Morning Folks! Right now I am pretty much splitting time between Diablo IV, Guild Wars 2, and World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix. Last night for example I farmed the world boss in D4 and got another level, and then did a round of dailies and some World vs World in Guild Wars 2, and finally settled into some leveling in PMIX as I seem to be calling it. At this point I am level 30 and have just entered the Valley of the Four Winds… or more so that first rest stop just inside the zone. I have to say that it has been a while since I have experienced any of the Pandaria content and I feel like collectively we the players… judged it way too harshly. Currently, the mechanical state of World of Warcraft is in one of the best states it has ever been, and combining that with a more classical era World of Warcraft expansion… is absolutely wonderful and refreshing. Not that Dragonflight, Shadowlands, and Battle for Azeroth were bad… but they don’t feel anywhere near as “epic” as Pandaria did. The whole stranger in a strange land aspect of the game really works here.
Last night I also unlocked the first of the exclusive mounts, the August Phoenix. This comes from leveling any character to 20 during the Pandaria Remix event. I guess my long-term radar for playing this event is to try and gobble up as many of the exclusive rewards as I can. A number of these are tied to quest completion and finishing each zone’s story, and other batches are tied to purchases with the event currency Bronze. I am pretty much ratholing all of my bronze to this point because I am still seeing viable upgrades from drops. I feel like at some point that is probably going to stop and I will need to invest in some of the big upgrade items from the vendors. For the moment I am holding onto as much of the event currency as I can until I know specifically what I need to spend it on in order to be viable.
One of the things I think I briefly mentioned yesterday but did not really go into detail on is the Cloak of Infinite Potential. This is an item that you get from completing one of the very first quests before diving into Pandaria proper, and it grows with you as you adventure. At seemingly random intervals you will find threads of time from defeating enemies and they will add equally random stats to your cloak. I figure at some point in the far future I will have an equal number of stats in all of the possible columns. The other aspect of the cloak is that as you collect threads, you gain achievements that will cause your alts to start out with ever stronger versions of this cloak adding to the replayability and speeding up your leveling process from that point forward. I already feel exceptionally powerful as is, but it will probably be truly silly to level an alt once you have a fully unlocked cloak.
The other thing that I thought I would give some examples of is the various special gems that I am picking up and slotting into my gear. Like I said yesterday prismatic gems are good old fashioned stat hits, but throughout gameplay, I am picking up all manner of unique abilities and procs that I now have associated with my gear. Of these, the only one that is an active ability is “Lifestorm” which is a big AOE lightning attack that heals me when it finishes. Trailblazer is one of the movement abilities that you slot into your boots and most of these are active, but this one just gives you a 30% boost most of the time you are out of combat. Slay is just “does an execute” which is pretty amazing and I am a fan of the two fire-based procs as they seem to be firing off all the freaking time. All of which is making this experience feel way more interesting than leveling would normally be.
Getting used to hotbar combat again is very much “a thing”. However, all of the tweaks and changes to the normal formula of World of Warcraft combined with seeing a living breathing world full of players who are actively calling out world boss spawns… makes this feel like a totally different game. I feel like the experiments that Blizzard is trying with these alternate variants of World of Warcraft are probably paying extreme dividends in player engagement. While the Battle Royale mode was not really my jam I still gave it a shot and found it at least partially enjoyable. Pandaria Remix is entirely in my wheelhouse and the fact that it is a 90-day event gave me the drive to go ahead and give it a shot. So as much as I hate FOMO mechanics… it seems to have worked on me this time.
One of the best aspects of fan-run private servers was always that they could have slightly modified rulesets. Project Ascension for example is an attempt to take World of Warcraft and make it completely classless. I’ve not played it but it certainly seems interesting. It feels like the core Blizzard team is maybe taking inspiration from some of these custom server types out there and deciding that they can in fact do that as well. While “Retail” World of Warcraft may never really be my main squeeze again, I fully support nonsensical alternate realities like Pandaria Remix. Maybe the future of Warcraft is not a single monolith but a bunch of custom slices that cater to specific player interests. Classic Warcraft seems to be thriving and I can see timewalking remixes thrive as well pending they roll them out regularly enough.
Have you been playing Pandaria Remix? What are your thoughts so far?
Whelp friends… I hopped on the bandwagon. I had finally seen enough folks talking about Pandaria Remix that after an evening of doing content in Guild Wars 2 I decided to fire it up and create a character. Since all of my Alliance characters are on Argent Dawn, I created my timerunner there and decided to choose a Dark Iron Dwarf since I had never leveled one of those since that race was added to the game. What is so weird about the way this works is that it is created as a normal World of Warcraft character on a normal server, but you ultimately play with only folks actively playing the remix content. When the event is over in roughly three months these characters transition to normal World of Warcraft characters and as such this becomes an alternate method for leveling something all the way to 70. Where this experience differs from normal leveling is that you start at level 10 and work your way up through the levels entirely on the Pandaria continent meaning there are significantly lower requirements to get into things like raids and scenarios.
The other thing that is significantly different about this experience is that normal loot does not exist. instead of quest rewards you get an item called the Cache of Infinite Treasure. Inside of these are what I can only describe as ARPG loot with some seemingly random stats and sockets for you to slot special kinds of gems. So far I have encountered Prismatic gems which give you a bump to a specific stat, Tinker gems which give you some proc or ability that can be used in combat similar to a trinket, and Cogwheel gems which give you a new ability that your class might not have had access to. For example, I found a gem that just gives me the Mage spell Blink. I have no clue yet how deep this rabbit hole goes because I have not made it super far, but so far it seems really cool.
Everything in this alternate version of Azeroth revolves around a currency called Bronze. This can be looted from individual monsters, is the reward for quests, and can be received from the loot boxes. You are also given an ability called the Unraveling Sands which pops up a crafting bench of sorts allowing you to salvage any loot you no longer need and turn it into Bronze as well. From what I understand there are traders scattered around Pandaria for the Infinite Dragonflight that allow you to trade in bronze for various items, some of which are unique to this game mode and I believe will transfer to your other characters after the event is over. Bronze becomes the currency you also use to buy eventual raid gear or probably more important mounts that are unique for this event like this 4400 Bronze Pterrordax.
I had a lot of fun last night and honestly, probably more fun than I have had since Pandaria originally shipped. Seeing this expansion again makes me realize how not into the last several World of Warcraft expansions I have really been. Pandaria has some deep Northrend vibes, of going to explore a whole new continent and seeing everything shiny and new about the cultures. I have no clue how far I will actually get in this because I would assume at some point it stops being fun and starts being super grindy… but until then it is a super chill way to play. Based on the general reception I am seeing, this seems to be breathing life into the game for a lot of folks. It is a more “classic” experience without falling into those super hardcore tropes, and so far it seems like everything is “Solo-Self-Found” to use the ARPG term. I don’t see a way to trade with anyone as mailboxes are turned off and you are walled out of guild banks or being able to leave the continent in any way.
Weirdly… the whole ARPG trope works for this experience. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those things that folks demand stick around in some form or another.
I’ve been kicking around this topic for a while now, and it seems like a good one to close out what has been a fairly busy week. This blog got its start originally as not only a World of Warcraft blog but more specifically a World of Warcraft Warrior Raid Tanking blog. From 2000 until around 2015 this blog was largely dominated by an endless cavalcade of MMORPGs. They were truly my primary gaming outlet and any time a new one queued up I was there with the rest of my friends grinding out a new batch of characters and classes. It was a love affair that started with Everquest and just kept continuing each time a new latest and greatest game was on the horizon. In part, I was enamored with the concept of playing with so many other people and most of my long-term friends stem from one or more of these games. Hell the entirety of the podcast I have been recording for over a decade, are folks that I met through Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
Tam and Kodra date back to my early days raiding with Late Night Raiders, and Thalen was a member of a competing raid that occasionally subbed in for assorted content. Ashgar is someone that Tam and Kodra met when they left Argent Dawn and was someone I was ultimately introduced to when I talked them back to the server for Cataclysm. Ammo I knew her mom first, but also stems originally from World of Warcraft on Argent Dawn. Grace/Ace is someone I met on Twitter but roped into our nonsense in Final Fantasy XIV and ultimately became someone that I am close enough to that I consider my sibling. The entire reason why I got on Twitter in the first place back in 2009… was to have a better way of communicating with other bloggers and more specifically the Blog Azeroth folks. I am uncertain I ever would have been attracted to the platform were it not for the rich MMORPG gaming community that I found there.
The problem is that as my life changed, and the bulk of my active gaming group shifted two timezones away… I found myself in a position where I was drawn to MMORPGs but largely ended up never playing with anyone else. I reached the point in my life where I could no longer stomach the late nights of staying up until 1 am and then getting back up at 5:30 am to start the next day. I needed to take better care of myself and also started getting more real-world responsibilities that required it. Around 2013 I shifted from being a worker bee, to a team lead, and eventually to an official supervisor. Then in 2017, I made another big shift to Management. All of this… brought a dislike for actually having any modicum of responsibility in my downtime. So I went from being a Guild Leader and occasional Raid Leader first… to trying to stay in the background and take on as little responsibility as possible.
I loved raiding in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and spent a lot of time leading raids over the years. However, I reached a point where I was no longer willing to give up multiple evenings of my time for the express purpose of progression. From 2004 until around 2012 I was devoting at least three nights every single week to raiding, and pushing everything else to the side. Once I stopped raiding… it became harder to work it back into my schedule. I made attempts to raid seriously again during Warlords of Draenor and Legion… and over in Final Fantasy XIV during A Realm Reborn and Heavensward but all were relatively short-lived. Legion I made it through a few tiers of content and Heavensward we never really made it past the Extreme Primals before I faded into the background. I would always get to the point where I was dreading raid night, because of the loss of freedom it posed.
In spite of not really having active groups on demand like I used to during most of my World of Warcraft days, I still actively pugged. My class of choice has always been some form of a Tank, which meant that I needed to take on a lot of responsibility in dungeon runs. I am not sure if the groups got more aggressively toxic… or if I just became less tolerant of other human beings, but over the years I found myself not wanting to run dungeons with other random players anymore. I built up this mental block to the responsibility of leading a dungeon, and I’ve found it extremely hard to get past it. While I still like the concept of tanking dungeons I just never do it… not unless I have at least one friend along with me. As my time tables shifted out of the range of most of my friends… it just meant that I didn’t run group content anymore.
I am legitimately not sure how it started, but in 2015 I got pulled into running Seasonal content in Diablo III with my friend Grace/Ace. I had always been a fan of the Diablo-like ARPG genre and often played them in my downtime from raiding or other MMORPG shenanigans. I fell in love with Diablo in college and obsessed over the game and then followed the long sequence of games that came after it from Dungeon Siege to Sacred to Titanquest to more modern games like Grim Dawn and Wolcen. Running Diablo III Seasons with Grace gave me all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… all the fun of rushing through the objectives and trying to build a powerful character as fast as you could… all condensed within a few weeks. Then I could walk away, do other things, and know that in three or four months we could do it all again.
More than that ARPGs gave me all of the complexity and loot chase that I craved, but the ability to take all of it at my own pace. I could play rich and mechanically interesting characters and did not need other players to accomplish any goals that I set out for myself. Sure it was fun as hell to play with friends whenever our paths happened to cross… but I never found myself in a holding pattern needing more people to make something happen. That was always the worst part about playing MMORPGs… was the waiting around for something to happen. In the early days of World of Warcraft, I had fostered this arcane tapestry of social channels that I relied upon to be able to form groups… but even then having access to all of those people and so many different relationships… it would still sometimes take upwards of an hour to get things started.
Playing MMORPGs in a post-dungeon finder economy meant that most people were not actively creating groups. Those who did exist in the group finder were divorced from any personal connection and often had a wealth of toxic behavior associated with them. It just became easier for me to be off doing my own thing and having a less rewarding gameplay experience… than to subject myself to having to deal with other people. Even when the groups went smoothly and everyone was kind… the imagined specter of potentially being called out for missing a cooldown or not mashing my buttons hard enough or in the correct order was enough to keep me from ever trying most nights. Occasionally I would get brave and put myself out there… and those were often the times that I ran into the worst possible individuals.
For years Final Fantasy XIV was the exception to the growing toxicity of gaming communities. It was downright wholesome in comparison and there were so many moments like above where someone needed to AFK and all of the players just chilled out and chatted while waiting. However with the downfall of World of Warcraft and the mass migration of players to XIV… with it has seemed to come a lot more of those cultural norms. Now I have friends talking about struggling to find a static raid group that does not require you to use tools that violate the terms of service. I’ve absolutely seen a lot more talk of damage numbers and open calling out of folks who are not performing up to some imagined bar in the few groups I have exposed myself to. All of this just makes it that much harder to get over my growing mental block to putting myself out there.
If I were the type of player who could happily subsist on casual “Stardew Valley” style gameplay, I could probably still find fulfilling gameplay in MMORPGs. I am not that player. I love loot and quite honestly the only reason why I started raiding in the first place back in World of Warcraft is that I wanted access to shiny purple items. Sure raiding with other people is its own kind of rewarding, and sure it feels great to finally take down a boss… but it feels much better to get that item you have been trying to get for months. Legitimately I probably had more fun in World of Warcraft raids by soloing them years after the fact… than I ever did actually doing them legitimately. I liked collecting things and I absolutely loved collecting appearances. That sort of mindset was not always conducive to a need-based or points-based raiding economy.
Do you know what causes endless mountains of loot to climb? Action ARPGs absolutely do, so much so that we set up complicated loot filter systems in order to show us only the “best” items, and even then… nonsense like this occasionally happens. So it was a few months back that I realized that a lot of my shift from MMORPGs as my core focus to ARPGs is that it largely scratches all of the itches for me. I can play with friends and have a heck of a lot of fun when our schedules happen to align, but the rest of the time I have endless progression and complexity buried behind a constant dopamine hit of loot acquisition. I get all the things that I love about MMORPGs but none of the obstacles standing in my way.
More than that I get to feel like I am part of a larger community and get to help others in their own progression. I get so deep in the weeds at times when I am writing about ARPGs, but I feel like someone out there is benefitting from the nonsense I am doing. Then there is the whole concept of guilds and shared stashes that let me legitimately help my friends who happen to be playing along with me. Games like Last Epoch and the resonance system allow me to share items that I have collecting dust in my massive treasure trove… even if I was not playing with a friend at the time it dropped. Bel League in Path of Exile was a heck of a lot of fun, and while it seems like most of the AggroChat crew is over that game… there will be times in the future when I can share things through the Guild Stash with other players who are active in the game at that time. If nothing else my blog and my constant ramblings serve as a locus of information for anyone who might want to get into these sorts of games.
That is not to say that I don’t still play MMORPGs, but when I do so I go into them knowing that I am likely never going to actively group with another player. I think this is why I have had a bit of a renaissance with Guild Wars 2 because it is a game that lets me do large-scale raid-like events in the open world… without ever having to organize or manage other players. I had a heck of a lot of fun recently playing through the Dragonflight story, and doing some of the World Quests in World of Warcraft but also reached a point where I felt like I had experienced enough of that game. At some point prior to the release of Dawntrail this summer I will pop back into Final Fantasy XIV and complete all of the content I have missed and then happily play through the new expansion, but also know that once the credits roll I am probably out again.
For the foreseeable future, I am very likely to be devoted almost entirely to ARPGs, because they scratch the right itches for me and fit my usage patterns. I’ve had similar phases with Monster Hunter World or whatever the latest Looter Shooter happens to be because they operate in similar patterns. I had several weeks of joy when Enshrouded launched into early access because it gave me a lot of the same dopamine hits. I don’t think it is that any of the MMORPGs have changed… and more that my patterns of play have changed. I’ve just finally reached a point where I am ready to accept it and stop trying to push myself to do things that I no longer find as comfortable as I once did.
Anyways! I had been kicking around this topic for a while now and like I said at the start… it seemed like a decent way to close out the week. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you all on Monday for a recap of whatever the hell I end up doing this weekend.
Shocking to no one… I’ve found myself back maining a Righteous Fire character. This time, I converted my Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain over to Righteous Fire, and in the grand scheme of things, it is going pretty well. I do not feel anywhere near as strong as my Juggernaut did, but for playing a very tanky Righteous Fire character, this might be a viable alternative to Inquisitor. I am hoping that maybe we will get a new alternate quality gem that restores RF to its former glory, but if not… I think I can be happy enough with Chieftain going forward. My comfy space seems to be alternating between T11 Cemetary and T12 Tropical Island and then trying to stack on as much juice as I can get from the mists.
My focus over the last week or so had been trying to get levels so that I could add a Medium Cluster Jewel with Fan the Flames. This essentially gives you Elemental Proliferation at the cost of SEVERAL passive points. I accomplished this at 95, but I have to be honest… it wasn’t really that big of a bonus. I am already running Berek’s Respite which gives me something akin to Elemental Proliferation any time I kill something that has been ignited. Since Ignites can’t stack… it essentially just didn’t add any significant bonus to the build. I’ve since specced out of this medium cluster and distributed the points around the board into more life which in turn should translate to both more survival and more damage for Righteous Fire.
We’ve also decided to let our Private League lapse into Trade League. There are essentially 8 days left in the league and at that point all of our characters will transition over into Affliction Trade. This is going to open so many doors for making minor tweaks to my characters, the one I am looking forward to the most is Boneshatter. I still feel like I have not given Boneshatter a proper shake, so when the private league collapses I think my first goal will be getting that character some better gear. I would really like to reach 100% spell suppression and have a MUCH higher damage Two-Handed Axe. It will be a challenge dropping into the league so late and being so relatively “poor” as compared to where I usually am at this point in a league. I have enough of a stash of Divines though that I should be able to make some movement on my characters.
Lastly this morning I recorded another one of my dumb videos, this time attempting to explain what I have been talking about regarding the SkyScale versus World of Warcraft Dragon Riding. Mostly after being used to instant mounts having to wait three seconds feels like an eternity. I show off some gameplay of GW2 specifically flying around on the SkyScale and then show some Dragon Riding and talk about its positives and differences. Maybe with some footage, it might finally start to make a bit of sense.
