World Of Warcraft

I am currently going through a period with an overwhelming number of options for me to spend my time with. Right now I have the following things competing for my time…

• Watch Dogs Legion
• World of Warcraft Shadowlands Prepatch Event
• Genshin Impact 1.1
• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
• Destiny 2 Beyond Light
• PlayStation 5 (soonish hopefully)

I’ve been trying to prioritize the things that are going to go away or the things that have a specific timer to them. That means that Watch Dogs and Valhalla are probably low on the priority scale since I can at any point play them. Shadowlands Prepatch lasts until the 23rd so I am absolutely wanting to spend some time with it. Destiny 2 has weekly event timers so I am also wanting to spend some time there. Genshin Impact… at a minimum I spend enough time to do my dailies and slowly progress my adventure rank.

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time in Icecrown farming the cycle of world bosses that spawn roughly every 15 minutes. If you are going to do this thing then I highly suggest installing RareScanner. Once you have seen a single spawn, it will begin working its way through the sequence of possible spawns and not only indicate which one is currently active but point you towards the next one in sequence. You have a shot at loot off each boss once per day and from the moment it spawns there seems to be a 2 minute timer before it actually becomes active. Depending on the size of your server you may or may not have sufficient time to fly to it and get a tag in before it dies.

As a result my pattern tended to be to fly to the location the next boss spawns, and then alt tab and do something else for awhile. RareScanner will give you an audible alert when the encounter spawns in and you have roughly two minutes to flip back over and prepare to fight. Each encounter has a chance of dropping some 110 gear and also drops a 25-40 of a currency that can be turned in to a repeatable quest vendor for the Argent Seals that are used as the main currency of the event. This means on average of every 5 bosses you can get enough to purchase a piece of ilvl 100 gear that costs 15 of the Argent currency. I think it would have been better were there not the need to exchange currencies, but this fits with Blizzards design ethic that we can’t have anything nice without it also being somewhat awful in the process.

I’ve been using the event to gear up my Paladin, which I plan on maining for Shadowlands. I hit a string of luck and managed to pull a one handed mace and shield which is awesome given that I tend to level as prot, as well as a random ring. I am not really sure how much more I will farm these bosses once I have gained enough currency to finish buying a set of the ilvl 100 gear. I wish there were items available for every slot, but once again… that would be universally good and there has to be something awful about everything released. I could in theory luck out and get jewelry off the World Bosses but I feel like hoping for specific drops is a dark path of madness. There are several 2handers available, and I would love to have one of those as well just to be able to Ret if I so choose.

If you are seeking information about the event as a whole, then I highly suggest you check out the WoWHead for the Death Rising event in specific. The drop tables seem to be a little off because yesterday my friend Stargrace managed to pull an item that was not showing up as the available options. However it was on the loot table of the ORIGINAL encounter that these bosses are patterned off of. Basically they took the bosses from Icecrown and the 3 dungeons that released along side it and scattered them throughout the zone. In theory I am guessing that means anything that they could drop previously has a ilevel 110 version available. I think everyone is chasing the 34 slot bag, which I am guessing is what is going to be craftable as the high end bag for Shadowlands.

As far as Destiny… I feel like I didn’t get far enough into it last night to really write a proper post about it. So expect to see my commentary on it tomorrow.

When I am in deeply stressful situations, I find myself leaning on the old and familiar. In this case it is in the form of World of Warcraft and leveling characters. I didn’t get a massive amount of time this weekend to play, but when I did I spent it methodically leveling my Alliance characters that have long been neglected since the early beginning of Legion. Legion was the expansion when I more or less switched sides and as a result I only had a handful of characters at the level cap. Since I finished off my Hordelings last week, that cleared the way for me to really focus on my oldest characters.

Prior to this weekend the only character I had at max level was Exeter my Paladin. Over the course of the weekend I pushed my Warrior, Death Knight, Demon Hunter and Hunter all to the level cap and am now working on my Warlock. Prior to the launch of Legion I abused that launch event and the invasions that came with it to push everything Alliance side up to level 100, which translates across to 40 in the level squish. So this means that most of my characters need ten levels in order to finish them off… which is shockingly easy to do especially in the Battle for Azeroth content.

That is one takeaway from the weekend, that the BFA content goes so much faster than trying to do the Timewalking content through Chromie. My Demon Hunter went that route and I chose to level in Outland, and it took considerably longer than any of my characters I opted for the modern zones. I am not sure if the quests are just more spread out or if it is that each individual quests rewards more experience. Whatever the case for the sake of speed I am probably going to stick to Kul Tiras for the moment. Why exactly am I doing this nonsense you might ask? I have no clue other than it gives me a good excuse not to think about other things.

As far as my Mom and Dad, I think things are going fairly well or at least as “well” as could be expected. I was up yesterday afternoon after editing the two podcasts, and attached some things to my dad’s walker in an attempt to help him navigate things a bit more easily. What he really wanted was the ability to make a cup of coffee on his own and the cup holder should in theory allow for that. he also needed some way to carry things back and forth across the house so I added a wire basket… with zip ties of course. It is surprisingly sturdy however and I think it will function in the manner he needs it to.

Thankfully in both the case of my Mom and Dad they have some more local support lined up. It would take me about an hour to get there were I not speeding, and instead they have a network of contacts that are local that they can reach out to for assistance. A friend of the family is going to be by every day this week, they are signed up for meals on wheels and home health will be there daily to work with dad. For now I think we are good… which eases my mind a little bit as I have to go back to work this week and can’t be there every day. I honestly think as good as dad is moving around, that he will probably switch over to a cane before the end of the week.

Well friends, my Dad is officially out of the hospital and is now settled into the “spare house”. I realize that is a bit of a weird concept but my parents have two houses, the one I grew up in and the one that passed down to my mom when my aunt died several years ago. This extra house has effectively served as a hotel for any family that happen to need a place to crash in the tiny town. This has also been extremely beneficial for moments like when my dad had thyroid surgery and needed to recuperate someplace while he was still radioactive. The benefit of the house is equipped with all manner of upgrades for those struggling with mobility since my Aunt struggled with that in the last years of her life.

The other huge benefit is that it isn’t filled with junk that makes it hard to traverse. My folks are more or less hoarders and taking anyone who was recovering from hip surgery to that house would have been a death trap. I think I finally have my mother convinced that it is time to just start throwing away or donating at least half of everything in the house, but that is a story for another day. Right now we are just trying to keep both Mom and Dad going. We have someone hired to come work with Mom and do whatever is needed to be done, so that hopefully I can return to work next week. We also have home health scheduled to come work with Dad in a location that should be conducive to the sorts of physical therapy he needs to do.

I cleaned the spare house and got it set up for him, and then ferried him from the hospital yesterday afternoon. I spent some time lasts night bouncing between the two houses, and during one of my absences he managed to get up, go to the restroom and make it back to his chair successfully so I am hoping we are good there. The fridge is stocked with some of his favorite things and if you look at the picture of the chair I have arranged most of the things that he would want to deal with on a regular basis around his chair. He has been waiting to read the latest Dresden novel and it is sitting there on the table for him. Today… unless things change… is going to be me staying home and dealing with the dead television and hopefully picking up a bit.

Yesterday I spent the morning waiting for a shipment from Amazon of things I needed for dad, and as a result I spent time puttering around on my final horde character. I managed to get him to 50 which completes a full set of characters on my horde server The Scryers. The above is a mildly photoshopped image so that I could actually fit all of the characters on one screen. I should probably devote some time to getting reasonable gear for my Shadow Priest and my Rogue, but for now I feel like I am in a great place for the start of the expansion.

Since I find leveling to be a relaxing experience, and that I need comfort gaming right now… I have turned my attention to my stable of Alliance characters. I had started leveling a number of these to at least 45 during my Horseman grind just so I could have additional chances each day. So I will be spending the next bit of time pushing up these characters the rest of the way to 50. There is no way that I actually finish leveling them all before the expansion, but I did get one of every class to 100 prior to the launch of Legion, which means the bulk of these now are sitting in the 40ish range. I do have some duplicate characters on this account because of allied races, but those are super low priority for me currently.

I am still out here and I am still largely functional… but there is a weariness in me that I am not sure I have ever felt. Right now I am mostly just trying to do what needs to get done and not thinking a terribly large amount about it. You can only function on instinct and adrenaline for so long however before a crash comes… and I think as we enter the weekend that I am starting to crash hard.

Friends I am exhausted… mentally, emotionally and physically. I’ve talked about the situation I find myself in, so I am not going to do so this morning. I will however continue to thank everyone for the support I have received from my community. What I am going to talk about is comfort gaming and how when I do make it home I am using World of Warcraft and the leveling game to unwind and attempt to feel normal again even if for only a few moments. After I finished my Horseman grind I picked up a new mission which was to level my Shadow Priest from level 10 to level 50.

I completed this last night, and I am somewhat shocked just how much fun I had playing Shadow Priest. Like for years I have avoided “finger-wigglers” like the plague. My safe space is playing a tank class and in the absence of a tank I tended to play some sort of melee dps. However something shifted at some point in my brain and it probably started with realizing I enjoy the Arcanist/Summoner in FFXIV. This lead me to play the Warlock in World of Warcraft and also realize that I do in fact enjoy it… and that more or less opened the finger-wiggling-floodgates. I am not exactly sure what shifted, but I have begun approaching casters in the way that I think you have to approach them in order to enjoy. Basically you have to realize how squishy you are and make assurances to kill the thing before it actually can damage you.

The only real challenge to my leveling was the constant loot lag experienced in several of the zones. For awhile I have seen these Moonkin bots roaming around in areas around the world. Apparently the Tar Pits in Nazmir is a hotspot, similar to the Murloc camps in Azsuna. I flew over the other day to get a screenshot and there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 moonkin running a fixed route and spamming Starfall. When actual players are added to this zone this created a level of loot lag that I had not experienced since the launch of the game back in 2004. This is being blamed on Multiboxers, and I am certain that Multiboxing was in play… but the behavior looked a lot more like automated botting.

This however has been a big enough deal for Blizzard to create a ruling that the input broadcasting software that is used to run multiple characters is a bannable offense. Multiboxing itself is not, which is a bit of a thin line to ride but one that I am happy they are doing so. I have multiboxed in the past, but me doing so meant I was running two accounts windowed on the same machine and just flipping over to a healer every now and then to throw some heals or buffs out. I have used a piece of software called IsBoxer that arranges your windows in such a way as to make this swapping easier. Now I have not done any of this in five or six years but I am thankful that the mere act of multiboxing is not bannable itself. I don’t forsee myself doing it again at any point soon, but I do like knowing I can if I want to. Specifically I used to do so to make farming older raids and such go a bit more smoothly.

I had given up on leveling the Rogue… but here I am with it being the last sub 50 character on my Horde server. As of last night it is sitting at level 48… so I guess I am now leveling it. I will be able to say before the launch of the expansion that I pushed all of my Horde characters to the level cap. Once I finish it… I have no clue what I will latch onto as a mission then. In theory next week I think the pre-launch event starts which will allow me to at least work on farming some gear. I might start down my Alliance list, because I find leveling to be a deeply relaxing experience and I absolutely need that stress relief right now.