World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 43 of 139

Clipped Wings

December 14, 2017 by Belghast

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Last night I had every intent of coming home and playing some Destiny 2… but instead I logged into World of Warcraft to “check what gear was up on world quests” and never really logged back out. I’m still very much stuck in “must complete the emissary caches” mode and as a result I had one in Argus for the Argussian Reach faction that I lacked enough quests to complete. As a result I started unlocking more of the planet until I finally got enough to finish it out. This however was super time consuming because doing anything on Argus feels needlessly tedious due to the packed base pop and terrain that goes out of its way to keep you from going from point a to b. For my troubles I got a big fat nothing… or in truth a little bit of gold that feels insanely lackluster given the amount of effort I went through to be able to complete it. So the real question I ask to you more seasoned players that did not take a massive break after Nighthold… did they just fucking nerf emissary caches into the ground? In the past these used to be a significant source of gear upgrades, and also used to drop legendaries like candy. At this point I have no legendaries and have not seen a single piece of gear from the six caches I have turned in since starting up playing again. Is this just a bad streak or did they simply remove any reasonable rewards from these things?

I’ve managed to move the needle a little further forward and am sitting at 884 and I think 15 concordance on my two primary weapons. I still have Tomb of Sargeras LFR to do this week but in truth it seems like grinding Argus is going to be my best bet for gear level movement. The only problem there is that I hate Argus and want to nuke the planet from orbit. I mean in all reality it isn’t that bad but it just feels shitty to return to land mounts again after being able to fly literally everywhere else. The base pop reminds me of a lot of what it feels like to roam around in a Rift zone where everything is super aggro and ready to reach out and thump you if you get too close. The main difference is that at least in World of Warcraft it is completely reasonable for me to round up 30 mobs and grind them down…. because I did this thing today out of laziness and not wanting to stop. The only really works if you can keep healing yourself like the protection warrior can, but nonetheless it is a viable option. In Rift if I had more than a couple of mobs I would have fallen over, which makes the game feel super tedious to play. If I apply myself and gobble up every quest I can do on Argus each day… I may be able to purchase a single piece of 910 gear which is a slow way to upgrade but potentially preferable to hoping for lucky double platnium bonus warforged gear from LFR.

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Towards the end of the evening while rewatching Force Awakens I did wind up grinding a bit in Destiny 2 and managed to complete the Mercury Flashpoint. When I turned in with Cayde-6 I managed to get my very first Masterwork item… and I maybe just almost accidentally called it Warforged. The positive it is at least an Auto Rifle which is something I will use. Grace said last night that when she got her first… it was a sidearm… which is something that no sane and rational person would ever want to use. I was absolutely certain that the game would give me a sniper rifle or something else that I generally loathe. Then again if that were the case the decision to shard it and get crafting materials would have been simple… in this case I have the strong desire to start using it even though Solemn Hymn isn’t exactly one of my favorite weapons. As far as the perk on mine, it gives a small range boost which is reasonable enough for the moment. Were it a warforged Better Devils I might work on trying to get the best possible roll, but for now I am okay with a ranged boost. I have a late night tonight because Star Wars… but I might be able to hop on when I get home and give it a proper testing.

Deceiver’s Fall

December 12, 2017 by Belghast

What a difference a night makes. I’ve been continuing to work on my Orc Warrior was for the foreseeable future it is likely going to be my World of Warcraft main. Sure I will continue to visit Belghast and unpack him from mothballs but I’ve never really given Horde a proper chance. I am also playing way more casually as a Hordie than I traditionally do as Alliance, which seems to help my general enjoyment of the game. I know were I to start playing on Alliance again as a regular thing… I would be back in the raid before I knew it and being way more serious about the game than I really want to. Sure on Horde side there are raid options but they tend to be super casual about that sort of thing, and also tend to cram it all into a single night win or lose. I’ve been focusing more on Fury given that I doubt I will actually be tanking much other than the occasional run with friends. I got pinged by my good friend Cuppy last night as I was starting to wind down for the evening and it turns out she is a healer, and roughly the same gear level so I foresee some dungeon running in our future. As of this morning I am sitting at 866 with the only thing holding me back still a 800 heirloom trinket. I looked at the auction house options for that last night and there is no way I can justify darkmoon trinket prices just to get a very temporary boost in level.

My focus for the night was getting through as much Looking for Raid content as I possibly could given my item level. I started the night cherry picking world quests focusing on only the quests that had the potential for gear level increases. This managed to push me up to the 660 item level breaking point and as a result could start doing the Tomb of Sargeras LFR, thinking in theory that I might get reasonable gear from it. Unfortunately the luck was not on my side and I wound up walking away empty on most fights. I did however pick up a warforged breastplate and a set of gauntlets at least making the night somewhat profitable. I need to ultimately sort out re-roll tokens because I walked in without any. In the past there was some sort of a catch up mechanic allowing you to get more of the older tier of token, and I will have to figure out if that exists here or not. I had never done any of the Tomb of Sargeras so it was at the very least cool to see it. I am certain that the LFR fights don’t actually represent the real fights that well but still interesting and enjoyable. The main thing I have noticed about being horde side is that LFR seems way less toxic than it is over on Alliance. People seem to just keep their heads down and do the content without need for much bullshit, and I can respect that greatly. Maybe I just had a lucky night, but whatever the case I approve.

Against the Legion Again

December 11, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a majority comfort gaming weekend, and as a result I spent a good deal of my time working on the Orc Warrior. Sure I played some Destiny 2 and probably have some things to say about the Curse of Osiris DLC but I will save additional commentary for another day. I did manage to unlock prophecy weapons and grind out two of them in the periods of time when I was not actually playing World of Warcraft. Most of the weekend was spent leveling and I managed to ding 110 Sunday afternoon. From there I spent the rest of my time unlocking all of the stuff required to start doing world quests in Broken Isles and Argus all for the purpose of attempting to gear. After essentially an evening of cherry picking quests and doing the three emmisary caches available to me… I managed to push my level up to 846. I still have a ton of dungeons to run for the purpose of unlocking my class hall, but I do have through Nighthold LFR open to me and I am considering running that tonight for the purpose of trying to fill out some of the slots that are not amazing. Right now I still have one heirloom trinket left and that is severely dragging my average down. The other big problem I am having is that I have horrible relics and that is mostly a case of being unlock in the randomized item quests available in the world. Lastly my Helm is pretty horrible, but I could spend a little gold to bring it up a bit because its from the class hall.

It feels so odd to be doing the legion questing thing all over again on a brand new character, and I am not necessarily looking forward to doing all of Suramar or the Broken Isles storylines. That said if I keep poking around on this character I likely will just for the sake of things to do between the gear based world questing. It is going to be weird having both an Alliance and Horde main that are warriors, but then again there isn’t another class that I like anywhere near as well as them. I need to start doing a daily drive by at the deathwing alternate appearance as well. I am hoping the unlocks I did on my other Warrior will count towards that weapon appearance, but I am somehow doubting if they actually will or not. It would have been awesome if I just got them handed to me when I dinged on a second warrior, because some of these alternate appearances are worse than others. Like there is no way in hell I want to do the Corrupted Ashbringer appearance ever again… and sadly my next highest horde character is my 100 Tauren Paladin. I am thinking I probably won’t play that character until the expansion lands and just try and brush off all of the artifact madness from this expansion. In theory I should be focusing all of the classes I never leveled and working on trying to get them a class mount. Instead I am running up a duplicate class that I already have reasonable geared on the other side of the fence and cursing the fact that the faction wall exists in the first place. All of that said though… I do find the design of Legion and the micro-goals spread across my map a really relaxing way of spending an afternoon.

Grind to a Halt

December 4, 2017 by Belghast

When we last visited my Orc Warrior on this blog I was just about to start the Warlords content, and this week when I have not been poking my head into Destiny I have spent it pushing forward in World of Warcraft. It’s honestly been a shock just how fast leveling went until I hit Legion content. The old world was a confusion slog where I jumped zones each time I saw an exclamation point show up on the adventure guide. This meant I was constantly jumping zones every few levels and most of that journey was a complete blur. When I started Outland I did the majority of Hellfire Plateau then jumped over to Terrokar Forest for a little bit before finishing up the grind in Nagrand. From there I jumped to Northrend and did a good chunk of Borean Tundra before jumping to Grizzly Hills and doing most of it and finally leaping over to Scholazar Basin to finish the run out. From there we entered the Cataclysm zones and did all of the 80-85 grind in Vashj’ir without actually completely finishing that zone. Then came Pandaria and I managed to do the entirety of the 85-90 grind without leaving Jade Forest. From there I went to Draenor where I managed to hit 98 by doing the entirety of Frostfire Ridge and finishing up with just a tiny tiny bit in Spires of Arak.

This is the point where the express elevator has come to a grinding halt and I’ve been confronted with normal speed leveling because all of my heirlooms petered out at 100. I chose to do Stormheim first largely because it is both my favorite and least favorite zone at the same time. All of the Norse themed Vrykul bits are awesome, but all of that faction nonsense is not. It did give me access to another Order Hall champion quickly however so I am down with that. At this point I have finished both the main story arc of the zone and the faction bullshit arc and am likely to move on to the next area. There are a lot of things I have noticed… not the least of which is how ridiculously huge this shield is on my female orc warrior. It is as thought they scaled the shield for the insanely bulky male models and then just called it good enough for the female ones. The second of which is how much more intricate and slower paced the Legion content is compared to Pandaria or Warlords. When I leveled through the content it seemed really quick, but what makes things slog a bit in comparison to what came before is how fragmented the quest hubs quickly become. This might also be an aspect of the map itself feeling so busy with so many world bosses and objectives hidden out there to slow your journey down. I cannot resist wasting a few minutes to find a chest that is nearby or going after a mini boss, and as a result my leveling pace has gone to hell.

At this point I am contemplating investing in a set of Heirlooms which will set me back quite a bit of gold. It isn’t as much about leveling quickly, it is more about not outpacing the gear I am wearing…. and also not looking like I am picking up scraps from the battlefield while I level. I’ve liked making outfits for my character up until this point and then progressing my way through the content without having to care too much about swapping out items. In a perfect world Warcraft would have heirlooms for every slot and I could simply level my alts without ever having to worry about swapping gear out. With the new races coming in I fully expect to be leveling a lot more alts, and in truth investing in plate 110 heirlooms now will probably helm in the long run given that I tend to play plate wearing classes more than any others. I am still really bummed about the direction they are taking with artifact weapons. I would have loved to see them turn them into leveling heirlooms much the way that the items that dropped off Garrosh in Pandaria served this purpose. It would have been a fitting end to a really awesome chapter of the game to be able to then use those weapons to level your alts. Still having a lot of fun but I am also ready for the ride to be over and for my character to get geared up.