Mechanics are Hard

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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.

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.

Weapons Dropped

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Last night did not exactly work as intended.  I had originally planned on getting home and running some Mythics with my friend Grace but that didn’t actually happen.  Then by the time a guild group asked for me to do Mythics with them… I was mostly in the wrong mindset to be successful.  I did however hook them up with a healer friend of mine that was able to make the group work.  Tonight however I need to get started on running my four Mythics required for a chest of raid loot.  In theory we can probably make a group happen even thought Tam is travelling and not available this week.  I am sure I can probably dip into the guild to pick up a dps if we wind up short, since that seems to be what we are always short on.

Instead of Mythical Nonsense…  I ground the Warfront.  Essentially as of yesterday I was short three pieces of gear from having everything 340 or better.  I needed a pair of gloves, a second weapon and a second trinket…  the last I am not entirely certain is an option for coming from Warfronts.  I have not found a great source of everything that can possibly drop from a warfront cache, but what I did find seemed to only indicate pieces of armor and weapons.  At first I was starting to think this was going to be a repeat of my past outings…  as I got two more belts and two more cloaks…  but before the evening was up I managed to also pick up a pair of gloves and a one-handed axe giving me that second weapon.  Now I am effectively down to just the trinket, which means I could run LFR and hope that I get lucky or pick up one of the inscription trinkets.

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This also means that I am largely without purpose when it comes to secondary activities on the Demon Hunter apart from farming faction to eventually push everything to Revered.  I am not contemplating starting to run Warfronts on the Warrior in hopes of maybe getting a reasonable sword and shield option.  I keep thinking at some point in the near future they will make Warrior tanking not feel horrible, and the couple of Warfronts I have run as DPS have been way less enjoyable than running them as a tank.  Its an option… but I am not entirely certain I am ready to dive right back into a gear grind.  I’ve abandoned any illusion of trying to maintain some sort of split mains scenario, and am largely just going to focus on the Demon Hunter for gearing purposes.

That means if I can make one of the Sunday raids… and I am not already locked for the week…  I will just be dpsing as Havoc Demon Hunter instead of trying to do Fury Warrior.  That doesn’t stop the fact that Sunday is a really bad time for me to be raiding so the likelihood that I am going to make many of them… is pretty limited.  It is our hope to get a RoboSquid Armada based raid going on Wednesday nights, which is a far better time for me to be committed to raiding.  Also if I am going to raid… I really want to be tanking since I am lacking whatever stuff makes people care about how they are doing on the meters.

If you are a NA Server Horde Player and are curious what the hell RoboSquid Armada is… check out this post for more details.  It is sort of a dream of mine to kick start non-guild based raiding as a “thing” that actually happens again.  If nothing else we have an in game Battle.NET social channel and a discord that are places we draw upon for building Mythic groups.

 

BFA: The Good and The Ugly

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At this point Battle For Azeroth has been out for just shy of a month and in that time I have leveled two characters to 120 and geared them.  I’ve shared little anecdotes as I leveled and did some of the content, but I have yet to really collect my thoughts about the expansion in one place.  This morning I am going to share some of these thoughts because some things are really working extremely well, and other things are not working at all.  This is by no means an objective list because the majority of the content on my blog is just me sharing my opinion with others.  Your list is probably going to look a little different if you were to create one.  However I feel like it is time for my to share my highs and lows.

What Works Well

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Warfronts

This is not something I thought I would be into at all but I am shockingly loving it.  Now some of that love will probably dissipate as the lure of 340 gear becomes less. I remember enjoying Alterac Valley back in Vanilla because it was about more than just fighting other players.  The Warfronts are essentially all of those elements that I enjoyed divorced from the player versus player interactions I didn’t enjoy. Also did I mention 340 gear?

Mythic+

I am way more into the experience of running Mythic Plus this expansion, in part because my normal circle of folks that I tend to game with… aka the folks loosely connected to AggroChat are also into doing them.  Also it feels like the gear is better this go around than it was the last time… because I got a 355 item from my Mythic 3 weekly chest, so numerically it seems to be scaling in a way that makes them worth it.

Kul’Tiras

Again I was not super sure how I would feel about the split faction islands concept but I really like roaming around on Kul’Tiras.  Once again this gives the feeling of PVP without actually being PVP since not playing on War mode means nobody gives a shit if I accidentally flag myself.  It gives me a whole new playground to roam around in after I have already reached level cap, and I am hoping that they give us more areas as the expansion drags on similar to how they expanded the game with the Broken Shore and Argus.

Dinosaurs and Pirates

I really love the horde content and the feeling of riding Dinosaurs and fighting Old Gods.  Everything about that is on point and makes me extremely happy. Similarly I love the whole Sea Witch and Pirate nonsense happening in Kul’Tiras.  Basically this is Ixalan the expansion and I am loving so much about it. The faction bullshit is still faction bullshit, but at least it is playing out in an interesting way most of the time.

Uldir

While I have not seen much of it, I am digging the whole Mesoamerican Titan thing going on with Uldir.  The two bosses I have seen have been fairly interesting, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the raid.  I think it is kind of shit though that they copped out and didn’t make it a tier set, and instead just made shared armor type sets.  This wasn’t cool in Trial of the Crusader and isn’t really cool now.

War Mode

I love War mode because it single handedly removed the worst players in World of Warcraft from my universe.  They simply do not exist any longer because they are off on their own island full, removed from my field of view.  Bravo for voting them off the island and making a more chill environment for me to run around in. As a result of this… the “enemy” players I encounter are often times helpful… and in turn I am regularly hopping in and helping them out as well.  It is a kinder and gentler Warcraft that I greatly approve of… now just drop the damned faction wall.

What Doesn’t Work

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Crafting

Crafting still feels awful.  Now I give them credit for splitting up crafting into a per expansion thing, because quite frankly that is the only reason why I am dabbling in crafting at all on my Demon Hunter.  However what feels completely fucking awful is the fact that the gear that is actually worth chasing is gated behind running fifteen mythic dungeons to achieve it. By the time I can craft it, it will no longer be worthwhile at all.  At a bare minimum there should have been a weekly quest to acquire a couple of the hydrocore items. Also there should have been a chance of any item over 340 that gets scrapped producing a Hydrocore. While this is less fucked up than Legion crafting was… it isn’t very far off the stupidity meter.

Weapon Drops

Every player I know is struggling to get decent weapons because they are just hard to come by.  I’ve run a silly number of Heroic Dungeons… several Mythics, killed a raid boss, and a slew of warfronts and have never seen a weapon drop in any of them.  I am having to survive entirely off drops from World Quests that seem to get rationed each week in an extremely limited quantity.  Now having written this…  I did get my first weapon drop of the expansion last night from a Warfront, and I will continue grinding that until I get another…  however that weapon came after a chest, legs, 3 pairs of bracers, a belt, another pair of bracers, another belt, a cloak…  and then finally a weapon.  I still feel like they have tuned this expansion drops for the era when we got freebie Artifact weapons.

War Campaign

What if you took the Garrison and the Order Hall but removed anything about it that made it enjoyable.  Then you would end up with the War Campaign that has a few interesting moments but largely feels forced and phoned in.  The missions you can run are boring and don’t really offer anything interesting apart from the occasional faction boosts.  The upgrades to your boat… are largely meaningless and are locked behind things I largely don’t care to be doing. It serves as a way for me to get to Kul’Tiras and nothing more, and all of the flavor that went into both the Garrison and Order Hall is just not there in any way that I care about.

Azerite Items/Heart of Azeroth

Much like the War Campaign this is a neutered version of the Artifact Weapon.  Everything that felt good or interesting has been diluted and spread out over a bunch of artificial bumps in the road where you get something…  but you don’t have an awful lot of choice about the thing you are getting. You get a 370 chest from Warfronts… well you are stuck with an arrangement of sub optimal talents on that piece of gear because it is not like you are going to luck into something else anytime soon.

There are so many ways this system could have worked better.  Maybe if each time you leveled up your Heart of Azeroth you got to choose which talent to learn, and then when you got a piece of gear you got to assign to the 2 or 3 slots available one of those talents you learned.  Then to go one step further… the assignments should be remembered like Talent picks and assigned to a specific spec so if you change your gear swaps Talent loadouts. As it is now… you feel like you have no real choice and have to largely roll with the items you get…  because once you have left 325 land you won’t have all that many options.

Islands

So at face value these are “fun enough” and involve running amok and killing tons of stuff with a group.  These work more or less like Pandaria scenarios… if they were completely divorced of having a purpose. As it stands I don’t get the point.  They are a cool tech that could have been interesting, but as it stands it is a boring and grindy activity that occasionally if you are really freaking lucky you might get a pet or a mount.  Your reward for running them is a purple currency called Dubloons that more or less doesn’t really have a purpose yet. As it stands the currency is used to buy a bunch of items that can only be used on Islands…  but this does nothing to help define the reason why you should give a fuck. As it stands you are forced to do enough to have done five different island layouts in order to move your also largely meaningless war table progress forward.  I can’t even call it a stick, because it isn’t really hard… but it is completely devoid of any carrot.

Whomping Witches

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Last night was a really good night.  My original intent was to grind Warfronts until my face fell off…  and that did not exactly happen.  I did however run two of them…  which sadly dropped exactly the same item… a pair of bracers that were five item levels lower than the ones I already wore.  Instead I allowed myself to get talked into mythical nonsense, at which point we ran an Atal’Dazar +2 because none of us had actually run it on mythic.  At first I thought we were not doing super well but in the end we managed to pick up time thanks to the fact that we now know a few shortcuts around the zone…  and finished the timer with time to spare upgrading our very first key and getting Tam and I the Keystone Initiate achievement.  My Demon Hunter was a third string character in Legion, and as such never set foot in a mythic, let alone a mythic+.

I managed to get a belt that was a minor upgrade…  which marks the first piece of loot that I have pulled from mythic+ so far.  Tam caused me to curse the fact that he has apparently stolen my luck and pulled a 340 weapon…  something I also so desperately need but in truth I would rather have that contribute to his dps as opposed to my aggro generation.  I did however manage to pick up a 330 weapon from a world quest before the end of the night so I at least saw movement.  The keystone from Atal’Dazar upgraded into a Waycrest Manor +3 at which point we decided to go ahead and give it an attempt.

The thinking being that if we could just struggle through the zone and get to the end… we would at least get slightly better gear from the weekly chest today.  Side note… I need to figure out where in the hell the weekly chest spawns.  I am guessing in the great seal area, but knowing the weird forced “I’m On A Boat” narrative, it is probably somewhere under deck near Gallywix.  So we set forth into Waycrest, which thankfully Grace had run on heroic earlier in the day so she more or less knew the appropriate path to take that day.  We had a few false starts but managed to nail the boss fights like we knew what we were doing, and came up a tragically five seconds short of getting the timer and upgrading the key further.  I think more than anything it proved to us that the keys were completely something reasonable that we should be shooting for.

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Tonight at this very moment…  the plan is to run whatever Emissary there happens to be for the day and dip my toes into LFR.  I think Grace and I have more or less made a pact to go in together as to minimize the frustration.  After that I figure we will evaluate what keys we all got and start the mythical madness over again from there.  I am shocked and surprised at how engaged Tam still seems to be with Mythics, because a part of me was certain he would bounce the moment he finished leveling his character.  He was asking us how high the mythics go… and in theory I believe they effectively keep scaling indefinitely.  Maybe this will be the expansion I finally see a Mythic +15.  Regardless in the mean time I am having a lot of fun and learning the zones better so I can pull more efficiently.  We are also slowly starting to re-learn when we should start using CC…  and given that I am a tank with a really damned solid CC… this is an interesting experience.