstrider
    • Archimonde
  • Defeat Wrath of the Lich King Bosses
    • Heigan the Unclean
    • Anub’arak
    • The Lich King
  • Defeat Cataclysm Bosses
    • Cho’gall
    • Nefarian
    • Ragnaros

The fights themselves are greatly simplified versions of the raid encounters. You also do not have to get the boss all the way down but instead to somewhere around the 25-35% mark before exiting and getting sent to the next fight. There is a chance at getting loot drops after each trio of encounters, and I managed to pick up a really nice ring for my trouble from the Wrath sequence. Grace picked up a modernized version of Cho’gall’s mace which was also really nice. There is one problem however that makes this whole process a little less nice.

If you wipe at any point you seemingly have to restart the entire sequence. So if you for some reach wipe on Archimonde… that means you will have to do Lady Vashj and Kael’thas all over again. You also have to mechanic. Moments into the Heigan fight we were down to I think five players given that almost the entire raid stood in the plague explosions and didn’t do the “Dance”. On the Lich King folks ignored Defile and as a result spread it across the entire platform wiping the raid and forcing us to go back and do the first two bosses again. We stuck through it and have our Deathwing mounts to show for it, but I doubt I will be farming for items.

Classic Doldrums

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I feel like I am in a weird place right now with World of Warcraft Classic. Last week I allowed myself to take a break from the game for the launch of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep. Now that I have hit the light soft cap I have been trying to re-engage with Classic and it for whatever reason just hasn’t been taking. What has been happening is that I log in… run around a bit… and then log right back out and go over to Destiny 2 to play it some more. As a result I am in the woeful position of being out of the level range with most of the crew that I had been running with previously. I am sitting at a little over 44 and now folks are starting to ding 50.

I think I am more or less just lacking to find traction in a set of quests that are enjoyable to do. Right now Tanaris is a little over my level range, and what is left in Stranglethorn feels tedious and boring. Last night towards the end of the evening I moved over to Feralas and managed to make it through a few quest chains, so maybe just maybe this is going to be my home for a bit. I figure if I can somehow eek out 45 and 46 I can return to Tanaris and start to make some proper traction there. The benefit of Feralas is that there is plenty of meat to keep cooking up food… of which I go through a silly amount of because that is how I ultimately heal to lower downtime.

I am very much in the doldrums of the leveling curve and post 40 everything slowed down massively, which I think is part of the problem. It feels vastly different than the run and gun pace of Destiny 2 that I allowed myself to get used to. As a result my brain sorta rejects Classic each time I try and spend more than a few minutes playing it. What makes it worse is there is a tangible feeling that day by day people are getting ahead of me to the point where it will be super difficult to actually catch up. I could in theory run a bunch of dungeons, but the dungeons in my level range are not super exciting because there isn’t much more than XP waiting for me in them.

On the Destiny side of things I have stalled out a bit as well. I am starting to get pretty much exclusively 410s off powerful engrams, which is fine so long as they drop for a new slot. However when the same slot keeps dropping over and over there isn’t much gained by it. I probably need to spend a bit of time in the world grinding blues and legendary drops between powerfuls to try and keep pushing it upwards. I still have yet to beat the campaign… which I really should do soon.

I could also start an alt which would help with the light pushing a bit. For the time being however I am just enjoying the moment to moment game play so much. I am curious what changes the reset is going to bring today. Right now the activities seem to be dropping a fixed set of weapons, and I am wondering if that is going to rotate today.

Green and Orange

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This morning I am struggling to come up with anything worth writing. Allergies are killing me and I am in sorta a histamine daze. We have a very lovely screenshot of what it looks like to be in Swamp of Sorrows… where everything is either orange or green. Were it not for my glowing eyes you would have trouble making out my facial details. This is an era in the game where objects don’t really throw off proper lighting, and as a result the campfire that I am standing beside is doing nothing to illuminate the scene.

Last night I more or less finished Badlands, minus all of the quests that involve Uldaman, which we still need to run. There are some quests in zone that I could do but they were higher level than was efficient for me to grind out, and also in a super dense and dangerous area of the zone. As a result I hopped a flight to Stonard and have been whittling through the quests that I had in Swamp of Sorrows. They also are largely higher level, but the zone as a whole is pretty spread out allowing you to keep from getting a bunch of multi-pulls.

That all may change as I am about to start hunting the murlocs along the eastern coastline, and we all know how they love to chain pull. In theory I really need to gather up a group of people and make an attempt at Uldaman, to knock out a bunch of the quests there. That might be an objective of this evening but the biggest challenge is the time zone thing. Last night was just a case of people logging in within a very staggered manner never quite giving us a party of five until Tam/Ash/Kodra had already committed to running some Wailing Caverns on their alts.

Forty really is about the halfway point in the leveling process not 2/3rds as the numbers would make it seem. Things have really slowed down significantly and each level seems to take way more effort than the previous one. I think this is around the point where I started to lose focus in the initial game launch, because I never quite made it to 60 at launch. I think I got to somewhere in the 50-55 range before wandering off originally and going to play Everquest II with some friends for awhile. I then came back and pushed through the rest of the levels and started the traditional level 60 activities.

I know next week my attention is going to start being split, and this weekend is the Tulsa State Fair, which means I am not going to get much leveling done on Saturday. The hope is on Sunday I can pour on a few more levels so I have a shot in hell of keeping up. Destiny 2 Shadowkeep launches on October 1st and I know I will start spending a bit of time each night in that as well. There is also Monster Hunter World Iceborne that I have yet to really touch. I don’t want to lose focus but we have officially entered the doldrums where that becomes a challenge.

Busting Rocks

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Last night I was a bit scattered in my gameplay. I had a few goals, and none of them were really met. Firstly I wanted to knock out a bunch of quests in the Badlands, because I am slowly being lapped by many of the 40 something dungeon group. One of these involved killing a ton of wildlife that drop various meats. After much slaughter I wound up with two stacks of Red Wolf Meat, which made me realize that I had no recipe to get cooking skill points from. This of course lead me to go over to WoWhead classic and figure out which recipes used that item, and where to find them.

This then lead me to realize that I would need to make a trip to Camp Mojache in Feralas, which is a zone I had yet to visit so far. Were I thinking about speed I would have flown to Thousand Needles and run north, which would have gotten me to my destination pretty quickly. Instead I mistakenly flew to Desolace and ran South, causing me to traverse almost the entirety of the zone. To add insult to injury… I seemingly forgot I had a mount and ran almost all of it by foot. I did however buy my patterns and move on to Thousand needles to farm the Mithril nodes up in the perch area.

The hardest part about this phase in the game is how spread out everything feels. Once you are in a place you feel fairly committed to it just because there is no easy way to bounce to the other continent. By this point my hearthstone was up, which I have set in Orgrimmar which I then popped over to Undercity on the Zeppelin. Without a doubt lately I have been running up on the Zep tower just as the one I needed is pulling away. From there a long flight path down to Kargath got me back to where I started the evening… the Badlands.

The other mission I had for the night was to get Blacksmithing to 225 so I can start the quest to unlock the later levels of that profession. The cruel irony is that in theory I should be killing up off Iron, and I need a metric ton of it. There is a quest that I need to craft 4 Steel helms and 4 Steel chests… so I am focused on creating those and seeing where it gets me skill wise. The suggestion is that I bank all of my Mithril until I have 235 skill, which is a long way from where I am. Also seemingly Iron became valuable on the auction house again, so buying my way out of this rut isn’t exactly viable. So instead… I will be mining the copious amounts of Mithril and Iron available in the badlands while I knock out as many of the quests as possible.

This leads me to the title of the post. I spent a very long time last night killing rock elementals because I need 10 small rock shards. The drop rate of these seems to be almost nonexistent, so I will probably get the rest of my level just killing them without touching any of the other quests. The positive however is that pretty much all of the areas with Rock Elementals have several ore node spawns. So I can hang back, slaughter rocks and grab the nodes each time they pop. This is apparently my life now.