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Week in Gaming 12/13/2015

December 13, 2015 by Belghast

Blogging is Hard

I’ve been in a bit of a relative funk this week, and found it extremely hard to get started writing most mornings. It is like for whatever reason my will to put fingers to keyboard and make important sounding things happen… has been drained out of me. At this point we are a few months away from going three whole years worth of blog posts, and I guess in a way it is having its toll on me. At this point I have far more regular readers than I have ever had at any other point in the blogs history, and that is freaking awesome. The fact that I have so many supportive people with my back… is ultimately the thing that keeps me moving forward on days like today. We recorded this insanely huge podcast last night where we took the normal crew of myself, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen… and included some other friends InkyBrushes, Nephsys and Pizzmaid. Sadly we were missing Ash but he had his own version of a really rough week. Combined we focused a single topic… and recorded for over two hours… which compressed down to just under it. The problem being… by the time I did even the most basic editing pass… it was around one in the morning.

I’ve been fighting what I think is largely sleep deprivation most of the week, and it has ended up with me falling asleep as early as 8 pm on a couple of the nights. Well granted I went to bed at 8pm… and read comics on my new kindle but still I ended up drifting off to sleep about 30 minutes to an hour later. I have been getting a lot of use out of my Marvel Unlimited account, and largely using it to read the backlog of awesome Star Wars comics. At first I went through what was available of the modern series, namely Star Wars and the Vader series. I started on the Princess Leia series but struggled with it, mostly because I simply was not a huge fan of the art style. Recently though I have been running back through and reading the Knights of the Old Republic series from the start. I am maybe a dozen episodes in at this point and I am loving it… this totally feels like I am consuming comics in the same way I binge Netflix shows. I just wish the lag between print and them showing up on Marvel Unlimited was not quite so great. The latest issues of the modern Star Wars comic to show up are from August of this year, but what I am really hoping is that they release the issues on a semi-monthly basis just with that lag. I can totally deal with reading comics late… I just want to be able to read them with a certain regularity.

World of Shipyards

This week has largely been about reconciling my differences with the Shipyard system. I commented last week that they were essentially a worst possible version of the Garrison system…. and in many ways I don’t have a significant change in that opinion. What did change however is that I realized that after so many of you told me about it… the Garrison addon I was already using had built in functionality to automate a good deal of the shipyard bullshittery as well. The end result is that I have somehow managed to learn to live with the Shipyards and they have rewarded me well for my blind submission. At this point between the three characters that have them… I have earned a hippo mount, a bunch of hellfire citadel gear caches, and more left sharks than I could ever have a use for… I seriously have three sitting in the inventory of my MooCowAdin. The problem with all of this of course is the fact that I now need to feed the beast that is the shipyard, and the only reliable way of doing this… is schlepping out to Tanaan jungle and completing the daily mission. Now some of my characters have been stockpiling oil from Garrison missions for along time now and won’t really have this problem… but Belghast is constantly struggling to pay his daily upkeep.

Other than this I have been slowly inching up my gear levels on Belghast and Belgrace, and attempting to run the Timewalking event on my alts… that can actually benefit from the 660-675 gear that they can drop. The funniest part of the week however has been learning that I don’t simply remember the BC era content as being significantly rougher… that it actually really is. PUG groups are simply not prepared for mobs that crowd control and fear the hell out of players… and are in no way ready for just how hard everything hits. There have been more wipes from the party finder than I have had in ages… and I am really enjoying every minute of it. The alliance side… has been a colossal mess of chain group joins and splits until finally we push through the dungeon. Horde side on the other hand.. people just buckle down and pick themselves up after a wipe and keep pushing forward. I guess when you have to wait through a thirty minute dps queue… you are significantly less likely to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble. Alliance will always be my first home because that is where my army of alts lives… but I have to say Horde is growing on me really quickly.

Fabian Strategy Lives

I know I spent a good deal of my post yesterday gushing about the new and revised Fabian Strategy… but seriously I am in love with this gun. It had been roughly a month since I had seriously spent much time in Destiny, and yesterday I poked my head back in. Apart from being woefully out of practice, I am still amazed at just how fun the moment to moment play is in this game. I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to play Battlefront, and the gameplay just doesn’t hold a candle to just how good Destiny feels. Now that I have this weapon that allows me to abuse all of my instincts, I can see myself really settling on it as my main gun. Now I have said that numerous times… and I know I said it recently with the Xhalo Supercell… but seriously…. this gun is amazing. I will always be a Titan at heart, because I want to play like a tank in most games. This gun makes me FEEL like a tank, because the chance of regeneration upon kill ends up firing a lot more frequently than I think most people realize. There have been several strikes that I survived entirely because of this weapon constantly triggering my shield regeneration. It is my goal this week to pop in periodically, and not go quite so long between play sessions.

Valor and Bribery

December 11, 2015 by Belghast

Valor in Name Only

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One of the big struggles I have had coming back is wrapping my head around the current state of Valor currency. There are many times in playing World of Warcraft where actually having a large volume of ancestral knowledge about the game… makes it a severe detriment. One of the big things that interested me in WoW was the fact that they were supposedly resurrecting the concept of Valor points earned from doing things. In the past this was important because ultimately you were able to purchase raid quality gear, and they served as a sort of “bad luck token” as my friend Rylacus and I thought of them. While they always sort of half assed the implementation, it did provide you with a bit of a way to offset your bad loot roll luck, by purchasing much needed tokens from saving up valor for several weeks. Granted it could have been a better system all along had they just offered all of the drops from raid bosses, on a vendor somewhere for varying prices to denote the importance of the drop. There were expansions where this token was done extremely well, and others where all you could purchase were a sequence of frustrating “offbrand” items that were never quite as good as the ones that came from the raid.

However as a raider… I always appreciated the fact that there was generally some upgrade path that I could take without relying purely on my luck. It never bothered me that those “damned dirty casuals” were able to get the same gear I could from out of the raid. In fact I liked the fact that there were many paths to end game viability, and I always thought this was one of the things that World of Warcraft struggled with. Apexis was supposed to be the solution to all of our gearing problems, or at least it seemed like that was intended to be the case. The problem is that the items purchaseable from Apexis crystals were significantly worse in every possible way for certain specs. Maybe this was just something that I experienced in playing Gladiator, one of the Warlords expansions special snowflake classes… but none of the gear from the Apexis vendor was in any way viable. As a result I simply ignored most of it and stockpiled my tokens hoping that at some point they would be useful. Now we zoom ahead to this patch cycle, and I am raiding on both my Alliance and Horde characters… so I kept thinking that surely I would be swimming in Valor by now.

Currency of Bribery

It turns out that is absolutely not the case, and the new version of Valor while similar in some fashions… has some fairly stark differences. In the past the best method of Valor acquisition was simply doing the raid every week. Each boss downed gave you a bit of Valor which added up quickly… and often times capped you without much effort. Now however the priority is massively different, and it feels like they are doing something that Square Enix is the master of. Bribing players to do community focused content. I finally looked up what actually awards Valor and it was a surprisingly small list of things.

100 Valor of the first Heroic of the day.
300 Valor for per mythic dungeon each week.
500 Valor for completing the weekly bonus quest.
150 Valor for completing each wing of Hellfire Citadel on LFR.
75 Valor for completing each wing of Highmaul and Blackrock on LFR.

So essentially this is no longer the currency of raiding and has instead become the currency to bribe players to participate in group content through the party finder. I am not sore about this or anything, because it makes sense. If you want to fix the queues… you need to get people into the system and what better way to do that then dangling something over their heads.

The only slight problem I have with it is that in theory they should have just introduced a brand new currency. Valor has a very specific meaning to me, as being the highest tier of raid currency. Justice points similarly has a very specific meaning to me… with them being the lower tier of activity currency. For me at least there has been a significant amount of cognitive dissonance in trying to adjust to Valor simply being this upgrade only currency. There is no gear purchasable with Valor, and instead everything you can purchase still relies on Apexis crystals… a currency that I am pretty certain will ONLY exist while we are on Draenor since lore wise they simply would not make sense anywhere else in the setting. What makes this doubly confusing is that we still have two different PVP currencies, being Honor and Conquest… and they still function in the same roles as Justice and Valor once did. Honor being the generic activity currency, and Conquest being the rationed and limited… and therefor more powerful currency. It just feels like they uprooted Justice and Valor for no reason… especially if they are going to further confuse things by introducing it in a completely watered down version later.

Late to the Party

I realize I am bringing this up a month late, and as such my discussion loses a lot of its validity in the eyes of many people. When patch 6.2.3 initially was released… I was fighting the desire to come back to the game. Then upon returning, it took me awhile to get adjusted to everything that happened in 6.2 let along the new patch content. So as often I am lagging behind. Largely I am not really that frustrated, but mostly pointing out my thoughts on the matter. As always I get to this point where I feel like a tweak here or a tweak there would greatly improve the game play experience. Where I am standing now however is that I feel like even though I really have no more upgrades available, in order to be the best player I can be… I really need to be running LFR every single week on every character that is available. If I do this however I am absolutely certain to burn out and be discarding this game into the waste bin once again. As awesome as I think Hellfire Citadel is as an actual and genuine raid… it is equally horrible in the LFR experience. So I am at this wall of… do I just accept that I won’t be progressing as quickly as I could be… or do I keep throwing myself against some content that I am not enjoying that much. I have to say… I am actually finding myself missing daily quests that I could do for Valor points.

A Whole New Shield

December 10, 2015 by Belghast

A New Shield

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It is officially Christmas time , as last night I ordered Pepperollies for the first time of the season. One of the local pizza chains has this thing that only exists during the holiday season, that consists of pepperoni, cheese, pizza sauce, rolled up in a crust and cut into little disks… then brushed with garlic butter and baked. They are so amazingly good that we have even tried to make our own version when we get the craving… and it isn’t the holiday block. I ordered dinner originally thinking that it would feed both my wife and I, but I completely forgot she had a Chanukah dinner at a friends house. So that means we have plenty of leftovers for tonight I guess. The primary reason why I was ordering something in rather than trying to fix something at the house… is that Wednesday nights I have started participating in an alliance side raid with some twitter folk which starts at 7 pm my time. I figure there will be a time where I cannot make this raid, but for the time being I am riding along for the fun. Unlike the Sunday horde side raid, they run on personal loot… so everything is left up to pure dumb luck as to whether or not I walk away with anything other than gold.

The exciting part of the night is that I managed to get a shield to drop off the very first boss. Swords and shields are hands down the most important gear slot for me personally… and I have stuck away in my bank/void bank every single mainhand/shield combination I have ever tanked with for any significant length of time. Since I managed to upgrade my weapon to 695 over the week… I still had a 670 shield, so getting the Smoldercore Bulwark to drop was a really exciting moment for me. I spent a few strategic tokens here and there, and picked up another few items… like the Stamped Felsteel Chestplate but I really cannot afford to break the four piece set. So the only other piece of gear that I will actually use was a new cloak… which is funny considering I have gotten pretty much nothing but cloaks from my garrison loot boxes. The Drape of Gluttony itself is pretty much ideally itemized with both Bonus Armor and Crit on it. Part of me wants to continue raiding Alliance side if for no reason other than it is quite literally the swan song of me as a Gladiator dps. The spec is so amazingly fun… but is absolutely not going to be around any longer after the expansion. It was my one time to be a special snowflake… and I kinda want to soak up as much of it as I can while it is still a thing.

On Timewalking

After finishing the raid last night I popped over Horde side to piddle around and try my hand at a random Timewalking dungeon. This week/weekend is the Cataclysm Timewalking event, and with it comes a bunch of level boosted cataclysm dungeon gear that has been brought up to 675. At least in theory that is what it is supposed to be… the problem is I’ve had some add on bugging out on me that keeps me from seeing the actual item level of an item. It appears that TipTac the addon I have used for years to relocate the tooltip pop up window to some standard location in my layout, has some old calculations going on… making it so items show up as their base level not the boosted level. This has also made it so that my weapons for example, will always show up as the pre upgraded version. While I will miss having that addon… I won’t miss seeing all the timewalking gear as level 115. So if you are also having this issue… kill TipTac. Unfortunately I’ve reached a point on both of my main characters where the timewalking gear isn’t really an upgrade, so instead I am mostly running it for the Timewarped Badges. And with those… I am mostly only interested in the pets and mounts… and the random chance of getting the Infinite Timereaver dropped mount.

If nothing else it is still fun to run these older dungeons and see them still function as relevant content. The only problem with this is that in truth… these dungeons are a lot tougher than the equivalent dungeons would be in Warlords. There are several rooms in Shattered Halls that will still gleefully murder you if you pull too much. With the Burning Crusade zones specifically… this was the era of mob crowd control… and they love to fear and incapacitate players left and right. So last night I ran one of these dungeons completely random, and then another two with my guildies. I would have loved to have done more… but it was almost midnight… and I had to function today. There is this strange nostalgia about the whole places… and unlike revamped versions of places… it feels the same. I guess it is my hope that they will stop redoing old dungeons… in favor of just adding them to a Timewalking event… either that or making Timewalking a permanent feature for certain dungeons. In truth I would love for EVERY dungeon out there to be able to scale to the highest level cap. I love the idea of evergreen content… even though very few games do it well. It is my hope to get in tonight and run several more of these, potentially on both sides of the fence… since I have plenty of Alliance alts that could benefit from the gear.

Sleepy Raiding

December 9, 2015 by Belghast

Bleary Eyed

For whatever reason this week has been significantly more difficult than most. I’ve been struggling with maintaining consciousness, and by that I mean it feels like I have just been dragging my way along through slowly drying concrete. I am not sure if this is still a side effect of letting me get completely out of my sleep schedule over the Thanksgiving break… or instead just that I slept horribly on Sunday night. It might also be that I seem to be fighting some cold like crap that just doesn’t seem to want to let go of me. Whatever the case, I’ve been tired enough to sleep at 8pm most nights, and generally finally give into its sirens call around 10pm. Since getting the new Kindle I end up reading for a bit until my eyes are too tired to keep propped open, and then finally I sleep. From everything I can tell I am sleeping extremely soundly because I when I finally wake up it feels like I’ve slept the entire night through. The only problem is I have been waking up 20-30 minutes ahead of the alarm clock. I know I should just get on up… but its cold out in the real world and the bed is so comfy.

I keep thinking at some point I will have repaid whatever sleep debt I have built up, but then again… I’ve never slept the supposedly needed 8 hours a night. Maybe I have decades worth of lost sleep waiting to be repaid and it is finally catching up with me. Whatever the case, I am struggling… which means that when I am actually online I tend to be wandering around aimlessly. Over the last several nights I have missed message after message in game by friends, and I always feel horrible when it happens. Sometimes it is simply the scroll of combat, other times I am alt tabbed out looking at something else. In any case right now in this current daze I am struggling to keep moving forward, let alone be functional when it comes to interacting with others. I seriously feel like I could take the day off… and sleep literally all day right now. Unfortunately I am not sure if that would do me a world of good… or simply make this whole situation worse.

Heading for Burnout

Last night one of my friends commented that I was probably heading for a burnout by trying to raid on both Horde and Alliance… and there is at least part of me that absolutely believes her. While I intend on making the Wednesday night raid tonight, I know at some point there is going to be a place where I simply cannot make both raids each week. In truth I have been feeling the desire and need to go off and level something new, instead of doing nothing but level capped content. Right now however it seems like all I have time for is to attempt running LFR on Belghast and Belgrace… and that simply doesn’t leave much time left for the rest of the activities. At least on Belghast I managed to pick up a 695 warforged baleful weapon, which gives me something decent to move forward with. On the cow I have a 690 two hander that has been valor upgraded twice, so once again a completely viable weapon. There are technically slots where LFR gear would potentially be an upgrade, but I am starting to question the logic of running it just for those handful of potential upgrades. I need to run Highmaul on the Cow for abbrogator stones, and Hellfire on Belghast for tomes… but past that I think I am going to cut out the rest of the LFR unless I am literally gearing a new character.

Looking for Raid is cool in the aspect of being on demand raiding with zero commitment. The problem being… it always feels like slamming your face against a wall even when it goes smoothly. Highmaul was really fun to LFR because it went so quickly, and you could pretty much ignore all of the mechanics. Hellfire however… the bosses just feel like drudgery when doing it with a group of randoms. Don’t get me wrong I love the feel of that place when I am running with players that are going to do the things they need to do to make it through the fights. But both Hellfire and Blackrock are both “real enough” to make them frustrating when folks are attempting to faceroll them. I seriously have yet to get a group that has a shot in hell of doing Archimonde. Generally speaking I get grouped into a raid that has already failed a few times… as a replacement, and we then wipe five or six times… and ultimately end up leaving because over half the raid abandons ship. I really think that the perfect LFR fight takes no longer than five minutes to kill, because that seems to be the absolute upperbound of PUG attention.

Timewalking

I noticed this morning that the Burning Crusade era Timewalking event has started, and I have to say… I am kinda amped. Granted I would have rather they simply made Timewalking a permanent part of the game, but I left the game before it actually went in. So I am hoping to be able to do several of the dungeons to get the feel of how they work. I have a whole bunch of nostalgia about the Burning Crusade dungeon running experience, and the thought of getting modern versions of the items I used to love… seems pretty awesome. Then again at the 675 ilevel cap… the items will pretty much just go in the transmog bin. I am not sure which side of the fence I will focus on, but whatever the case I just want to see some of the dungeons. Similarly I really want to experience the Mythic dungeon content, but in order to do that I really want to find a group to go in with. That does not seem like something that would be fun in any fashion to pug. Mostly… I am hoping I get over whatever thing I am going through, and can remain awake enough to function at a high level in content. Today already seems like a pretty sleepy day… so I am not holding out much hope. I guess my general answer is to feed myself enough caffeine until I begin to function appropriately.