World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 40 of 139

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.

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.