World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 39 of 139

Because Rocks

July 30, 2018 by Belghast

While we are still very much in Blaugust prep week, I am going to take the morning off and talk about some non-Blaugust stuff. First off the above embedded video is the YouTube version of this weeks Podcast where we talk at length about our feelings regarding Battle for Azeroth. Of the crew Grace and I are the only two that are really still connected to World of Warcraft in any major way, and the show itself became a bit of an extended version of the feelings we are both having. This weekend I spent a good deal of time prepping characters for the expansion since I had not really done that yet, and can abuse the event that is happening as a way to get some reasonable gear easily.

Unfortunately I made the decision to main Horde this expansion before I experienced the nonsense War of the Thorns quests… but as part of that decision I have been prepping my Warrior, Deathknight, Demon Hunter, Warlock and have been pushing up my Paladin. Now it had been awhile since I had done one of the class order hall missions, and I was immediately struck by now good tone wise it felt to be gathering up the paladins on either side of the fence to work together towards the goal of saving Azeroth. I am not sure how we got to this point where all of the past gains of the Legion expansion are out the window and we are back to a forced Red vs Blue narrative.

One of the things we talk at length about in the podcast is just how bad the Advertising campaign feels. Firstly we are divided as a nation and as a world by so many serious issues right now that it just feels irresponsible to be pushing more of that for the sake of selling your product. Secondly… in our experience World of Warcraft isn’t a dividing line but instead something that brings people together with the stupid artificial boundary between Horde and Alliance just being an inconvenience that maybe keeps you from playing with some of your friends. I tell this tale in the podcast but I figured I would talk a little bit about it in person.

When I went to take my ITIL training and eventually take the test, there was a significant amount of waiting around because of a scheduling mistake. This meant me and the trainer of the class had to sit around and hang out for a bit while waiting on my online time slot. During this we realized that we both had played World of Warcraft and were both raiders back in the day… but on opposite sides of the fence. Instead of it becoming a discussion about Horde vs Alliance… it became a discussion about our shared experiences leading guilds and raids and all of the weird things we had encountered in the process of doing that. We both immediately realized we had more in common in our experiences than different and focused in on those things… rather than some nonsensical artificial rivalry.

So as I find myself prepping for the launch of this expansion I end up thinking about the expansion that could have been. Had we continued the class fantasy and kept moving forward towards a unified Azeroth it could have been so amazing. Legion was probably the strongest World of Warcraft content to date and in part it was so strong… because the Horde and Alliance factored so little into it. There is a sequence in Stormheim that feels awful as you are forced back into the shoes of Red and Blue but everything else feels so good as you are working side by side with the other faction to face bigger evils. That is the World of Warcraft I want, where we take on things bigger than ourselves as we face what will be the obvious resurgence of the Old Gods.

I feel like Battle for Azeroth is the expansion that no one wanted, and I have arrived at this point by listening to my social media feed made up of a bunch of long time WoW players. Sure there are a few people I know who were excited for the War Mode… but only because they rolled on a PVP server to be with friends and don’t want any part of that nonsense and will be turning it off completely. It just seems like a weird gamble to triple down on the faction versus faction thing, when it felt so amazing to get away from it completely. I keep hoping that maybe they will throw us for a loop and that the factional nonsense is short lived, but I somehow doubt that.

I will be there with my hordelings hanging out with that side of my gaming family, but I am not going to be super pumped about it especially with the way that the early questing has gone so far. We are fighting a war “because rocks” and that we don’t want the other side to get any of these macguffins of ultimate power. Here is hoping that things get better from here.

Launches and Lurching

July 18, 2018 by Belghast

Initially I had planned last night on poking my head in on various characters within Azeroth but like many I was greeted with a lot of this screen when I first got home. It seemed like a combination of a couple of things… first being that there were apparently some rather nasty DDoS attacks going on with the hosting providers… and secondly this was a major patch in WoW. I mean I’ve been going through this cycle since 2004 and this is far from the first time a major patch rendered the game unplayable for one reason or another. Just the simple onslaught of a bunch of players coming back to do like I was planning is enough to take down servers. I have no idea when it was fixed and when the servers came back up… because I did what I have learned I need to do to keep from getting ragey… I moved on to playing something else.

Though that said I heard that the community was particularly toxic to the BlizzardCS account last night. There were apparently people calling for the firing of employees and all of that nonsense… while those of us who have been through far worse launches sit back and eat our popcorn. I think the reality is that Blizzard has spoiled us of late with a string of relatively smooth major patch cycles. So as a result when folks see what I would consider a normal MMO patch rollout… they lose their shit. There have been times when I too was losing my shit… particularly during the relaunch of A Realm Reborn when you had to effectively stay logged in if you hoped to play the game at all. In this scenario however I happily wandered off to play Elder Scrolls Online after a few rounds of attempts.

So I have been working my way through the ESO content as it was originally released and after finishing Orsinium… that lead me down the path of the Thieve’s Guild. Now I had accidentally already done the intro quest to this content because I quite legitimately thought it was just another quest in Windhelm. That is one of the challenges you have coming back this far behind the curve is there are quests everywhere… and a good deal of them are trying to lead you off to start expansions and DLC without ever fully announcing that is their intent. Sure I probably could have looked it up in the quest journal, but for the most part I find myself not using that at all while playing Elder Scrolls Online.

One of the challenges with Thieves Guild is the fact that it is more or less a stealthy expansion, and I Belghast… am not a stealthy person. I am one of those charge into the fight and taunt all the things type person… and the thought of sneaking around in full plate seems hilarious to me. That said I have tried my best to embrace this game play style because the content essentially forces you to do so. Getting detected in a good deal of the missions means that you are going to get swarmed by city guards that you have no way of actually soloing. Now thankfully it employs the Assassins Creed “instant hiding container” sort of thing, which allows you to evade attention at just the right moment. Now unfortunately if you already have guard aggro you are going to have to wait a bit until the “heat meter” dies down before popping out and continuing the mission.

Now it is not like I have never done a thieves guild in the past Elder Scrolls Online games… in fact to my knowledge I have done them all since Oblivion. The problem is in those older games there was always a path of “kill all the things” that got you through the quest as opposed to constantly sneaking your butt around. For the most part however I have managed to do the quests as intended part from a few times when I killed someone instead of just not doing that. While the gameplay is not my favorite thing in the world, I have to give the game credit for completely hooking me with the storyline. This is in fact an Elder Scrolls Thieves Guild story… which quite honestly tend to be some of the better written and more interesting guilds out there.

I am completely hooked on the characters and the story as it is deciphering due to my interactions. It is part pirates, part heist, part Indiana Jones and a whole of fighting back against an oppressive evil empire… all of which make for a really interesting sequence. The way it plays out is interesting as well as there is no one constant thread that you follow but instead a sequence of what seems to be disconnected actions that ultimately weave their way into a main story quest. I get the impression that I am reaching about the halfway point in the story as there was a major revelation last night, that seems like it will begin the end phase where I start narrowing down and working to righting the great wrong done to the guild. I am completely hooked… in spite of needing to creep about unbenefiting a warrior of my stature.

Elves I Don’t Hate

May 16, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I pulled an example from World of Warcraft and after doing so I realized that I never actually talked about the character that was hiding underneath the fold of the Destiny 2 image. I am extremely late to the party when it comes to Allied races, the Horde races were super easy to unlock but the Alliance ones required a level of commitment that I was simply not willing to offer them. They were one of those things that I worked on off and on as I had time or wanted something mindless to do while watching television or a movie. It was a few weeks back when I realized that I was actually getting pretty close to exalted with both of the factions required to unlock them. Even then I largely failed at doing the quests on a daily basis because I really am not a huge fan of Argus.

Nevertheless I managed to push across the finish line and unlock them both a few weekends back and as a result I have been poking around on a brand new Void Elf hunter during the AggroChat podcasts. I’ve found it super relaxing to just roam around and take things down at low levels and for whatever reason Void Elves don’t trigger that “I hate elves” instinct that I have built up over all of these years. In part I think they mostly register as Drow to me, which is something I occasionally played in D&D or the games like Everquest that had decent implementations of them. Honestly it weirdly makes me want to go back and farm the single piece of Dragonstalker that I am missing, because in all of my years of running Blackwing Lair… I never got the boots to drop off Broodlord Lashlayer. The only thing keeping me from soloing it each week is the fact that I really hate doing the Razorgore event.

I realize that I recently started a Tauren Hunter, but the whole being assigned a pet at the start of the game thing still seems a little weird. On the Tauren your start with a Plainstrider which isn’t really my sort of pet, but even then I kept using it for a significant amount of time before taming anything else to replace it. As Void Elf though you start with Voidstalker… that is both my kind of pet and also extremely cool looking. I’ve found myself with zero drive to go out and tame something else, but that might change as I am now interesting Stranglethorn Vale. I might grab something rare if I happen across it but for now I am more than happy to run around with my void pal… even though I have yet to give her a proper name.

It is weird to me that I have lost any forward momentum in World of Warcraft thanks to Battle For Azeroth and the direction they are taking the game. However I still enjoy dinking around on low level characters because to me that is the purest version of the “WoW Experience”. BfA really has been a let down as far as the information coming out about it. Additionally my time playing beta… hasn’t really done anything to hook me on the direction the game is going. For years I thought that maybe Metzen was what was holding the game back… but now I wonder if he was a force of stability keeping the game from dropping off a cliff. Note I loved Legion “for the most part” but the one bit that I could push right into the sea was the factional nonsense that happens in Stormheim. Battle For Azeroth feels like an entire game made out of those factional nonsense moments and I am not really looking forward to it.

Unintended Night

April 19, 2018 by Belghast

What I was supposed to be playing last night is World of Warcraft as Wednesday is our normal mythical nonsense night. Unfortunately we were down two people already and I myself wasn’t really in the mood to do it either. I’ve been dealing with some stuff and yesterday was a bit of a bad mental health day. When those situations happen I tend to turtle up somewhere quiet and hang out by myself until whatever it is has passed. World of Warcraft is such an inherently social game that even the act of logging in ends up prompting a bunch of people to poke me and say hello… and it feels bad to ignore them when I need to ignore them.

Sure there is now “Appear Offline” mode but even then that is not a perfect scenario. For me at least there are a handful of people that I am generally okay with interacting with, because they know the drill. They understand deeply because they go through their own periods of turtle time, and as a result there is no need to attempt to keep up appearances as it were. However if you are in Offline mode and you reach out to one of those people who are on the closest rings of your monkeysphere… they cannot respond. You will be able to send them messages all day long but they will always get the offline message when attempting to respond back to you. As a result when I am feeling like this I just avoid WoW like the plague because it isn’t worth the hassle.

What I wanted to be doing was to sit on the couch and play some Everquest while watching some more Mighty Boosh streamed through the television. Unfortunately they seem to have had a rather traumatic maintenance yesterday. The servers went down at 5:00 am EDT on the 18th and did not come back apparently until 2:30 am EDT on the 19th. I have no clue at all what was going on… but I kept trying to fire up the launcher and getting the maintenance message. I have been enjoying myself a shocking amount in Everquest, but I realize that I am riding the drug that is nostalgia. I am not sure how long that drug will last but for the moment I am riding its high.

What I did instead was play a lot of MTG Arena as I got it set up on my laptop. Yesterday Scopique wrote an interesting response to my post about Arena… or at least one that mentioned it because it wasn’t exactly a direct response. The funny thing is I wouldn’t necessarily call myself much of a competitive gamer. I traditionally shy away from player versus player situations, but games like MTG Arena or the Crucible in Destiny don’t seem to bother me that much and I am not entirely certain why. I stumbled across a post from Tobold who very much did not enjoy his time with Arena, but for the moment I don’t mind at all that it is largely just a stripped down 1v1 client. I think ultimately if you are going into Arena expecting Duels of the Planeswalkers or MTG Duels either one… you are going to be sorely disappointed.

Arena is simply a Magic the Gathering Online that isn’t horrible. Sure MTGO is serviceable but nothing about it is really intuitive and it feels like you are jumping through a lot of hoops to make anything work. MTGO was absolutely less cludgy than the days of trying to arrange a game on IRC and then getting both parties to fire up and connect to each other through the Apprentice application. However card gaming on a PC has changed drastically since then and Hearthstone more or less has led that charge. Arena is that Hearthstone-esc interface for the far more seasons and complicated game of Magic the Gathering, and the thing is… it works amazingly well.

There have been a few times I have been bit by the game trying to move forward without me… but in the grand scheme of things it seems to do 99.9% of the right things at the right time. The other moments don’t bother me too much because I am not placing a lot of my personal ego into whether or not I am winning. I am simply enjoying playing cards and occasionally I do really well. I do feel like Tobold’s comment of not feeling like he could be competitive with the decks presented was a bit nonsense given that I have been entirely playing the stock Golgari Exploration deck. I felt like I was able to pick it up and start winning matches almost immediately… and sure as my rank has risen I am winning less matches but even that doesn’t bother me much. I am still winning more than enough to complete daily quests getting me packs and gold… to buy more packs. All in all I feel like Arena is going to shape up to be a very solid version of Magic the Gathering Online… but we need to stop the comparisons there for our own sanity.