legion Archives - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Accidentally Epic’d

September 15, 2016 by Belghast

I figured this screenshot was appropriate this morning because this if anything else is how I feel. Ragweed is my direst of dire enemies. It has always been a problem for me and continues to be this day. I feel like I am a bit of a walking zombie and I didn’t really know completely why until I watched the forecast this morning. Sure enough ragweed pollen is spiking like mad right now, which explains the constant congestion, watery eyes… and general inability to breathe. On a day like today all I really want to do is to either go back to bed and hide from the world, or snuggle up in a cocoon on the sofa playing video games. The problem with this plan however is that our human resources department is being super bizarre with sick leave. I have almost 400 hours of sick time built up over the years… yet they tend to freak out any time someone actually uses some. What is the point of giving us sick leave… especially in the hundreds of hours territory while being stingy with actually getting to use it. So instead of chilling out on a day like today when I am not really a fully functional human being… I am going to shamble in my undead state to the office and mash keys with confused fingers.

One the WoW front however, as of last night I am missing one ring and a belt from being completely purple once more. The strange thing about this process has been that I didn’t really do anything super intentional to get there. Through unlocking my class hall, completely its mission… and then spending order resources to upgrade items all the way to 840 I got a big chunk of the way there. From there it has simply been doing any items that were upgrades each day from the world quests. The end result has been the least grindy gearing process I have ever gone through. I just played the game and did the things I enjoyed and before I knew it I was sitting there at 838, a reasonable level to do just about anything available in the game right now. The truth is I have only actually run two dungeons in heroic, and while I have done a slew of normal dungeons they were always for some other purpose than just grinding. Either I needed something for a quest or a friend of mine did… and we ventured forth and had a grand romp inside. It has been amazing just how painless and seamless this entire gearing process has felt. For a long time I have given credit to the way the catch up mechanics felt in Final Fantasy XIV, but even there you had to have a focus on actually running content to get gear. This time around it feels like I just did the things I would have done normally… and accidentally got epic’d.

Short and Long Game

September 14, 2016 by Belghast

Last night is a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me. When I first got home I piddled around for a bit doing the few world quests that actually had upgrades for me. I managed to pull out another 835 trinket, and a 830 Iron Relic which combined with a 830 necklace that I got much later in the evening takes my overall item level to 834. For the most part every single night I am doing two things. Firstly I am knocking out the four quests that are required to get me the emissary chest with whatever faction is highlighted. After that I check World Quest Tracker to see which rewards might be upgrades, because as my gear level has gone up… the sorts of rewards available to me has also increased. For example when I checked a few minutes ago before sitting down to write this blog post I had an epic chestpiece somewhere in Azuna with roughly 20 hours left on it. For those not familiar with the addon, it gives players a similar view to the mobile app in game and allows for the tracking of individual world quests. This is super handy because when you are tracking one… it then also shows up on your flight map so you can see pretty easily which location is the closest to the quest you are trying to finish. It also color codes the quests so you can see which ones are expiring soon. This way if you are trying to complete every possible quest, you can make sure you get those with a short timer on them done so you don’t risk them expiring.

After hopping on voice chat we organized into a group, because in part we were looking for something to do with Tam who has been working on a Monk healer. I needed a quest for enchanting from Halls of Valor… because even though I have done this place five times now the staggering of quests meant I kept needing something from it. The positive is that we could run a dungeon with him… the negative is that because of his “just boosted” gear score we had to zone in manually. What was awesome about the run last night though is that Grace has done quite a bit of healing on the Monk, so Tam and her talks about which abilities work for which fights as we went through the dungeon. By the end Tam was Mistwalkering like a pro, and I went from having to largely keep myself alive with Ignore Pain to not really even getting close to dying at all. The other thing we noticed is just how ridiculous the range on the Monk healing statue is. It seems to be most of an instance worth of distance… and I am not entirely certain that when it finally stopped healing… that it was due to range and not due to line of sight. We finished the dungeon successfully and it broke up the logjam that seemed to be my enchanting progression. After completing that one quest I got four other quests that unlocked a series of endgame neck enchants. Grace and I were talking a bit about this problem last night, that while I really enjoy the quests… it is going to make tradeskilling on alts a pure nightmare.

After the dungeon run, the group broke up as Mor and Ashgar needed to go off to bed… or whatever it was that they actually did. From there Grace and I decided to work on some of the Gold Dragon Wardens quests. These show up on your map with the traditional elite boss seal around them, and represent tougher group content. Sometimes these are reasonable to solo… other times they simply hit too hard or have too much life to be reasonable. While they are not often soloable, they generally speaking can be duo’d with my protection warrior and her mage. I can keep myself alive mostly long enough for her to burn it down and more often than not when we actually get to a given location… there is already a group starting the fight that we just hop in on. So I started the post with a statement about last night being a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me, and all of these examples are why. I started off the evening soloing, then pulled together a group and ran a dungeon… then continued the grouping in a much smaller scale with tracking down a bunch of elite world quests. I went from solo, to group, to duoing… all in the same night and it felt seamless and largely effortless to find some objective that felt valuable to do in all of those cases. Eventually I am sure raiding will be added in to that mix giving me a whole new level of things to do with friends, all the while constantly feeling like I am moving the needle forward. Legion is doing an excellent job of giving me small term gains, but still keeping extremely long term goals present and making me feel like I am constantly inching forward towards them. Now I just want them to keep this up for the rest of the expansion and continue this feeling into the next.

Battered Paw

September 8, 2016 by Belghast

The last twenty four hours has been interesting for a few reasons… most of them not terribly good. A few days back I introduced you to Luna, and to say her integration into our family has not been going swimmingly is an understatement. She is quite possibly one of the sweetest cats we have encountered… when it is human to cat interactions. However as she has gotten more comfortable in the house, she has also become less tolerate and more willing to straight up fight our other two cats. We are trying to work through this, but occasionally one of us has to try and break up a fight. Yesterday my wife attempted to break up one of those fights by trying to remove our youngest from the situation. In a highly stressed and freaked out state Kenzie bit the shit out of her hand. Now this same sequence of events had happened a few weeks earlier to me… but this time Luna bit me. For me everything seemed to be fine once I stopped the bleeding because four puncture wounds can really produce a lot of blood. For my wife however she is having some adverse effects… namely that her hand is swollen, red and fevered. Yesterday after work she went to an urgent care place here in town, and they too were concerned giving her a shot of antibiotics, and a ten day course. They also drew a boundary around the effected area saying, if the redness breaks this line… to get to the emergency room because my wife will need a course of IV antibiotics.

Needless to say I am now doing a lot of things for her, given that it is painful to grip anything in her primary hand. I’ve latched a couple of bras and opened a lot of pill bottles and pretty much anything else that requires grip strength. I would post a picture of her poor battered “paw” but honestly I am not sure the comfort level folks have with seeing injuries. When I posted my knee, it looked questionable but there were no open wounds. This on the other hand feels like it would cross some invisible internet line. Needless to say it looks bad, and thanks to the irregular line around it… and the swollen nature of the area… it kinda reminds me of a jellyfish. On the Luna front, what is ultimately happening is that we have built her a little suite of sorts in my wife’s office with litter, food and water and some comfy places to chill. She is ultimately staying there when we go to bed around midnight, and then getting back out when we are physically home and able to intervene if needed. The problem with this is that when I let her out each night she is starved for attention, and it just makes me feel horrible for doing it. That said I don’t want either side of this squabble to injure themselves further. Both Luna and Kenzie/Allie have several battle scars already from the past scuffles. Nothing yet that needs a trip to the vet thankfully, but still I don’t want to encourage more unsupervised “encounters”. Additionally when we are at home we try and make sure there is one of us on each floor of the house… so that there are clear safe zones that they can stay away from each other. I just am not sure how we get past this current situation and get to one where they at least tolerate being in the same room… if not hopefully someday are friends.

As far as the game goes, last night was a night of doing so many World Quests. Early in the evening I unlocked a set of quests… the first was to do 30 World Quests, and the second was to collect 30 Demonic Runes. Somehow I managed to actually complete both of these last night during my extended play session. With my wife in her current injured state I purposefully tried not to get into anything that I could not also get out of rapidly. There are so many little things that she just needs help with at the moment, and I didn’t want to inconvenience her or my party by getting into group content. So I spent the majority of the night running around doing these little vignettes of action, and I guess I caught it at exactly the right time… because when I finished the first round there were a handful of new ones up popping which allowed me to complete the 30 in total. This is not the sort of thing I will do often, as in try and do “all the quests” but it was fun to do it at least once. One of the things that I like the most about World Quests is that I don’t have to worry about collecting a quest… and if I get interrupted having it stranded in my quest log that I will then have to abandon to pick up something else of importance. I get to enjoy the action while it is happening and then forget about it if I need to get pulled away. The real shocker of the night however was that I did one of the PVP quests… admittedly without really intending to. I was bouncing around the map and noticed that there was a nearby quest with good rewards…. and it was only after I had killed a few mobs did I realize that I was now apparently flagged. It took a lot of deaths… not to PVP but just to the density of the mobs, but I managed to complete it and get my shiny bauble. All in all it seems like these are a way more reasonable and enjoyable form of potential PVP for me… it is doing an objective that has a clear reward at the end… rather than just killing players for the sake of killing players.

New Expansion Buzz

September 2, 2016 by Belghast

I have been having more fun in World of Warcraft than I have had in years. That at least feels like a true statement, but also one that makes me question it. Sure it seems like I am having a blast, but it got me thinking… don’t I always have a lot of fun at the launch of a new expansion? One of the interesting things about having a blog that has been active since 2009 is that in theory I should have evidence of how I felt at the launch of Cataclysm, Pandaria and Warlords. Around the launch of Cataclysm I seemed to be mostly focused on grouping and gearing… and grinding dungeons to get to the magical number needed for raiding. I think I was still very much in my “games are serious business” mode, so there really isn’t any talk about the expansion being fun or not. In truth remembering that time period I was very much not having fun, and I think in the grand scheme of things that is ultimately why Cataclysm was the expansion that caused me to “quit” World of Warcraft. The quit is of course a lie, considering that I am still playing the game… and never really went longer than six months without reactivating my account. The launch of Pandaria unfortunately happened during a serious lapse in my posting, and by the time I start back up… I was on the daily posting kick and talking about casually playing the game. With the launch of Warlords… I talk a lot about how nostalgic the game makes me feel, but in reality not much actually talking about how I am enjoying it. This was after all the expansion I had originally said I was going to take a pass on… so this quote makes sense.

I still stand by my original statement that if you have no interest in World of Warcraft, this expansion will do little to change that.

So if I set out to prove that I am always pumped about the launch of a new game expansion… I guess I disproved that theory? I guess at least on some level, any infusion of new content is something that I ultimately enjoy. There are new zones to explore, new quests to figure out… and lots and lots of tasty loot. However this time around something feels different, and I am having trouble quantifying exactly what that is. For the first time since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King… I have hope that the best days of the Warcraft franchise are not behind us. With all of the previous expansions… I felt like they did a decent job of stirring up nostalgia, but not really doing a great job of making me feel like the game has a new purpose. This time around so much feels fresh, from the class designs and reworks to the fact that they all seem to be focused on a clear vision of what that class does. I attempted to talk about this yesterday, but the fact that my airflow was pretty low ended up with the post being a jumbled mess. To be truthful I am still sick right now, so for all I know this post is also going to be a jumbled mess. However I love the feel of my Warrior for the first time since I really came into my own as a tanking main during Burning Crusade. The irony here is the fact that I am not really tanking at all, but instead dpsing my way through the content as Fury.

The only problem here is that we have just barely scratched the surface, and myself even more so than that. The game launched Monday night, and we already have four level 110 characters in House Stalwart. I am very much not one of them… but instead hanging back in the middle of the pack at level 105, having completely finished Stormheim and just started Azsuna. I have no idea what the “feel” of the expansion is going to be once we all kick off the training wheels and move into that sometimes glorious time known as the end game. Even Warlords had some really fun moments while leveling, and including some really amazing cinematic experiences. However once we arrived at the end there was a very hollow game waiting for us. I guess the difference this time is that with the launch of Warlords I absolutely expected to have bounced off of the game by about the three month mark. In truth it was a little closer to the six month mark, but the bounce did in fact happen at least mentally even though I don’t think I ever actually cancelled my account this time around. This time however… I have a blazing pyre of hope that maybe just maybe that won’t happen. Ultimately I really like what is going on… with the class design, with the storyline, with the zone creation, and heaven forbid with the lore itself. The bigger story of Khadgar being Khadgar and Jaina being Angry… well it can screw off. However the intricate intra-zone stories are awesome, and I totally want to have reasons to hang out with Havi during later content. World of Warcraft and Blizzard… please don’t break my heart this time.