Abandoning Warrior

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worldofwarcraf060001

I’ve loved the Warrior class since the first time I saw one tank a raid.  Back then I was attempting to tank with my Paladin during the “seal of rage” era and to be able to see the way the warrior could just do everything better than I could was impressive.  I rapidly started leveling a Warrior up with my good friend Finni as she leveled her priest, and before long I was tanking all of the Late Night Raiders off night activities like Zul’Gurub.  When Burning Crusade was released I used it as an opportunity to shed Hunter as my raiding main and embrace the life of the tank.  It was a good choice and I was largely happy with it until the tail end of Wrath of the Lich King when I started straying from the path by playing a Death Knight.  I kept on that Deathlord path up until Warlords when they reached a point where they felt horrible, and with that I shifted back to my original love and have been a Warrior main again ever since.

As it stands right now…  Warriors are not in a great place.  I’ve always prided myself on being the tank that was the most healable, in that I tried my damnedest to level out the amount of damage that I am taking so that I can be healed in a predictable manner.  That is no longer a protection warrior, in fact as I have seen so far they seem to be the absolute worst at taking damage spikes due to a combination of all of our active mitigation abilities being on the GCD and not being able to maintain 100% up time due to cool downs.  Playing a warrior tank right now is a stressful mess in a manner that it shouldn’t be at the low gear levels and challenge levels of content that I am focused on.  I always feel like I am rage starved and essentially have to choose between active mitigation and dealing damage, and the more I sway towards damage reduction…. the more trouble I have holding aggro on large packs of things.

This is exacerbated by the fact that I cannot find a weapon to save my life and finally had to plunk down 11k on a weapon that I know will be replaced almost immediately just because it is something better than the 273 weapon that I had been using.  To make things worse…  even in the open world while doing World Quests…  Warrior tanks feel like a mess.  It is a constant juggling act trying to keep myself alive while slowly chewing down the health of mobs.  Sure I can solo bigger content, but it requires me to be constantly vigilant and never miss an active mitigation…  or simply pull a ton of trash mobs to make sure I can always be killing something and proccing another 20% heal from Victory Rush.  Basically warrioring right now is the opposite of fun for me and it is at this point that I think I am stepping away…  feeling like I wasted the last few weeks on a class that I just don’t want to play.

worldofwarcraf090001

Instead I am spending my play time right now leveling the Demon Hunter because their tank ability is just complete nonsense.  They are grossly overpowered and I think honestly I am okay with that…  because it feels like a fun class to play.  At this point I am 113 and have tanked Underrot…  one of the dungeons that has just straight up murdered me as a warrior.  It was only last night that I realized that the 8.0 patch reset my talents… I was apparently doing all this with absolutely no talent choices.  It is nonsense and I cannot underline that point enough, but it is fun and it allows me to have a relatively stress free play experience.  Sure I have to be a damned dirty elf…  but at least my Demon Hunter looks cool.

The truth is at some point Demon Hunters are going to get the ban hammer…  and that is frustrating because they feel like tanks in general used to feel.  Sure it took you forever to kill something, but you didn’t have to worry about incoming damage while you were slowly chewing away at mob health.  More importantly than anything…  Demon Hunters right now are the easiest to keep alive for the healers and knowing that as a Warrior I am stressing out my healer…  stresses me out.  I took Friday off and I plan on using it to do a very hard push of the Demon Hunter to 120 and start gearing it.  The tanking is enjoyable enough that I am likely going to just start pugging dungeon runs for gear immediately or grabbing anyone in guild that needs gear for an instant queue.

I am deeply saddened that I have reached this point, with warriors.  I am even more deeply saddened that if you go on the Warrior forums you see a lot of people claiming nothing is wrong.  If the healers tell me Warriors are in general harder to heal than any other Tank class and they consider them bottom of the rung…  then I believe them.  They are the ones keeping my ass alive and I don’t like the notion that my choice of class makes their lives worse.  I like Fury just fine so at least my Warrior won’t go to waste… I just need to acquire two weapons…  which is its own challenge.  I guess I could craft two fist weapons with my leatherworker Demon Hunter and use that as a starting place.  I can only hope that Warriors return to glory at some point in the near future.

Fediverse: Things I Wish I Knew Earlier

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worldofwarcraf080002

First off this morning you are getting a picture of Dolly and Dot for no apparent reason other than the fact that they are adorable and they should be your best friends too.  Secondly this is going to largely be a Mastodon/Fediverse related topic, so your mileage may vary.  Last week I started off the week with a post about my adventures in the “Federiverse” at that time.  After some digging around I apparently used the wrong term, which was confusing given that both got used in equal parts as far as I could see.  It turns out Fediverse as a concept dates back to at least 2008, whereas the Federiverse thing doesn’t have its own Wiki page and only really links to hashtags on mastodon…  so I have edited my vocabulary to adopt the correct term.

Now I went through this little dance with the naming of the thing, largely because this is a sequence of events you are ultimately going to get used to if you truly blend into the culture on Mastodon and all of the other services using the ActivityPub protocol.  Like me you will likely be coming from a background built upon using Twitter or “Birdsite” as a lot of the denizens of the fediverse refer to it as, and that came with a bunch of cultural norms.  Mastodon and related services also have a lot of cultural norms and it can be sorta confusing getting adjusted to them.  For the most part however folks seem to be genuinely nice about helping new users along the journey.

In gaming there have been several times where I was asked to join a guild or a clan with their own well established doctrine of “normal” behaviors.  In many cases the choice was either to adapt to how things worked in that structure or to ultimately branch out and do your own thing.  When I go into one of those situations I try and be hyper conscious about my actions and how they might impact others.  Similarly I try very hard to not take anything for granted, and ultimately ask for permission rather than assume that I have it.  This is also a complimentary mindset for joining Mastodon and making sure that you largely fit in with the flow of things.  This morning I am going to talk about a few things that it took me a bit to sort out.

Gaming vs Gameing

One of the things that you are going to encounter as a gamer on Mastodon is that they regularly use an incorrect spelling of the word gaming.  It took me a bit to sort this out, because for awhile I thought maybe this was a US English vs UK English sort of thing and maybe some people actually DO legitimately spell it with that E.  Eventually I did what I have often done to learn things on the network…  I asked the Fediverse and in response it spit back more than a few comments.  Ultimately what it comes down to is “Gameing” is sort of their reaction to the “hardcoreification” of the “gamer” identity.  There are folks that felt like that identity was co-opted by the super serious and elitist, leaving little ground for the more casual players who just want to enjoy gaming to its fullest without getting caught up in too much epeen braggery.

As a result they started using the misspelled and nonsensical “Gameing” to represent the more pure aspects of the joy that is discovering new and interesting things through video games.  Understanding this now you will see me also adopting that hashtag at times when advertising my posts since I am not really the most serious person in nature.  I lead off this post with a picture of Dolly and Dot afterall, so I am not exactly hard edge.  This honestly dates back to a discussion that has sprung up numerous times in the blogosphere about how to identify a gamer, and if there is such a thing as “casual core”.  Instead we can just skip past all of this and use the #gameing bit to indicate which side of that gulf we happen to reside on.

Caption Your Images

mastodon-caption-image

One of the things about Mastodon and the Fediverse in general is that they seem to really care about accessibility.  What I mean by that is that your content is accessible by both sighted users and the visually impaired that may be using a screen reader app to check their social media.  You will hear people talking about making sure to caption your images, but it took me a long while to actually sort out how that works.  I thought by simply including text along with my image I was doing that.  However once you have uploaded your image you can click on it with your mouse, or finger on a mobile client…  and it brings up a box allowing you to had an explicit caption of what the image represents.  It is a good habit to get into, but folks are understanding when you simply rush to post something and forget.

Delete and Redraft

Now say you post an image… and you want to fix the fact that you forgot to add a caption.  Mastodon has this wonderful feature that is called Delete and Redraft… that is sorta like editing but not quite.  Essentially it does what it says… it deletes your original toot and pulls the contents of it back into the editor so you can fix that typo or add that caption.  This will of course nuke any interaction that has been done with a toot, but you are going to find that Mastodon is a network of people that don’t place quite as much emphasis on how many “favorites” or “likes” something got.

Using CW/Content Warning Tags

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Another thing you are going to see a lot of is the wide and varied uses of the CW tag, or the collapsible [show more] [show less] blocks on posts.  I am honestly still sorting out how I want to best use these, because there are a lot of different ways that they get used in the community.  Firstly they should always be used if you are going to post NSFW content and when you click the CW button in your client it brings up a box that allows you to describe what sort of content is being posted.  Additionally the community prefers that you use these in any situation where your post might trigger someone.  For example I used them when I posted a picture of cookies yesterday, just in case someone out there with an eating disorder might be negatively influenced by that posting.  I denoted in the description line “food, cookies” as a sort of short hand so people can understand why the tag is happening.

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The other usage you will see an awful lot that I also have attempted to adopt myself, is using them to shorten long posts.  For example the above image is of my Actively Playing pin on my profile.  Without expanding it you just see the text “Actively Playing 2018-08-25” but then if you expand it shows all of the games mentioned and their equivalent hashtags.  The interesting thing about CW is that if someone were to search for #MonsterHunter for example… they would eventually find my pinned toot even though the hashtag itself exists behind the block.  The only negative of a CW is that it also always hides the visibility of the image.  Basically this is the sort of thing you need to play with yourself to determine if you want to use it or not.  However you are going to be urged gently (most of the time) to adopt some sort of regular usage of them by the community.

Pronouns

mastodon-pronouns

I have to admit here, I have never really put my pronouns in a social media profile not because I am oblivious to the need of such things… but more along the lines that I didn’t really mind whatever pronouns someone opted to using for me.  If you want to call me She, it isn’t really going to bother me nor is referring to me as the more neutral Them.  However in the middle of a conversation I had someone explain that seeing pronouns in your profile just makes them more comfortable, especially in situations where someone is trying really hard not to make any assumptions about anyone.  Again this goes back to trying to ease into the water of a pool that is already full to the brim with people… and if it makes others more comfortable I will absolutely adopt that stance going forward.  Similarly I suggest you move in that direction as well, and as such I am also going back and shimming the “he/him” bit into my older social media profiles as I come across them just to help ease the comfort levels of others.

Interact Freely

The other thing of interest about the Fediverse is that no one seems to consider it creepy if you just start commenting on random posts.  That is absolutely a thing that happens due to the federated nature of the timeline…  people who have no connection to you will find your posts and occasionally comment and no one takes offense to this.  You are having a very public conversation and it is accepted that you are basically shouting into an open room, in part because Mastodon gives you the option to post privately or only to your followers along with the more public options.  If you can see a post… it means it is perfectly fine for you to chime in on it.  It is also perfectly normal to follow random people or boost their toots.  This is one of the more refreshing things about the Fediverse in general is that there are not as many weird hangups about interactions.  You are expected to branch out and meet new people through interactions, and generally speaking people seem to be way more open as a whole because the various content controls that Mastodon Instance owners have…  tends to make it a much safer place for open discourse.

It has been an interesting experiment getting involved with this network.  It feels more natural I guess the more I use it, and you too will go through a bit of an adjustment period.  Granted I still very much use Twitter and I am not really looking for Mastodon to be a replacement.  It is however a vastly different experience and as such I sort of treat it as its own thing.  I’ve only scratched the surface of things I could say about my experiences but I figure at this point it is a long enough blog post.  I would be curious to hear all of the little idiosyncrasies that you have found in getting adjusted.

 

Early Doldrums

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esobel-byammosart

I didn’t blog this morning in part I think because I didn’t want to write the post that was sitting inside my brain.  First off I wanted to share this amazing image of my Elder Scrolls Online Imperial Dragon Knight that I commissioned Ammo to create for me.  Secondly I ended up creating a big damned thread over on Mastodon and I just realized… it was the blog post I should have made this morning.  So I ultimately lied to you and am going to largely post that thread over here since it is actually a post.

I am in a really weird place with WoW at the moment.  The last several nights I have logged in mostly to do the Emissary quest and then largely logged back out.  I rapidly reached a point where the World Quest gear isn’t really an upgrade unless its one of my dwindling number of 300ish items

The other main problem is…  the Protection Warrior just doesn’t feel as good as it has in past expansions, especially for open world content.  Sure after swapping around my build I can survive essentially indefinitely, but the time to kill just feels awful.  Not to mention the flow of combat just feels off for some reason that I can’t quite quantify.

I am starting to feel like maybe I chose the wrong main this time around…  but I am also not finding the oomph to level something else in its place because that is even more time being out of sync with my friends playing.  The stingy nature of weapons while leveling, means that I don’t really have a viable off spec weapon set up to go Fury (my choice of dps spec as warrior), and even Arms would be super anemic since my single two-hander is pretty crummy.

I think if I force myself into chain running some dungeons I might be able to kick start that joy again… but right now I am in a doldrum the earliest I have ever been in any previous expansion.  The last few nights have been a little odd and lead to me just not playing at all with friends so I think tonight I am going to see what a round of dungeoning feels like to see if it kicks me back into enjoyment phase.  Otherwise I have to tackle the thought of leveling something else…  or just moving on for now knowing that eventually I will come back.

Sometimes you just gotta be willing to let the post out that is inside of you even thought you maybe don’t want to be negative.  It will get out one way or the other…  either in a long thread on social media or in a series of private messages to friends.

Old Dog New Tricks

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worldofwarcraf060001

Last night was a pretty chill night for me, in fact I honestly didn’t play that much Warcraft other than getting in and doing the Emissary quest for the day.  The sand fishing quest in Vol’dun can officially die in a fire… the only thing that managed to make it reasonable is that I happened to have a couple of other hordies doing it at the same time and we tagged each others spawns.  Effectively when you fish with the extra action button… you can either get a work or one of the angry trilobyte things… and it seemed like I pulled way more of those out of the ground rather than the worms I actually needed.  Not a fan at all… but it was a 310 azerite chest so figured I NEEDED to do it to see if I got anything interesting from it.  I am also trying to adjust to drastically changing up my play style with the warrior.

Ultimately I was operating with old data in the back of my head and also trying to play like I had played for most of legion…  when rage rained down from the sky like magic.  The entire time playing Battle for Azeroth I have felt rage starved, like I simply did not have enough of it to do all of the things I felt like I needed to do.  In Legion it seemed like I could spam revenge with impunity and still have plenty of rage left over to keep Ignore Pain and Shield Block active 100% of the time.  Additionally I seem to have missed the memo that Ignore Pain is now sorta garbage as compared to its original state that I was used to.  If I had to make a choice before I would almost always favor Ignore Pain over Shield Block because it seemed to buy me more leverage to work with.

That however is not the case anymore and additionally the Devastator talent that can be used to simplify the rotation…  seems to also be not that great.  So all through the leveling process I ran a build that looked a little something like this…

  • Impending Victory – having the heal was nice for regenerating my health
  • Crackling Thunder – because thunderclap radius meant I could hit more things
  • Unstoppable Force – because more thunderclap with Avatar
  • Indomitable – largely picked because I always used this before
  • Rumbling Earth – because I like shockwave a lot
  • Devastator – because it was one less button I needed to mash
  • Heavy Repercussions – because lazy and it is a simple pick

The build that I have shifted to looks a little bit like this.

  • Into the Fray – because apparently now haste is king?
  • Bounding Stride – more movement options is more better
  • Unstoppable Force – still because more thunderclap with Avatar
  • Bolster – because halves the cooldown of Last Stand and makes me block all melee attacks while up
  • Rumbling Earth – again because I like shockwave a lot
  • Booming Voice – because apparently Demoralizing Shout became my fastest way to get some rage
  • Anger Management – because thanks to bolster Last Stand is my best cooldown and it comes up more often

The problem with all of this is to make it work…  I had to shift around a ton of my keybinds and last night was largely me running around and killing things and trying to get used to the new places that things are in… and also learning to lean on Demoralizing Shout whenever I am rage starved to get back in the game.  I am old… and as a result I am starting to get a little set in my ways.  The keybinds I have been using for my warrior have been used in that configuration for probably three expansions now more or less apart from some minor tweaks.  It is going to take awhile to get to where I don’t feel like I am walking on marbles with these new keybinds.  Essentially I try and play my classes in a way so that I am not thinking about what I am hitting at any given moment… and I am largely just playing through muscle memory.  So I have to spend some time retraining said muscle memory so I can get back to just reacting to the situation on the ground as it is happening rather than hovering in my head trying to sort out what I should be hitting.

Tonight I will probably do more of the same, doing world quests to get used to the feel of things… and also because I am going to be at RiffTrax with work friends leading me to get home super late as compared to my usual schedule.  It is going to be Krull which has always been a bit of a guilty pleasure movie for me.  I grew up loving the weapon and tolerating the movie because the weapon looked badass.  It should be a good time and I am mostly hoping that I can keep my coughing down to a minimum in the theater as not to distract everyone else around me.