World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 57 of 139

Plus Anxiety

October 25, 2016 by Belghast

Me and this chest do not get along well. It is not so much that the chest itself offends, or the items that come from it… but instead the process of getting it to unlock. When I first heard about Mythic Plus dungeons… I thought it was pretty freaking great. It sounded a lot like the Greater Rift system in Diablo 3, and I was completely on board with it… until I actually set down to do one. I don’t handle timers well, namely they cause me so much more anxiety than they should. Literally if you put the easiest quest in the world on a timer… I will avoid doing it like the plague because it feels like every fiber of my being has to be concentrated on beating that timer. I mean I should have know this going into Mythic Plus content given that Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 cause the exact same sort of roller coaster of stress. To make matters worse… the first several keystones that we attempted we failed at miserably, which made me feel like the biggest failure of a tank in existence. This mental block against timers goes way back in my psyche, and it isn’t something I can entirely control. Once upon a time when I was a youngin… I went from being in the highest performing mathematics class to the lowest performing one… all because of a timer. There were these worksheets called mad minutes, where you were judged on how fast you were able to do math problems… not how correctly you worked them. The grading scale was skewed in a way that not making it to a problem was twice as bad as missing one. I’ve always been a fairly pensive person, and even though I push myself not to be… that is my nature and when you put me on the clock it puts me into panic mode.

All of this said… last night we ran two Mythic Plus dungeons and we were able to complete both of them before the keystone expired. So I guess I am managing the panic mode, well enough to push through a dungeon in time to get progress. Now I will probably NEVER go for the whole multiple chest bullshit, because I lack the drive to attempt to get multiple chests… when the loot in said chests is more than likely shit. On the positive last night I managed to pull a 5 item level higher version of the trinket I like, getting it at 845… which still seems really low to me given the effort. That however is a completely different rant for a different day because honestly I feel like every tier of mythic plus is 5 to 10 item levels too low for the effort spent in running it. What is the tale of today however is that apparently I am working through my anxiety with being on the timer. I still over prepare for this process and try and make sure there is nothing that could possibly interrupt my focus while running the dungeon. It was a huge boon last night when we got revenge on Halls of Valor… which is one of the early pluses that we attempted and failed at least twice. The entire goal of last night was simply to get the chest from our order hall unlocked that you can see above in the screenshot from Skyhold, however I will absolutely walk away with two victories that beat the timer… one of which was good enough to absorb a wipe on the final boss and still managed to pull out a win. Plus will likely always be a stress factor for me, because that timer… feels so insanely oppressive. I tried my best NOT to watch the timer, because it is one of those situations that so long as I didn’t think about it I was largely fine.

Two More Fall

October 20, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a pretty great night. For the last several weeks since Emerald Nightmare released, Wednesday nights have been raid night. At this very moment we are just raiding one night a week, and at first that probably held us back a little. However given the last two weeks I think overall gearing was a bigger issue. Last week we went from only being able to take down Nythendra to adding Elerethe Renferal, Ursoc, and the Dragons of Nightmare to the list. Though admittedly both the Ursoc and Dragons kill felt like sheer dumb luck and bursty dps. This week however we largely added to the mix what felt like repeatable versions of those kills. Myself and Art the other tank finally sorted out something resembling a workable taunt rotation on Ursoc, and the fight went from being insanely spikey…. to pretty damned easy. Similarly with Dragons of Nightmare we just straight up did the fight like we knew what was happening this time… and it went down in a single attempt. Elerethe would have been a one shot were it not for both of us tanks getting knocked off the platform. That was not my proudest moment.

However I am in fact super proud that we managed to get things together for Il’gynoth and added our very first kill this week. Overall it felt like our dps increased between the two weeks, and with it a better sense of what needed to die when. Instead of leaving the Horror up for quite a while we had nice gaps to burn it in… and while we cut it a little close for comfort at around the 10 seconds until wipe mark, it was still a victory. From there we decided to take a stab at Cenarius and actually extended past our normal run time because we made decent progress on the fight. It still feels like there are a lot of levers we could and should tweak to make sure that fight is more repeatable, however we got the kill and hopefully will begin work on Xavius next week. I realize this is “just normal” as the chorus of the more serious raiders might say… but screw it I am happy with our progress. I feel like we are even probably going to start mixing in some heroics before too much longer. Especially with the release of Karazhan on the 25th and it adding some additional gearing options for folks. I am hoping to get a team going there pretty quickly, because I am more excited about that place than pretty much any content in any MMO. I loved the original Karazhan and good or bad, ran it quite literally every Sunday afternoon for what felt like two years to help gear folks and their alts, only to later be replaced by Zul’Aman runs. I think more than anything… most of us are simply going to be happy that before long we can complete the balance of power quest step and move on to the next batch of mythics.

Plenty of Tinfoil

October 14, 2016 by Belghast

Lately it has felt like there has been a bit of a mass exodus of folks leaving Blizzard or at least the World of Warcraft team. The highest profile of these of course was the departure of Chris Metzen, but yesterday another fairly high profile name joined the group. Tom Chilton posted a note on the forums stating that he would be leaving the World of Warcraft team to join an as yet unnamed project. This leaves Watcher… aka Ion Hazzikostas in charge of the team. This of course is simply two folks leaving a game… but in between there have been a number of lower profile departures as well. The rumor mill of course starts churning and contemplating what might be going on at Blizzard to spawn these events, and honestly I think something more benign is at work here. For some of these folks… they have literally been working on the exact same project for over a decade. Imagine if you, in whatever your line of work… had to work on exactly the same thing every single day. Granted at Blizzard there is a lot of room to branch out and work on other teams as new games come down the pipeline, but I have long felt that WoW was essentially the product that no one seemed super excited to work on.

I feel like it is time once again to dredge up “The List”. Years ago there was a supposed leaked list of expansions, that in theory covered the entire planned arc of the World of Warcraft franchise. Of note… this list was floating around the interwebs before the launch of Burning Crusade, and I remember seeing it roughly the same time as the original Naxxramas patch was released. I myself wrote about it prior to the announcement of Cataclysm, trying to draw upon it for wisdom as to what the path forward might be. Cataclysm honestly threw a giant monkey wrench in the proceedings, and from that point onward it stops being terribly accurate, but for both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King it was down right prophetic. What I think we can draw from it now however is that the “Legion Set” was always something that was planned to wrap up the cycle of World of Warcraft. I believe that from day one, it was the intent of the original WoW team to bring us back into conflict with The Burning Legion, and it was simply a matter of figuring out what path we would take to get there. For the sake of having this list in a more modern post I am reprinting it below.

Draenor Set

Azuremyst Isle – 1 to 10
Bloodmyrk Isle – 10 to 20

Eversong Forest – 1 to 10
Quel’thalas – 10 to 20
Hellfire Peninsula – 58 to 62
Zangarmarsh – 60 to 64
Terokkar Forest – 61 to 65
The Deadlands – 63 to 67
Nagrand – 64 to 68
Blade’s Edge Mountains – 66 to 70
Netherstorm – 67 to 70
Shadowmoon Valley – 69 to 70

Northrend Set

Borean Tundra – 67 to 70
Howling Fjord – 67 to 70
Dragonblight – 69 to 72
Grizzly Hills – 70 to 73
Crystalsong Forest – 72 to 75
Zul’drak – 73 to 76
Sholazar Basin – 75 to 79
Storm Peaks – 76 to 80
Icecrown Glacier – 78 to 80

Maelstrom Set

Gilneas – 77 to 80
Grim Batol – 78 to 81
Kul Tiras – 79 to 82
Kezan – 81 to 86
Tel Abim – 83 to 85
Zandalar – 84 to 87
Plunder Isle – 86 to 88
The Broken Isles – 87 to 90
The Maelstrom – 89 to 90

Plane Set

Pandaria – 1 to 10
Hiji – 10 to 20

Wolfenhold – 1 to 10
Xorothian Plains – 10 to 20

The Green Lands – 88 to 91
The Dying Paradise – 91 to 94
The Emerald Nightmare – 94 to 97
The Eye of Ysera – 97 to 100

Deephome – 88 to 91
Skywall – 91 to 94
The Abyssal Maw – 94 to 97
The Firelands – 97 to 100

Legion Set

K’aresh – 96 to 99
Argus Meadowlands – 97 to 100
Mac’Aree – 99 to 100
Maw of Oblivion – 100+
The Burning Citadel – 100+++

So at least in part… I think some of the recent leaves from Blizzard or the WoW team… are because the job if finished. Now please do not mistake me saying that I feel like World of Warcraft is done… but what I am saying is that the original story arc has reached its conclusion. There were a lot of changes and reworks as time went on.. and we ended up fighting the Legion at level 110 rather than 100, but we got there nonetheless. I think for some of these folks who have been working on the product for over a decade now, there is a sense of closure. They can make a break and walk away feeling like they accomplished whatever job it was that they set out to do in the first place. I imagine were I in their shoes, it probably would feel like a great time for me to go do something else now. Among the AggroChat crew there has been a lot of discussion about the way Legion feels… and more than anything else that it feels like the first truly “fresh” content that we have seen in a really long time. There is something going on in the game, and a stark difference between the feel of the awesome intra-zone stories and the bigger factional story that feels forced in there. I think what we are seeing is the evidence of two different teams at work, with different visions and goals for the game.

So while we might be losing the old guard, it definitely feels like there is some fresh new talent coming in to infuse something exciting into the franchise. I’ve said this several times but it bears repeating. This is the first time since the launch of Catalysm that I have hope for the future of the Warcraft franchise. What I mean by that is that this is the first time in all of those years that I feel like maybe just maybe the best days of this franchise are not something we will remember fondly from the past, but instead something that is on the road that lay ahead. Almost two months into Legion I am still completely smitten by it, and that seems like a really good thing. By this point in both Pandaria and Warlords at least I was losing significant amounts of steam. Here I am still more than happy to run almost anything someone points me in the direction of. I am absolutely enjoying raiding and happy to be sitting at 4/7 Emerald Nightmare now with our super casual raid. I am interested to see what comes next, and what news might filtered out of BlizzCon about where the future will take us. More than anything I hope that the awesome Class Halls can be a bridge to get us to finally bury the hatchet and take a step away from the vision of the red versus blue game play and storytelling. I want the next decade to be one I get to share with my horde and alliance friends both.

Three Bosses Down

October 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was an interesting night raid wise. It seems like we reached some critical mass of gear to make the content largely doable. Either that or we simply spent too much time fighting with the harder encounters first. We’ve been able to down the first boss of Emerald Nightmare since our very first hastily thrown together raid on that Friday of the first week it was open. However for the last several weeks we have had a slightly shifting raid composition as folks filtered in and out of the group, including several different tank and healer teams. Last night however felt like things have started to solidify, and it really feels like a fairly solid team. The biggest problem that has been facing us was the shifting from boss to boss trying to find the next one that worked for us. On our first outing we gave Spiderbird a shot, and decided that maybe that fight had too many moving parts. Then for whatever reason… we collectively decided that Il’gynoth was the next best target. After a few weeks of wiping to the eyeball, we decided to shift focus back to Spiderbird at the tail end of last weeks raid and then were shocked we managed to get it easily to the 30% range before shit fell apart. So this week we came back and focused on this boss and after about four or five attempts we managed to push it across with a victory that felt pretty solid. Sure we were down several people at the point of the kill, but we had enough that after a little bit it felt certain we would get it. Granted we were about 45 seconds away from the enrage timer due to the missing dps.

From there we moved on to working on the Ursoc encounter because it seemed largely to be a tank, healer and coordination check. On I believe our second attempt we managed to get the victory after a bunch of shifting bits around to figure out how to handle the charges more effectively. As a tank however I have to say Ursoc is a bit of a heart attack. I was constantly praying that I would have enough rage to hit my next reactive ability to help curb the insane damage that was coming in. The constant tank swaps were a little strange to get used to as well, but Art and I managed to largely figure it out, and with it… another new boss kill. From here we moved to Dragons… and on our second attempt hilarity ensued. Several of us were down… and we THOUGHT we were wiping…. so Kylana started going into the whole spiel about how we could improve on the fight. However the remaining living tank and the dps and heals that were still up just kept on pushing forward. Apparently we were a lot closer to victory than we realized, because in the middle of this speech about the things we need to tighten up… we saw the Dragons of Nightmare killed message pop across our screens. It reminded me so much of the time we killed Sindragosa… with everyone dead. Thalen had fired the last shot and then gotten frozen… and the boss was dead but we all had to rez up and run back to be able to loot the body. Because of this fact I didn’t get a screenshot of that kill, as I was running back at the time. We put in some tries on the Eyeball but ultimately called it since it was getting close to our normal stopping time. However I will absolutely take three new boss kills in one night.