World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 123 of 139

Date with Dragons

January 15, 2014 by Belghast

Feeding Tradeskills

Last night was a prime night for faffing. I started the evening by doing my semi-regular ghost iron farming run to feed my daily cooldowns on my blacksmith, engineer and transmuter. I have figured out that it is just simply easier to farm up a bunch of ghost iron and then turn around the transmute it to trillium than trying to play the mining lottery to get equal amounts of black and white trillium. In about 15-20 minutes I can farm up a big stack of ore and then funnel that off to each of the professions so I can do my daily crafts. Right now I am funneling all these resources towards two things. Firstly I am stockpiling materials so that I can make myself a Sky Golem, which when I saw it I knew I had to have one.

Secondly I am stockpiling the rare smithing material in order to make the tanky belt… the only problem is I have yet to unlock the tanky belt through the daily crafts. As a result I have more than enough Balanced Trillium Ingot’s to make one, but I figure I can use items for all of my melee characters. So this becomes a daily disappointment as I log in and craft an ingot only to see that I did not yet learn the Protector’s Trillium Waistguard. I could craft the legs, but that would currently break up my four piece set bonus… so that is not a thing I am willing to do just yet.

Date with Dragons

Once I finished with my tradeskills I worked my way through the daily Netherwing quests. Curently I am a good way into revered so here is hoping by the end of the week I will be zipping around on a new flight of Netherwing drakes. Honestly I am mostly doing this for the fact that it adds 6 mounts to my grand total, and less that I actually think I will use one of the drakes. Back in the day I never did the quest chain because I thought they looked goofy. For whatever reason I cannot look at a Netherwing drake without thinking of a shark because of the way their nose is shaped. Right now my absolute favorite dragon seems to be the one I picked up from Stonecore. To be honest farming up the Vitreous Stone Drake was far easier than I could have imagined, since it drops on normal mode.

I finished off the night running Onyxia a few times, with no luck on getting that mount, and then popped into Blackwing Lair with a friend. While I really like the blue judgment set that came from the opening of Wrath of the Lich King event… I would still like to own a full set of the original Judgment. As a result I have been clearing Blackwing Lair weekly trying for the various visual pieces. So far I only have the chest and shoulders, but that doesn’t leave that many visual pieces left, one of which I will hopefully get from Onyxia. Mostly since my paladin is now a Dranei, and boots no longer show up… I am mostly trying for the gloves. While I got no judgment, I did manage to get my mage friend robes and shoulders for his set.

Zoning Out

I am guessing that I did not get a very good nights sleep last night, because as I sit here writing this mornings post I find myself constantly zoning out. I can seem to only manage a paragraph before my mind starts wandering again. As a result I think I am going to cut this off here a bit abruptly. I am still feeling a bit under the weather and yesterday it felt like maybe I pushed myself a little too far. I went through a flurry of activity when I got home, and crashed in my recliner shortly after and was pretty much useless the rest of the night. I was offered spots on two different raids last night, and I ended up turning both down because I just didn’t feel like I could give vaguely close to my normal effort. I feel like I made the right choice, but hopefully I did not put off the people who offered me a spot from future offerings.

Goodbye Cataclysm

January 14, 2014 by Belghast

Feeling Human

This morning is the first day in a long while that I have felt pretty decent. I went to bed around 9:30, but had to get right back up shortly after and deal with one of our ferrets. Our “old man” had made a horrendous mess of himself and as a result we decided there was more there than could be cleaned up with wet wipes. As a result we gave him an impromptu bath and then made sure to get some nutrients down him. We really need to talk to the vet about him, because at this point I am not really sure how good of quality of life he is really having. One of his two back legs just simply doesn’t work right most of the time. He will be just fine one moment, and then the next he will be tripping all over himself. Which is something we went through with his brother bandit when he got insulinoma… for which there really is no course of treatment in a ferret that old.

Even with the last minute excitement last night, I did still manage to make it to bed before 10 and slept through the entire night. I woke up a few minutes before the alarm was set to go off this morning, so I got a wee bit of a head start on the day. Right now I am feeling rather chipper, but I am sure that will be quelled as I actually get to work and see whatever stacked up yesterday while I was gone. I am looking forward to feeling human again, so here is hoping it lasts. Since I’ve gone over 48 hours without developing a fever, I am assuming that I am not contagious. My wife went to work yesterday and came home completely drained, so I am figuring that will also be the case for me. As a result I really don’t have much plans for doing anything when I get home but crashing.

Goodbye Cataclysm

I really did not do much of any consequence last night. It came time for our Monday night flex raid and I just was not capable of concentrating. Instead I continued to piddle around on Belglorian my Discipline Priest. I have decided that the thing I enjoy about Discipline is that they are kind of the “tanks” of cloth wearers. So long as I keep my shield up on myself, I can survive damned near anything and eventually win the fight…. albeit extremely slowly. The thing I did not realize however was just how much splash healing I was throwing around. One of the early Pandaria quests involves reviving a bunch of pilots that crashed landed in amongst a bunch of orcs. As I was working on killing the orcs I kept noticing that I was getting credit for reviving pilots.

I thought that maybe the quest was bugged and I was getting credit for another player reviving them in the vicinity. As I got closer to one and started nuking away with smite I noticed that I kept healing the NPCs. I am sure this will sound insane to most people but you have to understand… my priest was my free level 80 character I made when I accepted a scroll of resurrection. I am the future of our game… a high level player with no real clues about how the class works. Initially I had planned on leveling as shadow, but when a friend told me about the sheer survive of Discipline I made the switch without much effort put into researching the spec. It was one of those things that just worked, and the gameplay seemed extremely simple.

The problem with being handed all of these tools is I have no clue what half of them do, especially the passives. Sure I see pretty little icons proc at the top of my screen but I am far too busy killing things to actually hover over them and see what just happened. Now I had the common sense to at least research spell rotation and things like that before sitting down and building my hotbars, you can guarantee that not every instant 90 will do the same. Anyways enough of that old soap box, but I am the prime example of what happens when you hand someone a nearly fully leveled character.

Imperial Silk

I will admit that I had no real plans to ever level a priest, and since I got a free level 80… I decided to make it a priest since that was the least likely for me to ever level. One of the gaps that I decided to fill with this instant 80… was a Tailor. So for while some time I was a level 80 priest sitting in Stormwind with capped out tailoring, and no real way to make the ever so spiffy imperial silk. Sure I could have had someone summon me over to the Silken Fields, but that just seemed too cheesy even for me. As a result I decided to level the priest so I could legitimately start making bags for my army of alts. Funny thing is that somewhere along the way I actually started enjoying playing the class… even though I am probably playing it wrong. I like smiting things down while laughing off the damage I am taking with my shields.

Speaking of army of alts… I have to say having one of every crafting profession comes in really damned handy. The moment I dinged 85… I went through a flurry of activity logging in and out various characters. When I finished I had a complete set of Pandaria level armor, a new staff, and a new cloak… and as soon as I get to 87 I will make a new trinket. I’ve decided to level up alchemy on this guy as well, so at some point I will feed him a bunch of herbs which should allow him to equip the alchemy trinket as well. Mostly I am doing this so that I can have an elixir master as well as my transmute master. I technically have a third alchemist, but I am not sure if it is worth having a potion master as well. The only thing I can see myself making a lot of that might be worth it is Luck Potions. Depending on how I feel tonight, I might farm up materials for a push through alchemy at all levels.

Forced Convalescence

January 13, 2014 by Belghast

Remnants of Flu

I have to say I feel horrible. Saturday morning my wife was diagnosed with the flu, and at some point after that I started getting symptoms myself. As a result I started my own dose of Tamiflu as well to try and keep things from developing into the full blown flu. I think more or less I am keeping from falling deep into the recesses of fludom. I am not running a fever, but I generally don’t run a fever ever. I do however have full body aches and lots of coughing. My wife has been trying to get me to sleep as much as I can, but that ends up causing more issues like not being able to sleep at night.

I did however take some Nyquil and it allowed me to sleep some, and I managed to stay in bed until after 9 am this morning. Which is why you are getting my traditional post considerably later than normal. At this point I am not really sure what I am going to talk about this morning since in my convalescence I really have not done anything terribly exciting. I am expecting to be back at work tomorrow, since I doubt if I am contagious since it doesn’t seem like I have developed the full blown thing… just some kind of touch of it. I guess I am just left with the whole feeling miserable thing.

Forced Convalescence

One of the cool doodads that I picked up over the break is a Google Chromecast. Previously we had been a Roku household and both the living room and the bedroom televisions had the original Roku model hooked to them. While there was nothing wrong with these models, and we had gotten more than our fair share of use from them… over time they began to feel a little clunky. When Chromecast added support for Plex I started seriously plotting the move to the nifty $35 Google Dongle. After about a week of using the one in the livingroom, I popped back out to best buy and picked up a second dongle for the bedroom TV. Luckily at that point I seemed to catch a sale on them and snagged the second for only $29.

What is cool about it is that streaming to the Chromecast seems to work equally well from my Toshiba Android tablet and my wife’s iPad 2. So she has been using it to stream exercise videos in the bedroom, and in my forced state of convalescence I have been using it to stream Lost Girl over Netflix. I have to say that show is far better than I ever expected it to be. Lost Girl was always a show I caught a few minutes of before watching Being Human. After spending some time with it over the last couple days I have to say I am enjoying it quite a bit. The characters are really engaging and I love Kenzi to pieces.

Disciple of Discipline

The other thing I have been doing during my upright periods, is working on leveling my priest. So far I have taken my shortcut through cataclysm. Essentially I start in hyjal and do the first few quest chains in deepholme until I ding 83. At that point I switch to Uldum and quest along until I hit 84… immediately switching to Twilight Highlands which usually dings 85 before I have gotten very far into it. Sure it is pure hell on quest completion, but usually my goal is to get the hell out of Cataclysm as quickly as possible. Burning Crusade used to be the content I avoided like the plague, but quite honestly I find it more enjoyable than I do the Cata content. Ultimately my goal is to get to Pandaria as fast as I can, because other than a few bum quest chains I greatly prefer that content.

Additionally I am still working on the Netherwing faction on Belgrave. Right now I am roughly halfway to revered so it feels like I am actually making progress. Yesterday I stumbled my way through all of the flight quests out there, which are admittedly ridiculously easy now since it seems near impossible for one of the NPCs to actually knock you off your mount these days. I figure at this point I have a few more weeks of daily quests and then I will be the proud owner of a new batch of netherwing mounts. Right now I would trade all the progress in for just feeling better. On that note I think I am going to cut this off and go be comatose a bit longer.

Comfort Gaming

January 11, 2014 by Belghast

Tamiflu Chasers

Over the last several days I have talked about my own respiratory misery. My focus over this time had been on somehow surviving through to Friday and not making a complete and total ass of myself during my presentation. It seems that I was at least somewhat successful in that mission, however during all of this time I seem to have neglected the fact that my wife had been getting progressively worse. It reached a head last night when at bedtime she was running a 101* temperature. This morning she teetered back and forth on whether or not we should go to urgent care.

For those not familiar with the absolutely fucked up medical system here in the United States… Urgent Care is this weird beast that sits somewhere between your doctors office and the actual emergency room. The idea is to create a construct that allows you to get after hours emergency style treatment for non-life-threatening ailments. In the master plan the insurance providers tend to treat these like doctors office visits, and as such you only have to pay one neat co-pay. The problem is… they are insanely deluged with patients. Our local Urgent Care place opens at 9 am on Saturday, and we were there mere moments after opening… and the waiting room was already completely filled.

I dropped my wife off at her suggestion, and ran around running errands in the meantime. We are both a bit concerned that I will catch something since firstly… I was born with a naturally weakened immune system, and secondly… that my lungs are already in a pretty severely compromised state. I felt like an ass for her waiting alone, but she and I texted back and forth throughout the morning. At roughly 10:30 I picked her up and she was brandishing a prescription for tamiflu. She was in fact diagnosed with the real life full blown Flu, and unfortunately despite my yearly flu shot this puts me in a pretty bad place for likely catching it from her.

As a result I am in the process this morning of trying to get ahold of my own primary care physician to attempt to procure a preventative prescription for tamiflu as well. Needless to say my morning did not go anywhere near planned and as a result I am finally sitting down to write a blog post. With all the excitement I don’t really have a whole lot to say. Or at least nothing more exciting than what has already transpired.

Comfort Gaming

One of the best things I have discovered in the past year is the Alternative Chat podcast. If you are not in fact already an avid listener you should make steps to rectify that. In the latest episode the Godmother of Faff mentions a term that is so uniquely perfect, that I am shocked I had never heard it used before now. “Comfort Gaming” is a concept that is very near and dear to my heart, but I never really had an adequate term for it. There are so many gaming experiences that I can return to time and time again when I am in the need of some solace. Here in Oklahoma we are big on “comfort food” with our heaping piles of mashed potatoes and white gravy and our chicken fried steak. This same concept applied to gaming also makes sense.

I guess in a way WoW is my comfort gaming. I spent so much time trying to move past the game, but in fighting it I was denying the fact that I really did enjoy it and the people who play it. Sure there are so many games out there that do one thing or another so much better than the World of Warcraft. Games like Rift are pinnacles of technical brilliance with their deep systems within systems. However something just gets lost in the translation at times, and in all of my years of wandering between games I have found another game that fullfilled so many of the little high points I have looked for in a single package. Playing wow, questing, farming, exploring, collecting transmoggy bits, soloing old world content… all feels comfy.

Crawling back into the game this time was like breaking out that worn out pair of jeans that just feels amazing. There is nothing new under the sun in wow, and it is not exactly a pinnacle of innovation… but what you have here is a really great mix of fun ways to spend your time. I created my WoW Bucket list as a way to have something to fall back on when I got bored. Thing is with the great number of people I have assembled in my guild… I have yet to really get bored enough to search on the list for some purpose. Purpose seems to find me constantly in either helping someone else out or getting a wild whim that I want to follow.

So as I embrace the year of faff, I am also embracing “comfort gaming”. WoW is by no means the only comfort game I have. I find myself able to crawl back into the Fallout or Elder Scrolls worlds and get lost for an entire afternoon at a time. Similarly I am deeply looking forward to the release of Elder Scrolls Online… because that universe is one I supremely love. However saying that, I have no real intent to abandon the World of Warcraft. It scratches an itch for me, and in part is that way because of the amazing people that are playing it. While I could never play a game only for the people… the mixture of absolute fun activities and amazing folks makes the game as sticky as ever for me.