World Of Warcraft

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Horse Latitudes

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There is a region roughly 30 degrees north or south of the equator that is characterized by very calm winds and areas of high pressure. Historically this is a region that ships would effectively get “stuck” in for weeks at a time as they drift along listlessly without strong winds. According to legend in order to conserve the rapidly depleting supply of fresh water, some ships would throw the horses overboard. As a result they developed the nickname of the “Horse Latitudes”. There are however multiple competing theories about the origin if you are so inclined, but it is one of those terms from history class that held with me throughout the years.

Right now as I have felt so many times… I am feeling stuck. I feel like I am in this strange valley in between passions and just sort of languishing wildly there. I have the desire to play Genshin Impact, but I have ventured into a realm where I can only play so much at a given time without it feeling largely pointless. I figure at this rate I will probably be AR40 in about two weeks, when I will be even further in the hole on trying to get my characters leveled, ascended, talented and geared… when it doesn’t feel like I have made a significant dent since dinging AR35. As I have talked about before, everything hinges upon Resin and I don’t have the desire to spend the roughly $12 a day in primagems to ensure that I can get the maximum number of refreshes done.

So I find myself logging in every day, completing the daily quests… spending the resin I have available to me and then claiming the various daily login bonus rewards. I am now doing this on two different accounts and still finding myself lacking for something that feels meaningful. I could grind super hard on the second account but I figure that way lies burn out. Everything I am doing on that account already has an extreme “been there and done that” feeling to it, so I am trying to limit my time over there to just knocking out the dailies and stockpiling wish material.

Then there is World of Warcraft and the unknown release date of the Shadowlands expansion. If they came out tomorrow and said, that they were not launching until January, I feel like I could happily move on with my life. However the not knowing when and how it is going to launch feels awful. I’m currently running the Headless Horseman every day in an attempt to get the mount, but I found out yesterday that it only works on characters that are capable of getting the purple loot rewards. That limits me down considerably in the number of daily iterations. I should in theory be working on finishing out my rogue but I am just fundamentally not feeling it.

I created a new character on a new server with the theory of wanting to see the Exiles Reach player experience. However here he sits having never logged it in and started. I am just finding myself having a hard to getting started on anything in World of Warcraft right now, because it all feels lacking in some way. I guess what I want is something with the feel of Genshin Impact but the longevity of a World of Warcraft and the wealth of content to complete. I know someone in the comments is going to suggest Guild Wars 2, and god how I have tried to care about that game over the years. Whatever it is doing is not what I am wanting, even though I do clearly see some of the parallels to Genshin and the way the world is designed in both games.

I could in theory return to Destiny 2 and see if I can slide back into the rhythm of that game. The problem however is that I just feel so woefully behind in the seasonal construct. The fact that there has been so much revolving content that comes and then goes and that fact that we are losing several planets when Beyond Light lands in early November sorta paralyzes me. I have a bunch of Exotic quests that require various things, but I would need a team to do them… and I realize I can make that happen as well but that also in itself feels like a large outlay of energy.

In theory I should follow the lead of my friend Warenwolf and head back over to TQMB, but I am not even sure they would still take me back. I left at the PC launch of Destiny 2 because my long time friend group felt more comfortable if we started our own thing. However most of them bounced and I was never really quite capable of rekindling it once they were gone. My own huge lapses in play time didn’t help either, leaving us with effectively a dead clan. Having a vibrant community would probably help especially if it meant there were various drop in events that I could sign up for. That said I also know how much is going to happen in November as a whole and in theory I have a new console waiting on me as well.

That brings us to the next challenge. I have things that I wouldn’t mind getting back into on the PlayStation, but I am largely in a holding pattern until the launch of the PS5. I am not sure how much further I want to get into various games not knowing with 100% certainty that my save progress is going to carry over cleanly. Anyways I realize this is probably an annoying post to read but sometimes I write for me and my own mental housekeeping. I feel stuck and I need to figure out for myself how to get un-stuck.

Headless Mount Search

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Good morning friends! We did the thing again and it is seemingly to become a weekly occurrence. Two weekends ago we played Among Us on Saturday and yesterday we did Sunday in an attempt to be open to the folks who could not for some reason make Saturday. As a result we had a slightly different group but it was equally amazing. We didn’t go for quite as long as we did previously, and I had to bail in the middle to run my wife to go pick up her car at the tire place… but I think we are starting to get more in the swing of how this game works. More importantly the Impostors seemed to be more randomized than they were last week when it chose Sita over and over and over.

I am also still playing a lot of Genshin Impact, but as I have stated before I am now down to playing for 20-30 minutes a day and then going on to do other things. The account that I created for farming ore and resources… has turned into an account that I am legitimately and properly playing because it has champions that I don’t own yet on my main account. One interesting tidbit of information is that while I knew chests respawned, I did not realize that the super rarity chests respawn. I thought all of those were surely “one and done”, but apparently even the 200,000 gold chest in the Liyue bank can respawn. So each time a weekly reset happens I guess make your way through the world checking out where chests have spawned previously.

Since I have been so severely throttled in Genshin Impact, I have started trying to ease my way back into World of Warcraft. I gave all of my characters a facelift last week, but for my Paladin that I am currently planning on maining for Shadowlands… I opted to do a outfit change as well. For most of Battle for Azeroth my Paladin has been rocking the “Fel Knight” look, and while I still greatly enjoy it… I wanted something different. Over the weekend I created a similar mishmash of gear pieces to create what one of my friends has called the “Void Knight” appearance/ The actual name of my gearset is “The King in Purple” as a play on The King in Yellow.

Most of yesterday was spent going from character to character on both accounts and farming the Headless Horseman encounter. While I have not done this religiously each year, I have been trying for that stupid mount since it was introduced during Burning Crusade. I have Attumen’s mount which is significantly cooler, but fails hard because it cannot fly… whereas the Horseman mount can. During brew fest I pulled 3 rams and 2 kodos… so I am hoping that by running my army through every single day I will have similar luck. Look at this point all I have to live on is hope.

The entire process took quite a long time as rotating through characters also meant that I needed to sort out their talents and hotbars. Especially on the Alliance side it has been since early Legion that any of these characters really saw much play. I am not sure if it is tank durability, healing throughput issues or just the “bullet sponge” aspect of the Horseman this year… but something is not going as planned. I am chocking this up to the squish, but the encounter seems to be significantly more challenging than intended and as a result I am seeing quite a few parties wipe on the fight. This is not the roflstomp that Coren Direbrew was only a few weeks ago, so I suggest you go in this prepared and do whatever you can do to pick up your dps and get through it quickly.

So that was my weekend… some Among Us, some World of Warcraft mount farming and as much Genshin Impact as the game would allow me to play. How was your weekend? What all did you get around to doing? Drop me a line below and let me know.

Character Not Found

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Morning friends. World of Warcraft appears to be on fire right now, so I am giving it some distance so it can improve itself. Tuesday night I managed to do some makeovers and last night I was going to log in and spend some time roaming around with the freshly redesigned characters. Unfortunately this is what I kept encountering when attempting to log any of them in. It seems that the servers are still struggling, and as a result I am going to I guess give it another attempt tonight. I guess it is a good thing that the expansion was delayed and that the pre-launch event has yet to start. I am just hoping that the fires have died down by the 18th so I can farm the Hallows End event for another round of tries on the mount.

Instead of playing World of Warcraft I ventured back into Genshin Impact and made another attempt at a decent re-rolled alt account. You can create a seemingly infinite number of Genshin Impact accounts because they don’t actually require you to use an email address for any of them. If you can get to level 7 you will have earned a significant number of free wishes and should have a decent shot of pulling something reasonable. As a result my third attempt at an alt account seemed to have born fruit, or at least something that I consider completely functional when it comes to playing with it.

Xingqiu is a character that you encounter in the Liyue storyline and is not a character that I have on my main account. On this account I also managed to pick up Ningguang, 1 constellation Noelle, and a 1 constellation Xiangling. Of the characters on this account, I feel like Xingqiu is the strongest carry that I can build into a DPS Carry. I would have rather had Razor, Diluc, Chongyun or Beidou as a two handed beater but I can make this character work for leveling. To be honest this is a pretty great champion that I am happy I at least have access to now, even though it is on the wrong account.

So for my party right now I am using Xingqiu as carry, Xiangling and Kaeya as support dps and Noelle as a healer. Have Noelle bubble before going into a fight and then use either a pyro to hydro reaction or a cryo to hydro reaction for dps boosting depending on what I am fighting. However all of this said I think I glazed over WHY I would want a secondary account. Essentially if you have alt accounts and can get them to level 16, you can then abuse them for farming world resources… which you start to need in higher quantities as you progress through levels. So in theory I can log this account on… and then have my main join it to run around and collect ore, flora and kill mini bosses that are on a 24 hour respawn timer.

On the main account I have managed to push my Battle Pass up to rank 34 and I should be able to get higher this week pending I can finish a few achievements. The most annoying of these is the farm 20 clouds. Sure you can start and finish a cloud event without taking the rewards… but the cloud sits there with rewards waiting even if you log out and back into the game. I am not exactly sure how long I need to wait before attempting the cloud again… or if I need to wait for reset each day and in essence do two a day until I have gotten that twenty.

This morning with my free primagems I managed to pull yet another Barbara, which means I am one constellation away from having her maxed out. That last constellation is pretty damned sweet because it means she auto resurrects your characters when they fall in battle. The game itself has slowed down considerably because I realistically have only a few things that I can really do to make progress each day. Essentially I get in and do my daily quests and then farm whatever dungeons are up that day for resources with my resin. Now that I have moved to world 4 I need to spend one of the days farming the world bosses for attempts at either a 5 star artifact or even better a claymore pattern.

The core challenge of Genshin Impact is that it is still a Gacha/Energy game at its core and while it feels very open and very free… once you have completed the story content there are a very limited number of ways you can move that needle forward on a daily basis. There is apparently some discussion within Mihoyo about tweaking this, because apparently they had no idea that the game was going to blow up on the level of a “phenomena” like it did. So hopefully they ease some of the restrictions and lean into the whole big open world free to play thing, and shift around to some alternate ways of play. You can still have a really fun time without “whaling out” but from AR35 onwards it slows down again… and I imagine from AR40 onwards it is a very painful slog.

Warcraft Makeover Edition

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Yesterday was the World of Warcraft pre-patch for Shadowlands and shocking to no one the servers had a few issues as a result. I fought the retrieving realm list boss for awhile and then went through some issues where I would retrieve an empty character list. What I think was ultimately happening behind the scenes were that all of our level 120s were being interactively squished to 50s. If I waited long enough the entire list would load with my freshly vanillafied max level characters. The reason why I think this is that the folks like me that had an entire server full of 120s… seemed to be hit worse than the folks who only had one or two character sprinkled throughout multiple servers.

What I had not anticipated was the issues patching addons. I mean I should have, but for whatever reason they were crammed in the furthest corner of my mind and I was not prepared for how personally unplayable World of Warcraft is without ElvUI. I feel sorry for the folks behind Elv/TukUI because even this morning the patcher client is a smoldering pile of rubble that seems to be unable to connect into the servers. About halfway through the night I managed to manually download the 12.0 update for ElvUI from the website, and that at least allowed me to limp along until everything was back up and running. With the selloff of Curse Forge by Twitch, that means that the Twitch client is no longer a reliable means of patching. Swooping in to save the day is Wowup.Io which seems to be able to automagically detect where your game is installed, the addons you have installed and patch them successfully. It managed to catch pretty much everything that was not ElvUI and the rest seemed to have updated by this morning.

The highlight of this patch however is the new character models and as a result the only thing I actually did last night was log in a bunch of characters and head to the barber shop. The test of this post will be me exclusively talking about a few of these. First up is Belgrace, my horde paladin and at least for the time being the character that I an intending to main going into Shadowlands. The core problem I have always had with Blood Elves is the lack of beard options. Finally we have one, and while it isn’t an amazing one… it works for now. I also decided to go back to long black hair while I was at it and drop down to smaller ears.

Next up is my Demon Hunter, which is also a Blood Elf because racial locking. I am going to be honest I went with a really similar look because I think it looks badass. I dropped the blindfold because it always made things like eyepatches look odd and went with a more pale sickly skin to contrast against the dark hair. I wish Blood Elves had some “unnatural” skin tones like purple or maroon or something like that, but alas they do not. For now I am happy with it.

Female Belghast didn’t get all that many changes, just a few tweaks here and there with jewelry and some warpaint. I also changed the eye color to be a deeper and more vibrant red and shifted from a “cutefase” to a more serious expression. She spends most of her time as a fury warrior, and she should look downright mean, and I think she maybe does a bit more now. I kept the pig tails because I am used to them but I might shift that up at some point.

Now for the character change that I had been waiting for since first playing World of Warcraft. I got rid of my bones! Belgraft the Death Knight now has I believe the mottled skin appearance, which still looks undead but doesn’t make armor look like complete trash now! I shifted from a very pale/blueish skin tone to the darkest skin available on undead. Mostly I just wanted the glowing eyes to pop more as they stand out against the rest of his visage.

While I did a significant number more, the last change that I am going to talk about this morning is Belgrist my Druid. I originally did a dark skin/pink mohawk thing and it was fine, but I decided to go the other direction and choose the pale troll appearance with bigger pink hair. With this patch they also managed to give access to all of the artifact appearances you have spread out between all of your characters. This meant that I decided to go with the Ursoc appearance for bear form, Firelands cat for cat form and then the only options I had for swimming form were color variants of the Zandalari dinosaur form. I noticed there isn’t an option to customize your flight form, but maybe you just don’t collect appearances for that the way you do for the others.

Other than the growing pains and temporary moments of terror as I logged in to an empty character list… I think things went about as well as could be expected for such a major patch. I’ve not spent any time participating in the event associated with the patch, but I will likely spend some time participating to see if the weapons and gear are worth my time. I am still pretty damned hooked on Genshin Impact but the amount of things that I can reasonably do in a day is being limited by Resin so I will have some free time to spend in World of Warcraft in the coming nights.