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Don’t Bring Frogs

September 22, 2016 by Belghast

So this mornings post is going to be essentially a non-post. The last few days have been a sequence of bullshit that I have had to deal with, and as a result I am having trouble thinking of anything reasonable to write about. Generally speaking I share my life with you all, and while some of the names are withheld to anonymize the experience the sequence of events is pretty much raw and unvarnished. This however is one of those times when I can’t really talk about it, but suffice to say it is a bizarre time to exist in my head. Gaming has always provided an escape for when things are getting just too real, when I can climb inside someone else for awhile and forget any madness going on. Similarly laughter is something that helps push me out of my own brain for awhile and forget whatever is wrong for a few minutes. This morning instead of a proper post I am just going to share some videos that I have watched too many times.

Panda Hero

September 20, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I talked about my journey from bad engineer to not so bad engineer, but that was not at all the only thing I accomplished this weekend. For some time I had been sitting at three achievements from completing my Glory of the Pandaria Hero meta achievement and obtaining the purty mount you see in the screenshot above. I guess leading with a screenshot pretty much kills any suspense, but I am going to talk about this regardless. I actually accomplished most of this during my periods of playing Pandaria back in the day, but for whatever reason I simply was not with the group when they completed Rattle No More, Seeds of Doubt, and I never messed with the super annoying Polyformic Acid Science. What ultimately jogged my memory is that I wound up getting an enchanting quest requiring me to go gather up various components… two of which were located in Scholomance and Stonecore which meant me going to the respective areas and soloing a dungeon. It was during this process that I got one of the empty vials, and remembered how the whole Polyformic Acid thing worked. As a result I managed to do five of the six kills needed for that achievement during a single 60 minute charge… before using the empty vial and removing it. What I did not remember is that apparently when you remove and reapply a charge… it gives you a fresh 60 minute buff and not a partial buff based on what the previous timer was when you last stowed it. From there the actual chore of doing the last two achievements was minimal because with level 110 gear things just sort of fall over. However regardless I now have one more mount to add to my collection. The thing is I am in similar places on most of the other “Dungeon Hero” achievements because for whatever reason I never really prioritized them. I have never been the achievement hunter that Thalen or Rylacus was… but maybe it is time to start changing that.

As far as last night went, I spent most of it working on questing Exeter my Draenei Tankadin. I did not realize what a difference harvesting makes to the total amount of experience you can squeeze out of a zone. Belghast had no harvesting skill, but instead a double crafting combo of engineer and enchanting. As a result it took me all five zones to be able to reach 110, or at least a fraction of the last zone for me which was Highmountain. On Exeter however I have done nothing but complete Azuna my first zone… and I am sitting at 104 and roughly half of the way to 105. I’ve run zero dungeons, and the only real difference is that I am harvesting every ore node I happen across. However at 900 xp or so a pop those nodes I guess add up, as does the fact that I have plenty of rested experience since I am only playing him a few times a week right now. The push however is to get to 109 quickly so that I can have another character to start running the upcoming Coren Direbrew fight that comes with Brewfest… that should start showing up after the downtime today. Now however is the point at which I am going to ascend my soapbox. One of the things that the Legion pre-event showed off is just how damned well the content scaling works, and how much more enjoyable an event can be when you allow players of all levels to complete it. Direbrew has never really been a difficult fight and honestly most of the time you could complete it without a tank in previous years. It just feels odd that in an expansion driven by scaling of content, that they would not also update this event to use it.

As much as I am loving this expansion, there are a lot of things that still make me wonder. For example Stormheim is this amazing zone… so long as you completely ignore any factional crap that happens in it. This is really the expansion of two stories happening at once… a faction tale of red versus blue that feels grossly outdated, and deep and rich zone specific tales that feel fresh and new. I realize they probably did not have time to do everything in this expansion and update Brewfest… so they instead simply bumped up the item levels a bit and moved on. However I feel like at some point they really need to do an update pass on all of these seasonal fights to bring them in line with the newest tech. Imagine how much cooler it would be if anyone in the game could participate on all of their characters. Right now this event feels like it is setting an artificial deadline on when we should have been leveled by in order to keep from missing out. Then there is the issue of the fact that I am pulling 840/850 items from World Quests and the face value of the Direbrew trinkets is only 810… something that I am hoping can easily War and Titan forge up in level. In any case I will be doing this event every day on Belghast, and attempting to get my nearest character up to the appropriate level range of 109 so that I can get multiple characters trying to farm goodies. If nothing else I need to have more characters at the level cap since this does not appear to be something they are going to scale… because I still am chasing that ever damned elusive Headless Horseman mount.

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.

Hand Update

September 9, 2016 by Belghast

This isn’t going to be a terribly amazing blog post this morning, but I still feel like I need to put one up. Yesterday did not involve an awful lot of gaming, though I did manage to move the needle forward a little bit on the Warrior class hall quest. Largely I was in a holding pattern waiting for my wife to get home from work, so we could decide what we needed to do about her hand. During the course of the day it had gotten worse. When she went to urgent care on Wednesday night, they drew a margin around the red area. They said that if it crossed that boundary, she really needed to get to the emergency room and get some IV delivered antibiotics. Well during the course of the day yesterday it crossed that line… and then the school nurse drew a new line… and by the time she got home from work it had crossed that boundary as well in several places. Neither one of us really like going to the doctor, but my wife specifically abhors it. So to contemplate going to the emergency room was almost a bridge too far for her. Thankfully we live in a smallish suburb with an ER that isn’t too heinous, but I assumed as the night went on it would get considerably more busy.

The long story short is that they did in fact hook her up to an IV and let a bag of some sort of high powered antibiotic drip into her for about thirty minutes. As of this morning there was really no noticeable change, but they did also tell us that the redness wasn’t really the big warning sign. If she started having shooting pain up her arm, or red streaks traveling in that direction… then it needed to be taken seriously. The worst part of this whole thing however is now my wife not only has one hand that is partially functional but the other one is going to be bruised up more than likely from the IV and also not completely functional. The other worst part is that by the time we got out of the hospital at 9 pm last night we were both starving, and decided that since they took a lot of blood work that we would have some red meat. The frustration of the whole situation is knowing that what you are going for isn’t that critical, but that it is also literally the only way to get IV antibiotics. I have no clue why urgent care places can’t do that sort of thing, because it seemed silly to actually have to go to a hospital.

In any case… by the time I got upstairs I was zoning out pretty hard and ultimately went to bed around 10:30. I would have gone earlier but I was trying to allow Luna some snuggle time with mommy before carrying her upstairs to sequester her up in the office over night. I hate that my wife is having to go through this, especially considering like a week and a half before I had the exact same thing happen to me… and my cat bite healed just fine. I guess after a couple decades of having cats, it was bound to happen to one of us. I just wish it had happened to me, because I am used to being malfunctioning.