PMIX

The Mixed Bag of Group Finder

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Good Morning Folks! I had a very weird evening in Pandara Remix. I’ve basically reached the place where I have only a handful of vectors to scale up my character. I could pour copious amounts of bronze into upgrades… but I would FAR rather have a fat stack of mounts than buy temporary power in a game mode that has a shelf life of 80 more days. This means that in order for me to fill out my character I am going to need to knock out some achievements. One requires me to do all of the Raids on Normal Mode… which admittedly feels like a bad call from Blizzard on this one. The other steps of this progress are governed by “Finder” tools, but this step requires you to wade knee-deep into the scary realm of the Group Finder.

Weirdly however this was for the most part smooth as heck for the first bit of my evening. I ran through Mogu’shan Vaults, Terrace of the Eternal Spring, and Heart of Fear and it was an extremely delightful proposition. The groups assembled quickly and the only time I took a death was a some point during Terrace where I pulled aggro on one of the trash mobs that a tank had not picked up yet. This success story however ground to a halt as soon as I started shopping for a group for Throne of Thunder or Siege of Orgrimmar. This is where the tropes I had feared were starting to come out… where group leaders were asking for unrealistic gear scores or were “full on DPS” and were looking for a “pumper” or “frogger” for their last slot. I could have shifted over and tanked but honestly, I don’t remember half of these fights anymore.

I spent about an hour applying for groups, joining groups that never went anywhere because they had no tanks or healers… and generally just flailing around in hopelessness. The only thing I can think is that my luck was so smooth in those first few groups because it was extremely early in the evening. The Sweaty McTryhards of the world had not woken up from their slumber and all that were available were us casual scrubs who go to bed at 9 pm. So tonight I am going to set my goal to attempt to get in a Throne or Siege group first thing and MAYBE get my way through both of them if I am lucky.

I know one of the things that currently makes my character look bad is that I don’t have my Rings or Necklace. Admittedly I need all of the raids to get the damned necklace but given that I did not start on day one and I am not as far along in this curve as some players… it does not really seem to matter. So when I could not get the raids rolling I decided to take a step back and chip away at my heroic dungeons. This is the point where I realized how much I have missed this. Heroic Dungeons were always super fun and something that you could smash mindlessly for fun and profit. I’ve missed this game mode being relevant. Mythics came along and largely destroyed any purpose for running Heroics but also made them a bit too sweaty to be truly enjoyable in mass quantities. I get that in their hunt for more competitive game modes they can attempt to monetize into an esport… Mythics made sense… but I still miss heroic smashy fun.

My goal tonight is to knock out the last two dungeons that I need and then start chipping away at the fat stack of scenarios that I need for that ring. Currently, I have only run two of these on Heroic mode and there are so many freaking Scenarios. This is honestly a game mode that I would love to see make a return because it allowed for something similar feeling to a Heroic Dungeon… but that had little to no mechanical requirements. It also served as a way to allow them to pour more story bits into the game which is always good. I feel like World Quest Chains probably replaced these, but does anyone pay attention to the story bits attempting to be told through those? Probably not. Anyways my focus right now is on completing out the missing gear slots, because this will also help any alts that I decide to run up during the event.

The last bit for today is that I am legitimately contemplating changing mains for War Within. Hume Belghast has had a good run and I still like the character quite a bit… but Dark Iron Dwarves. Dark Irons have been something that I have loved since Vanilla World of Warcraft and Blackrock Depths in its original weird twisting form is probably my favorite dungeon. I loved that there was this entire Dark Iron City down there and I loved knowing my way around it. I also kind of love that they have a racial teleport around the world via Mole Machine. I am just having way more fun with this character than I expected given it was only ever intended to be something throwaway for the event.

Anyways! I hope you are having a wonderful week. Are you playing Pandaria Remix or PMIX as I have taken to mentally calling it? What are you playing? Drop me a line below.

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.

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?