World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 83 of 139

Goodbye Names

June 23, 2015 by Belghast

Preorder Announcements

This is a topic I have mulled over for several days, and am just finally getting around to posting. I have had a fairly rocky relationship with Guild Wars 2 that started with me bowing out of their alpha program and ended with me finally finding my groove a few months back and getting my first character to 80. The game is enjoyable but honestly it is not the kind of enjoyable I had hoped it would be. Which was all the more surprising when I found myself oddly riveted to the presentation at Pax South in January. I thought maybe it was the energy of the crowd, but whatever it was I found myself actually looking forward to the Heart of Thorns expansion. I have always liked Dark Knight type characters, and the Revenant looked very much like a character in my wheel house. So as we moved into E3 I was looking forward to seeing more information about the game, namely about the release date, pricing information, and what the guild hall system would end up being like. In all cases I pretty much got what I was hoping for, but upon seeing the pricing something struck in my craw.

As I looked through the options available on the website… the Standard, Deluxe and Ultimate versions all included the previous game. I kept looking for the versions of the game for players who bought the game at launch and had no need for the base game. Problem is there wasn’t one, and there was not planned on being one. Ultimately what I was looking for was a $10 or so price break on purchasing the game, to acknowledge the fact that I have owned their game forever now. The funny thing is… had they not mentioned anything about the core version… it probably would not have annoyed me at all. I guess I am not alone in my frustration because yesterday Arena Net announced that they would be giving Veteran Players an extra character slot to make up for the fact that they have owned the game so long. This is a nice gesture, but for me… who already has two empty slots because I don’t care enough to roll more characters… it still rings a little hollow. For the time being I won’t be pre-ordering, and honestly not even sure if I will be playing… just depends on what else I happen to be doing at the time this game launches. If nothing else I am sure it will go on sale at some point and I will be able to pick it up then.

Goodbye Names

I guess this morning is going to be a mixed bag of commentary from me, because another thing that mildly frustrated me yesterday was the announcement that World of Warcraft would be releasing all character names that had not logged in since December 7th 2010. While 2010 is a very long time ago… I also happen to have a bunch of characters. In fact I have a grand total of four different World of Warcraft accounts, and my primary and active account has managed to hit the maximum number of fifty characters. I have characters spread out on dozens of servers that I have no clue when the last time I played on them. So last night when I saw this news I had resigned myself to spending two hours logging every character on and off to make sure I reset the timer. Apparently the plan going forward is to do this release of character names each time Blizzard releases a World of Warcraft expansion. Personally I think that simply having an active subscription should be enough of a toll to pay to keep your names from getting the axe… but it seems that is not the case.

So while I was extremely frustrated when I first read that… my frustration faded as I came to the sad realization that there are very few characters in World of Warcraft that I really care about anymore. I have only had one foot in that game for the bulk of this expansion, and last night I realized I would far rather spend my hour making progress in Heavensward than logging characters in and out to make sure they did not get squashed. Today should be a big day for World of Warcraft with the 6.2 patch content being released… but I am finding myself not excited about it at all. I have too much new and shiny going on in another game, and while at some point I will log in and get my Naval missions going, for the foreseeable future I am not planning on raiding. That was really the last thing keeping me connected to that world was my raiding, and when it started to feel stale and forced… I felt it was time to start quietly fading into the background. So I guess at this point I am come around full circle, if someone really wants to be one of my old character names… then awesome go be it, because I won’t be using the name.

In Other News

Last night was a pretty great night… once I was able to get through the login boss mind you. I have some serious fears as to what tonight is going to hold in that department, unless Square Enix has something up their sleeves to make that problem magically go away today. For most of the night I was held up in the main storyline trying to get to level 55, so immediately upon logging in I started trying to arrange some dungeons. However other people in the guild needed stuff, so we arranged a very quick Shiva Hard trial for one of the guildies. It is amazing how “easy” this fight is, but then again my scale is greatly skewed from having just finished the Shiva Extreme battle last week. From there we ran another round of Sohm Al, which again dropped some nifty stuff for our alts. I think I managed to add one more piece of the cosmetic set to my inventory, which is awesome… because I absolutely want to complete the full set. Ashgar mentioned earlier in the evening that he needed the first primal encounter, and we also had several others nearing that point… so we hung out for a bit letting them get caught up before taking on the primal and defeating it rather brutally. That fight with a full guild group is a very different experience than with random players.

From there… we were bad people in that we decided to try and plant the seeds of raid addiction in a friend of ours. Lately Shiana has been leveling in game, and he was our raid leader back during Vanilla WoW and has raided off and on since then. I am not sure if it was Tam or myself that suggested it last night, but in either case we were both in collusion to get him into raiding. As a result we started last night on Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5, and while we had two new players to the fight… we managed to get through it without much issue. It was helped massively by the fact that both of the players that we grabbed were seasoned raiders in other games. From there we moved into Second Coil of Bahamut aka Turn 9 and we struggled a bit. Firstly with Ashgar gone by this point, I had to take over and learn the main tank role on the fight. In my experience each time you change roles on a fight, it is like starting back from square one and relearning everything. Then we had Shiana for whom this was just his second FF raid experience… but all in all we managed to make what felt like a bit of progress. At the very least I think I could fill in for Ash if I needed to, once I got over the whole Ravensbeak straight up murdering me bit. It was a great night of gaming… and tonight I am hoping to get a run of the third dungeon in… that I just unlocked.

Last Raid

June 12, 2015 by Belghast

Make Numbers Go Bigger

Yesterday morning before I left the house I tried an experiment. I placed three large chicken breasts cut into strips, some diced carrots, some diced potatoes, some hot curry bullion and chicken broth in the crock pot. I figured I was either going to end up with chicken curry or a colossal mess. The truth ended up a little between, when the end result was significantly soupier than I expected. In theory I could have cooked it on high for a few hours with the crock pot lid off and probably done just fine, but instead I had a bag of frozen noodles in the freezer and dumped those in to make what ultimately was curried chicken noodle soup. It was “odd” but I have to say once I added some salt, pepper and sriracha it was rather tasty. So for the next few days I will be eating on the leftovers that are so neatly packed away into some giant tubs from Ikea. Sometimes these experiments work out, other times not so much, but this is pretty much my preferred method of cooking… dump a bunch of ingredients together and see what happens.

Another experiment is going on right now on the Steam page as they have officially launched their summer sale. For those who have not experienced the summer steam sale, it is pretty much Christmas for gamers. During the sale you can see normally $40 games going for $4 and other ludicrous things. With the Steam sale there is always some sort of mini-game that happens in the background, that involves collecting cards or voting on this or that item. This time around it is quite literally a game that you play… essentially by afking. I think this might be a commentary on a whole series of games that have showed up on steam recently that involve sitting at your keyboard and clicking on things to make the numbers go bigger. This is essentially what happens with the new Steam Monsters game, either you afk and let your auto cannon do the work for you.. or you click until your heart is content and reduce the health of monsters ultimately clearing waves. The game I have been in has been going on since yesterday and at the time of writing this we are on level 237 of a seemingly endless wave of monsters. I have no clue what the point of the game is other than to make the numbers go bigger, but I am participating to find out.

Buffalo Farming

One of the things I am enjoying the most about ArcheAge is how I feel this sense of accomplishment after only playing a short period of time. Right now I am averaging one to two hours a night at most, but still feeling like I am making forward progress. The big change last night is I opted to drop Shadowplay from my Darkrunner build and pick up Occultism turning me into Bloodreaver. In truth I really was not using much of anything from the Shadowplay tree, and the Occultism tree will eventually support the AOE that I am dealing through Battlerage. For the moment I am planning on doing an AOE damage and CC build that should be solid as I move forward. I think one of the things I dig the most is just how easy it is to change things around. I can go to a Skills trainer or any graveyard and swap my trees around as needed to support the kind of game play that I am needing for a given moment. The only negative is that each time I do this I need to spend some time catching up that tree.

So last night I spent a good deal of time killing random stuff. I wandered down into a mine filled with Kobolds which also provided me an ample supply of ore to mine. For the moment I have not touched any of the crafting in the game, but I am instead stockpiling resources. At some point I will probably work on weapon-smithing, or whatever the games equivalent is. In any case I assume a stockpile of ore is going to go a long ways into whatever I need to do to make the crafting numbers go bigger. At this point I am level 18 and I think significantly higher than the rest of my friends playing the game. I kind the actual combat enjoyable, so I always end up killing way more stuff to complete a given quest… and this game seems to reward farming mobs over and over. As the title says, I was hanging out in this field killing the water buffalos over and over because it was enjoyable to leap at my target and whirl around like mad with my two swords. I have no clue what group content looks like in this game but as Kodra starts a character this weekend hopefully we can start working on groupy bits.

Last Raid

Last night was the final raid night for me for the near future. As I have said before I am going on a bit of a sabbatical from the game, so that I can fully enjoy the launch of Heavensward. I don’t plan on doing anything drastic like cancelling my account, and I will probably poke my head back in around the launch of 6.2 but the future of me and raiding is a bit uncertain at the moment. Quite frankly right now I need a break. I have enjoyed a lot of my time raiding, but the slog through Blackrock Foundry has taken its toll on many of us. As a result our raid group as a whole is taking at minimum a two week break starting today, and last night our raid lead cancelled all of the reoccurring raids off the in game calendar. So there was a sense of finality in last nights events that probably the rest of the raid did not have. I have called this subsection the way I did because really my future in WoW raiding is uncertain. I would like to think once things have calmed down I will pick back up and work my way back into the raid group, but honestly that is at least a month away and I cannot determine how I will feel at this point.

The big positive is that we managed to take down three heroic bosses, which should get most of us the ability to start getting mythic loot boxes from our Garrison. The negative is that we downed Gruul and once again he refused to drop the upgraded version of my sword. More than any expansion I have felt like I have had to fight tooth and nail to get the meager upgrades I have gotten. There has never been another time in another game where my fate was determined more by the cruel mistress of RNG than in Warlords. I have sat and watched as I have won enough rings and cloaks to outfit an army… but have struggled to get weapon and shield upgrades. I guess on the positive I did manage to get my four piece bonus faster than a lot of people, but by the same token that four piece bonus is so good for Gladiator that it has been its own albatross around my neck. I have functionally better items for every single slot that I have a set piece, but I need that bonus so badly. It reminds me of how overpowered the tier 2 hunter eight piece bonus was, and how no one was willing to give it up once they got it. So for the time being… I am bidding Warcraft farewell and packing it neatly in a box to be unpacked at a later date.

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

June 11, 2015 by Belghast

Flight in Draenor

This mornings post is going to be a little odd, because I have already written it once before. I sat down at the keyboard like normal this morning and started banging out a post, and within a paragraph of finishing it and hitting publish… we had a power outage. Unfortunately I was composing on my local machine, and also unfortunately it seems that LiveWriter only recovers if it crashes… and not the entire computer powering off. As a result I am composing a second post… in which I am going to attempt to say all the sage things I said before. This experiment is likely going to fail miserably. In my original post I got a little salty over the announcement yesterday that Blizzard was adding in a meta-achievement that would allow you to unlock flight in Draenor for all of your 90+ characters. The problem being I was grumpy for a silly reason, and now upon rewriting this post I have realized that. Sure it felt good to rant a bit, but overall it was largely meaningless.

What I do feel like yesterday’s announcement signals is that Warlords of Draenor has been a testament to the fact that Blizzard does not understand its core demographic at all. As a friend said last night, Flight is a Genie that you cannot put back in the bottle. Once it was given to the players they will always crave its freedom. While I personally agreed with the decision to take flight away, and supported the supposed line in the sand they drew, it seems like the villagers with pitchforks storming the ramparts made Blizzard change their mind. Warlords as a whole has been a bit of a comedy of errors, with extremely good aspects like the raid encounters… and extremely bad aspects like the facebook game style garrisons and the demolition of crafting. Ultimately my frustration with the flight move is it seems so rushed, and that they simply drew a card from the Final Fantasy XIV deck on how to deal with it. Last October Square announced that they would add flight, but through a system that forced the player to explore a zone and learn how to harness the winds. This meta-achievement seems like a rushed clone of that concept, and while it made me grumpy at first… I realize that every single game draws upon the best parts of every game before it. I guess next week when Heavensward head start begins we can determine if it really was the good idea that Square hopes it is.

Clockwork Mayhem

I spent a good chunk of my night playing ArcheAge and I have to say the more I play Kitty Belghast the more I enjoy him. Technically I am not Belghast at all… because apparently someone on Tahyang has my name. To make matters worse they made an Elf Archer… which is pretty close to being the “anti-belghast”. However I am getting by just fine with Belgrave the Nuian and Belglaive the Firran. I finished up my questing in the mines and have moved now into a junkyard of clockwork machines. I am really enjoying my Darkrunner build, because it just feels awesome to rush headlong into things with two swords drawn. Everything was going well until I stumbled onto a quest to kill 20 discarded clockworks. As I wandered through the junkyard I found them sitting there in several clumps of smaller mobs surrounded by an aggressive Harani. At first I thought these were like the other packs of mobs I had encountered, so I pulled and popped my AOEs… only to get murdered in the most horrible fashion.

It turns out that when ArcheAge says something is an “Elite” quest it means it. It also turns out that these are part of the Clockwork Rebellion event, which is the mirror of the Oblivion Rift event I had done before on the Nuian side. These are absolutely scaled for groups to complete them, but instead being the stubborn fool that I am, I tried to solo it. What I like the most is the fact that this game allowed me to do just this. Through careful pulls I was able to peel smaller chunks of the large packs off and take care of them in multiple passes. I found that I could take three or four of the little robots if I absolutely had to, and then would need to regenerate my health and mana back before trying another pass. In doing this I whittled down the quest until I was able to complete it and get an achievement for doing so. I have to say this sort of careful and methodical gameplay was extremely rewarding, and reminds me of an older era of gaming. My hope is that once Kodra gets the ability to play ArcheAge that he too will find the game he had been looking for with Pathfinder Online. In the meantime, I am having a lot of fun being kitty bel.

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

Several weeks ago I had ordered the Final Fantasy XIV Art Book from the Square Enix store, and last night when I got home it was sitting there waiting on my doorstep. The coolest part so far is the fact that it has almost all of the weapon and armor designs from the game, and shows the production art behind them. What makes that even more awesome is that each one of them has a sentence or two of notes below that explains some of their ideas that went into the design. If it is a weapon with animated parts it explains how the weapon bits actually move and function together and the idea behind them. If that was not cool enough it also included a tiny Enterprise minion that also has an even tinier Cid sitting on the deck. I am thinking this is the ideal minion to run around with as a Lalafell, because Tiny Cid actually makes me feel big.

I had logged out of ArcheAge and into Final Fantasy XIV last night because in theory it was the night our second static runs. Whenever my schedule works with it, I try and offer my services to make sure it can fill. Last night however after sitting around and waiting for a bit we were standing there with four people. The leader called the raid, and we instead shifted focus to running Art the bear tank from our WoW raid through some instances. The most frustrating part about leveling a DPS right now is the fact that the queues are so ridiculously long. As I have been leveling my Ninja lately my average wait time is around 40 minutes. So we built a free company group and I got the job of tanking. I tanked Copperbell as a Warrior, and Halatali as a Paladin and enjoyed both of them. I like tanking lower level content in part because it makes me realize just how limited my toolbox used to be, and how hard it was to actually hold aggro on mobs. Was a fun night all around, and I actually look forward to doing more of this as I work on leveling my Dark Knight eventually.

Blackhand Down

June 10, 2015 by Belghast

Gliders Away

Whatever has a hold of me allergy wise is driving me insane. I struggled my way to work yesterday only to be not so subtly asked to go home by my boss. Apparently I sounded fairly horrible. So I headed to the house and took a breathing treatment and attempted to be productive remotely. Last night I took several Benadryl before heading to bed so I am hoping that helped get me over whatever hump I was struggling with. This morning my head feels a lot clearer, but that might all change the moment I open the front door and are exposed to the world again. My friends have joked that I need a bubble… and there are days that I agree with them. To make matters worse we are under an Ozone alert day meaning that the air quality levels are already going to be horrible today. There is a whole list of things that we are not supposed to do during an Ozone alert day, but the show must go on.

Yesterday I was a little bit spread out in what I ended up playing. It was of course my World of Warcraft raid night, and at least on some level I was excited about getting in and getting more attempts in on Blackhand. I spent quite a bit of time last night playing around on Cat Belghast in ArcheAge and honestly the more I play that side of the fence the more charming I find it. I am naturally drawn the Nuians simply because it is the race I can create the closest facsimile of “Belghast” proper in. However it is pretty much a bland European fantasy world, with the same vistas and characters we have encountered in essentially every MMO. What makes Haranya interesting is they combine the tribal Firran with the Harani that are essentially steampunk engineers. Quite honestly the Harani remind me of the Al Bhed from Final Fantasy X, and doing quests just seem more interesting than the Nuia side of the house. I know Ashgar has a preference towards the cat people, and I guess I am developing that as well. In any case I am really enjoying my time spent piddling around in ArcheAge.

Blackhand Down

Last week on Thursday we had made a significant amount of progress on Blackhand. On our best attempt we managed to get hit to 11%, so it was my hope that after some time away from the fight we could pop back in and pick up where we left off. What made last Thursday challenging was that we were extremely short on melee so the walls were going down very slowly. Last night we had some of our normal melee which made that part easier, but we were also down two of our main healers which added its own challenges. However right out of the gate we managed to push to phase three like it was easy and at least match that 11% progress. The rest of the night was spent fine tuning things and on our very last attempt of the night our raid leader managed to bring in a additional healer which seemed to push us over the top. Unfortunately I spent the tail end of that fight in the lava as I managed to get clipped by one of the smashes while trying to execute spam Blackhand.

It feels extremely good to have defeated this raid tier, especially since Heavensward is right around the corner. This was functionally my last week of raiding in World of Warcraft before going on a bit of a sabbatical. I had hopes that we would be able to down him at least by Thursday, but now we are in the interesting position of not really knowing what to do with ourselves. I guess Thursday if we have the people we will venture back into Heroic and see what mischief we can get up to there. I know several of us are a single kill away from being able to get Mythic gear out of our Garrison loot boxes. So in theory it would be nice to knock that kill out as well. Similarly it has been talked about maybe just having a Heroes of the Storm night instead, since several of the raid are also playing that game. In any case it feels like I managed to squeak by another milestone fight before the buzzer. So that is two raid Warlords raid tiers I have managed to defeat in this expansion and I am pretty happy with that.

Closure

Even thought I am not enjoying World of Warcraft fight now as much as I had hoped I absolutely loved getting to raid with the guild again. Coming back I was in an odd situation where I simply did not know many of the folks that had joined the guild I founded in my absence. I am so happy to have been welcomed back with open arms and been allowed to get to know so many of them. I am not saying I am “done” with World of Warcraft, but if I was I would be able to end on a happy note. In a months time I might be raring to go and begin raiding again and pushing forward into Hellfire Citadel. Right now however I just know that I need a break from this game. I don’t want to try and split my attention between the new and shiny Heavensward content and Warcraft that feels very much like a worn in shoe. It is comfortable, but as you walk down the street you happen to notice every blemish and scuff and remind yourself that you really should buy a new pair of shoes. I am just thankful for the most part that people seem to “get” why I am taking a break.

I talked with Rylacus the man who wears the crown these days and explained it as this. If I was forced to play Warcraft, when there was another game I would rather be playing… it would ultimately lead to me quitting the game again. I think instead of I just back away for awhile, and let myself get Heavensward out of my system… or at least to a manageable level I will once again be able to juggle multiple games. The only problem I see is that there are a lot more people than just me that are in desperate need of a break. Yesterday it was revealed that once again World of Warcraft is timing their next infusion of crack with the launch of a major game. It seems that the 6.2 patch is going to land right around the time Heavensward officially launches. The current rumor is June 23rd, and for some that might be just enough to keep them from straying. For me personally, my heart already belongs to Final Fantasy XIV… I just spend time in Warcraft so that I can hang out with the friends that are still there.