World Of Warcraft

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Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker

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In yesterday mornings post I showed off briefly my transmog to go with the hidden protection warrior artifact appearance, but I have yet to really talk about it.  I have to say when I saw the protection warrior artifact during the lead up to the legion launch, I was more than a little underwhelmed by it.  However over time I came to love it, largely because of the lore behind it.  This is of course a spoiler so if you have not unlocked the protection artifact, and want to be surprised… then I guess skip this post for now.  Essentially the shield that you pick up as part of the artifact quest chain was crafted from one of Neltharion’s scales.  Yes I mean Neltharion… not Deathwing… as in before the transformation happened.  So that alone made me a bit more excited to wield the weapon, however when I found out that the hidden appearance was a Deathwingy version…  I knew sooner or later I had to get it.  Now apparently in beta this appearance was just sitting out in the open in the Vault of Neltharion area in High Mountain, so for awhile I started making the occasional trip through that region to see if it happened to be up.  I had largely forgotten about the appearance however in the hustle and bustle of gearing and tanky bits.  A few weeks ago however I found out that apparently the appearance was alive and kicking in game, and that supposedly there was an easy way to get it.  That easy method involved standing at the torch in the Vault of Neltharion and running a  script to see if the quest trigger that makes the shield appear had fired.  Now unfortunately I learned about this… two days after they had applied a hotfix to make the logging thing stop working… and instead give players a single chance each day to get the quest.

/run print("44311:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44311))
/run print("44312:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44312))

So for the last few weeks it has been a nightly occurrence to log in, make a beeline over to the Vault of Neltharion either by running through the path of Huln from Thundertotem or flying directly to the vault via Obsidian Overlook.  To explain what the above script does, is that when placed in a macro the first check is to see if the shield has spawned for you and is lootable.  The second check is to determine if you have already spent your once a day attempt to get the shield.  You are going to see an awful lot of “false, true” on those two before you finally see one that shows as “true, false”.  Basically running the script saves you wandering through the cave checking every single kobold gold pile, because apparently it can show up on literally any of them.  The biggest problem is that I am not exactly sure what triggers eligibility for this quest.  The only certain requirement is that you be at least Artifact Knowledge 5 to unlock it.  However others are claiming that you need to have read the artifact book in your class hall, and still others are claiming that it has something to do with the Xe`ra quest chain that lets you see events through the eyes of Illidan.  Supposedly when the quest triggers you see an emote in game and hear a gigantic roar…  this never actually happened for me during the time when the script actually returned true, so don’t count on that part.

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Here is a shot of me standing beside the shield on the pile of gold.  Note this is not the same pile of gold that I saw in earlier screenshots of how the process works, so I think that quite honestly it can be any of various gold piles that are guarded by kobolds.  Another thing of note… I have also heard that if you die it can reset the flag so I highly suggest you do not take the level or risks I did in trying to get the shield.  I did the traditional warrior tank thing and pulled literally everything up to the pile where the shield was and tanked it down.  On second thought this was probably not the most prudent way to do this… but dammit I was excited.  There is a certain level of paranoia and superstition now associated with this quest for me.  As a result I thought I would basically run through all of the various things that might be triggering it.  I cannot state that any one thing did it, but I had just wrapped up a bunch of stuff the day I finally got my shield.  So here was the status of several variables on that day.

  • Had obtained Artifact Knowledge 7
  • Sitting at Revered with All Legion Factions
  • Had just finished Xe`ra quest chain before attempting
  • Read the Artifact Book in Class Hall before attempting
  • leap down from Skyhold to Highmountain
  • flew to Obsidian Overlook
  • entered Vault from that direction firing script as soon as I saw the “vault” name text show up

Like I said… none of these or all of these could be significant… or this could just be the ramblings of a madman.  Either way I am happy to have my new shield and mace combo and now I am working on the other hidden color schemes.  It seems like these are the same requirements regardless of hidden artifact appearance or class.

  • Complete 100 Dungeons using a hidden artifact appearance.
  • Complete 200 World Quests using a hidden artifact appearance.
  • Kill 1000 Players using a hidden artifact appearance.

or you can just do what I do and periodically run this script from a macro to see what your present status is.  I basically just recycled what was my Vault macro, and turned it into this one.

/run local q,x,_,a,b = GetAchievementCriteriaInfo,0 for i=1,11 do _,_,_,a,b = q(11152,i) x=x+a end local _,_,_,c,d = q(11153,1) local _,_,_,e,f = q(11154,1) print(“Dungeons: “..x..”/”..b) print(“WQs: “..c..”/”..d) print(“Kills: “..e..”/”..f)

Which simply causes some numbers to print to screen indicating how many of each item you have completed.  In any case good hunting and hopefully you too will find your silly shield so we can stop caring about the Vault of Neltharion!

 

Raiding Upkeep

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This is not exactly a topic I planned on talking about this morning, but in truth it is a pretty fresh one for me as well.  This morning while doing my early morning trying to find excuses not to start blogging thing… I encountered this topic come across my feed.  The interesting thing about it is that I am currently living on both sides of this statement.  Firstly…  I have lived most of warcraft life in a perpetual state of poverty.  For years I dealt with tanking repair bills, and even then never really got used to using the whole making gold off the auction house thing.  My preferred method of earning gold is laying waste to zones… but that has never really been that lucrative.  By now any profits that I gained from the era of hot and cold running garrison gold is disappearing rapidly.  On the other side of this coin I am part of the leadership of a fledgling raid, and our folks… myself included are running into the same lack of ability to really afford the normal trappings of raiding.  For now we have been eating up the stock of Warlords era flasks… just to feel like we are doing something, but those are not that useful with the mudflation of this expansion.  Right now in theory every raider needs cloak, ring and neck enchants, gems, flasks, and if we want to get really serious about things two potions per attempt.  At this very moment the prices for these items on my server are kinda madness.

  • Good Ring Enchants – 10,000 g (each)
  • Good Neck Enchant – 25,000 g
  • Good Cloak Enchant – 2000 g
  • Primary Stat Gem – 25,000 g
  • Secondary Stat Gems – 2,000 g (each)
  • Flask – 2,000 g (each)
  • Potion – 1,000 g (each)

So to walk into a raid night as good as you can possibly be, carrying a single stack of potions you are well over the 100,000 gold mark.  I have long since ceased to have that sort of money, and am presenting sitting around the 17,000 gold mark on my Main, with a few other characters that I could potentially steal gold from in the 20,000 range.  In theory I should be selling enchants to make money, but getting the materials has been its own challenge.  With everything functioning off of personal loot, the only way I get materials is if something is simply not an upgrade for me.  Now my guild is pretty awesome because it has been tradition lately in runs that they trade over anything that cannot be used for me to disenchant.  The challenge there however is that I have gotten enough materials so far to do one and a half neck enchant.  The material cost for everything is just insane right now, and as a result…  since we are not really a progression raid we have not pushed the point.  I personally have gems and enchants on everything, and have been using last generation flasks just to feel like I am doing something.  I am passing out as many ring enchants as I can since that represents the cheapest thing I can do, but even then…  a single ring enchant is 10 dust, which represents me eating 3-4 green pieces of gear or shattering 3 blue crystals.  My stock of materials is pretty much spent at this point, and I have only outfitted a handful of people in enchants.

We are in a similar boat with wishing the raid bank could be chipping in more.  We just are not getting enough of anything to be able to pass it around freely so right now…  folks are largely dipping into whatever profession they have on their alts.  Traditionally when a new expansion launches I play through whatever characters interest me, leveling alts as a method of relaxation.  This time around… I am absolutely leveling whichever alt has the profession I am finding myself really needing.  I pushed up Exeter my Paladin because I felt like I needed a miner to feed engineering on my main…  however I am wishing I had instead pushed up either my gemcrafter or my alchemist.  Presently I have been working up the alchemist, but so far it feels like there are just so many other things that I need to be doing, especially considering we are under a world quest faction bonus event.  More important than that… I through some strange string of luck have managed to get two legendaries already… so I absolutely need to have that 15,000 order resources ready and waiting in a few days for me to start researching that final trait that will allow me to equip both of them.  Ultimately it feels like there is simply too much to do right now, to shift into the mode of trying to find ways to make money to be able to afford your raiding upkeep.

The real challenge is of course this is the sort of expansion that brings back folks from the mists of time.  We have had so many people renew their accounts that have not touched the game since Cataclysm, or at least since Pandaria.  The problem is these folks did not have a pile of gold built up from the era of free garrison money.  I admittedly did not milk that as much as I should have because I was off playing other things.  Alt proposed that if it is that important that we have the Token system, but that seems horrible.  Not that she said it, because I don’t necessarily think she was being completely serious, but that it is something to consider.  The problem with this theory however is that right now those tokens are only going to get a player about 35,000 gold which seems insanely low when confronted with the price of things.  That would be able to afford you a neck enchant and a single ring enchant at the prices things are going for your $20.  My personal theory is that all of the crafting materials are purposefully painful, as a way to soak up all of the excess gold that is floating around on the server from the garrisons mistake.  Then at some point in the near future, be it 7.1 or a hotfix…  across the board crafting materials are going to be reduced making literally everything easier to create.  As a long time enchanter, I have seen this happen so many times over the expansions where enchants are mindboggling insane at the launch and then are later tempered considerably.

Where the real pain is happening is that those of us who did play Warlords are going through a bit of whiplash.  Tradeskills in general have gone from a complete polar shift, going from being extremely casual and something that everyone can do…  to being something extremely difficult to even get materials for.  As an example… even after crafting goblin gliders for basically anyone in the guild who wanted them this expansion…  I am sitting on a stockpile of over 2000 True Iron Ore on Belghast.  Comparatively I have less than 300 Leystone Ore so far… and that is from both my miner actively mining anything I come across in the world, and my main running the salvage armor shoulder enchant.  This post might be coming off  as complaining at the current state of things, but in reality I am mostly okay with it.  That said I have just had to come to realize that we are not going to have a raid of fully flasked players every single week.  If I cannot bring myself to spend that kind of gold just for the privilege of raiding casually…  I am certainly not going to expect anyone else to do it.  Similarly I also remember a time before flasks in raids was an expected thing at casual levels.  Hell our progression vanilla raid maybe had a flask on the tank, or on a handful of overachievers… but the other 34 of us seemed to get along just fine taking bosses down without consumables.  I realize fights are scaled completely differently now… but my ultimate hope is that consumables become an edge that players can use if they choose to afford it, but less of a hard requirement.  I realize this is going to mean we are progressing slowly, and I am largely okay with that… given that I am raiding this expansion to hang out with my friends more than anything.

Fox Battle Buddy

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I am a simple man made up of many rituals.  When one of those rituals is broken… things tend to fly out of control.  This morning is a prime example of this, considering I am getting a super late start to writing a post.  The normal sequence of events was interrupted and in the process I wound up fiddling about for far too long and now am under the gun to produce a post.  In truth I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning other than to show you my awesome new mount.  The luck truly has been with me over the last week, what with getting the legendary belt, a 870 ring from the raid… and the drop needed to start the fox mount quest in Suramar.  There are supposedly a whole bunch of ways to start this quest, but I got mine from one of the daily emissary loot boxes.  Whatever the case it all starts with receiving a Torn Invitation, that immediately turns around and unlocks a series of four day long missions in your Order Hall.  From there you get a quest out in Suramar called Volpin the Elusive that involves saving this fabulous mount, or at least the Fox that becomes the mount.  My head canon is that the fox is so grateful for protecting him from the mean hunters, that he decides to be our lifelong battle buddy and going off on adventures with us.  In any case it is a very different looking mount, much shorter to the ground than is the normal case and because of this it makes it feel sleeker.  This is coming from someone who was already used to riding around on the fairly sleek Spectral Tiger.

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Other than the mount I managed to push my paladin across to 110 last night while roaming around in a momentary lag in the dungeon running.  In truth I wound up running a normal Eye on him to help out some guildies, and that gave me the initial push needed to cross the finish line.  The only problem here is that there is one entire zone that I never touched, which means I am not only trying to hit Friendly with Nightfallen but also needing to go over to Val’sharah and do the same for the Dreamweavers.  Essentially the number one priority right now is unlocking world quests.  That will allow me to casually gear this character without really needing to push super hard.  If I just pop over and check to see what pieces of gear are available I should be able to get to fighting condition in no time at all.  Additionally I plan on starting to focus on my retribution weapon whenever I unlock the first gold trait on my tanking set.  The truth is I am far more likely to gear the paladin doing LFR as Retribution than I am as a tank… I just found it super handy for leveling purposes to push up without the threat of death.  It is always handy being able to talk for friends, and being able to pull literally whatever I wanted with zero threat of death is always favorable to killing things quickly for me.  Playing a tank in an MMO feels akin to playing god mode, which is simply something that is hard to get used to NOT having.  In any case… I need to wrap this up and get on the road, but I am sure this weekend will be filled with dungeons and more faction work on the paladin.  Hopefully yours is relaxing and enjoyable as well.

Arbitrary Gates

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thundergodsvigor

Yesterday I talked about my feelings regarding Destiny and the Rise of Iron Expansion.  However I could have just as easily have talked about my insane good luck.  What I mean by that is to the best of my knowledge I am the only person to get one of the new legendaries in my guild, or at the very least only one in as far as the guild activity log on the armory scrolls back.  I managed to pick this up Monday night during a Mythic Maw of Souls… and I am still insanely pumped about it.  The Thundergod’s Vigor works nicely for me… considering how damned much I love to thunderclap.  Similarly I really need to get better about using Demoralizing Shout at opportune times… so Thunderclapping my way to more casts of it also seems awesome.  Then again there is the simple fact that all legendaries seem to drop at 895 item level, which serves as a nice boost for me in that department as well.  Then there is also the added benefit of it being an item from Diablo 3 which only adds to the coolness factor as far as I am concerned.  What I was not however expecting is that it apparently sends out an alert to the entire guild when a legendary drops…  which is in part what makes me think that I might legitimately be the only person in guild with one so far.  I feel extremely lucky, but at the same time sort of sad that these are not dropping for everyone.

A huge chunk of what makes Legion interesting to me is the interaction of these legendary items with the rotations of the characters.  That is the part that I love about Diablo 3, the way a certain item you pick up can completely change how your character functions.  It was my hope that the new legendary system would add some of this element to World of Warcraft, and at least it seems it might.  However if they remain super rare items that you may or may not see ever during your play of the game…  it takes one of the cooler items and locks it away behind at gate that few players are ever going to breach.  For as awesome as Legion has been, there are a lot of items that just feel odd.  For example last night I participated in the first of the LFR content associated with Emerald Nightmare.  I went into it expecting that nothing that dropped would actually be an upgrade for me, but I was however hoping to maybe complete a quest or two.  Now my friend Grace said she was able to complete her skinning quest without issue, however for me… I was not able to loot the item needed for In Nightmares.  Which seems a bit crappy, and has caused Blizzard CS to come out and state that this is “working as intended”.  However it feels like a massive let down to those hoping to complete the Balance of Power quest line and get that item appearance… but that cannot realistically do anything other than LFR.

Granted I am not necessarily in that category, because we have a raid group that is planning on working on this stuff tonight in fact.  It just feels like an arbitrary bar given that for many of us at least we have been working towards that item appearance since the moment we knew it was a thing.  Hell I am even considering pushing my way through some of the PVP objectives just to unlock those appearances and that feels significantly more casual friendly than this one does.  I mean I guess in some way it makes sense, there are large groups of players that seem to want some visual representation that they are “better” than other players.  At the very least this seems to be a vocal group on the forums and twitter, and represented the large chunk of the opposition to the Friendship Moose community and the practice of dragging friends through getting their special mounts.  It is my only hope that we can do some of this for my own guild once we have the bosses needed for the Balance of Power quest line on farm and can realistically pull random people in to get quest steps unlocked.  Arbitrary gating of content and sitting it up on a shelf just too high for players to ever reach… is one of the things that frustrates me about the MMO design.  LFR used to be this happy medium that let people see the storyline, and complete quests associated with taking out these bosses but I guess with Legion that is changing.  While so much of Legion has been this great step forward, this feels like a stumble backwards.