World Of Warcraft

This morning’s post is likely going to be disjointed because I did not get quality sleep last night. Over the last week I have almost rediscovered the practice of farming transmog gear from old raids. Largely I have been focused on the Warlords of Draenor raids, and more specifically Mythic Hellfire Citadel and Mythic Blackrock Foundry. I have two 120 Paladins and 1 120 Warrior that I have been running in an attempt to collect the various cosmetic bits of these raids. The Tier 18 Warrior set for example is one of my favorite designs as it is a call back to the Wrath set from Blackwing Lair. At some point I hope to collect all of the appearance options for it.

The influx of new gear has lead me to craft a new transmog for my Horde Paladin. Largely this came about by finding a really cool mace and a really cool shield and trying to make something that works with it. The funny thing about this transmog is that I don’t believe ANY of the pieces actually are from the same set. Luckily however any time “fel” is involved, it is highly likely that they will also have gold highlights, which effectively glue together a bunch of disparate pieces. We all know the cosmetic game is the real game, and since I have the Transmog Yak, I find myself trying to stay Transmogged as much as humanly possible. Wearing armor that doesn’t look like crap, greatly enhances my enjoyment in the game.

Another thing I noticed in my travels is just how often the Horde still has control of Wintergrasp. Lets talk really quickly about things that frustrate me from the Wrath era. Vault of Archavon is a fun little raid that never actually drops any loot that the character I happen to be farming it on can use. However when I popped open the map earlier I was reminded of how much it bugged me that the layout was not symmetrical. It absolutely looks like there should have been another wing to open up on the upper left hand side. Similarly it bugs me that there are portals underneath Wyrmrest Temple that don’t go anywhere. There are just little areas of the world that FEEL like they should have something going on, but don’t which has always felt like a bit of a lost opportunity.

Another thing that has been floating around the blogosphere during Blapril is the Quantic Foundry gamer motivation profile. If you are so inclined you can check out my full profile here. So there are aspects that surprise me. I would have expected that my social component would be significantly higher, but in truth I spend a lot of time organizing communities… and then spending my actual time in game soloing. In fact soloing is my default stance these days and it is a rarity that I actually group up with another human being, which is partially desire and partially circumstance that voice chat does not work while playing through parsec. I absolutely agree with the Mastery rating because I rarely give a shit if I am actually good at something, and I really don’t have much of a competitive streak. Immersion and Creativity both track I guess, and I do have a pretty strong leaning towards action oriented things.

If we dive into the secondary motivations it feels a little more nuanced. I am absolutely not a completionist, and I rarely finish video games. My community score is real strong, which also makes a lot of sense given my lack of a competitive nature. I also really like feeling strong… see me soloing two expansion old raid content for fun and profit and similarly I could care less about a challenge. The fantasy vs story thing… at first confused me until I read their definitions and again I mostly agree with it. I care more about the lore of a world and being able to create MY character in than world, than the continuity of a story being told with a character that I did not choose. I also really like blowing things up… though I would not necessarily call myself an “agent of chaos and destruction” as they describe it. When playing Mass Effect I only ever choose the renegade option when it is really warranted… like punching reporters.

So the question is then, how good is it at recommending games. When choosing the “Balanced” option It spit out the following list for me. All of these are games that I own and have talked about more than once on this blog. They are also all games that I greatly enjoyed for one reason or another. When flipping things to the “Niche” pick, it again spit out a list of games that I largely already have played and enjoyed including some picks like The Legend of Dragoon, which is one of my favorite PlayStation era RPGs. It also grabbed Grim Dawn, which I have written about at length and is probably one of my favorite Diablo 2 style games. It highly suggests Slime Rancher and Hellblade: Sensua’s Sacrifice which are games I own but have never played, so maybe I need to give them a try soon.

Do I think this is valuable and something I should actually follow? Probably not. Notice that the absolutely highest recommendation is only a 3.3, and there are other games that appear that I am way more into like Diablo III that only ranked 1.7. The problem with trying to boil down a game to a number is the fact that not every person plays every game the same way. You take an MMORPG, and there are dozens if not hundreds of different patterns to follow while playing it, and all of them can bring with them immense enjoyment to the player. I like farming older raids so I can look cool in World of Warcraft, and that isn’t exactly a standard pattern of play for a lot of players, but it also really makes me happy when I am doing it. Games are ultimately to nuanced of an experience to really be boiled down to a set of specific statistics, however I do think this does a reasonable job at giving recommendations in spite of all of this.

This weekend an event happened that I thought I would talk about, however first I feel like I need to give some background. During the heyday of World of Warcraft I was a die-hard Alliance player. They were of course the faction that had Dwarves, which went an awfully long way for me. However because of the human faction hacks, the fear break, and weapon skill hacks I ultimately re-rolled at some point as a Human Warrior that became Belghast, the character that I ultimately became most known for. Argent Dawn during Vanilla was a magical place, that much like cheers was a server where everybody knew your name. This was in part due to the fact that it had a very active server forum, allowing different guilds and both factions to mingle freely.

As I moved my way into leading raids, I got indoctrinated into a bit of a club of other raid leaders who were in pretty regular communication. I’ve talked about this before but we had an incident where someone took BOE loot as need, left the raid and posted it on the auction house. I mentioned it to one other raid leader, and within fifteen minutes this player was on the do not invite list of all of the major raids in the game and on non-raiding probation for the guild based raid that he just joined. Twenty minutes he was in chat begging me to reverse all of it, when in truth the cat was out of the bag. No one wanted someone like that in their raid and all I did was mention it to one other leader in passing and it set the wheels in motion that really couldn’t be undone.

Argent Dawn was a server that was greatly impacted by a number of events over the years, most specifically the Alliance faction. Firstly the transition between 40 player raids to 25 player raids was extremely fraught, and similarly was the shift down to the existence of 10 player raids. Probably more than that however was the shift away from non-guild based raiding that came with Cataclysm. Blizzard started attaching things at the guild level, and Argent Dawn was a server with a still thriving ecosystem of raid groups that weren’t actually really associated with a specific guild. For years we were an overpopulated server being one of the first two Roleplaying flagged servers, and each time new servers opened up Argent Dawn was often times in the list of eligible targets for transferring characters off. On the Alliance side of the house this claimed entire guilds as they decided to make the jump to greener pastures.

For me personally, I checked out of World of Warcraft during Cataclysm, and it began a cycle. I would go through this pattern of returning at the end of one expansion, playing the pre-expansion content and then ultimately leaving again one or two patches into the new expansion. This is not exactly what you want in a guildmaster, and this ultimately lead me to hand off the reigns a few times… firstly to Elnore who was a serious raider and shifted the focus of the guild to raiding. Then to Rylacus who was more or less the Steward of Gondor, not really leading the guild but more keeping tabs on it while I was away. Finally the guild transitioned to Kylana, who like Elnore once again shifted the guild and the infrastructure to serve the purpose of raiding. There was a time where I was unfairly bitter about the changes in the guild as a whole, since I fought hard to keep Stalwart not just another raid guild. However I can see that they made the changes that were needed by the people who were still around and still playing the game while I was constantly gone.

The bigger problem however, is that I was never just active in House Stalwart. I was active in the community at large and while I was gone it changed in even more sweeping ways. Not only did my effective “home” feel a little foreign each time I returned to the game, but the server community as a whole felt like strangers. There was a time when I had the limit of server channels configured on my characters, and coming back they were all ghost towns. Gone was the council of guild and raid leaders, gone were the social channels of friend raid groups, gone were the few roleplaying groups that I was still friendly with, and replaced was a bunch of asshattery in raid chat by a completely new crop of people. I tried to make connections, but ultimately it didn’t feel like home.

For years I had been a semi-active member of the Bloodmoon Chosen guild on the horde side, which was made up of a bunch of people that I knew from the Argent Dawn server forums and the eventual Argent Dawn IRC channel. These were folks that I had communicated with daily for years, so it absolutely made sense that I park my little horde alts in their guild. It was during Warlords of Draenor I believe that some drama happened on that side of the fence, and while I am still not exactly sure what went down, all of my friends from BMC broke out and founded their own guild. Facepull felt like home because it was made up of so many people that I had known since Vanilla days, and I started leveling a Paladin that served as my horde main for a few expansions.

The funny thing about Argent Dawn Horde side is that it seemed not to be changed so severely by the rigors of time. While roaming around in both the Hubs and the over-world zones I was constantly bumping into familiar faces and having random conversations with folks that I actually knew form the onset of the server. This weekend one of these events happened, and it was ultimately what inspired me to write about my shift in allegiance. I was landing at the Great Seal just as a familiar name was about to take off, which caused me to send a message to her. Tenebres is someone I have known from the forums for decades, and I remember when she posted baby photos of her now 15 year old daughter in what I think was the IRC Server at the time? So what followed was us talking for a good 45 minutes catching up on how and what we have been doing.

The thing is… this isn’t a one time event because I am constantly bumping into people that I have known for years while roaming the world, because it seems like the Horde never had the great server splits that the Alliance side did. The Horde just feels like home right now. There has been massive turn over in the Alliance guild, and I dearly love some of the folks that still tie back to the era in which I was actively playing. However playing Horde reminds me of the social fabric that I loved about the server because while it is somewhat diminished, it still exists and there are still large groups of people that communicate on a regular basis. It is ultimately those social connections that root me to a game and to its server, and without them the entire process just feels hollow. Ultimately this is why I am spending my time of late playing catch up and leveling an army of alts, because that is the one thing that I miss the most from Alliance side, being self sufficient in all of the tradeskills.

Well folks… the madness continues. Last night I dinged 120 on my fifth character in rapid succession. Prior to the launch of Legion, there was a pre-launch demon invasion event that I abused for every drop of experience that I could on the Alliance side. During this I managed to level one of every single class to 100 while doing these events. However on the horde side I have had mostly a bunch of low level characters to go along with what is ultimately my two main characters, the Demon Hunter and the Warrior. The goal has been to take these experience boosts and catch the stable of characters up so that going into Shadowlands I have a bit more choice in what I am going to play. I’ve always found running up alts relaxing, and last night getting the Warlock to 120 gave me my first caster.

So one of my friends pinged me the other night on Steam to ask a question and apparently I completely missed it. I won’t lie folks, you are most likely to get an answer from me on Twitter, because in the modern age I am exceptionally bad at paying attention to the chat services associated with the plethora of social options we all have. However the question was pretty straight forward and essentially boiled down to asking how I was leveling these alts so quickly. It is really straight forward… I am questing, rapidly, and with flight. I talked about this the other day but right now there is a Winds of Wisdom buff that gives you an extra 100% experience, meaning every drop of xp gained is twice what it previously would be. If you also have heirlooms that adds up in total to either +45% or +55% depending on if you have rings or not.

What that feels like in experience however is that extra experience gain appears to be multiplicative because I did not have heirlooms while leveling the Warlock and I absolutely noticed a massive difference. Normally speaking with heirlooms I can do all of Battle for Azeroth in completing a single zone’s worth of content and opening the three war campaign footholds. Without the heirlooms I had to complete one full zone, open the three footholds and then go do almost all of a second zone. It felt like everything was going about half as fast as I would normally go, but there were a few other factors. Namely leveling a caster is not my jam and my time to kill was probably significantly lower. This makes a big difference because the other thing that I do while questing is that I kill everything in my path while getting to the next objective rather than just swooping down on a mount.

I’ve always leveled quickly, the the answer has always been the salted earth approach that I take, since monster xp doesn’t seem like much but adds up over time. All of that said I absolutely boosted a mage because it is the least “bel” class on the planet. I actually enjoy leveling a priest way more than I do a mage, so more than anything this is probably just for sake of seeing all 120s sitting in my roster. I boosted the mage last time on the alliance side, so it appears to be a tradition for me. I will never likely take this character off any “sweet jumps”, and often times they turn into my banker alt. The real question is… after having finished leveling the Warlock, what character do I start with next? Right now I am leaning towards pushing up my Highmountain Monk, because a Tauren monk is hillarious.