World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 41 of 139

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.

Fast Boat

March 22, 2018 by Belghast

One of the interesting things that has happened over the last few days is that I apparently got invited to the Battle for Azeroth expansion alpha. I happened to notice this Tuesday night when I opened my battle.net launcher and found the World of Warcraft tab was trying to patch something. Sure enough upon further inspection I did appear to have access to the alpha client in my version selector drop down. I also noticed from social media that a few other people seemed to be indicating the same, so I am guessing there was a whole new wave of folks entering the testing. The thing about alpha testing that is legitimately an alpha… is it is as much a burden as it is a privilege. Yes you have access to something that most people don’t and that in some ways is inherently cool… but also it becomes your responsibility to go out into the unfinished world and help stop bugs that you will encounter.

First off let me get this out of the way… Battle For Azeroth Alpha is in fact an alpha in functionality and in name. I’ve been in so many different versions of Alpha programs over the years and even in Blizzard terms occasionally those Friends and Family Alphas feel “almost finished”. This time around BfA feels very much a work in progress and with significant functionality either missing or not entirely working. For example I spent the beginning of my evening testing an area of the game where quest tracking was not functional at all, and I sorta had to wing it given that I could not really see what was required to finish any of the quests. One of the more interesting things of note is that the Kul Tirran side of the house appears to have a flight path system that is in truth a series of extremely high speed boats, example is the one I am on above.

After spending some time bug noting Alliance side I rolled a Horde character and the Zandalari areas seem to be a bit more finished. Those areas had a proper quest flow with tracking working and advisement of where I should be going for the next quest. In truth that probably means that I should not be spending too much time in Kul Tiras until they have had a bit more time to flesh it out. I did however report a ton of instances where things were clipping oddly, or in one case where my camera was being pushed up through a when I stood in a certain spot. I guess that is part of the responsibility side of Alpha testing, that you need to vary your feedback based on what phase in the zone development they are in.

Sure I bug noted the fact that quest tracking was not working… but after doing that it seemed nonsense to keep reporting it each time I turned in a quest in that area of the game. Instead I started working on reporting the base pop and terrain anomalies, since they are likely the parts that are being worked on at that very moment. Ultimately my goal is to spend a little bit of time each night working on testing content, because I feel like since I have eyes on the game… I should be helping to make it better for launch.

The gaming for fun side of the evening was spent over in Monster Hunter World which received a patch. I did not actually defeat a Deviljho last night, but I saw several of them as they interrupted my other hunts. It is in fact as nonsense as everyone seemed to make it out to be and I am hoping that maybe tonight I can devote some time to actually purposefully hunting one or two of them to get used to how those fights go. The focus of my evening last night however was finally getting Thalen through Nergigante. It has been a goal to make sure that everyone gets off high center with this fight in part because it seemed to take me so long to do that myself. Everyone was more than willing to lend a hand in my hour of need so I feel like it is only right to keep paying that forward.

Additionally I like the fact that I now feel pretty comfortable with this encounter and could always use more monster bits. While waiting around for Thalen to finish up a hunt we started talking about our stats… at which point I joked that I changed my guild card title to Pure Long Sword at some point. I really have in fact been focused on only this one weapon for awhile as you can see by the fact I have done 253 hunts with Long Sword and the closest second is hammer with 7. Both Tam and Ashgar have way more spread graphs when it comes to weapons, and in truth I probably should as well. I should make a point of trying every weapon and seeing if there are hidden gems out there that I might ultimately like. My biggest problem has been that I just didn’t want to take resources away from my current longsword crafting projects to create other weapons.

World Scaling Thoughts

January 19, 2018 by Belghast

Firstly since I was absent in making a blog post yesterday I feel like I need to address said lapse. I’m dealing with this horrible strain of the flu that has been going around. I was in fact one of those people who had the flu shot early in the season as soon as my work offered it, and still managed to catch it. Last week I went to the doctor and they misdiagnosed me with a bad sinus infection. As the week carried forward and I was not getting any better I went back to the doctor and this time around they thought to swab me for influenza. I feel horrible because I probably infected a bunch of people during that weeks time considering people are dropping at my work like flies. The biggest challenge of this batch seems to be thinking… as in stringing together a sequence of thoughts into something that makes sense. I tried it yesterday and failed… primarily because the topic I want to post about involves a little finesse. However here I go attempting to make a post work in between the coughing spells.

On Tuesday January 15th the World of Warcraft was once again forever changed with the introduction of patch 7.3.5 and World Scaling. You have to understand I have been thought a lot of emotional tinges about this sequence of events and it really has taken me this long to be able to sit down and formulate my thoughts. Now this is something that I had been wishing would arrive in World of Warcraft for so many years before there are lots of games out there that do it really well. Prior to the patch I had been furiously leveling a Tauren Hunter and upon logging in I had the immediate guttural reaction of “Gah! This Feels Horrible! LOGOUT!!!”. The longer I have lived with these changes the more nuanced my opinion has become, and today I am going to try and weave it all together into something that makes sense. Firstly lets talk about what leveling has been like for the last few expansions in the heirloom economy. Putting on a full set of heirloom items turned you into a god and you could pretty much roll though content with impunity. With zero hyperbole… on my beast mastery hunter I could pretty much oneshot every single mob in the game while doing level equivalent content. This had a bunch of positives and a bunch of negatives… the negative being you weren’t actually doing any of the content legitimately. The positive is it allowed you to tackle all of those boss level encounters and made up for the fact that the zones you were leveling in were effective ghost towns and you might never actually see another player.

The other side effect is that you could level exceedingly fast because of the sheer volume of things you could kill in your wake. You could pull big and pull sloppy and shake it off knowing there was virtually nothing the mobs could do to you that would actually kill you. This meant that on a really good night I might be able to do twenty levels of content, and on average something along the lines of ten to fifteen. It was not unusual for me to do literally all of outland in a weekend afternoon buzzing from 58 to 68 in a single sitting. The changes have firmly closed this era of the game. Speed leveling is probably still possible but the definition of fast has changed considerably. In the nights after the patch I have played with many variables but for the most part it is a really good evening if I see two dings. In addition to the lack of speed is the constant fear of death as even wearing a full set of heirloom gear I feel just as weak as if I were wearing greens. I am constantly in peril of pulling too much or the wrong combination of mobs at the same time and maybe not being able to live through the damage. Previously food and bandages had no value at all because you simply did not need them… but I find myself utilizing both again. The big boss encounters however are the problem because once again… there is no native population of players leveling through these zones anymore. There is no one in zone shouting that they need help cleansing ursoc for example… an encounter that is still mostly unsoloable for anyone but a tank with some sort of health regeneration of their own. The island full of all of the boss encounters in Grizzly Hills… I couldn’t even get through one of the mini-bosses let alone the final encounter that requires burning down the boss while also managing large waves of adds. Essentially if a quest rewards a blue item… it is probably off the menu for solo players to ever attempt because due to world scaling there will never be a time when it is far enough beneath your level to comfortably solo.

So do I mourn the old fast and silly leveling with heirlooms? Admittedly a little bit. Because it was fun to feel that powerful and get through the content that quickly. However I also realize it was a bit much and lead to all sorts of problems like being unable to kill something slow enough to complete any of those “use item while weakened” type quests. Level scaling in truth is good for the health of the game because it means everyone will be actually doing the content in the game rather than buzzing past all of it. Essentially everyone will be leveling every alt now like they were leveling their first. I am sure Heirlooms do speed things up still, but it isn’t nearly as noticeable as before. The problem I see however is that in the new economy… the survival capabilities of various classes are likely going to need to be tweaked. I’ve been playing a bit as Survival Hunter… and there are just certain encounters that I cannot handle by myself. I take too much damage and cannot chew my way through the hitpoints before they chew through mine. Survival is a fairly sturdy class, so that tells me lots of other classes are going to have pure hell in this new world order. I am not sure what sliders they have to tweak how the content feels, but this first pass feels like it lands a bit to much on the side of unforgiving brutality at times. There have been several times I have had to log out and walk away from leveling… because it was annoying me too much. Leveling alts was always my moment of zen and my happy place… and now it is stressful. Again a lot of the problems are with the fact that while the world is scaling I am still utterly alone in all of these zones with no help to be had from another player happening across my path and maybe seeing I am in trouble. The general world sorta feels the way that Argus feels at times when you are a little undergeared…. and maybe that is the problem. Heirlooms previously were supposed to scale like you were wearing the best blues you would wear at a given level. There should never be a time when you feel undergeared for the content… but unfortunately that is mostly how I have felt every moment after the patch.

Essentially it is an adjustment period, and I will have to get used to feeling weak again. I think in the grand scheme of things this is probably a good step for the long term health of the game. I just have to learn that I can’t fly nearly as close to the sun as I used to.

On The Mend

January 16, 2018 by Belghast

I am mostly among the living. Yesterday was a federal holiday here in the United States and with me being off work… it also mean’t that I largely treated it as part of the weekend for blogging purposes. I am still fighting the same crud that I had last week, but it feels like at some point on Monday I turned the corner. While I still have the vestiges of whatever bronchial mess has inflicted me, I am starting to feel better and less like an appendage of the couch and or bed depending upon the time table. it truly was a miserable weekend and while I attempted to game I was not terribly successful at anything until yesterday. I spent most of the break working on the Tauren Hunter who has now finished the Outland and is knee deep in Northrend just starting the Grizzly Hills area. My hope is that when I ding 74 the bear spirit beast will be up and I can collect it for my pet. Up until this point I am mostly running a Fel Corehound that I got from the Blasted Lands. I took the Beast Mastery talent that allows your pets to shadow step… so it is entertaining watching him leap up on targets rapidly. At this point however I can kill most mobs well before my beast even has time to interact with it… which is the life of running full heirlooms.

Sunday I indulged a really weird whim and decided to reinstall the Arc client and give Neverwinter a spin. I’m on the PR feed still from Perfect Worlds and they are constantly putting out press releases about content releases to this game. It got me wondering what the current state of matters is when I have literally not heard anyone talk about it in almost two years. It turns out the game is in pretty great shape as far as actually logging in and playing it. As far as doing its best to feel insidious from a loot box standpoint… it is also working on winning some awards. I don’t remember much about the game if I am being very serious, but you know that thing that we chastised Call of Duty WW2 for doing at the beginning of the year? Where if you get a drop the game announces to the rest of the world what you just got? That apparently happens in Neverwinter as most of my time spent in the central hub area was a constant stream of people getting loot drop rewards. In the very short time I played yesterday I got somewhere around 25 loot crate drops from random stuff while doing quests. Each one of these crates would require a key which runs roughly $1.25 each without any of the “buying in bulk” discounts applied. Through the quests I wound up getting three free keys to open three sample crates and if the ones that drop in the wild are at all similar to what they gave us as “examples” for why we should buy into this system… they were full of utter garbage. If you can however do what I started doing and just vendoring the damn crates for a few copper each time you saw one drop… and loot past the money grubbing nature of the game… the core feedback loop is actually rather enjoyable. I think when I logged in last night I was around 16 left over from my initial push around launch and I believe I logged out for the evening around 25/26ish. During all of that time I enjoyed the core game quite a bit so long as I completely ignored the multiple currency cash shop nonsense. If you can do the same then you too will probably enjoy yourself.

Last completely random thing I did last night… is patch up and log into Elder Scrolls Online. This game is in fact the same as I remember it and still rather enjoyable. The biggest problem I will have is trying to sort out exactly what I was doing when I was last playing. I am still being insanely stubborn and wanting to finish all of the original three story arcs before doing any of the newer content. As a result I believe I am somewhere in the middle of Malabal Tor during my Aldmerri Dominion play through. From there I will at some point venture forth into Ebonheart where maybe just maybe I can play long enough to see the character that was inspired by me and some of the folks we play with. I think the fact that I jumped around so much last night… but still managed to get a bunch of play in with each jump… is probably proof that I am on the mend. In truth a good chunk of this weekend was spend with me just staring blankly at things without really doing a lot of interaction. There were several times that I would start up a YouTube video that would then cycle through a whole bunch of things before I even realized I was still watching something. Now however I need to go warm up the car and prep myself to venture forth into the frozen tundra (for Oklahoma at least). Tonight will likely either be more Neverwinter or ESO because I had a lot of fun playing both.