blackrock foundry Archives - Page 2 of 3

Timewalking Frustrations

April 15, 2015 by Belghast

6.2 Disappointment

This week we have had a pretty massive information dump about the 6.2 PTR patch information. I have to say overall I am fairly disappointed, not necessarily in what is contained within the patch, but that everything about it feels like an “end of expansion” content patch. The patch information is super spoilerific, but it seems as though the Burning Crusade is now invading Tanaan Jungle. Soon the gates will open revealing a zone besieged by fel magics, that culminate in the Hellfire Citadel raid zone. All of that sounds pretty badass, but the problem is it also sounds like the end of an expansion scenario. If 6.2 is on the PTR that means more than likely we are a little over a month from seeing this content in game. Which would probably place it landing at the beginning of June. We have no new expansion announcement, which means that more than likely they will be announcing it in November at Blizzcon.

The problem there is that unless they launch immediately following Blizzcon, we will be looking at another Siege of Orgrimmar style content lag. I feel like if they announce at Blizzcon the earliest an expansion would be launched is Spring 2016. The best case scenario I can think of in my mind places a new expansion in our hands in March 2016 which would be a nine month content lag. While that is nothing near as bad as the sixteen month lag at the end of Pandaria, it is still not amazing. Sure they would I guess shoehorn another minor content tier like Ruby Sanctum, but I don’t think that will really make anyone happy. Maybe I will be wrong, and maybe they have an even more epic conclusion of this expansion planned. This Siege on Hellfire Citadel however just feels like the last grand hurray for the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Which leaves the question in my mind of… what next?

Timewalking Frustrations

The absolute largest disappointment coming from this however relates to the Timewalking system. This was hinted at quite some time ago in an interview that something was in the worlks called Timewalking mode, and my mind was set ablaze. My grand crusade has been for years that World of Warcraft needs a mentoring system, that allows higher level players to scale down to the level of lower level players… and do content with them “for real”. When this new game system was hinted at, I was absolutely giddy because this meant finally after all these years WoW was getting mentoring. This has probably been the biggest reveal as part of the 6.2 informational dump, and I have to say I am really frustrated with the result. I am going to full quote a section of the announcement below.

In Patch 6.2, we’re introducing seven different weekend events that will run from noon Friday through noon Monday every week. Two of those events will be Timewalking weekends, in which you’ll be able to queue up for a randomly selected old-school dungeon with a new sort of “heroic” difficulty: When you Timewalk these dungeons, you’ll find that your character’s power and gear has been scaled down to a fraction of what they normally are. For the first time in years, some dungeons you outgrew long ago will once more put your skills to the test.

So instead of a robust mentoring system, we are apparently going to get a weekend gimmick. If I am reading this statement correctly it sounds like these are going to be limited time events that will happen twice. Maybe this is going to be like the pvp weekend construct, and simply rotate through seven different events, or maybe there are literally only going to be seven events ever. Right now we don’t really know, but regardless of the situation it feels like a complete waste of resources to put these in as limited time events. I was hoping for and expecting a robust mentoring system, but instead I am getting a carnival ride. I really don’t know why I set myself up for these disappointments, because traditionally my hopes are dashed on a regular basis when it comes to this game. I still have so much hope and can imagine a game that is so much better than what we actually have to play, but we never seem to get there.

Cycling Down

I am more than willing to admit that some of my frustrations might just be me. I have reached that point with World of Warcraft that I often do… where I am simply not enjoying the game. In previous trips back to the game I would have left it months ago. I pushed three characters to level 100 and everyone to within Garrison levels… and simply lacked the drive to push any further. The moment to moment gameplay was extremely fun while leveling, but the non-raid end game content has felt like I had no real purpose. So instead I log in an hour before raid on Tuesday, so that I can get my extra roll tokens, and make sure I have potions and flasks. Occasionally I half heartedly log in to run Garrison missions on my main, just for the hopes of those raid loot boxes every other week. I feel like I am spending the absolute bare minimum of time in this game, and so long as we were progressing smoothly in the raid it felt like it was time well spent.

Unfortunately we are not progressing smoothly. We will have a good night, and then it feels like we regress five steps the next one. I am tied to this game because I am actively raiding in it, but I have to say I am starting to question why I am even doing that. When raid voice chat is full of frustrated and stressed out voices… it pretty much destroys the enjoyment for me. I am all about joking and having a good time… and kicking ass while doing it. When we stop being able to have that relaxed raid dynamic, and still be high functioning my will to care drains from me. Ultimately I came back to the game riding a wave of nostalgia. I stayed because I was raiding and getting to hang out with a handful of friends that I missed. When even Rylacus, the life of the party, is starting to sound stressed and worn down… I question why we are doing any of this? I am sure I will chill out in the coming days, but seeing the 6.2 content, and our current raid struggles… it is making me question why I am still playing.

Pope Belghast

March 20, 2015 by Belghast

On Spoilers

This week has been an absolutely insane one, and I have had this feeling of constantly being behind the curve. So it is no surprise that yesterday I was just not getting around to listening to the relaunch of the Contains Moderate Peril podcast, now with the addition Jaedia and Jasyla joining the cast of permanent hosts. One of the topics that landed on was a discussion about spoilers. I have this mixed feeling about the concept of information being spoiled, and it largely centers around the fact that I don’t generally mind them. If nothing else knowing there is a plot twist coming up, only serves to enhance my interest in the product. I can only think of one instance where a spoiler actually stopped me from watching the show… and that primarily was because the single character I cared about was killed, and I didn’t feel like going through the motions of watching it happen.

All of this said I am super sensitive about potentially spoiling someone else’s experience. For example on AggroChat when we are about to discuss major plot points, even if it is a game well past the statute of limitations on such things… we still tend to preface it with “spoiler alert”. All of this discussion however has made me realize how generally awesome my twitter feed actually is. I can count on one hand the number of times that I have seen information in it that was actually a spoiler to anyone. Similarly the group of people that I hang around with and game with seem to be equally sensitive to such information. I just find it interesting that we don’t consider reading the book before going to see the movie spoilers, but when we read a plot synopsis it is somehow different. I will say that knowing the “Red Wedding” was coming, only served to enhance my enjoyment of that season of Game of Thrones, because I knew at some point this event would happen. That said… I would have been pissed as hell had someone spoiled any moment of the Harry Potter books for me, so I guess it goes both ways.

Back to Blackrock

Since my world was insane Monday and Tuesday… I ended up missing my World of Warcraft raid group night. As a result last night was my first time back this week, and it felt a little odd to be back in the game. It seems on Tuesday they managed to down everything we currently have on farm but the Operator Thogar encounter… which is fine by me because so far that is hands down my favorite fight this expansion. It took a few tries but I think on attempt three we managed to down Thogar again. I was absolutely shocked when I saw loot pop up on the corpse, since we generally run on personal loot. Our raid leader said that we had very few upgrades that could be gotten so that personal loot was no longer the big draw it once was. Unfortunately I have to disagree with him as I have not had a single upgrade in going on seven raids. I’ve gotten nothing but gold, and in many cases double gold since I am spending tokens left and right. I kept expecting that one of the weeks the slot machine of a loot system would pay out… but I am guessing that is no longer the case.

I was really hoping this week would be my week to pick up shoulders, since I have been sitting on the chest piece for a few weeks now. Neither piece is an upgrade unless I am also getting the two piece set bonus for wearing them. I am annoyed that I still have four slots that are sub 670 gear, but given time I will hopefully find some upgrades. One of the things I was not expecting is that they bumped Blackrock Foundry gear up by 5 ilevels, which actually makes LFR worthwhile for a couple of slots like my 640 legs. As far as progression content we worked on the Heart of the Mountain encounter for a bit before popping out of the instance, flipping it to heroic and working on Hans and Franz. On our best attempt we managed to get them down to 8% but we had various issues. Largely we were flying without a safety net last night as both our Deathknight and our Healing Druid were not in attendance… meaning we had no battle rezzes at all. I am getting frustrated that we are struggling with this attendance hump, not quite being able to get all the right classes we need to succeed on at the right time.

Pope Belghast

Before and after the raid I spent time in what has become my more comfortable gaming home… Final Fantasy XIV. For a period of time I was splitting myself fairly equally between World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV, but honestly at this point I am only actually logging in twice a week because I feel a sense of commitment to the raid. The thing that has always been missing in every game we have played is a huge thriving community. Right now we have that in Final Fantasy in spades, and in fact I would say our average player base is easily twice the number of people who are actually online regularly in House Stalwart. I want to say Ashgar said that over the last few days we had 55 unique players online, and we often top 20 on a nightly basis. For awhile I was actively recruiting players, but folks seem to keep recruiting themselves once they hear about the Free Company. All of this makes me a very happy Belghast.

After yesterdays post about being a reluctant healer, Ashgar took it upon himself to convince me to heal expert roulette last night. I told them this was a horrible idea, but they didn’t really listen and I endangered the lives of not only Ash but also Thalen and Solaria. It turns out that I honestly didn’t do too horribly. We ended up getting Keeper of the Lake which is a frustrating instance at the best of times. We died to the very first boss, but I believe that was the only time we wiped, and I only managed to lose a player once… and that was on the final boss encounter where I swiftcasted a battle rez. Yesterday after the WoW raid I spend most of the time milling around in the housing district, when we had a brilliant idea. I have been sitting on the player commendation pope hat for awhile, and with my soldiery healer gear… it just worked too perfectly not to use it. I even have a proper miter in my hands. I introduce to you Pope Belghast, the reluctant healer.

Serious Spelunking

March 11, 2015 by Belghast

Kromog Fell Down

Once more we entered the Blackrock Foundry, and once more we made some progress in our eventual goal of killing Blackhand. Generally speaking on Tuesday nights we try and clear all of our “farmed” content, some of which is less farmed than others. We struggled a bit at Oregorger this week, but managed to get him on what I think was our third attempt. That fight is just frustrating no matter how often you do it. I am not really sure what we were doing differently and if we were breaking boxes in the wrong order, but Oregorger was not going where we expected him to go. Eventually through a combination of luck and perseverance we managed to defeat him, and move on to more interesting fights. Quite honestly other than this rough spot, it was a pretty banner week given that we were down at least one healer the entire night.

Once again I got nothing of any use from the evening which is starting to get frustrating. This is two weeks now without a single upgrade, even after spending plenty of bonus roll tokens. My hope is that eventually there is going to be a week where everything I need drops all at once. It is just frustrating when you can feel the entire raid getting better geared… and you are still stuck at roughly the place you started Blackrock with. Our big accomplishment of the night is that we finally managed to defeat Kromog or Kologarn 2.0 as we tend to refer to him. On the attempt we managed to down him I think I was the only person dead, or at least one of the only. My issue was that I danced around with one of the tanks for a bit as we kept going for the same hand. All told though it was a pretty great night of raiding, and I look forward to making progress on Thogar on Thursday.

Serious Spelunking

While raiding is enjoyable and an important part of my week, it was far from the most important thing on my mind last night. Since I have a level 50 of every role, I have decided to deep headlong into the hole that is crafting in Final Fantasy XIV. Since I am making this my new mission I have decided to take it on in a rather methodical way, and that means focusing on leveling my Disciple of the Land “gathering” professions first to hopefully make feeding materials to the OTHER professions that much easier. If you have been reading my blog you have known that over the last few days I made a very serious push to finish leveling mining. Last night at the beginning of the evening I was what felt like a stones throw away from 50 sitting at 48 and some change. The problem is my evening did not work out exactly how I intended, and one thing or another kept sidetracking me. By raid time I had managed to push through to 49 but had to take a break to beat up orcs and such.

After the raid however I went back to pushing the gathering leves. The 45 leves in Coerthas send you all over that zone, or more importantly in three distinct areas. One of the tricks I figured out is the keep doing the one closest to the leve master, with a hopes of stacking all three of the ones that were further away at the same time… and then going out and completing those together. Each time you complete a leve it resets the ones the master offers. Essentially it took a few trips to the closest leve and one trip to the three furthest and I dinged 50. I have to give huge thanks to Thalen for hanging out and crafting me a full set of level 50 miner gear that I am wearing in the above picture. The best part… is that /visor turns off and on the headlamp. I have to say that a game is amazing if it can even make the crafting gear feel epic.

Lumberjack Time

I wasted no time sitting on my laurels, because I have so much more to level in order to reach my goal of being an “omni crafter”. This morning I started down the path of the botanist, which is essentially the guild of lumberjacks. I have to say though… after playing a Warrior for so long… that axe feels really puny. As of this morning I am sitting at level 5 and have completed the first quest. For this next stretch I am going to try and push through as long as I can stand it on just harvesting material alone, to hopefully allow my level quest allowance to regenerate a bit. Right now I only have 35 allowances, so it took most of the 99 maximum that I was sitting at to go from 30 to 50 mining. That is really my only frustration with this process, is that I don’t really understand why there is a leve allowance in the first place. There have to be better ways to farm gil than to grind leves over and over.

At least with leveling a battle profession, I can rely on dungeons and fates to replace the need for leves. But with crafting of all kinds it feels like you desperately need those to augment the experience you gain through harvesting. My hope is that once I start down the crafting path proper, I can use the Ixal dailies to make some serious headway. The goal right now is to stair step up each of the professions. So the first goal will be to take all of them to fifteen, then start raising them by 5 levels at a time. The hope is to make it so that when I need an item from one profession for the one I am currently working on… I can craft those without much fuss. This is a pretty significant undertaking, but I think I can accomplish it without burning out too badly. Honestly so far with the gathering professions I find them extremely relaxing. You end up hanging out, listening to the amazing music in this game, and clicking sparkly nodes. Compared to tanking… it is a piece of cake!

Melusine Down

February 10, 2015 by Belghast

I’m an Adjective?

There are just some days that it hits me how surreal my life can be. I seem to be having one of those days. I talked a bit about being called a “Cult Leader” last night, but apparently somewhere along the line I have become an adjective as well? If I would say I am most known for anything it would be that I blog each and every morning regardless if I have anything of any real gravity to talk about. If you follow Jaedia and Simcha you would have found out that this is apparently now termed the “Bel Method” because both of them have been dabbling with it of late. I didn’t even know I had a method to be honest… I just do this thing that involves blogging before I am actually awake. I am pretty sure people were rambling aimlessly long before I showed up, and will continue to do it long after I am gone. Though I do admit I got a great chuckle when I read that I have transcended humanity and now have become a “thing”.

@fynralyl that's the server the #BelEffect is happening on anyway. @belghast

— Sig (@Sigtric) February 7, 2015

Which makes it all the more humorous when the other day, I was mentioned in a conversation I was not really even participating in yet. My good friend Fynralyl mentioned on twitter that she was downloading Final Fantasy XIV, and before I even had a chance another friend… who is not even playing the game chimed in with our server information. To make it even more humorous Sigtric said the above quote, that the “#BelEffect” was going on. I am now an effect? I mean I realize my penchant for gathering people up and trying to get them all in the same place is rather notorious… but has it really become an effect to be monitored? Like I said before… it is really surreal to be referred to in adjective form. I am attempting to take it all in stride, as a sign of affection… but it is supremely strange. Now I am oddly cautious to see what other characteristic I have becomes a “thing”, is my traditional “Hey Folks” greeting now going to become canonized as well?

Melusine Down

Last night was of course our regularly scheduled raid night in Final Fantasy XIV. We unfortunately are starting to have a good problem happen… that quite often on Monday nights we have more than enough people to do our eight man. As a result since Paragon missed the last one, Cav offered to sit out and with that we zoned into Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. This was our second week of attempts on this encounter, and last week we managed to figure out most of the bits so it was just down to refinement and polish. We were teaching Paragon the fight from scratch, but he was a pretty quick study and before long we were back to where we left off last week. This fight is largely about managing adds, either in the form of the Renauds that need to be frozen with cursed voice or the Lamias that need to be burned down as soon as possible to lower overall raid damage. On top of all of these things… there is just a phenomenal amount of damage going out. There were so many times I was praying for my next cooldown so that I could survive just a little bit longer.

The turning point in our fight was honestly when we wiped because all of the Renaud that were frozen woke up at the same time. Prior to that the attempt was extremely smooth, and then we watched as the giants ran around wiping the raid. From that point on we started trying to manage just how many of them we had up at a once, and I started trying to do a better job of centering myself with the wall of them. These two tweaks lead to me getting frozen significantly less, and the wall of adds being more manageable as a whole. It was I believe one attempt after we started this strategy that we managed to get her down, and clear Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. Once again Ashgar remembered to tell folks to pose before we opened the chests, and I am super glad that he did… because this really is the best kill shot yet. I remembered to be centered in the photo rather than on one of the edges. We went into Turn 8 shortly after and only stayed long enough to get an idea of how the room works. Hopefully we can all watch some videos this week and make a good solid attempt next.

I Hate Oregorger

Yesterday I stumbled onto a blog post over on AskMrRobot showing how wipes on Oregorger compare to the raids average ilevel. I know we are still fairly low ilevel wise as a raid, I personally am only around 660 because we jumped straight from 7/7 normal and 5/7 heroic to doing normal mode Blackrock Foundry. I am wondering if that is the answer to dealing with the bullshit randomness of his hunger phase is to simply out gear it. Last Thursday when we were doing attempts on Oregorger we were following the exact pattern that everyone agrees upon is the best way to beat the fight. In fact multiple times during the night we stopped, rewatched videos to double check that we were not doing anything wrong… and still we kept dying to the damage of the phase. Either we were not fast enough on killing the crates, or simply lacked the gear to soak the damage. In any case the charge above would seem to agree that maybe Oregorger is simply a “gearing” thing. Had we entered Blackrock wearing full heroic gear… maybe it just would not have even been an issue.

In any case my hope is that by some sheer miracle of luck that we can down him because I want so bad to have this fight on farm status. I feel like both Gruul and the Hans’gar/Franzor encounter are likely on farm status after last week. I am wondering if there is something else that is low hanging fruit we can pick up while waiting on our gear level to raise before wrecking Oregorger. From what I understand the other boss we can try is Beastlord Darmac since Blackrock Foundry employs a “wing” strategy to its layout. Whatever we end up doing, I am looking forward to getting in tonight and smashing more Iron Horde faces. While much of the shiny of this expansion has faded for me, I am finding that the raiding is keeping me engaged and interested. While I may only be logging in to fiddle with my Garrison on nights other than the raid… I am still very much enjoying each and every boss fight.