horde Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Hellfire and Horde

November 30, 2015 by Belghast

Adulting Sucks

This morning I am sitting here trying to eat my oatmeal and drink my coffee… and this Monday guy keeps pestering me and trying to make me adult. Really freaking annoying. This weekend was a tale of my wife and I avoiding adulting.. so much so that finally yesterday we had to get out and do things in the world. Essentially yesterday was the day of doing all of the things we put off the rest of the break. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t too bad, but the world was cold and rainy… and when I first set foot outside yesterday morning my first instinct was to rush back inside and swear off breakfast. Then my tummy kicked in and told me that it was hungry, and it was also sick of the options we had available in the house. So I ventured out and got breakfast, and realized that I could in fact survive outside of my house shaped bubble with its blanket cocoon. You can tell the hibernation instinct is strong… because we bought the fixings for a bunch of various crock pot meals… so we don’t have to leave the house at all once we make it in from work.

Unexpected Activity

A good chunk of my weekend was spent doing things to get gear for Belgrace my newly 100 Tauren Paladin. When you boost a character they end up giving you a full set of green 640 gear, which is a significant increase over the sort of gear you end up with by natively leveling. Also apart from having to get silver in the proving grounds… you are level appropriate for heroics and the first two LFR raids. I however had pretty crappy luck in Blackrock Foundry with getting upgrades, but I did have a fair amount of luck picking up Baleful drops in the Tanaan Jungle campaign area. So last night I was sitting at 656 with a decent purple weapon… that was sadly as good if not better than Belghast’s alliance side. I had settled down into my blanket cocoon on the sofa prepping to watch my Sunday evening television binge of Once Upon a Time > Walking Dead > Into the Badlands > Talking Dead when I got a random invite from my friend Nubzy.

I knew that they raided on Sunday nights, but I had no clue they planned on dragging me into Hellfire Citadel. I had told her that I was working on gearing and that I had managed to get to 656, but that did not necessarily mean I was expecting to raid. They were resetting the instance apparently and were grabbing a ton of other people into what was their largest raid group to date of around sixteen people. Brerhoof has always been awesome, and he set to making me some upgrades for my remaining 640 green slots. So before I had even really set foot into the dungeon Brer handed me Gauntlets, Pants and Boots that were significant upgrades. Then off the very first drop I managed to pick up Shell-Resistant Stompers and luckily I had not bound the boots yet so I equipped the drop and holding onto the BOEs for the time being. Either I will get an upgrade for them, or pass them on to the next guildie that needs them. The night as a whole saw me getting a bunch of really nice upgrades… in addition to the boots I picked up a Helm of Precognition, an Warlord’s Unseeing Eye for offspec… and most importantly a 690 weapon upgrade Fel-Burning Blade.

Old School Feels

While the gear upgrades were awesome… the real take away from the night was just how much fun I had. The horde guild is named Facepull, and that should tell you something about the attitude and demeanor. More than anything running with them… reminded me of the nights raiding with Duranub before Cataclysm. It was an old school kind of fun, and even when we did something stupid… no one really got pissy about it. We just kept pushing forward and making progress. For having a bit of a strange balance we did really well making it up to Gorefiend before hitting a bit of a wall. At that point we had a few members of the raid have to leave… one of which was a healer leaving us with a fairly unbalanced party. The big surprise of the evening is I guess I did not realize that Nubzy was now one of the tanks. I guess I knew her most as a Shadow Priest, so I guess in the back of my head I just assumed she was booming it up on her Druid. Right now the plan is to gear out my offspec for tanking, but if we continue to need healing… I might change those plans at some point.

Paladin is the only class I have really successfully healed on… but that was back during Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King. I know Paladin healing is far less whack-a-mole than it was… and for some people that is probably a good thing. For me that really has no healing instincts left anymore from my Everquest days… that is definitely a bad thing. The only sort of healer I am is really the “mash button faster for more heals” kind. Granted I did level as a healer in SWTOR on my Scoundrel, but good at healing companions is one thing… good at healing people is a completely different one. In Final Fantasy XIV I kinda fail at my Scholar and I am not exactly the sort of healer you really want on my White Mage either. In any case I had a lot of fun, and the Sunday evening thing is something I could potentially get used to. They don’t start until almost 8pm EST, which by that time I am always downstairs watching television anyways. I managed to dps just fine while watching my shows last night, so in theory this is a decent fit. I have to say I could get used to this raiding as a cow thing… and the group of people seemed pretty damned cool as well.

We’ve Got Cows

November 25, 2015 by Belghast

Another Realm

I have briefly talked about this in the past, but I’ve lived in this strange place when it comes to World of Warcraft. Sure I played lots of Alliance because that was where most of my characters that I cared about existed… but I’ve always been one to bridge the gap. It was thanks to my involvement in the Argent Dawn server forums, and the later unofficial server forums that I created and hosted that I got to know tons of people on that side of the fence. For years I said I would level something on Horde to play with my “other” set of friends, but that never really panned out. During Wrath I ended up pushing a Deathknight to 80, but unfortunately the account it is on… is not the account I play most of the time. When it was announced that Scryers would be merging into Argent Dawn… I went somewhat crazy and created a full account worth of Horde characters because quite honestly… I had no clue how the merger would work. I did not know if all of the sudden there would just be this one amalgam server… and we would have 22 characters on it. The end result however is that both Argent Dawn and Scryers exist as distinct worlds… but everything from guilds to the zones themselves spans across the two realms allowing me to officially guild up with my old school Horde friends.

This has allowed me to do some utter madness… and ultimately have both a Horde and Alliance version of every single character. The big problem came with the fact that I had one of each on the Alliance that I did not want to lose access to. So now after some juggling Argent Dawn has become the server I play Alliance on and Scryers the server I play exclusively Horde. The only challenge is the fact that I had nothing leveled on Scryers, whereas on Argent Dawn as you can see above all but two of my characters are over level 90, and even then the lowest is 53 which is still a significant amount of levels. Prior to this week on Scryers I had managed to get an Orc Deathknight to 60, and a Tauren Paladin and Blood Elf Warrior to around 20. With the announcement of Legion came the pre-order process, which I went ahead and did giving me a boost to level 100. I was extremely torn on this one… do I take the boost and potentially get to do some stuff with my friends now… or do I level it the old fashioned way. Having not seen much of the Horde content, I actually do want to level there eventually.

Moo-Cow-Adin

Essentially I arrived at a thought process that is level the Blood Elf Warrior and Orc Deathknight legitimately… but boost the Tauren Paladin giving me access to do “big kid things” right away. I largely went with the Paladin because I really do enjoy both Protection and Retribution, but more importantly it gives me a character that I can in theory fill three different roles on. While I don’t really like healing as a Paladin, I have done it in the past and in a pinch I could do it again. I am however completely comfortable doing LFR and the likes as a Retribution Paladin allowing me to hopefully gear up both my Retribution set and eventually get a Protection set. The problem is… I knew if I was ever going to play the character for real I had to look cool doing it. This means I had to find something that I could enjoy to transmog into for the time being. My go to set for Paladins is the Tier 6 Lightbringer set, because it is relatively easy to farm. So last night I set off to go do Black Temple, Mount Hyjal, and finally Sunwell.

I am convinced that the game goes out of its way to screw with players trying to farm a full set of gear in a single attempt. It seems like there is always a single piece of gear that refuses to drop… and generally speaking it has been the helm token for me off Archimonde. This is extra insulting because as far as a raid goes… I HATE running Mount Hyjal. This is namely because you are a slave to the timers… and it seems to take significantly longer than most any other raid due to this aspect. Namely it is the Horde section of that raid that drives me insane… because I tend to play Melee focused characters, which makes knocking Gargoyles and Frost Wyrms out of the air a major pain in the ass. All told I was pretty happy with the results, and the only piece I did not manage to get were the legs from the Illidari Council fight… because for some reason it glitched and only gave me two pieces of loot including a single leg token. I have zero problem farming Black Temple to get the legs, and in the meantime I got a drop from Sunwell that will fill in well enough for the time being. At some point I need to get a better weapon, but for the moment I am rocking the big damned glowy orange axe from Black Temple, which makes me happy enough.

Onwards to Tanaan

My guild suggested that I spend some time digging into Tanaan Jungle to get some upgrades from the 640 set they start you out in after being boosted. I also really want to start the Legendary Ring quest, which I just picked up last night. From there I plan on throwing myself at the LFR and seeing if I can get some decent upgrades, and hoping to complete the ring quest along the way. It is really my hope that they upped the drop chances of those items out of Highmaul that are needed for the ring, because otherwise… this is going to be a thoroughly frustrating experience. I remember how long it took to get those on Belghast when we were actively raiding every week. In any case I seem to have sorted out how to actually play a Paladin again, and gearing my Moocow is pretty much my side gig from this point onwards. It is my hope to be able to get geared enough to actually join in some of the reindeer games happening on this side of the server. The only footnote there is that I really need not to raid actively, and I am hoping that won’t be a problem.

For a period of time I was really damned happy playing both Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. I enjoyed the mix of the two games because they both scratched a distinct itch. World of Warcraft is this really enjoyable experience when played casually. I enjoy doing older content for transmog bits, or casually leveling alts… but when I was raiding both Warcraft and FFXIV… the differences just started frustrating me. Ultimately I prefer the FFXIV raid game better, because it feels like the boss encounters are simply messaged better. Granted if they just added telegraphs with clearly identified edges of effects like they have in both Wildstar and FFXIV it would go a long way to my enjoyment. Ultimately I think I simply got burnt out by trying to raid two different games at the same time… and ultimately ended up choosing the one that was causing me less frustration. So now… I am hoping to go back to playing both games casually… and in theory maybe starting to raid once again in FFXIV. We have started doing this Saturday thing again, where we do older content and it was a lot of fun this week. My hope this will ease me into doing more content in that game as well, and in the mean time I am planning on diving into LFR on the Paladin in WoW. Granted I won’t be doing any of it tonight… because this is the first of our Thanksgivings, and I also need to stage a proper Thanksgiving post for tomorrow.

The Pause Button

July 9, 2014 by Belghast

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Right now I find myself struggling to get excited about anything in the MMO genre. I think I part I am feeling this overwhelming feeling that there are so many games that are not MMOs that I want to be playing. For years I have just defaulted to playing an MMO for so many different reasons. For starters it was more or less my social lifeline and the primary way that I kept in touch with all of my friends. The guild House Stalwart that I lead and still do lead more often than not in absentia of late… was a vessel in which I collected all of my friends in one place. During the heyday of World of Warcraft this was a glorious thing, and kept me tied to the game because it was the place I could hang out with everyone at once.

When I entered the twitter and blog community this shifted considerably, and I started wanting to hang out with new and different people and had pure hell trying to incorporate all these new friends with my old friends as well. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and the end result has been a series of games played with a small subset of friends each time something new came out. I guess over the last few weeks I have realized that I no longer need the crutch that is MMOs as a way of capturing my friends and hanging out with them. At this point I pretty much have contact with everyone I have ever gamed with seriously outside of said MMO. Just because I am not playing the same game doesn’t mean I no longer have access to those people.

The Pause Button

At this point I really want to indulge my absolutely insane steam backlog, and start playing my way through it. In part this is because a single player game has something that an MMO will never have… a pause button. Over the last few months my wife and I have gotten more serious about exercise, especially since getting our fitbits back in March. Neither of us necessarily like doing it, but we know we need to and the payoff in the long run will be a much improved life. So much of my gaming life has been about getting home and getting everything done that needs to be done before gaming “primetime”. The problem is our exercise routine doesn’t fit into this plan, since in general we need to wait for things to cool off before going out and about. Sunday I made a walk in a heat index of 110 degrees, and that is not something I want to do again anytime soon.

What this means in reality is that I really cannot get involved in anything at all until I get back from my walk. This also means that for sake of sanity sake… this only gives me an hour or two to do anything structured and still be able to get up and around in the morning in a non-zombie state. So right now my exercise routine has pretty much destroyed my ability to do group MMO content, which is the primary reason why I plan MMOs in the first place. I don’t mean grouping to quest or grouping to PVP… but grouping to run Dungeons. Without the drive to do the next dungeon, the MMO experience I am finding is rather bland. At the very least that thing that used to drive me higher and higher in level just isn’t there right now.

The Treasure Trove

I am not saying anything dramatic like I am done with Wildstar or Elder Scrolls Online or World of Warcraft or MMOs in general. Instead I am giving myself the leverage to not care about them if I so choose. I am sitting on what feels like a gold mine of narrative games that because of the feeling of having to log in nightly to whatever my current MMO was… I did not play. So you are likely going to see a lot more single player game coverage… and significantly less multiplayer coverage. I guess this is the good thing about having a blog format that revolves around my whims and not necessarily a specific game in it. I might end up losing some readers in the process, and I guess I am okay with that. I have become known for being an “MMO Gamer” and while I won’t stop being that, I will probably focus on more of the content that I would normally talk about during Steampowered Sunday.

Right now I want to actually finish some games. I have this horrible habit of getting near the end of a game, generally within an hour or two of beating it and losing the drive to push across the finish line. It is like I had so much fun playing the game that I don’t want the experience to end, and if I never go back and finish it up… it never has to. Right now I am within two hours of being the new Wolfenstein game for example, but I have been reluctant to do so… because I really enjoyed the experience on the way to the end. I am honestly the same way with novels and my bedside table is strewn with a ton of half finished books. In games the journey has always been so much more important than the destination… so I guess I avoid finishing the journey. All of that said it is something I would very much like to change. Back in the era of Nintendo, I had challenges with friends to see who could beat a specific game the fastest… so I know that me is somewhere deep inside waiting to get out.

Autopilot Gaming

All of that said… what did I end up doing last night? Playing World of Warcraft while watching movies. I was in the mood to hang out downstairs and watch stuff off Netflix, and after making a couple of attempts to play various games I settled to playing WoW. I have lost the ability to ONLY watch Television, after having done it as an activity while I was doing something else for so long now. That said games like Divinity: Original Sin require too much of me to be able to play them and keep track of a movie at the same time. WoW on the other hand is almost pure muscle memory at this point… I don’t have to think about the game to play it. So I decided to fire up one of my army of new hordies over on Scyers and at least get one of them into my guild of horde friends Bloodmoon Chosen. For years I have made an attempt to play Horde, because I have a large number of friends over there as well as Alliance. However because of my desire to have all of my slots available for Alliance, I kept relegating the horde to an alternate account. With the merger of Argent Dawn and The Scryers server, this gives me the ability to have 11 Alliance characters and 11 Horde characters.

The first movie of the night was Odd Thomas… which was familiar sounding but I did not have a clue why. It was staring Anton Yelchin… aka Chekov from the new Star Trek series, and more or less I have liked him in everything I have seen him in so far. Turns out that maybe somewhere deep in the bowels of my mind I realized this was a book series by Dean Koontz, but when folks on twitter informed me of such last night I was surprised. I really enjoyed the movie in a more action hero Donnie Darko kind of way, which likely makes zero sense anywhere other than my own head. It was good enough that it makes me want to track down a copy of the novels and read through them. I’ve never been a huge Koontz fan, and generally I tend to consider his novels a bit on the cheesy side… but I dig this protagonist. I like the whole unlikely crusader for good aspect of the story, and it tends to be a trope I enjoy in most movies.

The second movie of the night however was not nearly as enjoyable. One of my guilty pleasures is that I like John Cusack. I am a huge fan of movies like Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, but the unfortunate truth is that Cusack tends to play exactly the same character in every movie he is in. Edgar Allen Poe likely was a neurotic mess… but Cusack’ particular brand of neurosis doesn’t quite work here. Additionally while I can get behind the transformation of the cerebral Sherlock Holmes into the Robert Downey Jr. badass action hero… this doesn’t work at all for Cusack and Poe. I am honestly not sure what I was expecting, but after the high that was Odd Thomas I was just looking for something else and this movie showed up in one of my Netflix streams and I figured what the hell. Unless you are supremely bored and have literally watched everything else of substance in your movie feed… I would highly suggest skipping it.