World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 132 of 139

Trove Crafting

December 5, 2013 by Belghast

First Winter

One of the things about weight loss that no one really told me is the fact that I would go from being very hot natured, to freezing all of the time. This is the first winter after losing roughly seventy pounds so far, and I have to say it is a pretty miserable thing. I am absolutely living in this Carhart black zip up hoodie. I pretty much wear it over everything, because it keeps me at least somewhat warm. I keep hoping that eventually my internal body temperature will regulate and I will get used to having less insulation. It is essentially the same feeling as you have when you have just gotten a long overdue hair cut… but instead of my head being cold it is my entire body.

I am not complaining, the weight loss has had many other tangible benefits. However as “snowmageddon” barrels down on my area I find myself shivering quite a bit. We are supposed to get all manner of icy nastiness dumped on us around noon. I am hoping that either it gets delayed long enough for me to get home tonight, or that it is not nearly as severe as they are expecting. I am not really looking forward my normally fifteen minute commute turning into an hour and a half as everyone suddenly forgets how to drive. At least my coffee helps warm me up.

Trove Crafting

Released another Trove video yesterday, this time covering the brand new crafting system patch. I have to say I am impressed with the game so far. The biggest thing for me was the addition of the ability to craft health potions. This has enabled me to make some really bad decisions and survive. I think over the course of the evening last night I much have gone through 30-40. Each time I saw a bottle plant I made a beeline for it just so I could make some more. Right now everything tends to drop monster parts, which I am guessing is a generic placeholder material that will eventually be updated to be various specific things. Currently a Health Potion is 1 bottle from a bottle plant and 1 monster part, which makes them extremely easy to craft.

Similarly they have made bombs extremely costly to craft, and as a result the world is not nearly as marred with bomb holes. I don’t even make them anymore, because really I don’t find them that useful even in combat with monsters. In the video I could not figure out for the life of me why I was unable to make bombs… but then upon re-watching it I face-palmed over the fact that I simply could not count. I want to say I was missing fire flower parts, or something like that. The crafting system is actually really efficient so far, and I like it overall quite a bit more than I did the Minecraft one.. especially when it comes to bulk crafting.

Acheesements

Since today is ending up a bit of a mixed bag update post, I figured I would also talk a bit about what I am doing over in World of Warcraft. A group of friends and I have been knocking out the various achievements needed for Glory of the Pandaria Hero. I am within a stones throw now of completing it, but at the same time we are catching up a player that has next to none of them. What is going to be most time consuming I fear is finishing off Polyformic Acid Science. Right now I think I have 3 of the 6 kills. However I just found out that you can go into normal mode, solo the instance, get the vial and then hold onto it to give you double the amount of time to get through all the mobs for the achievement.

Past that I am working on farming Motes of Harmony on my Paladin to make weapon upgrades for my various characters. That is the glaring flaw I have seen so far with the timeless isle. You get really nice gear to catch you up, but it lacks anything even remotely similar for weapons. The weapons you can buy off the timeless isle vendors are only ilvl 476, which are the same as the epic weapons that drop from the early heroic instances. I feel like what we are missing are the Icecrown 5 mans. They were a really good way during Wrath of the Lich King to help catch alts up, and the weapons there were viable enough to raid with, at least until you can get something better. As a result I have several 90s with full timeless gear, but walking around with a 450 blue weapon simply because there is no really effective way to improve that.

I am not looking forward to working through the halfhill farm again, but I am thinking that might be something I just need to bite the bullet and do on my characters that seem to be mote starved. At least that way you get roughly one spirit of harmony a day guaranteed. I really wish blizzard would apply a patch and make Spirits bind on account. On Belgrave for example, I have 5 stacks of them in the bank… because there really is very little you can use them on as an inscriptionist. However every other crafter is starving for them, and ends up spending them on something the moment they get more. I hope in general as we go forward into Warlords of Draenor that more things become bind on account. I feel like the ability to trade items freely between characters can only be a net positive. The more alts someone rolls, the more time they spend playing the game… which in generally makes them less likely to unsubscribe and go elsewhere.

Quintessential Quintet

December 3, 2013 by Belghast

Farewell to Arts

I did another really quick video yesterday since we are supposed to have an impending server reset. In the holiday weekend since the last restart folks have filled the server with all sorts of nifty stuff. So I thought I would do a really quick video showcasing some of the cooler things. The highlight for me is the alligator. I am wondering who built it, because seriously it was perfect. The server has essentially exploded with pixel art everywhere, some of it seeming to be freehand which is pretty amazing. While this is all interesting I am hoping soon we get a bit more substance.

It was rumored that we would be seeing a new patch today or tomorrow and in it I am really hoping they introduce two things. Firstly I want to see the crafting system and all the nifty things it can produce. This is likely going to be a massive thing because this also means they will likely change they way the blocks work so that we actually harvest them instead of just destroying them. Currently the game works a lot like Minecraft creative mode, where you have pretty much unlimited resources to place at your disposal. While this is cool for free range building, the game however right now is lacking a “game”. Wandering around and exploring, engaging in combat is fun but I feel like we need something to give us a sense of purpose.

The second thing I want badly is the cornerstone concept, aka your plot of lands that persists to each server you play on, and that no one else can disrupt. Part of why I have not built much of anything yet is the fact that we still have way too many mad bombers on the server all to willing to destroy your hard work. In fact I railed on Shawn Shuster of Massively a bit in the video as in his walkthrough that was posted yesterday… he was all too happy to blow up other peoples creations.

There have already been some pretty epic works of art destroyed by some idiot who would not suppress their inner poo flinging monkey long enough to appreciate what had been created. While I realize this is a side effect of having a game with no rules yet, it still depresses me to see the world as Swiss cheese. I am sure once the new patch has gone life I will do another quick video showing off what it added. So stay tuned to my channel and I will post something up there as soon as it is available.

Quintessential Quintet

Also last night I managed to push my paladin Exeter to 90 and with it came an achievement that I was not expecting. Apparently Quintessential Quintet is a thing? I cut an odd path on this one, by the time I left Jade Forest I was already 87 thanks to all the mining nodes. From there I made a beeline for Kun Lai, and critpathed my way through the zone until I reached the quest chain that lead to Townlong. Similarly in Townlong I quested my way through the Shadopan chain until I reached the jumping point for Dread Wastes. All of which was to set myself up perfectly to be able to start working on Klaxxi quests as quickly as possible.

Why you might ask? This is my blacksmith, and all the nifty things you can create seem to be on the Klaxxi vendor. Namely I wanted to be able to start creating masterwork weapons for all my other characters as I get them to 90. That seems to be the big weakness as it comes to the Timeless Isle content. You can gear your alts up with 496 extremely rapidly, but you have a few glaring holes… namely your weapons. Also I seem to have a much harder time getting Curios for trinkets, and the neck/ring slots to drop on the Timeless Isle. So as a result I have ended up spending a fair amount of time trying to remediate their gear just so I can be able to queue for something.

Timeless Isle is nifty, but I really miss the equivalent of the Icecrown 5 mans. I wish there were heroics that I could run that actually provided something viable for filling out a set of gear. I feel as though they should really have put in a new 5 man that dropped 496 weapons to go with all the gear they are handing out like candy. Even with epics… a crappy weapon is still a crappy weapon. Right now my paladin for example is using the treasures of pandaria BOA one handed sword that you find on the ground. Which is better than anything he has gotten yet, but at least being able to create the masterwork hammer will be something slightly better. I think those are 463 ilvl which is essentially what the heroic gear is.

What Next?

I have to say getting Exeter to 90 was a pretty cool thing. He technically was the very first character I created, and my intended main. For years my internet handle was “Exeter” and quite honestly “Belghast” was my main over in DAoC, and it was not until late in Vanilla that I started to play that character as a main. All the while through vanilla my main was Lodin the hunter, and it was an almost accidental occurrence. I had a death in the family that pulled me away from Warcraft a few weeks after the release of the game. As a result I got rapidly outpaced by the rest of the guild, and back then soloing a Paladin was a truly painful experience.

Hunters were the gods of soloing, so I started leveling Lodin just to be able to keep up with my friends. Within a very short amount of time I had caught up, and when we hit 60… I got drafted into the raid group of a guild member as they wanted to replace a troublesome hunter. I had no intent to actually play a hunter as my main, and in truth I am not terribly suited for the class… but I did for almost all of Vanilla because it was my “Raid main”. Once you start playing a character in a raid group you are pretty much committed to always play that character until they no longer need it. The positive effect however is that I met so many life long friends through raiding, and that the Late Night Raiders hunters were all such amazing people.

As soon as Burning Crusade was released, I saw this as my opportunity to leapfrog Lodin in gear and start playing Belghast as my main. That is the awesome thing about expansions, the gear reset lets you change your focus. From that point until the tail end of Wrath of the Lich King, I was a warrior main tank. It was not until I needed a break from the hot seat that I switched focus to the Deathknight and fell in love with it. All of this time I felt horrible for leaving Lodin abandoned in the dustbin. It was not until Cataclysm that I actually managed to level him out of the outlands. During one of my last sessions playing I pushed him up to Pandaria levels, so I feel as though it is probably his time to shine again. I pretty much permanently run around in Giantstalker transmog in honor of the fun times I had with him raiding during those early days of Vanilla WoW.

A Guild Divided

December 2, 2013 by Belghast

Nostalgia Won

If I remember correctly the last time I wrote a real post before my Nano recess, I was talking about the upwelling of nostalgia brought on by playing Hearthstone. I fought valiantly to resist but before long I was staring at the account section of the battle.net page and renewing my subscription. I had put this off because really I assumed this decision would end in tears. The odd thing is so far it has not. I have been enjoying the hell out of playing, and have even resumed raiding a bit. I don’t want to jinx it by saying I am back, but so far it feels like at least a possibility.

One of the awesome things about coming back at the tail end of the expansion is that Blizzard tends to give players many different ways to catch up gear wise. I have spent a ton of time out on the Timeless Isle and have been collecting sets of level 90 heirloom gear for each of my alts I intend to level. Since coming back I have caught my Deathknight Main Belgrave and Druid Belgarou up a bit in gear, leveled my Shaman Tallow and Warrior Belghast to 90, and am within a stones throw of 90 on my paladin Exeter. There is part of me that wants to push as many toons to 90 as I can before the release of Warlords of Draenor.

I have to say despite all of the negativity flowing around it, I am really looking forward to the expansion. They said during Blizzcon that the majority of the content would work more like Timeless Isle, and that was pretty much music to my ears. I love the way the content on the isle works, and I can spend hours both there and on the Isle of Giants tearing about the mobs with Belgrave. I think my happy medium is a mix of quests to give me purpose, and then found objectives along the way to force me to stop and smell the roses. If they can strike a balance, I think the content will be just about perfect for me. Not to mention that Garrisons sound amazingly fun, like a mix between player housing and the crew skill system in SWTOR.

A Guild Divided

At the beginning of Cataclysm I got a serious case of wanderlust. I would like to think it was because Rift was so amazing, but in reality I think I just needed a break from WoW. At that point I had played it for almost eight years straight without significant pause. But the sad thing is, that while I played it for seven years, I have yet to play a single game since for more than seven months. When I wandered off so did a lot of other guild members who were feeling a similar drag on their time. The untold story however is the fact that the vast majority of the guild stayed in World of Warcraft and in spite of my recruitment to other ventures… seemingly thrived. In fact I would say that right now Stalwart WoW was experiencing a bit of a renaissance with folks coming back that have long been dormant.

You can say this is the “Blizzcon Bump” but it seems a bit different for some reason. On my server Argent Dawn, I am seeing people showing up on my friends list that had disappeared years before I left the game. Even seeing familiar names popping into channels that out of nostalgia I am still joining. As much as I wanted to deny the fact, World of Warcraft is still thriving at least in pockets of players that have kept the embers of the community burning brightly. In my absence Rylacus has done a phenomenal job of “not messing with things” as he puts it. He has always been one of my closest and most loyal friends, and as I have been gone he has simply tried to continue on with what he thought I would do. It seems to have worked, because on week nights we tend to have 20-30 or more people online and active in doing something.

The only problem is that this maintaining the status quo has only caused to further some divides that started back in Cataclysm. When I said “A Guild Divided” in the section heading, I was not referring to the nomad gamers and the wow loyalists… but instead a rift that was always there but has deepened in my time away. Essentially our guild right now is a tale of two raids, the haves and the have-nots essentially. One raid has thrived clearing content and racking up the loot, while the other has floundered struggling to fill. There has been no intended malice, but the lesser performing raid has lost a lot of its brighter members to the better performing raid as folks sought out the path of easier loot. As a result there is more than a bit of bitterness and bad blood that has developed towards the alpha team.

Cleansing the Way

In the past I had served as a bridge between the two worlds, a bit of a buffer to lower the frustrations and aggressions. Rylacus has tried hard to fill these shoes but he simply does not have the volume of playtime that I do. Now that I am back at least for a bit I am trying my best to bridge this rift and hopefully mend the way between. As a result I have started tanking for the lesser progressed raid, and it seems like I am the difference between failure and success. The first week we downed new content, and it seemed so easy that I had no idea it wasn’t already on farm. The other tank is amazing to work with, and I am adjusting rapidly to this whole new concept for me of “no main tank”.

Additionally I am trying to attend the events sponsored by the alpha team to build the social equity there. The “big kids” have been gracious enough to host an open flex raid night on Mondays and this is getting betters of both teams in the same space. It is a bit awkward at times, but so far I think it has been an overall positive experience. The flex gear will help bolster both raids. The holidays have taken a big chunk out of our schedules, but I am hoping this week we can return to normality. In a sort of serendipity… several of my blogger and twitter friends have characters on Argent Dawn or are rerolling there. Going to try and get as many of them as I can into the open raid nights.

When I had come back for Pandaria the guild felt wrong to me. No one talked, no one worked together… and I really did not know how to fix it. Now coming back things are just different. Guild chat is full of lively conversation. Folks seem happy, and willing to help one another. Stalwart had survived all these years on a shared spirit, a feeling that we were all working together towards a greater good. During Cataclysm it feels that this spirit lost its way as we absorbed so many of the smaller satellite guilds that made up our non-guild-based raiding alliance. It feels though that in the midst of all of this a strong community has evolved. Here is hoping that I can be a catalyst towards solidifying this community into something truly great. If nothing else, I have been remembered and I still very much feel loved by my WoW family.

Nostalgia Won

October 30, 2013 by Belghast

Crackception

That’s right… you are seeing the above image correctly. That is two in game npcs in World of Warcraft playing Hearthstone. The game that has caused such an upwelling of nostalgia… is being played in the game I am nostalgic about. I feel as though they are missing an amazing opportunity here however. If you could ACTUALLY play hearthstone inside of World of Warcraft, the same way you can play Legends of Norrath inside of Everquest 2… it would quickly become the ultimate piddling around waiting on someone experience. I can remember how amazingly popular the bejeweled and peggle became as pre-raid activities and those were just addons.

It would be amazing if they wove hearthstone into every aspect of the game. Peggle loot was a thing that existed, and while it took forever it was an extremely fun way to settle loot disputes. Would be equally cool if you could do something like that with hearthstone. However that would also be a sure fire way to derail the gameplay, but still an enjoyable one. I guess the hearthstone game board feels all the more enjoyable… when you see it in a three dimensional table top version in the above screenshot.

Nostalgia Won

The fact that you are now seeing fresh World of Warcraft shots on my blog means that I lost the battle with nostalgia. I caved last night and renewed my account for a month so I could get in and satiate the urge to play that has been brought on by hearthstone. I go into this knowing full well that this decision almost always ends up in tears of frustration, but I felt like it was something I needed to “get out of my system” nonetheless. I have to say… once I got past the extreme awkwardness of seeing people I had not seen in years, that the overall gameplay was rather enjoyable.

I spent some time piddling around Timeless Isle and managed to find a chest with some purple shoulders in it. Of course my friends immediately told me those were “not good”, but hell when I left the game I was still in blues. I did not manage to stick around for much raiding at all in Panda-land so anything I could get was a massive upgrade for me. I liked the concept of the timeless isle overall, the fact that you could get decent purple gear just by killing random stuff out in the world. Additionally apparently there are lots and lots of chest out there that have the random chance of dropping something that can turn into a piece of gear like I found.

Similarly I had quite a bit of fun leveling Belghast. For whatever reason post Wrath, Belghast has not really seen any action. Right before the release of Panda-land I managed to push him up to 85 only to stable him again. For whatever reason it feels somehow wrong to have Belghast NOT be at the level cap for an expansion. Even though I pretty much transitioned to playing my Deathknight in Wrath, I would like to see him at least hit the cap here. The game is always enjoyable when I still have quests to do, but once that slows down I am sure I will get bored with it yet again and wander off in another direction. I know for certain that I am not back fully, because even if I end up landing for awhile… I will be gone once again when Elder Scrolls Online comes out. Right now every game that is not ESO is just a placeholder.