World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 39 of 139

Shovel Cow

August 6, 2018 by Belghast

I am in this really weird place because I am both disconnected and connected to World of Warcraft at the same time right now. I am disconnected from the storyline because of the events of arsonist Sylvanas, but I am also finding myself enjoying the simple act of leveling. On the alliance side I have one of every class up in the 100-110 range, but on the horde side I am severely lacking in a bunch of columns. As of right now I have a stable of 110s on The Scryers in the form of my Warrior, Paladin, Demon Hunter and Warlock and then a 110 Deathknight over on Eonar. That said there are a bunch of spots left in my roster to level something and with the introduction of the prestige races I thought it would be really funny to make a High Mountain Tauren Monk.

So lately I have been spending most of my time in game rolling around… figuratively and literally… on the Monk. The highlight of the weekend was when I found out that I had a one handed shovel graphic in my transmog collection and that if I turned both of my weapons into them… they would sling across my back. This only really works because monks don’t actually use weapons at all and they just sit there strapped across my back as I punch and kick things. Now I am also just realizing that I can probably do a shovel knight transmog of some sort on a heavy armor character.

I’ve always found the leveling game to be one of the stronger points for World of Warcraft and as screwed up as the 60-80 leveling bracket seems to be right now… I do feel like them slowing things down a bit and blunting the effect of heirlooms was probably a good idea. Sure it means I can no longer solo world bosses, but it also means that I can have an experience that feels a little closer to what it actually felt like to level something originally. I am still flying through the levels however, but the ability to sit down and finish an entire zone without the need to move on in order to satisfy the part of me that wants to be “optimal” is a good thing.

It had been years since I had finished the entire Hillsbrad>Arathi>Hinterlands crawl always dropping out of each zone at some point as soon as the next zone lit up as having a quest available. Now I am doing the Plaguelands which honestly I feel like is one of the zones that benefits the most from Cataclysm. However on the podcast this weekend we largely talked about the big problems with World of Warcraft storytelling… and eventually drew a conclusion that Cataclysm was the expansion that derailed what seemed to be an arc of really solid story. If you are curious the above embedded video is that show… but be warned we bash Warcraft pretty hard.

In other news… I appear to no longer be allergic to casters in video games. I recently started playing my Warlock a lot and have even been considering maining it in Battle for Azeroth. This weekend I started a brand new Nightborne Shadow Priest and spent a few hours really enjoying myself leveling it through the Ashenvale content. I am not sure what snapped inside my head but I actually sorta find casters relaxing. I’ve always said that “me and finger wigglers don’t get along”, and that was sort of my shtick. The truth however is that I never really enjoyed that style of game-play and recently something changed. I find myself enjoying this game of “can I kill it before it touches me” that I have never really gotten into before.

I think we can blame Final Fantasy XIV for this because that is really the game I first seemed to get into the caster thing, or at least the gameplay style of “dot all the things”. I had a shockingly enjoyable time leveling Arcanist and then Summoner, and put quite a few levels into my Thaumaturge/Black Mage as well. I went through this thing where I leveled every single class to 50 just to help get rid of a bunch of gear, and in doing that… I arrived at a sort of truce with playing a caster. Recently however that truce has turned into a comfort level that I have never really experienced before. I don’t necessarily get it myself and my friend Grace thinks I must be ill… but whatever the case I had a lot of fun running around on the new babby Shadow Priest this weekend.

Lastly… my friend Chestnut had this idea as part of Blaugust to do a bunch of mini podcasts asking some questions about how we got started. It took me awhile but I sat down yesterday after editing AggroChat and before I editing the weekly sermon podcast from the church my wife attends. I tried very hard to keep it under 10 minutes and managed to do so… which is a miracle in itself since AggroChat is sort of known for long shows. I thought I would share it here and I believe Chestnut has a master plan for some other use for these as well. Hopefully you have an awesome week and I am sure I will get back on doing some Blaugust related topics tomorrow.

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.