lodin Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Playing Dress-Up

July 20, 2016 by Belghast

Quest for Bank Space

Be warned, I am really not sure how much this mornings post is actually going to be a proper topic… and how much it is just going to be show and tell. Essentially last night was spent sifting through so many characters on so many different servers to unlock all of the appearances I seem to have available to me. From there I started cleaning out the banks one at a time starting with Belghast my Warrior and for the time being my main. This was shockingly hard work, and I ended up installing an addon to help give me some confidence to actually go through with getting rid of an item. What I really wanted was a clear thumbs up or thumbs down on every single item much like Rift has stating that “you have this appearance”. Caerdon Wardrobe works at least in a way that is most critical, but still I really wanted to see that message for every soul bound item “just to make sure”. What the addon does do that is useful is for non-soulbound items it tells you that either you don’t have the appearance, or you have collected the appearance from another item. As far as the soulbounds… I just took the plunge and accepted that over a decades worth of accumulated stuff really was in fact added to my account appearance collection. This admittedly was a hard step, and one made no simpler by the fact that apparently Ark Inventory changed greatly… and with every character I logged in I had to do a bit of remapping of some of the styles to get things to load correctly. So I spent the night with Grace as moral support trudging through my bank… while the rest of the AggroChat crew listened in while playing Final Fantasy XIV thinking we were absolutely insane.

Honestly Tam thought this was some sort of limited time event… but I somehow doubt that the rest of the crew takes appearance items nearly as serious as Grace and I do. I mean Tam always has a spiffy glamour in FFXIV but he only has the one glamour and is not constantly rat-holing appearance items just in case someday he MIGHT want to use one for an outfit. I have joked and said that wardrobes are the true end game… but I am being serious. I have been more motivated in games when there is a cool piece of armor or a weapon on the line, than literally anything else you can dangle in front of me like a carrot. As a result one of my favorite activities has been doing old raid content and collecting nifty appearance items to line my vaults for another day. The problem being that quite literally on my Warrior I had seven inventory slots, zero bank slots, and zero void storage slots. Every last corner of that storage was filled with weapons and armor that I under no circumstances would be willing to part with. So a whole lot of my simply not playing the game… is because I had no room to keep accumulating items. Last night had been a long time coming, and was a bit of a purge of my digital hording of stuff. So in many ways selling all of those items was a liberating experience… but also one that terrified me at the thought that maybe just maybe the system would fuck up and I would end up losing everything. Of note… I got every single fashionista achievement other than the shirt one from logging in my first character. As the night went on the shirt achievement happened slowly while logging in a long list of alts that have otherwise been abandoned to the sands of time.

Show and Tell

Essentially the order of operations went a little something like this. I first logged in every single character on my account… which includes numerous characters on other servers that I have only ever played once or twice. From there I focused in on chewing through my mains… where I decided to sell off any gear that was not the current “best in bag” for my current spec. I figure with the expansion only a few weeks away, I was going to be just fine being confined to a single spec per character for that moment. I burned through my salvage crates and learned the appearances I did not already have… and mailed the extras off to Grace for her to sift through as well. Of note she is doing the same thing, but I just realized that it might not work as well as I thought it would… given that I think you can only learn an appearance on a character of that armor type. We will sort out the details of that later though. Then I started tearing into the bank, offloading anything that did not have a nifty and unique use effect and selling it. The only real speedbump here is the fact that a lot of the Naxxramas and Ulduar era class gear can’t be sold… so I will have to manually delete that at a later date. The final thing I did before logging out of any character… was to set my talents and give my character an outfit for the occasion. The rest of this post is ultimately going to be me posting pictures and talking about the outfits.

Belghast – Warrior

This is my “Ready for the Legion” outfit, rocking the Illidari tabard and shield, and using the red/fel green version of the Icecrown Deathknight look-a-like armor. As to whether or not this will remain my main for the coming expansion has yet to be seen, but for the time being I think I look awesome.

Belgrave – Death Knight

Character number two on the list was my Deathknight, and also the point at which I learned that I can apparently now transmog legendary weapons? I wanted to go with something fiery looking to match the Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros legendary weapon. So I ended up landing on the black hand armor set from the garrison appearance vendor. To go with it is one of the trading card game tabards, the Flame one to be specific.

Lodin – Hunter

When this game launched I tried to make Melee Hunter a thing, and wound up tanking a bunch of the instances with a combination of myself and my gorilla pet. Now that Survival is the honest and true melee spec… of course I am going to freaking use it. As a result I wanted to come up with an outfit that worked with the new PVP gear I picked up. This is one of those situations where it “sorta matches” or at least well enough to make me happy in combat, however as I look at it now I am starting to pick it apart a bit. I am going to be “happy enough” for the time being.

Exeter – Paladin

I tried a bunch of different things before finally settling on this outfit. I wanted something purple for my paladin, but didn’t want to use the purple judgement set that I have often used in the past. So I started with the purple tone deathknight icecrown set, and started shifting around bits until I was happy. Once again I am using one of the card game tabards, this time the purple Tabard of the Arcane. The end result is almost my favorite of the night… which is ultimately the next one.

Tallow – Shaman

When Cataclysm introduced the ability for Dwarves to be shaman… I immediately race changed my then Draenei Shaman to be a proper Wildhammer Dwarf. Ironically I also then turned my Dwarf Paladin into a Draenei one… but that is a different story. I have always been enthralled with the whole idea of the Wildhammer Clan, and for this transmog I wanted something that felt almost wildhammery but still looked nice and armored. So I ended up shifting to using one of the Warlords leveling sets… that I just happened to have the perfect set of hammers to go with. I then decided to go with the Fel Goggles to bring out the Fel coloring of the hammers. This was the last one I did last night before crashing but is hands down my favorite so far. So that was ultimately my night, and tonight I will hopefully do the rest of this server.

Setting Priorities

December 15, 2015 by Belghast

Return of the Deathknight

I’ve already talked at length about how we know without a doubt that Gladiator will be dying with the launch of Legion. As a result this will greatly hamper my enjoyment as a Warrior since in truth I have never really liked Fury or Arms that much. Sure I could go back to tanking full time… and that would be pretty awesome… but my prospects for returning to a main tanking role are not entirely that great. I mostly shifted to DPS so that if I missed a night… it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Missing a night as one of the primary tanks however… that is a big deal and causes great hardship on whatever raid you are part of. That said… everything I am hearing about Blood Deathknights is telling me that they are returning to the awesome feel they had before Warlords turned them into finger wigglers. I mean there are lots of people that don’t get my complaints about the class… but having a lot of caster animation abilities in your standard rotation ended up making them feel less of a big sturdy melee class. I mean I play Blood when I need to survive, especially while questing on Tanaan but I pretty much hate every moment of it. The class has always been tied to that spec for me.. and even before it became the main tanking tree… I was a blood Death Knight.

Granted there were times I flirted with Unholy for DPS, and Dual Wield Frost for Tanking…. but in each of those times… Blood was still my other spec, the one I never got rid of because it just felt awesome. With it returning to glory, I have to say I am kinda excited about dusting off Belgrave again. The problem being as you can see above… he is wearing this horrible mishmash of whatever gear I happened to find along the way. So one of my goals over the coming weeks is to get him as geared out as I can given the meager scraps he has access to through Hellfire LFR, Kazzak, and Tanaan jungle drops. I figure whatever effort I put into gearing him now… will only serve to make him easier to level in Legion. I am still not giving up hope completely on getting in Alpha, because there is honestly just a bunch of stuff that I want to test out. However in the meantime there is a bunch I can do to improve his status in life, and some of that might even mean pugging a normal Hellfire raid at some point. The thought of that scares the shit out of me, but if nothing else… I want to get to a point where I could survive tanking a Mythic Dungeon.

The Hunter

The second goal is to find some time and get Lodin my hunter through the Shipyard quest and unlock that part of the garrison. There is an absolute certainty that when Legion comes out… I will be switching him to Survival hunter and never looking back. My main character in Everquest was a cleric, but my primary alt… was a Ranger… a dual wielding melee ranger. So when World of Warcraft was released, I absolutely tried to make Hunter into a melee ranger class. I’ve posted plenty of screen shots of me “tanking” early dungeons as a Hunter, and to be honest… when I found out that the class was never going to be viable as melee… I lost interest in it as my main. Other circumstances however lead me to raid as it in Vanilla… which by default turned it into my raid main. However from the moment I had to abandon survival and hitting things with big two handed weapons… the class just wasn’t for me. Now I have played it off and on since then, and I really enjoy Beast Mastery and the aspect of taming interesting creatures to fight for me. But the player fantasy of being a badass ranged character… has never been one that I shared. In preparation for my eventual spear wielding days as Survival, I want to spend some time gearing up Lodin and getting him ready for the expansion. Right now he has a pitiful smattering of gear out of gear from Highmaul, augmented with a handful of Baleful shipyard drops. It is my hope to get him into fighting shape soon, or enough of a shape to be able to survive farming Tanaan. Right now however… he is sub 640… which greatly limits my options.

The Dwarflock

The other character that has been calling my name lately is my Dwarf Warlock Belganon. He is currently somewhere in Northrend in the mid 70s, and represents one of only two characters Alliance side that are sub level 90 and that do not already have a Garrison. It is my hope to push him up, because of all of the finger wigglers… the one I am most likely to play is the Warlock. I feel like the lessons that I learned playing an Arcanist/Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely make me a better warlock player. I’ve always leaned heavily towards Demonology… because just like Beast Mastery…. they have the really awesome pets. Especially now that all of the Warlock pets have been updated with higher quality Warlords/Legion era models, I think its time to revisit the class and see if it works for me. I will never likely main a caster of any sort, but from time to time I have fun playing them. If I can manage to get this guy up… that just leaves the Monk… which I have admittedly struggled with. In both cases I am kinda hoping to be able to dungeon most of my way to maximum level.

Old Friends

December 28, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #37 – Games of the Year: Part Two

Last night I uploaded the second half of our Games of the Year broadcast, finishing out our pseudo countdown with the game that four of us voted for. However while that might have been the game of the year through consensus, it just did not feel quite right to declare an official game of the year for a podcast with so many disparate voices. As a result each of us gave our own game of the year, and you will have to listen through the podcast to see what my pick wound up being. I have to say we had an interesting round of discussions about this one and I hope we end up doing this as a yearly thing. With the end of the year closes what I am calling “Season 1” of the podcast. I only started classifying things by season because there was a place for that in the ID tag within Audacity, and I figured what the hell… might as well.

With the new year will bring a new season, and at this point I am not quite sure what it will look like. Right now we have a cast made of of myself, Ashgar, Kodra, Rae, Raven and Tamrielo but I sincerely doubt that most shows will have all six of us. That seems like a rather large group to podcast with, but hopefully we can muster four to five of us on any given night. The biggest regret for season one is that we had Tam has a pretty constant part of the show but we never actually updated the logo to include his chibi… even though he has had one for quite awhile. Ultimately I figure we should get Rae to draw up a Raven chibi as well just to have it at the ready. I would love to revamp our homepage a bit to have bios about each of the podcasters. I would also love to bring back in Dallian on occasion, who filled in quite regularly as this podcast was getting off the ground but we have not had to tag in for awhile. Hopefully you enjoy this second part of our Games of the Year show.

Old Friends

Yesterday I had an excellent surprise when I saw what character a good friend of mine was playing. She has favored the horde for some time, and when her guild over on another server went belly up I sponsored hr membership to the guild horde side that I have my alts in the Bloodmoon Chosen. While it sucked to have her over on the other side of the faction wall, it made me happy that she at least had a good home. Yesterday however on a whim it seems she decided to play her hunter AIlah. The above picture is of me and Ailah waiting for the Naxxramas 1.0 raid to start one night, to my left is Saracell another good friend, and hanging out in the background I realized was Vexa. The Late Night Raiders Hunters were an especially close knit family, and there is not a single one of them that I still do not talk to regularly. Ailah however was one of the founding members of House Stalwart, and for the most part my right hand woman back then when it came to guild organizational things.

Like happens so many times she became the mommy of two awesome boys, and lost a good chunk of her disposable play time. I always enjoy seeing her on when she has the time to play, especially now that she seems to be interested in her hunter again. Thankfully I had been playing Lodin my hunter, so that I could give some basic knowledge about how hunters work these days. It seemed like she had not actually been touched since vanilla because she was wearing all of the same gear we raided in… for the most part everything you see in this picture. I hooked her up with a crafted set of gear that will hopefully ease her transition into Northrend, and some quick advise with at least how I have my bars, talents and glyphs set up. Thankfully huntering is super easy so I am sure she has picked it up quickly. I have to say it was an awesome surprise to see an old friend show up like that, and hopefully she will be around more often. I doubt she will ever have time for raiding and such, but will be nice to run the occasional dungeon together.

Bad At Casters

I have traditionally been horrible at playing casters, that said the warlock feels familiar enough hat this point that it would likely be my caster of choice. While I knew I would never end up leveling a mage, so I used my free boost to 90… the Warlock on the other hand I actually enjoy leveling. He has been sitting at level 75 for quite some time however, so when Ailah started working on the Northrend content I grabbed him to hang out with her for a bit, since he was the only character in the level range. It took me a bit to get used to the controls again, because warlocking feels nothing like huntering, and that is the pet class I have been playing most recently. The only problem with leveling these days is that you really don’t need to use any of your abilities, since things die so quickly. I still have yet to figure out how the whole demonic transformation business works and how best to trigger it. I know it is a thing I can do every so often, but the mechanics behind it are still pretty opaque since things die so insanely quickly.

At some point I really want to finish leveling my Warlock to at least 90. I feel like it might be a caster I would actually enjoy playing, since the Mage is most definitely not that. My biggest problem with the mage is how weak it feels. I hate playing classes that cannot take a hit, so this is why I tend to play Discipline priest over shadow… because the shielding ability gives that class some serious survival. Similarly I like Demonology Warlock because the pet is nice and sturdy and can keep me alive through almost anything. When I say I hate “finger wigglers”, I guess you can more correctly narrow it down to me simply hating the “glass cannon” archetype. I favor survival over damage any day, which might be why I almost always level in tank mode regardless of the class. That is one thing I would love to see them add to the warlock, a caster tank mode since they get called on to tank things already in certain circumstances.

Quintessential Quintet

December 3, 2013 by Belghast

Farewell to Arts

I did another really quick video yesterday since we are supposed to have an impending server reset. In the holiday weekend since the last restart folks have filled the server with all sorts of nifty stuff. So I thought I would do a really quick video showcasing some of the cooler things. The highlight for me is the alligator. I am wondering who built it, because seriously it was perfect. The server has essentially exploded with pixel art everywhere, some of it seeming to be freehand which is pretty amazing. While this is all interesting I am hoping soon we get a bit more substance.

It was rumored that we would be seeing a new patch today or tomorrow and in it I am really hoping they introduce two things. Firstly I want to see the crafting system and all the nifty things it can produce. This is likely going to be a massive thing because this also means they will likely change they way the blocks work so that we actually harvest them instead of just destroying them. Currently the game works a lot like Minecraft creative mode, where you have pretty much unlimited resources to place at your disposal. While this is cool for free range building, the game however right now is lacking a “game”. Wandering around and exploring, engaging in combat is fun but I feel like we need something to give us a sense of purpose.

The second thing I want badly is the cornerstone concept, aka your plot of lands that persists to each server you play on, and that no one else can disrupt. Part of why I have not built much of anything yet is the fact that we still have way too many mad bombers on the server all to willing to destroy your hard work. In fact I railed on Shawn Shuster of Massively a bit in the video as in his walkthrough that was posted yesterday… he was all too happy to blow up other peoples creations.

There have already been some pretty epic works of art destroyed by some idiot who would not suppress their inner poo flinging monkey long enough to appreciate what had been created. While I realize this is a side effect of having a game with no rules yet, it still depresses me to see the world as Swiss cheese. I am sure once the new patch has gone life I will do another quick video showing off what it added. So stay tuned to my channel and I will post something up there as soon as it is available.

Quintessential Quintet

Also last night I managed to push my paladin Exeter to 90 and with it came an achievement that I was not expecting. Apparently Quintessential Quintet is a thing? I cut an odd path on this one, by the time I left Jade Forest I was already 87 thanks to all the mining nodes. From there I made a beeline for Kun Lai, and critpathed my way through the zone until I reached the quest chain that lead to Townlong. Similarly in Townlong I quested my way through the Shadopan chain until I reached the jumping point for Dread Wastes. All of which was to set myself up perfectly to be able to start working on Klaxxi quests as quickly as possible.

Why you might ask? This is my blacksmith, and all the nifty things you can create seem to be on the Klaxxi vendor. Namely I wanted to be able to start creating masterwork weapons for all my other characters as I get them to 90. That seems to be the big weakness as it comes to the Timeless Isle content. You can gear your alts up with 496 extremely rapidly, but you have a few glaring holes… namely your weapons. Also I seem to have a much harder time getting Curios for trinkets, and the neck/ring slots to drop on the Timeless Isle. So as a result I have ended up spending a fair amount of time trying to remediate their gear just so I can be able to queue for something.

Timeless Isle is nifty, but I really miss the equivalent of the Icecrown 5 mans. I wish there were heroics that I could run that actually provided something viable for filling out a set of gear. I feel as though they should really have put in a new 5 man that dropped 496 weapons to go with all the gear they are handing out like candy. Even with epics… a crappy weapon is still a crappy weapon. Right now my paladin for example is using the treasures of pandaria BOA one handed sword that you find on the ground. Which is better than anything he has gotten yet, but at least being able to create the masterwork hammer will be something slightly better. I think those are 463 ilvl which is essentially what the heroic gear is.

What Next?

I have to say getting Exeter to 90 was a pretty cool thing. He technically was the very first character I created, and my intended main. For years my internet handle was “Exeter” and quite honestly “Belghast” was my main over in DAoC, and it was not until late in Vanilla that I started to play that character as a main. All the while through vanilla my main was Lodin the hunter, and it was an almost accidental occurrence. I had a death in the family that pulled me away from Warcraft a few weeks after the release of the game. As a result I got rapidly outpaced by the rest of the guild, and back then soloing a Paladin was a truly painful experience.

Hunters were the gods of soloing, so I started leveling Lodin just to be able to keep up with my friends. Within a very short amount of time I had caught up, and when we hit 60… I got drafted into the raid group of a guild member as they wanted to replace a troublesome hunter. I had no intent to actually play a hunter as my main, and in truth I am not terribly suited for the class… but I did for almost all of Vanilla because it was my “Raid main”. Once you start playing a character in a raid group you are pretty much committed to always play that character until they no longer need it. The positive effect however is that I met so many life long friends through raiding, and that the Late Night Raiders hunters were all such amazing people.

As soon as Burning Crusade was released, I saw this as my opportunity to leapfrog Lodin in gear and start playing Belghast as my main. That is the awesome thing about expansions, the gear reset lets you change your focus. From that point until the tail end of Wrath of the Lich King, I was a warrior main tank. It was not until I needed a break from the hot seat that I switched focus to the Deathknight and fell in love with it. All of this time I felt horrible for leaving Lodin abandoned in the dustbin. It was not until Cataclysm that I actually managed to level him out of the outlands. During one of my last sessions playing I pushed him up to Pandaria levels, so I feel as though it is probably his time to shine again. I pretty much permanently run around in Giantstalker transmog in honor of the fun times I had with him raiding during those early days of Vanilla WoW.