World Of Warcraft

Last night was a lot of fun… and once again expanded our sphere of influence for shenanigans.  We have not been doing mythics the last few nights because many of our regulars have not been available.  Tam for example is travelling this week, and Mor is being a fake nerd and actually socializing with other human beings in real life.  He somehow doubts his fake nerd status…  but Grace and I both assured him that the only acceptable interaction is over the internet.  So instead Grace and I both decided to step down our nerd status one peg… and communicate with other people online trying to fill the last few DPS slots we needed for a Mythic plus.

I have this aversion to pugging…  and what I mean by pugging is actually posting a group and filling with complete strangers.  Like someone might be a stranger to me, but if they are a friend of a friend of a friend… it somehow feels better.  Last night for example one of our regulars had a friend who was down to run stuff on his shadow priest.  However as yet another French Canadian friend…  I got the impression he was concerned about his English skills and didn’t want to hang on discord as a result.  I mean…  my English skills are not exactly legend but unfortunately I don’t have another language to fall back on.  I totally get it but it did make some of the interactions a little sluggish especially when we started having problems.

Hai NA Horde friends… looking for a couple dps for M+/M0 whatever it takes to get some mythics done for the weekly quest. Need 2 dps.

— Bel 🆚 World of Warfronts (@belghast) September 14, 2018

I pinged Guild and either no one was watching chat at that moment or they were uninterested.  Whatever the case I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone and decided to ping twitter with the above message.  Thankfully twitter answered and my good friend Tart decided to join us in nonsense.  It was around or about this point that I realized…  Tart and I have never actually been on voice or run anything in game together.  It was a lot of fun and we had a set line up of Demon Hunter Tank (me), Disc Priest (grace), Shadow Priest (tart), Mage (widjack), Shadow Priest (friend of widjack).  We analyzed the Mythic+ keys we had available to us… and it was basically Underrot or Temple of Sethralis.  We thought we were choosing the easier of the two and went with the Temple…  we maybe should have gone the other way around.

We have a bad habit of doing things without actually reading the instruction.  Like I have absolutely winged trying to put together IKEA furniture…  and ultimately put something together almost right but not quite…  to the point where it would require me to disassemble everything to fix the problem.  This is why our buffet in the kitchen has no drawer pull.  Our Mythic experiences largely align with this methodology of “Just Do It”, which is fine for learning through failure but not exactly fine when you are being timed in doing so.  The core problem was…  neither myself or grace or wid had actually done Temple of Sethralis on Mythic anything… let alone the timed version.

Basically on every single boss we struggled with some thing that we now were supposed to do on Mythic that was not in place on Heroic…  the worst of these being the “Galvanize” boss.  However with time we figured it all out…  we were just painfully behind the curve of getting a key to upgrade.  However those lessons we learned won’t be forgotten any time soon because we paid for that education with a piece of our soul.  I mean…  if I am being honest…  reading up on an encounter or watching a fatboss video doesn’t really do much for me.  I am one of those people that needs to experience the fight before anything that I learn about said fight actually sticks and becomes permanent memory.

In truth it seems like most of our crew from last night was this way…  like Tart had run the mythic earlier in the week but didn’t really grok what we were supposed to be doing either.  However after last night I am certain that none of us will be forgetting anytime soon and for me at least that is progress.  I was super disappointed however that we did not get extra loot due to the Sign of the Warrior buff going on.  Normally speaking when you run a Mythic you get about 2 pieces of loot in the chest at the end, and with the Sign of the Warrior you are supposed to get an extra piece of loot, which should have been three.  I managed to upgrade my boots though by five item levels, and we got a pair of either cloth gloves or cloth bracers that no one seemed to be interested in.

Regardless of the loot though it was one hell of a fun night and super awesome to actually run something with Tart.  We now have her inducted into the RoboSquid Armada and hopefully she will answer the call for more peoples in the near future.

Last night did not exactly work as intended.  I had originally planned on getting home and running some Mythics with my friend Grace but that didn’t actually happen.  Then by the time a guild group asked for me to do Mythics with them… I was mostly in the wrong mindset to be successful.  I did however hook them up with a healer friend of mine that was able to make the group work.  Tonight however I need to get started on running my four Mythics required for a chest of raid loot.  In theory we can probably make a group happen even thought Tam is travelling and not available this week.  I am sure I can probably dip into the guild to pick up a dps if we wind up short, since that seems to be what we are always short on.

Instead of Mythical Nonsense…  I ground the Warfront.  Essentially as of yesterday I was short three pieces of gear from having everything 340 or better.  I needed a pair of gloves, a second weapon and a second trinket…  the last I am not entirely certain is an option for coming from Warfronts.  I have not found a great source of everything that can possibly drop from a warfront cache, but what I did find seemed to only indicate pieces of armor and weapons.  At first I was starting to think this was going to be a repeat of my past outings…  as I got two more belts and two more cloaks…  but before the evening was up I managed to also pick up a pair of gloves and a one-handed axe giving me that second weapon.  Now I am effectively down to just the trinket, which means I could run LFR and hope that I get lucky or pick up one of the inscription trinkets.

This also means that I am largely without purpose when it comes to secondary activities on the Demon Hunter apart from farming faction to eventually push everything to Revered.  I am not contemplating starting to run Warfronts on the Warrior in hopes of maybe getting a reasonable sword and shield option.  I keep thinking at some point in the near future they will make Warrior tanking not feel horrible, and the couple of Warfronts I have run as DPS have been way less enjoyable than running them as a tank.  Its an option… but I am not entirely certain I am ready to dive right back into a gear grind.  I’ve abandoned any illusion of trying to maintain some sort of split mains scenario, and am largely just going to focus on the Demon Hunter for gearing purposes.

That means if I can make one of the Sunday raids… and I am not already locked for the week…  I will just be dpsing as Havoc Demon Hunter instead of trying to do Fury Warrior.  That doesn’t stop the fact that Sunday is a really bad time for me to be raiding so the likelihood that I am going to make many of them… is pretty limited.  It is our hope to get a RoboSquid Armada based raid going on Wednesday nights, which is a far better time for me to be committed to raiding.  Also if I am going to raid… I really want to be tanking since I am lacking whatever stuff makes people care about how they are doing on the meters.

If you are a NA Server Horde Player and are curious what the hell RoboSquid Armada is… check out this post for more details.  It is sort of a dream of mine to kick start non-guild based raiding as a “thing” that actually happens again.  If nothing else we have an in game Battle.NET social channel and a discord that are places we draw upon for building Mythic groups.

Last night was a really good night.  My original intent was to grind Warfronts until my face fell off…  and that did not exactly happen.  I did however run two of them…  which sadly dropped exactly the same item… a pair of bracers that were five item levels lower than the ones I already wore.  Instead I allowed myself to get talked into mythical nonsense, at which point we ran an Atal’Dazar +2 because none of us had actually run it on mythic.  At first I thought we were not doing super well but in the end we managed to pick up time thanks to the fact that we now know a few shortcuts around the zone…  and finished the timer with time to spare upgrading our very first key and getting Tam and I the Keystone Initiate achievement.  My Demon Hunter was a third string character in Legion, and as such never set foot in a mythic, let alone a mythic+.

I managed to get a belt that was a minor upgrade…  which marks the first piece of loot that I have pulled from mythic+ so far.  Tam caused me to curse the fact that he has apparently stolen my luck and pulled a 340 weapon…  something I also so desperately need but in truth I would rather have that contribute to his dps as opposed to my aggro generation.  I did however manage to pick up a 330 weapon from a world quest before the end of the night so I at least saw movement.  The keystone from Atal’Dazar upgraded into a Waycrest Manor +3 at which point we decided to go ahead and give it an attempt.

The thinking being that if we could just struggle through the zone and get to the end… we would at least get slightly better gear from the weekly chest today.  Side note… I need to figure out where in the hell the weekly chest spawns.  I am guessing in the great seal area, but knowing the weird forced “I’m On A Boat” narrative, it is probably somewhere under deck near Gallywix.  So we set forth into Waycrest, which thankfully Grace had run on heroic earlier in the day so she more or less knew the appropriate path to take that day.  We had a few false starts but managed to nail the boss fights like we knew what we were doing, and came up a tragically five seconds short of getting the timer and upgrading the key further.  I think more than anything it proved to us that the keys were completely something reasonable that we should be shooting for.

Tonight at this very moment…  the plan is to run whatever Emissary there happens to be for the day and dip my toes into LFR.  I think Grace and I have more or less made a pact to go in together as to minimize the frustration.  After that I figure we will evaluate what keys we all got and start the mythical madness over again from there.  I am shocked and surprised at how engaged Tam still seems to be with Mythics, because a part of me was certain he would bounce the moment he finished leveling his character.  He was asking us how high the mythics go… and in theory I believe they effectively keep scaling indefinitely.  Maybe this will be the expansion I finally see a Mythic +15.  Regardless in the mean time I am having a lot of fun and learning the zones better so I can pull more efficiently.  We are also slowly starting to re-learn when we should start using CC…  and given that I am a tank with a really damned solid CC… this is an interesting experience.

This weekend was a lot of fun, and was a blend of Warfronts, Mythics, Heroics and at the very end dipping my toes into the raid with Facepull.  By the end of the weekend the Demon Hunter is 337 item level, and the Warrior still 332 since I have yet to do the Warfronts and get the 370 item.  Tonight is going to be me grinding away slavishly on Warfronts because thing I did not realize…  you get a 340 or better every single time you do them.  I thought I was just lucky in getting a 340 and a 370 for turning in the quest, but apparently that 340 is a reoccuring thing.  Based on what I am hearing there can be weapons and armor both that drop…  which given my track record with weapon drops in this expansion probably just means armor slots I already have better items in.

Since Facepull is a very well established raid, it meant that I would be filling the very uncomfortable spot of DPS which is not really a thing I do well as evidenced by how bad my parses will ultimately be.  I’m a tank… I think like a tank and act like a tank and when you tell me to burn something I get a very confused look on my face.  However I was apparently not a bad enough impediment to keep us from downing Taloc after a handful of tries.  Of course I got nothing but crafting materials, because that is the way of the world.  It supposedly drops a really sweet two handed mace that would have been a nice dps upgrade for my warrior…  but that wasn’t going to happen because weapon drops don’t exist for me in this expansion.

This is a lovely shot of me dead on the floor in the room of MOTHER which apparently is actually supposedly to be in all caps.  You know what Titan servitors like the most… burning and purging corruption.  MOTHER appears to really enjoy it, and the fight is all about trying to stop her from doing this thing while also not being purged yourself.  On this particular attempt Ary and I zigged when we should have zagged and got a wildly unexpected mace to the face.  Ary got a battle rez because he is a useful member of the team, I stayed on the floor because I was just barely keeping up above the tanks.  We made progress but also sorta went too long and lost progress as well, with our last handful of attempts being significantly worse than some of the ones in the middle.

I feel like MOTHER is either a gear check issue, or we are just doing something not quite right during the process.  Since most of us were hovering around the 325 range I figure we probably hit a gear wall, which became a subject of much lamentation over discord.  All in all it was a quirky and enjoyable night, and I managed to die most spectacularly when I accidentally clicked on a Warlock portal and went zooming into a firey death pulling MOTHER in the process.  I had no clue what was going on and apparently I instinctively screamed “OH SHIT!” to which my wife freaked out trying to figure out what was wrong.

The only negative of the experience is the fact that the Sunday time slot is really horrible for me.  Pretty much ANY weekend time slot is horrible, but especially Sunday night because that is generally when we finish up anything that needs to happen for the week.  I felt like an ass sitting there and raiding while my wife had to struggle with things I would have normally helped out with.  So there in lies the problem… I enjoyed myself as I generally have any time I have raided with Facepull…  but the timing is horrible and I am not likely going to make it every week… which means I stay in an under geared pupa state and am likely more trouble than it is worth?  I would like to get a raid going on a week night that is much easier for me to manage attending on a regular basis.  We will have to see how things shake out, but ultimately my hope is something workable can happen via RoboSquid Armada.  Being on the computer from 6:30 pm to 10 pm on a Sunday when I should be swapping loads of laundry and what not isn’t going to work for me as a regular thing sadly.