World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 60 of 139

Operation Hey Folks

September 16, 2016 by Belghast

For the last week and some change, I have been running at least one dungeon a night. Often time I am queuing with less than a full party. This is a situation that generally causes me great anxiety, because I like going into a group knowing that folks I know… outnumber the folks I don’t know. I said awhile back that I have been trying to force myself to be more cordial in dungeons. As a result I have adopted my common “Hey Folks” and “How Goes?” greetings. My friend Grace that I am often dungeoning with has been doing the same. Mostly we had a discussion awhile back about how this is the common expected behavior in Final Fantasy XIV, and that maybe if we attempted to treat World of Warcraft the same we might get similar results. Folks in FFXIV are largely charming and willing to help you sort out mechanics that you might not understand, all just because you spoke up and said you were new to a dungeon. My experience in the past of WoW has not been nearly that charitable, but I was willing to give it a shot either way. The awesome thing about going in with the majority of a party… it means the moment someone resorts to toxic behavior you can punt them quickly. All in all I have to say I continue to be pleased at just how well this is going, even in Heroics. If you present a friendly face, more often than not it has been met with a similarly friendly response.

Last night we had someone drop shortly after introductions… which I am hoping was just a case of them getting disconnected or being needed elsewhere. However others in the party not only were cheery but performed admirably. At the end of the dungeon run we took time to praise the Deathknight for example who did an amazing job of pull casters into the group, and pulled off a clutch rez when our healer inadvertently stood in some “bad”. All of this is really making me wish that World of Warcraft would adopt a commendation system similar to Final Fantasy XIV. I think a lot of that culture is based on the fact that at the end of a dungeon run, each player gets a single commendation that they can give to someone in their party. There is the additional caveat that you cannot give commendations to members of your own guild, meaning you have to be giving random strangers these nods. To make it something that folks are actually interested in receiving there are a number of achievements based on the number of commendations you have, and some of the rewards are things like mounts, titles and cosmetic items. Basically the system would port perfectly to World of Warcraft random dungeons, and give some additional reinforcement of good behavior. Last night for example I greatly wished I had the ability to heap tangible praise on this Deathknight for doing a pretty amazing job all around. Even the mage that ultimately replaced the dropped Demon Hunter, was deserving of commendations because for the most part everyone “mechanic’d” like a pro.

Other than dungeons, last night I spent most of my time attempting to catch up in Suramar. I had been lagging behind horribly in the questing there, namely when it comes to unlocking things in the actual city proper. I am not a huge fan of stealth mechanics, and it is foreign to me to attempt to sneak around. A huge part of me wants to simply fight my way from one side of the city to the other… but the sheer mob density here makes that not really a viable option. Similarly I don’t believe a lot of the quests are actually open to you unless you are wearing the illusion. As Tam and I have commented… Suramar is like being a High Elf Enchanter in Neriak… for those who ever had that experience in the original Everquest. The illusion works most of the time, but occasionally there is someone all to happy to murder you. As you progress however you start to build little enclaves where you are more or less free to roam safely. Last nights grind was focused on getting far enough in to be able to start unlocking some of the lucrative world quests, one of which yesterday was an epic trinket. Before I went to bed last night I managed to unlock the dinosaur quest… which is truly amazing and with it the trinket world quest. Nothing quite as fun as riding along on the back of a devilsaur and gobbling up demons and evil elves.

Accidentally Epic’d

September 15, 2016 by Belghast

I figured this screenshot was appropriate this morning because this if anything else is how I feel. Ragweed is my direst of dire enemies. It has always been a problem for me and continues to be this day. I feel like I am a bit of a walking zombie and I didn’t really know completely why until I watched the forecast this morning. Sure enough ragweed pollen is spiking like mad right now, which explains the constant congestion, watery eyes… and general inability to breathe. On a day like today all I really want to do is to either go back to bed and hide from the world, or snuggle up in a cocoon on the sofa playing video games. The problem with this plan however is that our human resources department is being super bizarre with sick leave. I have almost 400 hours of sick time built up over the years… yet they tend to freak out any time someone actually uses some. What is the point of giving us sick leave… especially in the hundreds of hours territory while being stingy with actually getting to use it. So instead of chilling out on a day like today when I am not really a fully functional human being… I am going to shamble in my undead state to the office and mash keys with confused fingers.

One the WoW front however, as of last night I am missing one ring and a belt from being completely purple once more. The strange thing about this process has been that I didn’t really do anything super intentional to get there. Through unlocking my class hall, completely its mission… and then spending order resources to upgrade items all the way to 840 I got a big chunk of the way there. From there it has simply been doing any items that were upgrades each day from the world quests. The end result has been the least grindy gearing process I have ever gone through. I just played the game and did the things I enjoyed and before I knew it I was sitting there at 838, a reasonable level to do just about anything available in the game right now. The truth is I have only actually run two dungeons in heroic, and while I have done a slew of normal dungeons they were always for some other purpose than just grinding. Either I needed something for a quest or a friend of mine did… and we ventured forth and had a grand romp inside. It has been amazing just how painless and seamless this entire gearing process has felt. For a long time I have given credit to the way the catch up mechanics felt in Final Fantasy XIV, but even there you had to have a focus on actually running content to get gear. This time around it feels like I just did the things I would have done normally… and accidentally got epic’d.

Short and Long Game

September 14, 2016 by Belghast

Last night is a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me. When I first got home I piddled around for a bit doing the few world quests that actually had upgrades for me. I managed to pull out another 835 trinket, and a 830 Iron Relic which combined with a 830 necklace that I got much later in the evening takes my overall item level to 834. For the most part every single night I am doing two things. Firstly I am knocking out the four quests that are required to get me the emissary chest with whatever faction is highlighted. After that I check World Quest Tracker to see which rewards might be upgrades, because as my gear level has gone up… the sorts of rewards available to me has also increased. For example when I checked a few minutes ago before sitting down to write this blog post I had an epic chestpiece somewhere in Azuna with roughly 20 hours left on it. For those not familiar with the addon, it gives players a similar view to the mobile app in game and allows for the tracking of individual world quests. This is super handy because when you are tracking one… it then also shows up on your flight map so you can see pretty easily which location is the closest to the quest you are trying to finish. It also color codes the quests so you can see which ones are expiring soon. This way if you are trying to complete every possible quest, you can make sure you get those with a short timer on them done so you don’t risk them expiring.

After hopping on voice chat we organized into a group, because in part we were looking for something to do with Tam who has been working on a Monk healer. I needed a quest for enchanting from Halls of Valor… because even though I have done this place five times now the staggering of quests meant I kept needing something from it. The positive is that we could run a dungeon with him… the negative is that because of his “just boosted” gear score we had to zone in manually. What was awesome about the run last night though is that Grace has done quite a bit of healing on the Monk, so Tam and her talks about which abilities work for which fights as we went through the dungeon. By the end Tam was Mistwalkering like a pro, and I went from having to largely keep myself alive with Ignore Pain to not really even getting close to dying at all. The other thing we noticed is just how ridiculous the range on the Monk healing statue is. It seems to be most of an instance worth of distance… and I am not entirely certain that when it finally stopped healing… that it was due to range and not due to line of sight. We finished the dungeon successfully and it broke up the logjam that seemed to be my enchanting progression. After completing that one quest I got four other quests that unlocked a series of endgame neck enchants. Grace and I were talking a bit about this problem last night, that while I really enjoy the quests… it is going to make tradeskilling on alts a pure nightmare.

After the dungeon run, the group broke up as Mor and Ashgar needed to go off to bed… or whatever it was that they actually did. From there Grace and I decided to work on some of the Gold Dragon Wardens quests. These show up on your map with the traditional elite boss seal around them, and represent tougher group content. Sometimes these are reasonable to solo… other times they simply hit too hard or have too much life to be reasonable. While they are not often soloable, they generally speaking can be duo’d with my protection warrior and her mage. I can keep myself alive mostly long enough for her to burn it down and more often than not when we actually get to a given location… there is already a group starting the fight that we just hop in on. So I started the post with a statement about last night being a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me, and all of these examples are why. I started off the evening soloing, then pulled together a group and ran a dungeon… then continued the grouping in a much smaller scale with tracking down a bunch of elite world quests. I went from solo, to group, to duoing… all in the same night and it felt seamless and largely effortless to find some objective that felt valuable to do in all of those cases. Eventually I am sure raiding will be added in to that mix giving me a whole new level of things to do with friends, all the while constantly feeling like I am moving the needle forward. Legion is doing an excellent job of giving me small term gains, but still keeping extremely long term goals present and making me feel like I am constantly inching forward towards them. Now I just want them to keep this up for the rest of the expansion and continue this feeling into the next.

Breaking Silence

September 12, 2016 by Belghast

After the challenges of last week, this past weekend was largely a time to chill out and relax. On the “paw” front I am pleased to announce that the round of IV antibiotics seemed to work pretty well given that the swelling is largely down as is the redness. There is one spot that is a bit troubling, but we are watching it. I am guessing that the location went a little deeper than the rest and as such might take a little longer to recover. There is always the fear that the bite penetrated a tendon or something else, but we will continue to watch it as it hopefully heals. On the gaming front… I had all of these grand ideas about running nonstop dungeons, but what happened in reality is that I wound up chilling with the wife downstairs and watching various stuff on the television. It felt like it would be an invasion of the peace and quiet to get on voice chat and start talking “strategery” and such. What happened instead is that I queued up a few times as a pug dps, and spent time working on older stuff in the meantime while waiting on that lengthy queue to pop. Of note on the Ruin server group, the queue time for a DPS is about 45 minutes, which means I had plenty of time to work on other objectives while waiting on the queue to pop. I spent some time in Warlords farming spawns attempting to get my Shatari Defense reputation up… because I am admittedly a bit jealous of Grace and her amazing fire mammoth mount that she keeps running around on. The only problem there is it seems with the opening of Tanaan Jungle at least one of the farm spots has been nerfed into the ground… and Shattrath city has spawns really far apart making it hard to gather things up and AOE them down with whirlwind spam.

Another queue I wound up spending on the Isle of Giants in Pandaria where I learned a few key things. Firstly once again it is hard to gather everything up and AOE it down… because my aggro radius is minuscule now with the dinosaurs. Second I can apparently now easily solo Oondasta as Fury, so that is going to go on the mount farming list. The white raptor mount has been something I have worked on for awhile, and yesterday I ground out the last 2000 bones roughly. The queue popped before I could actually turn in, so I had to finish things up after the dungeon. The real takeaway from the weekend however is… my theory of treating World of Warcraft like Final Fantasy XIV seems to largely be working. Upon entering a dungeon, be it as tank or as dps… I do my customary “Hey Folks” which seems to unjam the conversation mechanism. Then throughout the dungeon folks tend to be willing to talk, but if I don’t say anything… it seems like folks are willing to just ride along in silence because there has always been the wowism that silence is preferable to dealing with assholes. The thing is… I think we can do better and a lot of the negative opinion folks have of this community is due to the fact that folks are willing to either put up with bullshit in dungeons because they want it to be over and don’t want to have to deal with another 45 minute queue. I am not sure if it is going to help, but I am absolutely making an effort to talk to people be it in my Class Hall fielding questions like I did yesterday… or running a dungeon, or even out in the world while doing an objective. I think most of us just simply assumed that no one was willing to have conversation, and I am trying to flip that assumption on its head.

The other big thing from the weekend is that I started work on my second character. Some time ago I started Exeter my Paladin off by getting Lightbringer. However after swapping Belghast to tanking, I am finding it way easier to quest like a madman in that mode. So as soon as I hit 102 I did the quest chain to pick up the second artifact, and had been holding artifact power items in reserve for awhile. Unlike Belghast I have a clear path that I am planning on working towards first, which I guess makes the experience feel more purposeful. On the Warrior protection tree there were so many cool things that I wanted, but none of them seemed to be clearly better than any of the others. Paladin it feels like there is one right choice for survival, and I am going in that direction first. Largely I devoted the time spent during the podcast to working on this guy, and by the end of the night I had hit 102 and was off into tanky land. I apparently also unlocked one of the appearances so I quickly swapped to the purple look and used it as an excuse to rock my purple judgement set. The one set that I wish existed in game is the yellow judgement set that you see one of the NPCs wearing. As it stands I have normal, Blue from the opening of Wrath event, and purple from the BC era heroics. This really is the best looking tier set in the game, and I wish more recolored sets would show up in dungeons, which reminds me… at some point I really need to work on farming up the turquoise wrath set. In any cases it was a good weekend and fairly relaxing, but it is my hope that with the week I will be back doing dungeons with friends again. I am now up to 823 item level on Belghast, which means I need to be hitting up those heroics.