World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 40 of 139

Nonsense Managed

April 5, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was the first occurrence of our mythical nonsense group and it almost didn’t happen. We had planned on running from 7 pm to 9 pm Central time… so that it wasn’t too ungodly late for our East Coast contingency. However the entire thing almost failed to happen. At go time we had two of our players that were unable to get in due to some bug that seemed to be only effecting certain servers. Grace and I were both logging in characters from Eonar and Byx on Chromaggus also managed to get in just fine. However Maryalee on Wyrmrest Accord and Nayukhuut on Moonguard both were encountering the issue shown in the above screenshot with their server showing us as “Incompatible”.

The funny thing is that when this first started happening I was able to log into my characters on those servers just fine. However after closing WoW and relaunching… the Battle.net patcher updated the game and then suddenly I also got the issue. Since Blizzard CS said they were working on it… we decided to push ahead and attempt a Mythic 0 with three players. We originally were planning on doing Maw of the Souls… which I keep wanting to call Maw of the Damned because Death Knight weapon. I swapped over to Blood Tanking spec and we gave it an attempt that honestly went pretty smoothly especially considering I have not actually tanked a dungeon this expansion as Death Knight.

About halfway through our Maw run the other two players managed to get into the game and after we finished up the run we had some options on how to proceed with our madness. We sat down and assessed the keys we had available to us…

Mythic 2 – Seat of the Triumvirate
Mythic 2 – Cathedral of Eternal Night
Mythic 2 – Blackrook Hold

Quite honestly I am not that familiar with Cathedral having only run it a few times… and I am not sure if I have ever run Seat of the Triumvirate at all. While Blackrook Hold is not exactly my favorite dungeon it seemed like the more realistic choice and quite honestly the easier one. However that also set us down the path of only getting one of the keys upgraded each time. We pushed forward and knocked out the Dungeon in completely reasonable time.

My key upgraded to Mythic 5 Upper Karazhan… which made me immediately think… “why the fuck is this a mythic dungeon?”. However we managed to largely steamroll the entire dungeon other than the final boss who is just an asshole. Thankfully in spite of my death we moved forward and the remaining folks managed to get the kill moving us forward again. I remember Karazhan being a boar to get through when we were trying to run it to get to the bonus boss… but now it seems like it is probably a completely reasonable thing to do in a timely manner. I think the fact that everyone has Concordance now… pushes up the gear levels to the point where you can just take a lot of abuse making all of the mechanics easier.

The next key target was Mythic 7 Neltharion’s Lair… which generally speaking is a fairly easy dungeon to run. The problem we encountered however is the pair of affixes we were dealing with… and the fact that we are all used to trying to skip content in the dungeon… meant we struggled quite a bit. Firstly we had the Teeming Affix meaning that several of the packs are larger… which in this dungeon means a pack of three mobs normally sometimes becomes a pack of six mobs. This also screws with the aggro radius of packs and things we used to be able to sneak around we had to on directly. Secondly we had the Quake Affix meaning that every so often every member of the party was dealt a radius of quake damage… which if stacked means you take damage from everyone.

Considering we had a party with three melee characters and a fourth in the form of our healer that occasionally would go hit things… Quake damage became a problem. We almost made the timer… like had everything gone perfectly on the final fight we would have. However we wound up being about a minute short after the run back from a death on the final boss. I am not sure if this means we will all start with Mythic 6 keys next week or if the fact that we completed a Mythic 7 dungeon means we start there. Whatever the case we should have five new options for next Wednesday night to keep moving forward. We are entering the territory where we can no longer faceroll the mythics so we will have to start getting some strategy on… and maybe flasking.

Whatever the case I had a heck of a lot of fun running around with this team and look forward to next week. Having been out of the mythic game for so long… we made way more progress than I originally thought we would in a single night so I am super happy about that.

Mythical Nonsense Tonight

April 4, 2018 by Belghast

I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning, but in theory mythical nonsense begins tonight. We’ve gathered up a group of players who are willing to join in this madness and set our sights on getting our first key through the easiest and coolest of the mythics… Maw of the Damned. From there we will shift around and try and determine what our next target is based on the keys that we get. In theory we are going to run until 10 pm central or wherever there is a breaking off point somewhere close to that. The idea being that we run for a few hours and see how many we can knock out… and keep upgrading keys until we get to at least Mythic +15 so that we can walk away with shiny artifact appearances or something like that. I have no clue how far we will get tonight, and I have no clue how long this journey is actually going to take… however we have a list of adventurers ready to go.

MaryaleeScarlet – Protection Paladin – Tank
DiscGrace – Mistweaver Monk – Healing
MissByx – Fury Warrior – Melee DPS
Nayukhuut – Frost Mage – Ranged DPS
Belgrok – Unholy Deathknight – Plays With Dead Things

In theory I need to try and get an Argus kill in tonight before go time since I failed miserably at playing WoW last night. With the teacher strike going on the evenings have been weird for lack of a better term. I didn’t want to get into anything serious until my wife got home… and yes while LFR is LFR… the Argus section of that raid is a serious time commitment at the least. Then after my wife got home we largely talked about the nonsense the State Legislators did during the day… like shutting off the water to give themselves an excuse to go home early for the day and avoid the teachers. My hope is tonight I can pop in for a bit, get an Argus kill so I can walk into Mythical Nonsense ™ with a second legendary and slightly higher item level.

I would totally stream this… but a few of the folks I am running with have already objected to that notion when someone brought it up on twitter. So I will just have to report in on our progress tomorrow. It should be a lot of fun, especially since two of the people I will be running with… I have never run with before. Byx and Grace however… have gone through many iterations of my nonsense over the years so they are largely immune to it. So I will ultimately have to break Maryalee and Nayakhuut into the fact that I have no clue what I am doing 99.9% of the time and that tanks make the most annoying DPS. It should be hilarious… or at least entertaining for all.

Nothing Much to Say

March 28, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I feel like I don’t have an awful lot to talk about, but still feel obligated to say words and things. The last few nights have mostly been what I would refer to as maintenance gaming, where I log into something… do a few repeatable activities and then log right back out. The majority of this time has been spent in World of Warcraft since I apparently have set forth a goal of unlocking the alliance races which will involve copious amounts of reputation grinding. At this moment I am about 6500 out of 21000 towards exalted or some close equivalent in both of the necessary factions. At the suggestion of my friend Grace I have started hoarding faction tokens for the Darkmoon Faire buff, which admittedly is not a thing I have really partaken of in its modern format.

I still find it super annoying that the Alliance route to new races is way harder than the Horde route. As a “Mostly Alliance” player for most of my wow career I have always felt like Blizzard favored The Horde… not in the least because of the constant insistence that we should care deeply about Green Jesus. Weirdly enough however for the last while I have been almost exclusively playing The Horde and the character I am grinding up is my Orc Warrior not my Human one. There are certain things that just work easier on that side of the pond than the other… for example jumping the wall from the flightmaster to the Horde area in Dalaran is so much faster than having to fly all the way across the map to the Alliance area. Having a reasonable foothold on both continents is another nice point… with ways to get there quickly. Sure you can still use the Theramore boat as Alliance… but it feels weird to do so.

Grace had this idea of doing a sort of “raiding light” group one night a week that worked on trying to get the Mythic+ number as high as we could. So far however that is struggling to get off the ground given in our most immediate aggrochat crew we represent the only viable folks for this mission. I am heavily favoring Horde side since my Warrior there is 927 but most of the connections I would have to pull in people for nonsense are Alliance side. Over the coming days I might start reaching out to individuals that play horde side to see if they would be interested in shenanigans but for the moment the idea has taken root but not seen much progress.

As evidenced by the screenshot I used for this post I fired up Destiny last night and played around in it for a bit. The changes have made a lot of the weapons feel odd so in theory I will need to test everything out again to see what I do and do not like now. The fast rate of fire valkydyn that I am pictured holding above no longer feels that great. The general movement speed however does and it feels like Titan Skating is back to being a fairly viable thing once more. I am not sure if this is “just me” but I swear the grenade recharge rate was lowered once again, either that or I am still struggling to adjust to how generally slow that is. Even with double charges it was rare that it would actually be up when I wanted to use it while roaming around Mercury and doing events.

I miss Destiny 2, and more importantly I miss wanting to play it. I am not sure why I bounced so hard with the release of Curse of Osiris, and why I never actually managed to get any of the other classes in my stable through the story. Ultimately I was expecting something along the scope of The Taken King, and then was disappointed that we got something the scope of Dark Below instead. Additionally there just isn’t a grind I want to be doing there, because the weapons at least prior to yesterdays patch all sorta felt the same. Maybe now with the sandbox update there will be some reason to grind content to attempt to get masterworks for the things I want to be playing with.

The other side note is that I have started attempting to play some Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate over lunch, but quickly realized that if I want to do this thing I will need to leave the floor. We have a gaming area set up for folks to mostly play the WiiU that is hooked up there, but it does offer a bunch of really comfy chairs. Over lunch yesterday I attempted to camp out in one and do a few hunts, and within minutes had someone do a drive by and start up a conversation about some project we were working on. Basically now that I am 100% in the management world I cannot bump into someone without a conversation about something we need to deal with happening. Ultimately I like the concept of playing a little 3DS or Switch over lunch, but I need to find a hidey hole to go do this thing in.

Bad Grind Good Grind

March 27, 2018 by Belghast

I am still reeling a bit from a dream I had over night. I guess in theory you could call it a nightmare, where I ended up leaving my current job and ending back under the yoke of the one boss in my work history that I hated working for. I’ve always been one of those people who tended to naturally get along with bosses. Pending they are coming from a place of logic, I get why they want the things they want… and especially now as a “boss” myself I get how orders that seem disconnected from reality end up having to be passed down. This boss however was petty and vindictive and gave me nothing but a constant stream of conflicting information. If I did what I thought was right… he would rail on me for not doing it however the hell he wanted me to do it. If I stopped and asked for directions in how he wanted me to do a thing… he would rail on me for not taking initiative. In the end it was two and a half years of the lowest point in my career that did some serious damage to my psyche that I am apparently still sorting out.

On the gaming front however I have been playing quite a bit of World of Warcraft, mostly because I want to unlock the two Allied races that I have yet to. Let me take a moment to talk about how much bullshit the way these races are unlocked is. Primarily that it is grossly unfair that two races for a single faction are unlocked by doing content that has been in game more or less since the launch of Legion, and the other two gated behind the newest content and honestly the most frustrating to do. So I have the two horde races of the High Mountain Tauren and the Nightfallen unlocked and a monk and rogue create respectively. Now I am working on the frustrating rep grind that is roaming around Argus and doing daily quests barely watching the needle climb at all.

Argus just feels bad and was only slightly improved when I got the reputation to unlock the improved flight whistle. Why in the hell this was not a default thing makes zero sense to me. I get that they rushed this content out the door and did a lot of visual tricks that are easily dispelled the second you lift off the ground. However the constant tug of war of achieving flying only to have it arbitrarily taken away from you is maddening. We experienced this with Pandaria and then suddenly losing the ability to fly on the Timeless Isle and Isle of Giants and in both cases it felt horrible. Having a speed bump in the form of Argus still feels horrible… but I am gritting my teeth and dealing with it for the sake of racial unlocks. As to why this suddenly matters to me now? I have no clue… it could have been simply spurred on by having access to the races in Alpha.

The other game I have been playing a significant amount of lately is Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on my new pokeball edition 2DS XL. Unfortunately the shut down of MiiVerse and the lack of having any sort of a native screenshot functionality will keep me from actually capturing any shots of my gameplay. However this has sorta become my evening retreat as I chill out doing some monster hunter from bed before finally heading to sleep. I find having some sort of a wind down activity helps a lot and at least thus far this fits the bill nicely. I do however have a USB to 3DS charging cable at work so I might start taking this with me and playing a little over lunch now that I am getting into some of the more exciting activities.

I’ve not made it terribly far but at this point I have taken down two monsters: Velicidrome and Seltas… both of which I need several more parts from. I have the mission to hunt the Great Jaggi so I am likely to attempt that next because I need a single hide to upgrade my current sword and shield. Not sure why I have not broken out my beloved Longsword yet, but for the moment I opted to stick to the starter weapon. In truth in Monster Hunter World, the Sword and Shield is probably my second favorite of the weapons so I am in part using MH4U as a way to get more familiar with its quirks.

How quickly I have taken to this game in the relatively short amount of time I have been playing it… tells me that Monster Hunter World is not necessarily a fluke for me. Sure it was this amazing gateway into a very complex game… but the core mechanics are ultimately the thing that is keeping me there. I’ve had similar experiences with Generations, but I feel like 4U does a much better job of easing you into the game and giving you some semblance of a story to care about. At some point I fully expect to return to Generations and push a little further given that I have yet to actually get to a single real monster there.