Games

I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning, apart from just how badass my Orc Warrior Lady looks in the Blackhand set combined with the revamped version of the crazy Black Temple shield and Mechanar sword.  As much as I generally did not like the story arc of Warlords of Draenor…  it produced a bunch of gear that I absolutely love.  The Iron Wrath set still is among my all-time favorite Warrior sets and I really need to put some time into farming the transmog bits that I am missing.  One of the things I realized last night is that my attachment to the Sun Eater’s appearance is at least in small part because I farmed Heroic Mechanar for ages to try and get it.  It also made me realize how different the economy of gear is now as to when it was back then.

There were items worth farming because when you got them… they would actually serve as a pretty good weapon for a good while into raiding rather than something you toss in the bin immediately.  I remember in Burning Crusade when they introduced the long and contorted weapon specializations for Blacksmithing…  those items were actually worth working towards because they would serve the player for more than a day or two.  Anything I could craft for myself right now gets tossed in the shredder the moment I step foot into a heroic or at the very least a mythic dungeon.  Those long tailed goals are largely gone from the game, the things that are worth striving towards.

I think the problem for me is that my core gameplay loop has shifted from seeking specific objectives, to gaining the next disposable item that will increase the magical number that gates all of the tiers of content in the game.  I remember there used to be a time when I would create “Hit Lists” of the items that I wanted from specific dungeons, and then set forth to run those dungeons until I completed that set.  Back then however the items in each dungeon felt unique to the location… not just super similar draws from the same item pool.  The transitory nature of the items however makes each new acquisition feel completely unimportant…  the equivalent to the commons in a pack of Magic the Gathering cards that you just skip over hoping that maybe just maybe you got something really cool in the Rare/Mythic slot.

I miss caring about the drops.  I am not sure how you go back to that era especially when the modern era is actually way more open to varied styles of play.  Right now I am largely gearing through a mix of World Questing and running the occasional dungeon.  If I were super serious about things I would be abusing the fact that I have instant dungeon queues as a tank and pug my way to glory.  At this point I am sitting at 300 item level and I need 305 to start doing heroics.  That said in truth I probably need to have a full compliment of 310 items to make heroics really viable as the person who is soaking all of the damage.

The thing is… I used to feel confident running dungeons with strangers.  Somewhere along the way that changed and I no longer feel as bulletproof and steadfast as I once was.  I used to feel like I really had a handle on all there was to know about warrior tanking.  Now I just sorta feel like a pretender in plate armor, and I think that lack of confidence hinders me so much when it comes to random groups.  Last night Grace and I ran a dungeon, and I felt like I was screwing up all of the time…  and doing all the wrong things.  I am not entirely certain how to get over that, apart from just bashing my face against the random group finder until I become desensitized again.

The funny thing is though… I don’t have reason to feel this way.  So far all of the random people we have grouped with on Horde side have been awesome.  I generally start the group with a “Hey Folks!” and unlike Alliance side I almost always get a response back which starts an open dialog that often continues during the dungeon.  I do however miss the days when I used to have a ton of active social channels on the server, and had to build groups by hand…  because then I actually got to know more people.  It is all too easy for me to stay in my comfortable bubble of people I am already familiar with rather than branching out and making new connections.  I think in part that is why I am enjoying Mastodon so much… is because it is forcing me to meet and entirely new world of people.

I feel like I need to be apologizing since you are not getting an awful lot out of me this week.  I am still recovering from whatever crud I seem to have caught, and my wife appears like she might be coming down with it too.  All this time I thought it was just super bad allergies but maybe it really did end up being some sort of a summer cold.  Regardless we ended up heading to bed around 9 last night because we were both sitting there fighting sleep.  That means I did not spend an awful lot of time playing last night, but I did managed to finish up the main story arc of Zuldazar which was very cool.  The only negative is there is a lot of stuff happening that doesn’t cleanly get resolved so I am expecting that once again the raids will act as finishing off bits of story.  It gives the players that would not normally run the raids a hook to go do them…  but at the same time it is a bit annoying that you are essentially forced to do them to see the end of story lines.

I got called out by Grace that she had not yet dinged 120, but I am going out on a limb and saying that she dinged last night.  I mean she said as much, but I also remember he saying as much the night before.  Basically at this point I cannot trust my brain because apparently whatever crud I have is effecting my memory as well.  I think I also said I was 117 going on 118…  which is not true as I dinged 117 last night.  It is little wonder that I had trouble following some of the story line throughout Zuldazar a bit.  It is my hope that this weekend I can push forward and ding 120 so I can start doing end game shenanigans.

The real hope however is that I start to feel like a normal human being.  Yesterday was my first full day back at work since Monday, and it took an awful lot out of me.  This weekend also probably means we are going to run a lot of errands as my wife realizes things she needs for the classroom given this is her first day back with kids.  It is going to be busy… and I realistically need to be back a normal operating status in order to do all of the things that need to be done.  I’ve not done any of the Developer Appreciation Week posts but my hope is to do a few of them over the weekend.  This is really not a great time to be sick, so hopefully I get over this nonsense quickly.

This morning I am doing considerably better than I was yesterday, but I am still not quite in fighting form.  Whatever crud I have has kicked my butt and I only managed to make it about three hours yesterday before tagging out and heading home.  What is annoying the most is that I feel just generally drained and awful and unable to enjoy pretty much anything I am doing.  I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to catch up on Jessica Jones Season 2 and I think I made it to episode eight before giving up for the day.  The only negative about this is that I was probably not paying anywhere near as close attention to World of Warcraft as I should have.

I reached this point where suddenly there were Mogu everywhere and I am not sure how we got there exactly.  I’ve since pieces together some of the details but I have a feeling there is a quest somewhere in the chain where I simply wasn’t paying anywhere near enough attention.  It is around this point that I realized just how damned spoiled Elder Scrolls Online has made me.  It is very easy for me to glaze over a wall of text presented with a quest, but significantly less easy for me to ignore a character that is actively talking to me.  Voice acted content makes me forget that I am effectively just doing a fetch or a kill ten quest, and instead the character I am interacting with becomes intimately more “real”.

I still largely look like a toddler that dress themselves for the first time… all I am missing is the inexplicable scuba mask and tutu.  I am trying to do this whole no transmogging thing…  but every night is a struggle.  It is funny that I am realizing how much of my enjoyment of my character is the way that it looks.  Right now I look like hot garbage and it is by reference making everything I pick up feel like it is utterly useless and disposable since it will make me look a brand new kind of awful.  It seems that there is way less loot as a whole from quests, and I think in part this is because of the upgrade-able items, however I have yet to find a weapon with Heart of Azeroth talents on it.

Ultimately this is meaning that I don’t have any gear for an offspec because each time a new weapon rolls around it is a significant upgrade to what I was wielding before and not something I can pass up for sake of balancing out my characters options.  I like the upgradeable gear, but right now I seem to keep getting the exact same three slots so I am presented with a series of lateral choices rather than building out a full set of gear.  That has always been one of my big complaints about World of Warcraft and leveling, is how piecemeal the gear ends up being and how you always have a few slots that are languishing with no direct upgrades.

I legitimately thought I was nearing the end of Zuldazar, but some events transpired that have effectively thrown me into a “world two” sort of scenario.  Quest destinations that I thought I had finished now suddenly are springing up with brand new options.  I have a feeling that before the end of this I will have arrived at every destination twice…  which makes me realize just how damned bad I am at following main story quests.  The events that shifted everything into motion…  came from quite literally the last quest I had showing on the board.  I thought I was heading towards the end conflict of the zone…  not opening up a whole new one.

Tonight in theory I should be able to push through the end of Zuldazar.  I am artifact level 10 and about 1/5th of a level away from 117, so I am sure I will wrap that up before shifting to swampland.  Grace has of course already dinged 120 because she is better at not getting distracted by shiny objects… and by shiny objects I mean mobs that look at me funny and I have to charge into.  We did run a dungeon last night and that was pretty fun.  I have a feeling though it is not going to be super popular given that there is a functional repeat of the Blackrock Depths Torch Room in it.  I feel like every set of dungeons has an Oculus, and unless there is something more heinous hidden in the dungeons I have yet to run… I am guessing that this expansion it will be Temple of Sethraliss.

Today is the official start of developer appreciation week in Blaugust Reborn, but I am not sure if I can muster any measure of a post that requires that much forethought.  I am not entirely certain if I am just dealing with allergies or if I have picked up some sort of a summer cold… but whatever the case I am miserable.  I wound up going home around one yesterday when the meeting that I had to be there for…  got rescheduled.  I am in that state where my throat is so raw that it is gagging me, which is not super fun to randomly find yourself in that state.  I’ve largely been avoiding doing anything serious and instead just casually leveling on the warrior.

It is unfortunate because I know I have friends who are chomping at the bit to chain some dungeons…  but I am just not confident in my ability to function in a group setting right now.  At this point I have finished Vol’dun and managed to get 113.5 roughly in levels and 5 in artifact power.  I have not done the faction campaign stuff at all, and in truth have largely been avoiding it.  I went into this expansion expecting for it to be pvp all the time… and have been pleasantly surprised by the lack of faction nonsense that I have had to deal with at this point.  I am afraid doing the faction specific campaign will ruin that little bit of joy I am having.

I am absolutely loving seeing what the Troll Empires were like during their strength rather than the broken down outposts that we usually encounter in game. I say outpost…  because seriously Zul’Gurub feels like a backwater as compared to Zuldazar.  The temple city is amazing…  even though I keep finding myself getting lost trying to traverse it and remember where the various things are that I need to interact with.  I spent ten minutes last night trying to remember how to get back to the throne room for example.  We largely picked Vol’dun as a way to get the desert content out of the way, since those zones tend to have a lot of oppressive sameness.  However as you can see from the above screenshot… there is a lot of stuff going on in that zone that makes it feel less like the traditional MMO desert.

The outfit I am wearing is supposed to be plate armor…  so I am not exactly sure why there is a prominent target telling the monsters fighting me where exactly to strike.  I am sure on male characters this looks like awesome troll armor, but instead I sorta get a cool looking dress….  with midriff exposed.  I started playing my Orc Female characters largely because I got tired of the Horde Hunch, where pretty much most of the traditional male horde races have a hunched over thing going on.  It has been a great experience other than dealing with the fact that so much of the plate armor has weird pieces missing for no apparent reason.  Maybe I am secretly protected by the mystical power of the male gaze?

I am trying really hard not to transmog as I level, but that may or may not last much longer.  I wonder if you poke her in the belly if she will go “Tee Hee” like a really gruff orcish Pillsbury Doughboy.  Video linked for the sake of anyone who has no clue what the Pillsbury Doughboy is… and why you would be poking one.