Pandaria Remix

Raid Leveling Not for Me

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Good Morning Folks! I am still sort of in this pattern of MOSTLY playing World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix. I’ve come to realize that I do not have the fortitude to play this optimally… which would be to do ALL of the world bosses, a random heroic and normal dungeon, a random heroic and normal scenario, and then complete ALL of the raids. Instead, I think I am going to focus on trying to get my World Bosses done as they are fun and it is pretty easy to find groups in the LFG tool. After that, I think my goal tonight is to start chipping away at the Heroic Dungeons and Scenarios that I need to unlock rings. Then the next stretch goal would be to complete all of the raids on Normal mode, but that is probably going to take all week as I have realized my appetite for that sort of thing is not what it once was.

Related to that I got my Tauren Paladin over on Drenden up to level 25 at which point I tried my hand at one of the leveling theories. The idea is to run raids starting at 25 and level your character through doing that. I’ve personally found this to be a little lacking as I think in total I gained a single level after having done two wings of LFR. Because of this gameplan I’ve also been leveling as Retribution which is fine for playing at endgame levels… but is not my preferred method of leveling. So as a result I think I am going to shift gears with this character and just level it the old-fashioned way while switching over to Protection so I can bounce shields all over the map for fun and profit. I am also questioning my choice of Tauren as I remember now why I don’t like playing them… because they feel painfully slow.

Lastly, I created a little Vulpera Hunter on Eonar where another friend has a base of operations. In theory, my goal is to push this up to 70 before the event is up so that I can have yet another max-level character seeded throughout the cosmos in case I decide that I want to play on that server. I already have an Orc Deathknight that I played during Legion and a few babby characters of various ages. It would be awesome if they made the Stable go cross-character and cross-realm because that has been my core reason for not playing something other than the original Lodin. I did not love the concept of collecting spirit beasts again. I am kind of wondering how the Warband is going to change things up, because in theory, I should be able to have all of the characters that I am playing regardless of server on the same screen.

Now that I have capped my Barbarian, I think I am going to spend some more quality time with my Necromancer. There is a pattern that can be used from levels 20-50 that will allow you to craft legendary caches so that you can get aspects pretty quickly. So my plan is to push this character up to 20 and see how well that process works. Barbarian was a lot of fun, and I might still rework that character to go for the overpowered Dual Swing Twisters build, but I also want to see how the Necromancer world is doing. I also really need to find a bow build that I like because traditionally… tanky brawler, minion, and bow characters are what I tend to play over and over in ARPGs.

Anyways! Today is my first day back this week so I am not looking forward to getting back into the swing of things. I also have to go into the office tomorrow so I am somewhat dreading that as well. Hopefully, you all had a wonderful weekend and an extended weekend if you are in the states.

Multiple Caps Reached

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Good Morning Folks! Or at least I hope to finish writing this and publish it within a timeframe that could still be referred to as “morning”. Here in the United States, it is Memorial Day and as such I would normally count this as part of my weekend and not blog. However, I found myself feeling weird about it being a Monday and not blogging so here we go! Since I last blogged I’ve hit a few milestones, the first of which is dinging level 100 for the first time in Diablo IV. Sadly I think it also probably denotes the end of my involvement with the game for the time being. I might max out my seasonal reputation but I am not feeling terribly driven to push further into the endgame. I am just not bossing motivated and the “mapping” experience in Diablo IV is sort of boring.

I’ve been actively doing The Pit since around 95 and I gotta say it feels worse than Greater Rifts did. The above is a picture of having cleared a Greater Rift in Diablo III and the comparative loot explosion that you got at the end. Clearly, The Pit just feels lackluster because generally speaking you tend to get four items and it does not seem to scale heavily as you go up in difficulty. Maybe there are breakpoints where it starts to feel more rewarding, but for the most part, it feels like it is a system that entirely exists to get the materials needed to masterwork your items… which again is a system that only really exists so that you can go deeper into The Pit. If The Pit already feels unrewarding… doing more of it so you can do more of it… does not feel like a good experience to me. I am not driven to prove how hardcore I am… I play these games to get cool loot and when I stop getting that I tend to bounce.

On the other side, I have been playing a huge amount of World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix lately and dinged 70 on my first timerunner character. I gotta say this setup is extremely sweet for setting up a character and preparing it for the next expansion. Just creating a character gives you maximum flying speed and a full inventory of 36 slot bags, then you can pick up those same bags for 10 Bronze each and outfit your bank in them as well. From what I understand when the event is over this character will exit the other side as a normal level 70 character with one of those high item level gear cache bundles as though it had been boosted allowing for it to essentially start War Within on a strong footing. Given that every character gets a boost from the current level of my timeless cloak, it is honestly a great way to seed various servers with max-level characters. I’ve always had a slew of friends who play on Drenden so currently planning on leveling a Tauren Paladin and maybe some sort of a Hunter over there.

Here is a crudely photoshopped mess of me attempting to show off all of the stats of my cloak at the same time. I am not sure how to read the cloak rank number, but I think that means I have collected 15k threads so far. I would potentially believe this based on my stat hits, and this is all through legitimate means. By the time I started my first character the “frog farm” had been nerfed, so this is just through normal play patterns. I have enough survival through my gem choices and my cloak stats that I can pretty much roll around in Titan Grip Fury mode. I need to work on earning my rings and necklace which are associated with achievements. Basically doing all the dungeons in Heroic Mode gets one ring, another is associated with doing all of the Heroic Scenarios, and the last is from running all of the raids in Normal Mode. I wish they would nerf this a bit and change it to Raid Finder mode because it is way easier to queue for Raid Finder than to use Group Finder for raids.

All of the World Bosses and Raids are on daily lockouts so that they can be farmed constantly. In fact, one of the popular leveling methods for alts involves getting to 25 and then queueing for LFR wings on each character daily to get a huge boost in XP and threads. I’m focused on this main character though and trying to unlock all of the things I need to unlock before shifting to alts. Given that I am queuing as a DPS, getting into raids should be relatively straight forward. I contemplating tanking them but honestly, I am not sure if I want the responsibility of trying to remember how all of this content worked. Maybe after running through various content a few times, I might shift over to my tank gear and give it a shot.

I did not in a million years think I would be falling back in love with World of Warcraft. If anything I thought I would be limping through the remainder of the story content in Final Fantasy XIV and preparing myself for the launch of that expansion. Early Access for it starts on June 28th which will be here before I realize it. I essentially need to make some hard decisions about whether or not I am going to hop on that train or not. There is a bare minimum amount of work that needs to be done if I am going to attempt to play at all. Essentially I need to get through the MSQ and then do a massive amount of retainer maintenance. Every class is level 80 or higher and as such I really need to spend some time cleaning out gear that I will never wear to free up room for new gear. This would involve a lot of grand company turnins… and probably is a week’s worth of effort at a minimum.

At one point I was pushing up a number of jobs to level 90 and managed to complete Paladin which I leveled during the campaign and then Monk, Dragoon, Samurai, and Machinist through doing daily quests and pvp content. I was pretty close on Red Mage as well so I could probably easily push it up as well. Basically, the new jobs will probably start at 80 which means the only gear I would care about keeping that us below that are things for Sage and Reaper which I could probably easily push to 80 as well. The problem with all of this is that I just need to make the decision to get started. I think at some point I will be in a daily maintenance routine with Pandaria Remix which would leave some room for maybe dipping my toes back into FFXIV.

This is of course on top of any time that I am spending in Guild Wars 2, because I would also really like to finish out the Secrets of the Obscure content there. I picked up my next Legendary starter kit and this is one that I have wanted for ages… so I need to start working towards collecting a bunch of Mystic Clovers and knocking out another Gift of Exploration and Gift of Battle. I need to see which character is closer to 100% World Exploration and then finish that out. I will probably have more fun doing it on my Ranger thought. I would really like to have a Legendary Hammer because it is a weapon that I really enjoy on a bunch of different classes.

Anyways… I got a lot of gaming on my plate. The positive is that I will definitely not be bored for a while.

Krasarang Wilds

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Good Morning Folks! I was someone who played through Mists of Pandaria at launch, and it was only this morning as I was titling this blog post… that I realized it was “Krasarang” and not “Kasarang”. I have been saying it wrong for twelve years… not that I spend much time talking about this exceptionally skippable zone. Generally speaking, I would do just that, ignore ever going down here on characters and instead make a faster route either out to Townlong Steppes or up to Kun-Lai Summit. However, since all that really matters is the level that I obtain… and since everything scales to my level I figured it was a better call just to bop down and knock out the wilds while it provided the most experience. At this point, I am level 45 and have just started through the first few quest chains in this zone. I figure tonight I will wrap it up and then move to Townlong as I just like that zone better than Kun-Lai.

This is one thing that I miss the most about modern World of Warcraft expansions… is that it felt like there was merit in determining which path you took through the content on each character for efficiency’s sake rather than just sort of needing to do all of it. In this era of the game there always seemed like there was way more content than any given player really needed to do, and as such you could vary things up each time you ran a new alt through it. This is partially due to the fact that Mists of Pandaria has seven zones at launch, with a number of external islands added through the course of the expansion and Dragonflight for example shipped with 4 zones… and a 5th that only really matters if you were creating a new character. Similarly, Shadowlands shipped with four zones… and a fifth which was considered a pseudo-endgame zone in the form of The Maw.

One of the biggest pains with Pandaria Remix is dealing with gear and all of the gem sockets. Essentially tinker gems are a resource that once collected you never have to deal with getting again as you can remove gems freely from gear. However, this means each time you pick up an upgrade, you have to strip the previous piece of gear of gems and then outfit the upgrade in a similar manner. When watching some of the content about the Remix so far, one of the addons that folks kept pointing out is something called Narcissus which has an interface to make this a bit more simplistic. Essentially it gives you a talent point like interface that allows you to select the gems that you want to run and then will automagically socket those into gear. I wish it did this on its own as you swapped items, but unfortunately, it does not. But equipping an item and then checking the two to three gems afterward to remove them from the previous item and equip them into the new item is at least saving me a bunch of clicks.

The real purpose of the addon seems to be a replacement for the default character gear and stats system. There are features that allow you to enter photo mode as well as options to create virtual “group shots” combined with a bunch of characters. There is also a way to save off barbershop customizations to simply the process of swapping between looks. None of these things are things that I really care about right now however… for me, it is just the addon that makes the gear swapping in remix less dumb. Essentially my gameplay pattern is to run a bunch of content and get a bunch of caches until I start to feel like my gear might be weakening… then chain open them with a macro and equip any upgrades before diving forth into the next barrage of questing. My only real complaint is that I wish the infinite caches were stacking and as such took up less inventory space. I am also slightly annoyed by all of the consumables that I get because quite frankly… I hate dealing with consumables.

#showtooltip
/use Cache of Infinite Treasure

For anyone who is curious and needs it, this is the Macro I am using to open the caches. I basically just place it on my hotbar and spam it to chain open them. Far easier than clicking on each individual one.

August Phoenix

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Morning Folks! Right now I am pretty much splitting time between Diablo IV, Guild Wars 2, and World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix. Last night for example I farmed the world boss in D4 and got another level, and then did a round of dailies and some World vs World in Guild Wars 2, and finally settled into some leveling in PMIX as I seem to be calling it. At this point I am level 30 and have just entered the Valley of the Four Winds… or more so that first rest stop just inside the zone. I have to say that it has been a while since I have experienced any of the Pandaria content and I feel like collectively we the players… judged it way too harshly. Currently, the mechanical state of World of Warcraft is in one of the best states it has ever been, and combining that with a more classical era World of Warcraft expansion… is absolutely wonderful and refreshing. Not that Dragonflight, Shadowlands, and Battle for Azeroth were bad… but they don’t feel anywhere near as “epic” as Pandaria did. The whole stranger in a strange land aspect of the game really works here.

Last night I also unlocked the first of the exclusive mounts, the August Phoenix. This comes from leveling any character to 20 during the Pandaria Remix event. I guess my long-term radar for playing this event is to try and gobble up as many of the exclusive rewards as I can. A number of these are tied to quest completion and finishing each zone’s story, and other batches are tied to purchases with the event currency Bronze. I am pretty much ratholing all of my bronze to this point because I am still seeing viable upgrades from drops. I feel like at some point that is probably going to stop and I will need to invest in some of the big upgrade items from the vendors. For the moment I am holding onto as much of the event currency as I can until I know specifically what I need to spend it on in order to be viable.

One of the things I think I briefly mentioned yesterday but did not really go into detail on is the Cloak of Infinite Potential. This is an item that you get from completing one of the very first quests before diving into Pandaria proper, and it grows with you as you adventure. At seemingly random intervals you will find threads of time from defeating enemies and they will add equally random stats to your cloak. I figure at some point in the far future I will have an equal number of stats in all of the possible columns. The other aspect of the cloak is that as you collect threads, you gain achievements that will cause your alts to start out with ever stronger versions of this cloak adding to the replayability and speeding up your leveling process from that point forward. I already feel exceptionally powerful as is, but it will probably be truly silly to level an alt once you have a fully unlocked cloak.

The other thing that I thought I would give some examples of is the various special gems that I am picking up and slotting into my gear. Like I said yesterday prismatic gems are good old fashioned stat hits, but throughout gameplay, I am picking up all manner of unique abilities and procs that I now have associated with my gear. Of these, the only one that is an active ability is “Lifestorm” which is a big AOE lightning attack that heals me when it finishes. Trailblazer is one of the movement abilities that you slot into your boots and most of these are active, but this one just gives you a 30% boost most of the time you are out of combat. Slay is just “does an execute” which is pretty amazing and I am a fan of the two fire-based procs as they seem to be firing off all the freaking time. All of which is making this experience feel way more interesting than leveling would normally be.

Getting used to hotbar combat again is very much “a thing”. However, all of the tweaks and changes to the normal formula of World of Warcraft combined with seeing a living breathing world full of players who are actively calling out world boss spawns… makes this feel like a totally different game. I feel like the experiments that Blizzard is trying with these alternate variants of World of Warcraft are probably paying extreme dividends in player engagement. While the Battle Royale mode was not really my jam I still gave it a shot and found it at least partially enjoyable. Pandaria Remix is entirely in my wheelhouse and the fact that it is a 90-day event gave me the drive to go ahead and give it a shot. So as much as I hate FOMO mechanics… it seems to have worked on me this time.

One of the best aspects of fan-run private servers was always that they could have slightly modified rulesets. Project Ascension for example is an attempt to take World of Warcraft and make it completely classless. I’ve not played it but it certainly seems interesting. It feels like the core Blizzard team is maybe taking inspiration from some of these custom server types out there and deciding that they can in fact do that as well. While “Retail” World of Warcraft may never really be my main squeeze again, I fully support nonsensical alternate realities like Pandaria Remix. Maybe the future of Warcraft is not a single monolith but a bunch of custom slices that cater to specific player interests. Classic Warcraft seems to be thriving and I can see timewalking remixes thrive as well pending they roll them out regularly enough.

Have you been playing Pandaria Remix? What are your thoughts so far?