fury Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Good Morning Folks! Or at least I hope to finish writing this and publish it within a timeframe that could still be referred to as “morning”. Here in the United States, it is Memorial Day and as such I would normally count this as part of my weekend and not blog. However, I found myself feeling weird about it being a Monday and not blogging so here we go! Since I last blogged I’ve hit a few milestones, the first of which is dinging level 100 for the first time in Diablo IV. Sadly I think it also probably denotes the end of my involvement with the game for the time being. I might max out my seasonal reputation but I am not feeling terribly driven to push further into the endgame. I am just not bossing motivated and the “mapping” experience in Diablo IV is sort of boring.

I’ve been actively doing The Pit since around 95 and I gotta say it feels worse than Greater Rifts did. The above is a picture of having cleared a Greater Rift in Diablo III and the comparative loot explosion that you got at the end. Clearly, The Pit just feels lackluster because generally speaking you tend to get four items and it does not seem to scale heavily as you go up in difficulty. Maybe there are breakpoints where it starts to feel more rewarding, but for the most part, it feels like it is a system that entirely exists to get the materials needed to masterwork your items… which again is a system that only really exists so that you can go deeper into The Pit. If The Pit already feels unrewarding… doing more of it so you can do more of it… does not feel like a good experience to me. I am not driven to prove how hardcore I am… I play these games to get cool loot and when I stop getting that I tend to bounce.

On the other side, I have been playing a huge amount of World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix lately and dinged 70 on my first timerunner character. I gotta say this setup is extremely sweet for setting up a character and preparing it for the next expansion. Just creating a character gives you maximum flying speed and a full inventory of 36 slot bags, then you can pick up those same bags for 10 Bronze each and outfit your bank in them as well. From what I understand when the event is over this character will exit the other side as a normal level 70 character with one of those high item level gear cache bundles as though it had been boosted allowing for it to essentially start War Within on a strong footing. Given that every character gets a boost from the current level of my timeless cloak, it is honestly a great way to seed various servers with max-level characters. I’ve always had a slew of friends who play on Drenden so currently planning on leveling a Tauren Paladin and maybe some sort of a Hunter over there.

Here is a crudely photoshopped mess of me attempting to show off all of the stats of my cloak at the same time. I am not sure how to read the cloak rank number, but I think that means I have collected 15k threads so far. I would potentially believe this based on my stat hits, and this is all through legitimate means. By the time I started my first character the “frog farm” had been nerfed, so this is just through normal play patterns. I have enough survival through my gem choices and my cloak stats that I can pretty much roll around in Titan Grip Fury mode. I need to work on earning my rings and necklace which are associated with achievements. Basically doing all the dungeons in Heroic Mode gets one ring, another is associated with doing all of the Heroic Scenarios, and the last is from running all of the raids in Normal Mode. I wish they would nerf this a bit and change it to Raid Finder mode because it is way easier to queue for Raid Finder than to use Group Finder for raids.

All of the World Bosses and Raids are on daily lockouts so that they can be farmed constantly. In fact, one of the popular leveling methods for alts involves getting to 25 and then queueing for LFR wings on each character daily to get a huge boost in XP and threads. I’m focused on this main character though and trying to unlock all of the things I need to unlock before shifting to alts. Given that I am queuing as a DPS, getting into raids should be relatively straight forward. I contemplating tanking them but honestly, I am not sure if I want the responsibility of trying to remember how all of this content worked. Maybe after running through various content a few times, I might shift over to my tank gear and give it a shot.

I did not in a million years think I would be falling back in love with World of Warcraft. If anything I thought I would be limping through the remainder of the story content in Final Fantasy XIV and preparing myself for the launch of that expansion. Early Access for it starts on June 28th which will be here before I realize it. I essentially need to make some hard decisions about whether or not I am going to hop on that train or not. There is a bare minimum amount of work that needs to be done if I am going to attempt to play at all. Essentially I need to get through the MSQ and then do a massive amount of retainer maintenance. Every class is level 80 or higher and as such I really need to spend some time cleaning out gear that I will never wear to free up room for new gear. This would involve a lot of grand company turnins… and probably is a week’s worth of effort at a minimum.

At one point I was pushing up a number of jobs to level 90 and managed to complete Paladin which I leveled during the campaign and then Monk, Dragoon, Samurai, and Machinist through doing daily quests and pvp content. I was pretty close on Red Mage as well so I could probably easily push it up as well. Basically, the new jobs will probably start at 80 which means the only gear I would care about keeping that us below that are things for Sage and Reaper which I could probably easily push to 80 as well. The problem with all of this is that I just need to make the decision to get started. I think at some point I will be in a daily maintenance routine with Pandaria Remix which would leave some room for maybe dipping my toes back into FFXIV.

This is of course on top of any time that I am spending in Guild Wars 2, because I would also really like to finish out the Secrets of the Obscure content there. I picked up my next Legendary starter kit and this is one that I have wanted for ages… so I need to start working towards collecting a bunch of Mystic Clovers and knocking out another Gift of Exploration and Gift of Battle. I need to see which character is closer to 100% World Exploration and then finish that out. I will probably have more fun doing it on my Ranger thought. I would really like to have a Legendary Hammer because it is a weapon that I really enjoy on a bunch of different classes.

Anyways… I got a lot of gaming on my plate. The positive is that I will definitely not be bored for a while.

Yesterday was of course the launch of Legion, or more so the first full day of the expansion. I have a lot of memories of acquiring copies of World of Warcraft throughout the years. When it launched in 2004, I was firstly in the “never pre-order anything” camp, and while there was a line out the door and down the sidewalk at Gamestop… I was able to stroll into Walmart at midnight and pick up my copy. I remember Walmart having this huge display in electronics, the size you would have expected for a major movie release. With Burning Crusade, getting a copy was significantly more difficult, but I still managed to roll into Walmart at midnight and snag one. I did however spent the next few weeks going out at lunch trying to find copies for folks who could not for whatever reason seem to get it in their area. When Wrath was released, once again I did the Walmart at midnight thing… and this time there was actually a line. I had an awesome conversation with another warrior tank while standing in line waiting on our boxes. However by the time Cataclysm came around… I believe that was the first expansion you could purchase a digital collectors edition and I did so happily because I was getting “too old” to be doing this midnight madness. I had reached that point in my life when I just wanted to be able to log in and play, and didn’t care too much about how that happened.

With Pandaria I somehow ended up with another physical collectors edition, and at this point I don’t even remember how or why. Now traditionally speaking around here… World of Warcraft Collectors Editions rot on the shelf. Not in a large quantity, but up until recently there have been a couple of physical copies of Warlords of Draenor available at various stores. I have a second account, and could use a second key… so yesterday I checked a few places to see if there happened to be one available. The idea was that I would ultimately trade that CE key with a friend who just got the normal copy, given that I already have the digital entitlement on my battle.net account. That plan however backfired in the most spectacular of ways because no one seems to have Legion in any form, let alone Collectors Editions. Throughout the day yesterday I heard tales of Amazon switching orders to arrive on September 29th, and listened as several friends had to dodge and weave to get around this delay. Throughout the day I checked Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Gamestop… none of which had so much as a single copy. When I looked up Legion on the Best Buy website, it stated that there were no copies available in a 250 mile radius. 250 miles includes the Dallas Metro, Kansas City Metro, Fayetteville/Bentonville Arkansas area, Wichita Kansas, and Oklahoma City.

I refuse to believe that every single copy sold out, because that just seems impossible. What seems far more likely is that there has been some massive shipping mishap, that involved delays to the central southwest. The result however is that it feels like Legion was the expansion that retail somehow forgot. While Warlords of Draenor was supposed to be this expansion to invite people back that had been gone a long time… it feels like Legion is actually delivering on that promise. It is going to be sad if it somehow misses its opportunity simply because the copies of the game are not available. The truth is… my only interest in a physical Collectors Edition is the fact that it includes the soundtrack. I wish that they would add that to the list of digital entitlements that you get when you buy the collectors that way. I can also always use a new mouse pad at work, so there is always that bonus as well. I however more than anything wanted to walk into Walmart and see a big display of pretty new copies of the game, in the hope that it might entice players to return. It has been great seeing players coming out of the woodwork for the first time in years, and I guess part of me wants to see that continue. Pretty boxes sitting on a shelf taunting you when you go to get groceries… seems to be an awesome way to guilt players into coming back.

As far as the expansion itself… so far I am enjoying myself. It is a much slower paced expansion, but that is precisely what I had wanted. I spent all night playing the game, from the time I got home around 5ish until when I finally went to bed around 10:30. During that time I managed to make it to level 101 and about 15-20% into level 102. As I had originally planned I went Fury this time around… which is quite honestly the first time since the launch of the game that I will not be leveling my Warrior as Protection. I am sure somewhere something is turning over in its grave… but more than likely it is just the old me that used to take pride in saying “Real Warriors Level Prot”. Fury is fun as hell, but there was a period when I started on the artifact quest… that I questioned my decision. I am guessing that maybe these quests are just a little “overtuned”… because I remember in beta thinking they were rough. I died probably no less than a dozen times when I tried to do this as a Deathknight, and I probably took a half dozen deaths as a Fury Warrior. Towards the end I was super carefully picking my way through the zone a single mob at a time, and kicking myself for not bringing any food into the quest. That was ultimately the hardest part was that I had no real way other than bloodthirst to get back my health. I finished it however and once I started Stormheim… everything leveled out and I have had no problem taking down any of the starred mobs solo. So far I am enjoying the hell out of myself, but I don’t feel like I have spent enough time in game yet to give it much more than a thumbs up.

Multiple Caps Reached

Expansion Retail Forgot