legion Archives - Page 4 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Top Floor

August 21, 2016 by Belghast

Off and on throughout this event I have used the “elevator” metaphor to explain how the experience bonus of the invasions has felt. It started off as a steady elevator, and then took a bunch of detours for maintenance. However at the end the final version felt like it was picking up speed as I finished the climb towards the top. The other day Devolore made a comment about this invasion that I think is worth sharing.

While I realize the goal of the event was not to level everything to 100… that is precisely what I set out to do. Before the initial change I managed to get my Priest from 92 to 100, and then turned around and got my Mage from 90 to 100. That left only my little monk that starting last Wednesday was sitting at only level 53. In the last four days I have finished the climb to 100, finally dinging off of an invasion last night after we wrapped up recording the podcast. It was a wild ride filled with pure madness, but overall it was an enjoyable one. This is the feeling I have been chasing for awhile, going into an expansion knowing that every single character on at least my primary server was ready to go and awaiting the next content release. There are a bunch of things I learned on the trip, and I took care last night to log some of my findings. The rest of this post is likely going to be a bunch of bullet points explaining what all I found out.

It took a total of 49 Invasions to go from level 53 to 100
I was wearing full heirlooms the entire way, so adjust accordingly
That makes it .95 levels per invasion completed
I saved 97 loot boxes while doing the even, 49 Blue, 48 Green.

The Loot

This is what 97 loot boxes from the event looks like sitting in my bank. I saved every single one from the moment I started climbing from 53 to 100, in a large part because I wanted a bunch of information to be able to draw conclusions from. On a whim I ended up opening all of my Green chests first, and they my Blue chests… which caused me to notice a pattern.

Phase 2 – Small Legion Chest – Can Contain

Bracers
Gloves
Belt
Boots
Weapons

Phase 4 – Large Legion Chest – Can Contain

Helm
Shoulders
Chest
Pants
Weapons
Coalesced Fel

In the course of the events I ran I got 118 items to drop from the chests, and around 2000 nethershards… but I was not keeping as good of track on that number as I did the others. As I opened the boxes I recorded the what dropped and divided up level 700, 710 and 720 drops in the hopes of being able to pull some percentages together on the chance of each.

Level 700 Item Drops

Helm – 9
Shoulders – 13
Chest – 10
Bracers – 11
Gloves – 11
Belt – 8
Pants – 9
Boot – 6
Weapon – 14
Coalesced Fel – 9

Level 710 Item Drops

Helm – 2
Shoulders – 1
Bracers – 2
Gloves – 1
Belt – 3
Pants – 1
Boots – 5

Level 720 Item Drops

Shoulders – 1
Belt – 1
Pants – 1

So in total I got 100 level 700 drops, 15 level 710 drops, and 3 level 720 drops. Using some quick and dirty math that means that I got a Warforged 710 item 12% of the time, and a 720 item 2.5% of the time. In any case… my Monk is likely going to be my best geared character once I complete the Broken Shores content and get my ring and trinket. Leveling through Invasions was often times frustration… but overall it was an extremely enjoyable experience. I would love to say I would do this same rough on my hordies… but with only nine days until the launch of Legion I just am not sure if I have that sort of grind in me. More than likely I will be focusing on filling the gear holes in my various characters, and pushing them all through the broken shores and follow-up content.

Fixed Mostly

August 20, 2016 by Belghast

The Wild Ride

The last two weeks have been a bit of a roller-coaster of nerfs and buffs to the Legion Event. When I first wrote Monday about the “elevator” it was really simple and fast to get a character through the levels, and it didn’t even require much attention to detail. Simply being in the zone allowed you to reap the entire lions share of experience. This unfortunately lead to a bit of a plague of afk leveling, because players would park in a relative safe spot and just wait for the phases to complete. The irony here is that I didn’t actually do this myself until the first round of nerfs, taking the experience down so much that the event didn’t really feel worthwhile. The positive takeaway of this experience is that Blizzard kept trying different combinations to see if they could find the sweet spot. I know of at least four different hotfixes that were applied to tweak this variable or that until we wound up with the one that happened last night, and seems to FINALLY restore the event to a level that isn’t AFK leveling, but still feels like you aren’t wasting your time. Also the new version of the event seems to reward group player, and dissuade players from some of the antisocial behavior that had sprung up.

For a period of time your best bet was to find a quiet corner of the zone to camp for demons and solo everything you could. This however lead players to getting rather vocal when someone was encroaching upon their turf. I mean I get the frustration because it could literally half your experience gained if another player touched whatever you had been soloing. A drive by dot could wreck your experience, and as a result folks were somewhat understandably grumpy about the experience. You can read my own twitter feed full of random comments about this over the week, so on several levels I have been grumpy as well. Since I have been writing about it I thought this morning I would talk about the various methods I have personally experiences, and which have good results if you are going into these events hunting experience for leveling, rather than loot boxes. You admittedly end up with more lootboxes than you could ever want as well, but that is just a fringe benefit.

Your Own Private Army

Scattered throughout the Invasion zones are a number of NPCs that can be saved. Several of them will fight along side you when you save them, and are really handy. I am sure I don’t have a full list, but here are some of the ones I know about and have used.

Darnassian Starcaller – Druid – Ranged/AOE
Ironforge Crusader – Paladin – Melee/Stun
Gnomeregan Mechano-Mage – Mage – Ranged/AOE
Senjin Battle-Healer – Shaman – Heals/Ranged

I am certain there are more, but wowhead is freaking out this morning. I know at some point I also had a dwarven hunter lady while out in Tanaris. Essentially they are scattered throughout the battlefield, and in Westfall they are often times inside the farm houses. Rescuing them essentially allows you to take things down more quickly because you have a battle minion following you around and attacking whatever you happen to be attacking. For example if I have the Crusader I tend to go after the huge mini-boss type baddies because the stun effects them and allows me to shred them. If I have one of the AOE minions… then I tend to focus on large packs because they will chew them up with AOE damage. I am not sure how many of these you can have at once, but I have for certain had two up at once and been just fine. Essentially when you have a couple of these battle minions up, you can run throughout the zone looking for packs of Legion mobs and shredding them for experience.

Vehicular Demonslaughter

The option one of my friends tends to favor is to grab one of the many vehicles scattered around the battlefield and start laying waste to baddies with it. There is a shockingly wide variety of these available. For the alliance I know we have Dwarven Steam Tanks, Gnomish Spiders, and Darnassian Glaive Throwers. Similarly there are horde options as well including some weird undead thing that throws bombs. Once again the idea is to grab a tank, and just go to town wrecking as many demons as you can before you run out of fuel. Fuel being a buff that you get that shows how long you can be active in the vehicle. Personally I have had the best luck with the Steam Tanks because they allow you to just brute force large packs of mobs at once. Demolishers I think play a similar role for the horde, and allow you to just storm into a Legion camp and destroy everything in your path.

Chase the Skulls

Now personally after the patch I think this is the best option for maximum experience gain… and it seems like everyone else has caught on as well. Boss fights reward a silly amount of experience now. In my 70s last night I was getting 45k-60k experience per boss kill, and the various mobs scattered throughout the map and marked with Skulls in phase three… count as bosses. So new best way to gain experience seems to be to chase these around the zone, and I say chase because there will be a massive amount of flying mounts heading in one direction or another. The key here however is to stay alive. This is my only real complaint about the changes… is that with placing so much emphasis on boss kills, you are completely screwed if you are dead while the boss is taken down. If you are dead you get exactly zero experience for the boss kill, and makes the entire process a complete waste of your time. As a result you have to play super cautiously, especially as you near the end of the bosses health bar. I tend to disengage from melee range and use my extremely crappy channeled range attack just to make sure I am on the threat list of the boss but also giving myself maximum room to duck away in case of one of the many one shot boss abilities. Overall the changes are much better than they have been… and in truth you can end up with a lot more experience per invasion than you could even before the first round of nerfs. The big difference is that you have to be extremely active and constantly moving around zone and fighting to make that happen. Ultimately I think that was what they were going for, and I wanted to reward activity that helps the invasion out… and not activity that happens to get in through a loophole.

Slow News Day

August 19, 2016 by Belghast

For lack of a better term, yesterday was a slow news day… at least in terms of me and gaming. A handful of times a year I go out with some co-workers to RiffTrax and last night was the live show for Mothra. I say live show… because in Nashville the Rifftrax crew genuinely is doing this live… and simulcast to the various theaters around the country. We’ve talked about how great it would be to sit there in the theater and experience it in person… but that would be like a nine hour drive. Also the RiffTrax show is always on “a school night” which would make work the next day super awkward and staying over in Nashville even more bizarre. The interesting aside from last night is that I apparently had either not seen Mothra… or did not remember it at all. In truth when I think Mothra… I think Mothra vs Godzilla. Growing up there was a local UHF channel that used to have “themed” weeks during the summer. There would be one week where they played all of the Spiderman movies, or another week where they played nothing but Bruce Lee. One of the weeks was always every single Godzilla movie, and I remember watching those as a kid and enjoying them greatly. Mothra on the other hand… was just way more bizarre than I ever realized. Also as the RiffTrax folks kept pointing out… for a movie about Mothra she didn’t spend much time on screen. The “Riffs” were of course plentiful and one of the more awesome things about going to several of these live shows… is that they keep making call backs to previous ones. Both Merlin and the Ice Cream Bunny made appearances at least in joke form.

As far as gaming goes I did manage to get about an hour in before I finally collapsed, and during that time I mostly just worked on trying to get drops from the invasions. Right now it seems like everyone is for the most part either finished gearing… or one slot away from it. I’ve made a lot of progress in knocking stuff off in my spreadsheet, and at least feel like I am in a better place than I was earlier. It does get frustrating when you need a single item… but keep getting nothing but bracers for example. What I seem to be missing follows…

Exeter – Paladin – Gloves
Lodin – Hunter – Shoulders
Tallow – Shaman – Legs
Gloam – Rogue – Gloves
Belglaive – Demon Hunter – Grinding out Purchased Items
Belghast – Warrior – It’s Complicated

Right now I am mostly focused on that last one. Belghast was my best geared character going into this event, so some of the items are simply not upgrades… unless I happen to warforge them. Even then some of the slots are not worth it unless I get the 720 warforged versions. The main thing for him however is gloves and a set of weapons because at least in my Fury set I only have a pair of 690 axes. I am not sure at what point I call it “good” however, because really I feel like my 11 level 100 characters are all in a reasonable place for leveling in the Legion expansion, which ultimately was my entire point in doing any of the events. At some point soon I am going to shift my focus over to the Monk and see how close I can get to pushing him over the level 100 line before the expansion actually hits. I am not sure why but it just feels like it would be awesome to say I went into this expansion will a full stable of level 100 characters… at least on Argent Dawn my primary server.

Elevator Broken

August 17, 2016 by Belghast

Fun While it Lasted

On Monday I wrote about riding this new Legion Event to 100 on several of my characters, and how holding chests allowed me to instantly have viable level capped characters upon dinging. At least the second part of that statement is true now, but sadly the first part… not so much. It seems yesterday they patched the servers to increase the spawn rate of events, but greatly decrease the experience gained from each. While this is technically a net gain… it is also a whole lot of busy work to gain it. Previously on my Monk in his 50s/60s I was gaining at least one full levels worth of experience from each event I participated in. So that mean’t every four hours, I could run two events with him and then still have time to swap in some other alts for gearing purposes. As of yesterday I was getting a little less than half of a level of experience per event participated in. That means during the same four hour window, there are now a total of six events, instead of two… and as a result if experience stays roughly half a level that means I gain 3 levels instead of 2 before. The gotcha however is that you spend almost every second of that four hours either participating in an event or travelling to the next one, and in my experience I had no real time to swap in that many alts to also attempt to get gear. Given how fast experience is gained through questing, it also feels like during that same four hour block I could probably do significantly better than three levels.

What made the “elevator” nice is that I could more casually swap in my lower level alts, and still have time to do the ones I was trying to get gear for. Now instead I have to make a choice between getting the gear from the event, or leveling. I mean I get why they did this, because they really want folks to focus on the gear and not the easy ticket leveling. I am just glad that I managed to pull my Priest from 92 to 100, and my Mage from 90 to 100 before the elevator broke. As a result I am tabling my Monk for the moment, at least until I finish getting all of the rest of my stable of 11 characters fully geared in 700 or better items from the event. Technically Belghast my Draenor main has the least stuff from the event, but he also has 700 or better in most of his slots already. Other than that my rogue really is the one missing the most gear, so I will be working on him next. Exeter my Paladin is missing a weapon, Lodin my hunter Shoulders, and Tallow my Shaman a handful of items. Instead of focusing entirely on the Monk I am going to work on getting these characters the last of the missing pieces so that they are in a better state to be prepared for leveling them in Legion. I have this feeling that 700 is essentially the place they are expecting us to be at for the new content, and even though we will be swapping all of it out for better gear almost instantly it should at least ease that transition.

Unknown Main

I am hoping over the next few days to be able to reach a point where I am completely okay hopping off the event train. While it has been a fun ride chasing the skulls around the zones, I have to say I have neglected other important things during the process. For example I have yet to complete the Broken Shore quest chain in live on any of my characters. While I did it a bunch of times in Beta and have since seen the cinematics I missed… with the patching in of more quest content I feel like I need to get on the ball and start in with this. More than anything this expansion feels really different, and in a good way. I like the way that they seem to be easing us into the content with the invasion, and the head start into Broken Shore or the Demon Hunter experience. It feels like we are having this rolling soft launch more than waiting for the 30th to flip the switch and have everyone rush into doing exactly the same stuff. My hope is this is going to allow us to have a more staggered experience with different groups of people progressing through the content at different speeds. I know personally I will likely be starting the new content in Stormheim, but that is largely because it feels like this great big love letter to Northrend.

The biggest challenge however still yet to be solved is… I have zero clue what my main is going to be. There are a bunch of different classes that I really enjoy right now. I love Vengeance Demon Hunter, I think in part because of its mobility and the ability to get places due to double jump and glide which comes in super handy in the new content. I also am completely in love with Lodin my Hunter… because I am finally getting to play out that fantasy of being a melee hunter. Belghast and Belgrave are both strong contenders because well… I tend to level tanks first, but in both cases they don’t necessarily feel that new or fresh but more the same. I am also loving Tallow my Enhancement Shaman and Gloam my Outlaw Rogue… but they will more than likely be relegated to the back burner. The character that I love that I am shocked to admit it though is my Demonology Warlock. It is actually a really strong contender for getting leveled quickly, because I have enjoyed playing it so much. Now however you can see the problem… I am loving this game at the moment because I am loving a lot of my characters at the same time. There however has to be a first… and I am still completely up in the air as to who that is going to be.