Last night was the first night since the launch of Battle for Azeroth where I didn’t feel like I had a purpose in playing.  What I mean by that in large part is there was nothing readily achievable that I could be doing that would further the state of my gear.  This is a thing I go through with MMORPGs is that so long as I am making the numbers go higher I feel happy and filled with purpose, but once that elevator reaches the top floor I start flailing listlessly.  Having gone through this so many times in the past, this is the beginning warning sign of me starting the check out process.  Effectively at this point I need to find something to anchor me to the game and rapidly or I will drift away into the ether with the first shiny bauble that crosses my path.

Last week I was anchored with a constant feeling that I needed to be getting Mythics done so I could chase a fabled piece of 370 gear.  Before that on an almost daily basis I was swapping things out for items of better quality, which felt interesting and exciting.  As it stands now I have a few options each week to help me move that needle forward… and it feels horrible when they reward gold or artifact power instead of a piece of loot.  I’ve not done LFR for the week but thanks to Warfronts and the cavalcade of guaranteed loot every twenty minutes…  they have no shine this expansion because I have already upgraded every slot above the bare minimum level that drops there.

I got double artifact power off of the Warfronts world boss in Arathi basin, and gold off the World boss that opened up with the reset yesterday.  I am basically left with two options… find a time when I can raid, or dig in harder with alts.  We are trying to make Wednesday nights at 7 pm CST until 10-11 CST work but we are probably still short a handful of people in necessary roles.  Ashgar my traditional co-tank is still very much in the leveling process because his attention is split between lots of different games right now.  We could do higher and higher mythics to try and get gear but pulling those together has been a challenge.  I should have spent my time last night running Mythics to help gear up Morgull, but instead I sorta did a lot of nothing.

As far as alting goes….  I really want to unlock the Mag’har because I want to start a red shaman.  The only problem there is the faction grind feels horrible…  with no real way of making daily progress other than doing literally every single quest available on Kul’Tiras.  I did that last night, and was bored out of my mind the entire time because at this point…  I have done this several times without it feeling like I am making forward momentum at all.  The grind doesn’t feel good this expansion, and quite honestly….  the only time faction grinding DID feel good was during the era of faction based tabards that you could wear and gain faction for doing other activities.  At a minimum I could equip a tabard and queue for heroic after heroic giving me a constant drip of faction and a bunch of loot to show for it.

Ultimately I think I will pour more of my attention into the Warlock and see if I can stave off the desire to bounce until we can manage to pull together a raid group.

This mornings post is going to be a little weird.  Just getting that out up front.  Yesterday I spent some time thinking about the Azerite Item system and how lousy it generally feels, but there was something about it that seemed extremely familiar and it took me some time to place my finger on it.  Finally it dawned on me…  the system was in effect the same idea as the whole weapon trait system in Destiny/Destiny 2.  An item drops with a seemingly random set of traits (less random in Destiny 2) and you wind up having to evaluate whether or not the item is of sufficient light level, but also if the traits on it are worth keeping.

This lead to a lot of generally lousy feeling situations where an item drops of high light level…  but has a crappy set of traits meaning that you won’t actually use the item.  This is what is also happening with the Azerite trait system, because not all of these traits are created equal and some are very much superior depending on your need.  For example when I was working on trying to tank as a warrior, there were three traits that were leaps and bounds better than anything else I could get on an item…  and they so greatly effected my survival that I found myself passing on upgrades that didn’t have them just so I could maintain the same build out.  Now I am not saying that the World of Warcraft devs borrowed this system from Destiny, because I have no way of knowing that.  However there are a bunch of other systems that I would love them to borrow from different games…  and now we get into the weird part of this mornings post as I talk about some of them.

Item Infusion

The problem I mentioned before with Destiny… specifically year one… was the passing on items that had higher ratings because they lacked reasonable item talents.  In Year two they put in a system to largely fix this, and it continues to be viable in Destiny 2 as well.  That system is item infusion which effectively takes the item you like and raises it to the level of the higher level item that you didn’t like…  by destroying it and consuming some crafting resources.  Now this system went through a bunch of iterations but the one that makes the most sense for World of Warcraft is the like items infusion construct, of if you want to raise the item level of a Chestpiece for example…  you need another donor Chestpiece to consume and raise the level of the first one.  The reason why I think this would work…  is because of the way that gear scales now.

Effectively you can get the same item at level 200 as you can at level 273 based on the order in which you do the zone content in Battle for Azeroth.  This tells me that these items are not hand crafted but instead made up of a mathematical formula based on the item level of a given item.  You can see this with World Quest gear where the same item scales from 285 to 340 depending on how progressed you are through your own gearing process.  Effectively that Item Level and the stats associated with it can fluctuate and the item still remains functional, which tells me that they could implement an infusion system without somehow functionally breaking the game.

What this would mean is… you could find a chest piece that you really liked the specific trait package of…  consume another chest piece that has a higher item level…  maybe throw in some materials like ore for a metal plate and even a little expulsom since that is accessible to anyone via the scrapping machine.  There would probably also bit a minor gold charge for using what I am assuming is either an NPC or a Machine to do the item level swap for you… but the end result is the item you like using at a new higher item level.  In the Reddit Q&A Ion mentioned that he wants players to use the item with the higher level …  but they will never reach a point of equity with these talents.  There will always be a better option for specific specs, and as a result a system like Item Infusion might be able to fill that much needed gap.

Bookrocks / Bad Luck Tokens

Another system that I would love World of Warcraft to steal is one that ultimately was borrowed from them in the first place.  In Final Fantasy XIV they have this concept of Tomestones or as we tend to refer to them as “Bookrocks”.  These are effectively a “Bad Luck Token” system that allows players to slowly and methodically work towards a goal regardless of how good of luck they happen to have in dungeons.  They work more or less like the Justice and Valor system used to, but in truth just simply works better.  As you do content you get bookrocks of different types depending on the tier of content that you are doing.  The number that drops also depends on the difficulty of content within that tier… so raid content drops a lot of them… and dungeon content drops significantly fewer.  There are various “roulettes” or random dungeon finder systems that reward bonus bookrocks each day and keep players constantly queueing for the content that you need them to queue for.

At any given time there are generally two types of book rocks available…  the bulk currency for items that are now super cheap and easy to pick up giving players a hand up in catching back up content wise.  Then there is the rare currency that has a weekly acquisition cap on it and often times requires multiple weeks worth of saving to add up to a new piece of gear.  When a new tier of content is released… they add a new rare bookrock and the previous rare offering becomes uncapped and takes the place of the previous bulk.  There is a system to cash in older bookrocks to turn them into whatever the new bulk is.  This allows someone to come back from a long absence and through running current content catch up rather quickly… or at least reach a level where they are viable for modern content.

One of the major problems with Battle for Azeroth is there just is no point to run most of the content.  Islands reward you a currency that only matters if you want to do more islands.  Normal dungeons and Heroic dungeons stop mattering the moment you figure out you can survive Mythic…  which takes much needed Tanks and Healers from the dungeon finder queue making it all the harder for the dps you are leveling or maybe a few months behind the curve to catch up and actually become viable.  Final Fantasy XIV is designed in a way so that it bribes players to do the right thing for the community…  which is to queue for content and do so often.  Since content now all scales…  I would set things up in a very specific way to mimic the sort of systems that Final Fantasy XIV has… and associate daily bonus “bad luck tokens” to them.  Here are some examples:

• Leveling Content – a queue that includes all of the normal dungeons from Ragefire through Legion
• BFA Normal – a queue that is all of the normal story dungeons from Battle for Azeroth
• BFA Heroic – a queue that is any of the heroic dungeons from Battle for Azeroth
• Islands Normal – a queue that is the normal islands to help folks who can’t yet do heroic.
• Islands Heroic – a queue that is for the heroic islands
• Warfronts – if your faction currently holds the Warfront… then a daily queue for that too

Effectively there should be two full sets of gear available to help fix the gaps players have in their itemization.  In the currently system I would say the bulk gear option should be in the neighborhood of 340 and they could borrow the way the catch up mechanics have worked in other expansion of having a vendor that sells you an item that turns into a piece of gear for your spec.  The rare currency would probably be something in the neighborhood of 360 to give you something aspirational for most players to work towards but also not being the best item you could possibly get in that slot.  As new content is released, the base level of these items trickles up each time to match what the new normal is, so as the soft cap for World Quest rewards increases so does this.  Combine this system with Infusion above and it allows you to keep the item that works for your spec but keep pushing its item level up to match the level of content you want to be doing.

Borrowing is Good

So often I feel like Blizzard wants to make the “Warcraft” answer to systems and often times creates purposefully inferior implementations.  Transmog for example is arguably worse than every single game that has a more detailed Wardrobe system.  However we deal with it because we were happy to get ANYTHING…  even though it is needlessly limiting.  Void Storage…  was a horrible system…  but at the time we were happy to get it because we desperately needed bank space.  It feels like each time a new system is implemented… they make it awesome… and then purposefully give it some negative impact.  So you can have unlimited pie…  but that pie is always going to be your least favorite… mincemeat.  A lot of the problems that Battle for Azeroth has…  have already been solved by other games.  I would love to see them start trying to apply those solutions to already solved problems to World of Warcraft, and give the players are more rich and usable experience as a result.

I’ve reached the point in World of Warcraft where my progression options on the Demon Hunter are greatly limited.  At this point I am 349 item level and unfortunately there really aren’t that many reliable ways to bump that number up.  When Warfronts opened I was able to get a single 370 level item for completing that quest.  Similarly a lot of our weekend revolved around trying to complete the “do 4 mythics” quest because timing is a pain in the ass…  which also rewarded a 370 item.  Lastly there was the opportunity to get a 370 item from the Arathi Basis “fake pvp” boss encounter…  but instead I got double artifact power.  I cannot believe that I am even suggesting this…  but World of Warcraft needs something like the Powerful Engram system to give you weekly opportunities to see some forward movement if they want players to stay interested in the content without resorting to alting.

I am not actively raiding right now and that would probably help this feeling of bumping up against a cap.  Similarly if we could do Mythic +10 we probably wouldn’t be having this issue either.  But effectively myself, Grace and Tam have reached a soft cap that we cannot push past without raiding.  In Destiny 2 there were a handful of events that could be completed each week that gave the player “powerful rewards” which effectively meant an item that was guaranteed to be greater than their effective item level.  This meant that even though I had checked out of Destiny 2 effectively… I was still coming back each week to burn through these three or four systems to get something that felt like progression.  World of Warcraft is largely a “raid or die” system at this point with so much gated behind raiding that there isn’t much of an opportunity for forward momentum.  This however is always the problem…  because they effectively only have the one progression path instead of having multiple paths that all arise at the same goal of a geared player able to do lots of different activities.

All of that said I am still loving Mythics when we can manage to get five players together at the same time, and I am loving the fact that it does not matter at all what item level the player is when we grab them and drag them into the content.  We grabbed Morgrull last night who was a fairly freshly dinged 120 and got him at least one piece of gear from Freehold.  It also feels good that we are slowly building out this team of players that are capable of doing stuff, giving us a lot more options for the future.  Last night I did not raid with Facepull because Sunday is still a bad day for me to do anything super serious on.  It is very hard for me to commit to being at the keyboard from 6:30pm to 10pm my time with a handful of 5 minute breaks.  Last night I was swapping laundry and alt tabbing back and forth between working on some stuff for today.  I got up and walked away from the screen at several points during the night, and raiding would have procluded that.

As such my hope is that our little gathering of cross server nonsense can eventually turn into a fledgling ten player raid group, that we can get something going on a night that isn’t personally horrible for me.  Something like Wednesday nights would be excellent, and it is making me wish that WoW raiding were 8 player based and not 10 player based because we probably could muster that size of group already.  However we keep adding new players into our gravity well and eventually that will be enough to make something like that happen.  I miss the era of non-guild based raiding and I sorta want to make it viable again.  Sure the whole not being able to trade items across servers is a giant pain in the ass…  but it should still be doable and would allow us to pull in a far greater array of people once we got something rolling.  Not all of my friends live on the same server and transfers are cost prohibitive when you are like me and have an army of alts…  so I want to figure out a way to make this work cross server.

Lastly I thought I would link the podcast from this weekend because it is relevant.  We talk about the life cycle of an MMO and what games do well and do horribly.  We talk about the onboarding of new players, and the revitalization of returning players…  and how many games don’t take them into account at all.  We also talk at length about the end game power creep and how awkward it feels to see item levels matter so freaking much.  The episode has nothing to do with Gorb other than the fact that we didn’t record the 15 minutes of us trying to explain what Gorb was before starting the show.  Gorb is that raisins and peanuts mixture…  no Gorb was a movie with Robin Williams from the 80s…  etc etc.  This is one of those shows that sort of happened accidentally…  since it was a combination of topics that had rolled over from other weeks.  However they aligned themselves with a certain synergy that made for an interesting discussion from a bunch of long time MMO burnouts.

Lastly as you can tell from the first photo I have begun working on my third character…  this time I decided to level my Warlock.  This is one of those marriage of convenience sort of things because sure I enjoy Warlocking…  but mostly this is my tailor/enchanter and I desperately need enchants because they are prodigiously expensive this expansion.  As such I am power leveling the character by crafting a lot of mail pieces and grinding them down for dust.  However I have reached that point where I can technically make weapon enchants…  but I don’t have access to the purple materials yet.  So time to buckle down and grind grind grind to 120 and start gearing her.  I wonder if I can name my void walker Gorb.

Last night was a lot of fun… and once again expanded our sphere of influence for shenanigans.  We have not been doing mythics the last few nights because many of our regulars have not been available.  Tam for example is travelling this week, and Mor is being a fake nerd and actually socializing with other human beings in real life.  He somehow doubts his fake nerd status…  but Grace and I both assured him that the only acceptable interaction is over the internet.  So instead Grace and I both decided to step down our nerd status one peg… and communicate with other people online trying to fill the last few DPS slots we needed for a Mythic plus.

I have this aversion to pugging…  and what I mean by pugging is actually posting a group and filling with complete strangers.  Like someone might be a stranger to me, but if they are a friend of a friend of a friend… it somehow feels better.  Last night for example one of our regulars had a friend who was down to run stuff on his shadow priest.  However as yet another French Canadian friend…  I got the impression he was concerned about his English skills and didn’t want to hang on discord as a result.  I mean…  my English skills are not exactly legend but unfortunately I don’t have another language to fall back on.  I totally get it but it did make some of the interactions a little sluggish especially when we started having problems.

Hai NA Horde friends… looking for a couple dps for M+/M0 whatever it takes to get some mythics done for the weekly quest. Need 2 dps.

— Bel 🆚 World of Warfronts (@belghast) September 14, 2018

I pinged Guild and either no one was watching chat at that moment or they were uninterested.  Whatever the case I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone and decided to ping twitter with the above message.  Thankfully twitter answered and my good friend Tart decided to join us in nonsense.  It was around or about this point that I realized…  Tart and I have never actually been on voice or run anything in game together.  It was a lot of fun and we had a set line up of Demon Hunter Tank (me), Disc Priest (grace), Shadow Priest (tart), Mage (widjack), Shadow Priest (friend of widjack).  We analyzed the Mythic+ keys we had available to us… and it was basically Underrot or Temple of Sethralis.  We thought we were choosing the easier of the two and went with the Temple…  we maybe should have gone the other way around.

We have a bad habit of doing things without actually reading the instruction.  Like I have absolutely winged trying to put together IKEA furniture…  and ultimately put something together almost right but not quite…  to the point where it would require me to disassemble everything to fix the problem.  This is why our buffet in the kitchen has no drawer pull.  Our Mythic experiences largely align with this methodology of “Just Do It”, which is fine for learning through failure but not exactly fine when you are being timed in doing so.  The core problem was…  neither myself or grace or wid had actually done Temple of Sethralis on Mythic anything… let alone the timed version.

Basically on every single boss we struggled with some thing that we now were supposed to do on Mythic that was not in place on Heroic…  the worst of these being the “Galvanize” boss.  However with time we figured it all out…  we were just painfully behind the curve of getting a key to upgrade.  However those lessons we learned won’t be forgotten any time soon because we paid for that education with a piece of our soul.  I mean…  if I am being honest…  reading up on an encounter or watching a fatboss video doesn’t really do much for me.  I am one of those people that needs to experience the fight before anything that I learn about said fight actually sticks and becomes permanent memory.

In truth it seems like most of our crew from last night was this way…  like Tart had run the mythic earlier in the week but didn’t really grok what we were supposed to be doing either.  However after last night I am certain that none of us will be forgetting anytime soon and for me at least that is progress.  I was super disappointed however that we did not get extra loot due to the Sign of the Warrior buff going on.  Normally speaking when you run a Mythic you get about 2 pieces of loot in the chest at the end, and with the Sign of the Warrior you are supposed to get an extra piece of loot, which should have been three.  I managed to upgrade my boots though by five item levels, and we got a pair of either cloth gloves or cloth bracers that no one seemed to be interested in.

Regardless of the loot though it was one hell of a fun night and super awesome to actually run something with Tart.  We now have her inducted into the RoboSquid Armada and hopefully she will answer the call for more peoples in the near future.