paladin Archives - Page 5 of 10 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Let Corruption Flow

November 1, 2016 by Belghast

This morning I have essentially wasted the time I would have normally written a lengthy blog post… on the mad quest for the Corrupted Ashbringer. Normally speaking each morning I log into Rift and GW2 to claim my daily rewards, and then maybe pop into World of Warcraft to check on my Class Hall missions before finally settling in to write a blog post. This morning I logged into my Paladin and fished a bit, and after a couple dozen casts finally received the item I had been so feverishly hunting for. So for sake of argument, the best I can tell I caught my Shard of Darkness after 1682 casts. Which places me significantly more than my friend Kel that got his in 149, but significantly fewer than the poor soul who was fishing Sunday and said he was somewhere in the 8000s. Of course after getting the shard…. I had to work my way through the rest of the quest chain this morning because there was no way in hell I could work a day without seeing this through. I get on these vision quests sometimes, where I have to do this one thing… and when I do finally get it I have a lapse in goals for a bit. Given how many things i put off doing for the sake of fishing up the shard… I have a feeling I am going to be just fine with finding something else to replace it.

The funny thing is… last night I actually felt the slightest bit of resentment that I was not spending it trying to get the shard while we were off doing a dungeon. In the grand scheme of things however I am largely glad it worked out as it did, because while this quest dominated my life for a few weeks I managed to do so in a fashion that didn’t really seem all that grindy. The final fishing part was only painful because each time I clicked that lure, there was a bump of excitement that only got squashed quickly when I noticed it was “more fish”. As far as finishing up the quest, I thought I would be clever and just manually fly up to Archerus. That however won’t work because it is actually completed in the version of Archerus that hovers over the Broken Isles, which meant another trip back to Dalaran to fly out with a special quest menu item. From here we talked to the modern Four Horsemen who infused the crystal with their powers… and after another trip back to Lights Hope chapel I am wielding my new weapon skin. This finally fixes all of my problems with the Ashbringer weapon, because this thing looks freaking amazing. I have even been sporting a transmog just waiting to get the weapon. Thanks so much for joining me in this journey… and tonight I am going to give it a trial run in some LFR in the hopes of getting some tasty upgrades on the Paladin.

A Busy Weekend

September 26, 2016 by Belghast

Mondays are always a challenge. I realize that is the understatement of the year but there is just something extra heinous about trying to revive your week day routines after happily nuking them from orbit over the course of Friday and Saturday night. Sunday night is always the roughest night of the week to get to sleep, because my body is not quite ready to relinquish the last vestiges of true freedom. Similarly since giving up the whole weekend blogging thing for lent…. or whatever I did to actually give it up… rebooting that process each Monday morning is an equal challenge. This morning for example I have logged in to “check on” several things, all the while happily avoiding actually sitting down to put thought on paper or at least virtual paper. This weekend was an odd one, but a good one. It started off Friday night with House Stalwart my guild throwing together an impromptu raid into the Emerald Nightmare. We did not really have a lot of time, since it was literally thrown together over the course of that evening, but we did manage to go in and one shot the first boss. From there we started work on the spider boss, but given its moving parts I am wondering if that was the best choice. In truth ALL of the next bosses seem to have their own madness going on and with it a challenge or two that will force us to shift and adjust to the fight. We managed to get spider to phase two, which isn’t much of a challenge but at least I can claim it was progress.

Another thing we attempted this weekend was our very first Mythic+ dungeon… because well Grace and I had keys burning a hole in our pockets. However after attempt number one, I think we are going to wait to do number two… until we know the dungeons better. Mythic Plus Halls of Valor… also happened to be the very first Halls of Valor Mythic run for most of us. As a result we were less than efficient at a number of the fights and failed to get the timer. That said given the number of wipes we had I think we did fairly well in that our timer ran out around the time we crossed the glowing bridge of nonsense. So while we failed… we at least failed in style? The truth is all of us just need a lot more normal mythic runs before we start burning any more keys. None of us have any of the magical legendary drops that our UI tells us we can currently equip one of…. but I hear they absolutely maybe sometimes sorta drop in mythics. We were maybe unprepared given that we were also dragging Ashgar into his first mythic ever… and we went for a timed one. The truth is I think we just wanted to know what the challenge looked like so we could prepare for it. I know personally I find it hard to wrap my head around what is needed until I have failed for a bit at doing something. Similarly we had to fail at the spider boss for me to be able to wrap my head around the videos that I will ultimately watch before we make another attempt on Wednesday.

Finally I made a significant push on Exeter my Paladin, who is now 108 and about halfway through it. Not shockingly I ended up dropping Retribution around 102 and have been leveling as a Protection Paladin the rest of the way. This has allowed me to do things like tank for friends when they need to run lower level instances. We pulled together an Eye of Azshara for Thalen over the weekend… and I happened to need it as well. Now I have several more dungeons waiting in the wings for me to do that I may or may not wait for friends to get to as well. Now that I am so close to 110 I sort of want to push across the finish line so I can start doing world quests and such on this character too. Similarly I want to get in some Coren Direbrew runs for trinkets before those things go away. So at a minimum I am probably going to finish out the rest of 108 because 109 allows me to start queuing. I still think that is a major missed opportunity, in that they should have allowed the Direbrew event to scale with players. At this moment I have finished Azsuna and Highmountain and have just trudged through the faction bullshit in Stormheim. The first part of that zone feels so unlike the rest of this expansion, I can only hope in the future they are going to realize that this game feels so much better when you give us an interesting place to explore with its own story… and quit trying to force everything into a dated red versus blue narrative.

Kodra the Prodigy

September 23, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I had what is going to go down for awhile as one of my strangest dreams. The root of it was a roadtrip, that apparently myself and the rest of the AggroChat crew were taking across country. I have no clue at all where we were going, or what we were actually doing. However we were in a road trip in a car that was probably too small to fit all of us… but those are the sort of details that dreams just handwave away. What I do know for certain is that at some point we stopped at a roadside diner, and while milling around and waiting for everyone to finish going to the restroom I noticed this little girl had a cool vintage metroid championship t-shirt. I commented that I liked her shirt and she showed it to me proudly… and that is when I noticed that emblazoned across it in a fuchsia with purple shadow version of the Metroid logo was the name “Kodra”. Round about this time in the dream Kodra comes out of the bathroom and I point out the t-shirt and he is super nonchalant about it. This is the point where we learn that apparently he was a child prodigy at video games… and “he doesn’t like to talk about that time”. We also find out that apparently there is this entire internet sub culture that has been trying to find out what happened to Kodra after the championship… which in itself is funny given that he goes by that game on our podcast. It is around this point that the dream starts to break down like every dream does, especially given that I am not sure the timing works. Kodra is quite a bit younger than I am, so not sure what age he would have been when Metroid was even a thing. In any case… it was one of those strange dreams that I had to commit to paper as it were.

As far as “me”, I am doing mostly better… or at least on the road to better. I feel bad about the weird state of yesterdays post, but I just didn’t have any proper fuel to cobble together a post. I have been stressed beyond belief for reasons I can’t get into. Just know that for the most part those events have passed and I think I am on the other side of them. Cryptic as hell I know but that is about all I can really say. I have not been feeling great, but I think it is just a side effect of the stress. Last night I wound up going to bed before 10 pm, and then woke up about midnight feeling like I had slept an entire night. My body does strange things when it comes to sleep, but thankfully I was able to mostly get right back to sleep. As far as gaming goes last night, I managed to exist in the “organized gameplay” world just long enough to drag some friends into Heroic Darkheart Thicket for the World Quest that rewarded an 850 wrist. This was unfortunately good enough that it was worth breaking up my four piece world quest set to partake of the level difference. After that and finishing up my emissary quest for the day I flipped over to my paladin and continued questing out in Highmountain for a bit. So far leveling as a tankadin is pretty chill and relaxing, and while I would rather run around Justicar Julia Celeste, I have to say Vindicator Boros is growing on me. It is kinda fun to run around and be Super Draenei Tankbros. I contemplated actually transmogging to some of the gear he is wearing to make it even seem more legit, since I think I have a lot of that stuff from the Draenor expansion. However my purple judgement set matches the purple tone artifact so well… that I am leaving it be for the time being. Over the night Tam managed to ding 110 so my hope for tonight is to grab him and smuggle him into a heroic to hopefully get some gear.

Panda Hero

September 20, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I talked about my journey from bad engineer to not so bad engineer, but that was not at all the only thing I accomplished this weekend. For some time I had been sitting at three achievements from completing my Glory of the Pandaria Hero meta achievement and obtaining the purty mount you see in the screenshot above. I guess leading with a screenshot pretty much kills any suspense, but I am going to talk about this regardless. I actually accomplished most of this during my periods of playing Pandaria back in the day, but for whatever reason I simply was not with the group when they completed Rattle No More, Seeds of Doubt, and I never messed with the super annoying Polyformic Acid Science. What ultimately jogged my memory is that I wound up getting an enchanting quest requiring me to go gather up various components… two of which were located in Scholomance and Stonecore which meant me going to the respective areas and soloing a dungeon. It was during this process that I got one of the empty vials, and remembered how the whole Polyformic Acid thing worked. As a result I managed to do five of the six kills needed for that achievement during a single 60 minute charge… before using the empty vial and removing it. What I did not remember is that apparently when you remove and reapply a charge… it gives you a fresh 60 minute buff and not a partial buff based on what the previous timer was when you last stowed it. From there the actual chore of doing the last two achievements was minimal because with level 110 gear things just sort of fall over. However regardless I now have one more mount to add to my collection. The thing is I am in similar places on most of the other “Dungeon Hero” achievements because for whatever reason I never really prioritized them. I have never been the achievement hunter that Thalen or Rylacus was… but maybe it is time to start changing that.

As far as last night went, I spent most of it working on questing Exeter my Draenei Tankadin. I did not realize what a difference harvesting makes to the total amount of experience you can squeeze out of a zone. Belghast had no harvesting skill, but instead a double crafting combo of engineer and enchanting. As a result it took me all five zones to be able to reach 110, or at least a fraction of the last zone for me which was Highmountain. On Exeter however I have done nothing but complete Azuna my first zone… and I am sitting at 104 and roughly half of the way to 105. I’ve run zero dungeons, and the only real difference is that I am harvesting every ore node I happen across. However at 900 xp or so a pop those nodes I guess add up, as does the fact that I have plenty of rested experience since I am only playing him a few times a week right now. The push however is to get to 109 quickly so that I can have another character to start running the upcoming Coren Direbrew fight that comes with Brewfest… that should start showing up after the downtime today. Now however is the point at which I am going to ascend my soapbox. One of the things that the Legion pre-event showed off is just how damned well the content scaling works, and how much more enjoyable an event can be when you allow players of all levels to complete it. Direbrew has never really been a difficult fight and honestly most of the time you could complete it without a tank in previous years. It just feels odd that in an expansion driven by scaling of content, that they would not also update this event to use it.

As much as I am loving this expansion, there are a lot of things that still make me wonder. For example Stormheim is this amazing zone… so long as you completely ignore any factional crap that happens in it. This is really the expansion of two stories happening at once… a faction tale of red versus blue that feels grossly outdated, and deep and rich zone specific tales that feel fresh and new. I realize they probably did not have time to do everything in this expansion and update Brewfest… so they instead simply bumped up the item levels a bit and moved on. However I feel like at some point they really need to do an update pass on all of these seasonal fights to bring them in line with the newest tech. Imagine how much cooler it would be if anyone in the game could participate on all of their characters. Right now this event feels like it is setting an artificial deadline on when we should have been leveled by in order to keep from missing out. Then there is the issue of the fact that I am pulling 840/850 items from World Quests and the face value of the Direbrew trinkets is only 810… something that I am hoping can easily War and Titan forge up in level. In any case I will be doing this event every day on Belghast, and attempting to get my nearest character up to the appropriate level range of 109 so that I can get multiple characters trying to farm goodies. If nothing else I need to have more characters at the level cap since this does not appear to be something they are going to scale… because I still am chasing that ever damned elusive Headless Horseman mount.