shaman Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Richer Than You Think

December 19, 2013 by Belghast

A Patch Awoken

Monday evening the Final Fantasy XIV servers were down to deliver the brand new 2.1 patch. This is the one that everyone had been waiting for, that was supposed to deliver a ton of new content. At one point I was anxiously looking forward to this update, because it held the promise of player housing as well as new dungeons to run to collect what we lovingly refer to as “bookrocks” aka Tomestones. Now that the patch is live, I find that I can’t seem to be bothered to actually patch the game up. Tuesday and Wednesday night I spent a bit of time hanging out in mumble with my friends who are still playing it, and they seem extremely excited about it overall. The video below shows all the reported changes, and I will admit it seems pretty staggering.

However several of these things seemed to be tarnished by somewhat bad design. The biggest of these that I have heard of is the housing system. Currently it is oppressively expensive, the day it was released I saw a tweet (that I seem to be unable to find at this moment) stating that they gained the first million gil towards their house… only 99 more to go. That apparently is cheap… here is a listing of the housing prices on the various servers. We are in group three, on Cactuar so right now it would cost 125 million gil to purchase the largest home… aka the one suitable for a guild house. Considering prior to 2.1 there really was no way to make money at 50 other than crafting… this seems insane. The highest I have ever gotten with my character was 200,000 gil, and repair bills and components for my artifact weapon whittled that down to around 75,000 gil the last I checked in on the game.

Supposedly they have added in a bunch of new ways to earn money, which I guess is a positive. However it does seem silly to roll out such an expansive and impressive system… that no one can actually use on day one. Supposedly over time the housing prices will fall, but that still puts the large house at 100 million gil at the absolute cheapest possible price. Listening to my friends, they seem to be enjoying the new content. The new dungeon Pharos Sirius seems to be genuinely difficult and to the best of my knowledge they have not beat the final encounter. That was one of the interesting things about FFXIV dungeons, is that they had a 2 hour timer to get through them. I feel like I should be excited about the prospects of the patch, but I just fine myself not caring at all. Whatever magic I felt towards FFXIV seems to be gone for me, in the same way it has flickered away for so many other games.

Richer Than You Think

This morning I achieved a personal goal… too bad it comes 2 expansions too late to be terribly impressive. I have never been extremely successful at making money in MMOs. I guess in the grand scheme of things it just has never really been a priority. As a result I have always thought that I was broke, or at did not have a ton of liquid assets in game. While I am still not anywhere near some of my guild members, I am was apparently doing better than I ever thought. Awhile back I installed Titan Panel again, to help organize a lot of my informational gadgets in one place. In trying to keep track where I was with all of my tokens I installed a Currency addon. Interesting thing about it… is that it started to keep track of all of the money spread across all of my characters.

As of last night it showed that I had 25,000 gold distributed among all of my alts… five of which are 90 and in various stages of “raid ready”. No character had more than 5,000 gold on them specifically, but spread out among all of the characters it added up. Because of this I decided to realize something that had long been a goal for me. With Wrath of the Lich king they added what has been ubiquitously referred to as the “Repair Mount”. Since I do a lot of random killing out in the world, and solo farming of dungeons/raids… I find myself constantly searching for a repair vendor. So many times I have thought to myself “man it would be awesome to have that mount”, but even with faction and guild discounts it was still 14,000 gold… which seemed like an insane amount.

I never would have purchased this back in the days before account-wide mounts… but the idea that I just gave every single alt the ability to repair whenever they hell they felt like it? Sure 14,000 seemed like a reasonable price, especially considering I have branched out onto a second account of characters. So this morning before sitting down to write my blog entry I shifted back and forth between all of my characters and began pooling my money on Belgrave to make the purchase. I knew for certain he was exalted with Kirin Tor, the faction the mount vendor is sold on. I have to say… I am freaked out a little that I just spent all that gold on a single mount, but within a few days that will pass and I will be happy with my decision. There really is very little I want to purchase in the game at this point that my army of alt crafters cannot eventually make. So I figure thanks to the mount I will be able to farm up more goodies to fill the coffers again.

Lucky Streak

Most of the yesterday evening I spent working my way through Siege of Orgrimmar. The first section of the dungeon went extremely smoothly and the loot gods seemed to be smiling upon me. I managed to get a usable drop off three of the four bosses there. Of course the first drop of the evening was a neckpiece… after purchasing the one with honor last night. That seems like it is always the way however… when you upgrade a piece, you end up getting a better one almost instantly. The second part of Siege however went extremely slowly as I had to complete it in two passes. I was on the second boss of the first pass when my wife came home last night and needed my assistance. After killing Iron Juggernaut I bailed from the LFR and did what she needed for a bit.

After coming back that meant sitting through another 30-60 minute queue and repeating the first two encounters without loot. However that second run went far more smoothly than the first, and we had no wipes at all until folks lost focus during the Nazgrim fight. That is not the type of fight that you can “burn down at the end”, since the not dealing with the adds means he very rapidly heals back all of the damage you are dealing to him. During the second attempt however, folks stayed focused on the adds and we managed to defeat him in near record time. My hope is tonight to come back and finish out the last two parts. At 11pm I attempted to queue for the third, and it looked like roughly an hour queue so I gave up and went to bed. Still no love for a weapon, but this next segment has the chance of dropping a weapon I believe. So between it and my nightly habit of running a Heroic Scenario… I might have a chance.

Hole In Itemization

December 18, 2013 by Belghast

Just Too Good to be True

I set out on a mission to attempt to earn a 498 pvp weapon last night through the justice point to honor conversion. For the most part it went easy enough, and while there were plenty of mouthy folks in LFG the instance runs themselves were smooth enough. I just kept my mouth shut and did my job as dps and pushed through it. It is amazing how much it defuses a troll when no one at all in the party responds. They make a few comments then quiet down themselves because no one is feeding them ammo. For awhile last night I was thinking that this was really going to be an awesome way to earn starter weapons. Unfortunately like so many great ideas this one had a massive flaw, that comes from the fact that I do not PVP… nor I understand how the PVP systems in any game work.

First flaw in the plan was the listed conversion rate was not 375 Justice Points to 250 Honor, but instead 500 Justice Points to 250 Honor. This was manageable but basically meant that you had to earn 3500 JP to be able to get a weapon. I did that last night without any real issue in a matter of hours. Second flaw… and this one is the fatal one. Apparently in order to purchase weapons with honor points, you have to have PVPed enough during the current season to earn 7500 honor. Since I have not PVPed at all on any of my characters during this expansion, let alone the current season I simply cannot purchase weapons. I have no desire to PVP enough to gain 7500 honor, which would be roughly 30 battleground wins. In fact that sounds like just about the worst possible way to spend my time I could imagine.

Jewelry Is Nice

Since I had already taken the hit converting 3500 Justice to 1750 honor… I really had no desire to take the hit again and convert 1750 honor back to 875 Justice. Other than weapons I have had a few glaring holes in my gear. I was still using a crafted 450 necklace and a 450 ring. While the weapons all require honor earned during the season to purchase, the gear however does not appear to have a similar requirement. As a result I picked out a fairly decent neckpiece from the vendor for I believe 1250 honor. This got me one step closer to my overall goal of being able to queue for Siege of Orgrimmar.

At this point I flew out to the Shadowpan Assault quartermaster in Townlong. Sure enough they had a decent ring as well. After plugging these two holes in my itemization and after picking up a slightly better weapon in the heroics I ran to get the stockpile of honor, I am now finally able to queue for Siege of Orgrimmar. While I didn’t necessarily get what I wanted out of the nights activity… I actually still got what I needed. Maybe the rolling stones were right all along.

Hole In Itemization

So after all of this, I return to the original thought process that there is a massive whole in itemization, at least from the standard late expansion “catch players up” mentality. I got into a bit of a discussion of an aspect of this yesterday over on Twitter. In previous expansions, there existed higher tiers of heroic level content. The prime example of this was Trial of the Champion that helped catch players up in gear, both on normal and heroic modes. Then later in the expansion you had the three instance story arc of Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection that ratcheted up the difficulty level as well as the rewards. I can remember Halls of Reflection heroic still being a significant challenge in Icecrown raid gear.

While I love the concept of the Timeless Isle, and the whole explore to find nifty things ideas… they are quite literally giving us epics in the process. This is extremely friendly to altaholics like myself, and has allowed me to gear out an army of 90s… but I feel little to know sense of accomplishment from doing so. The Wrath era sequence was probably my ideal for gearing. It felt significant gearing from heroic, to the trial 5 man and then finally being able to queue for the Icecrown 5 mans. Additionally the gearing seemed far more complete, since each 5 man tier dropped a complete set of gear including workable weapons.

Now it feels very much like, “Gratz on 90, here is your epic gear” but while you can queue for these raids… without having a way to get a decent weapon you become an instant drain on any group that ends up getting you. There are weapons you can get on the Timeless Isle, but like I said yesterday they are cost prohibitive (20,000 coins for a one-hander, 40,000 for a two-hander) and at 476 they are simply not worth the effort and do not provide enough of a bump over 463 crafted/heroic weapons to make it worth your time. Now that I can queue for Siege however I will hopefully get lucky enough to pick up a weapon that way. Additionally I will continue to run my nightly Heroic Scenario, as the potential 516 weapon would be well worth the time spent. Additionally these scenarios when run with a guild group put money in the guild coffers and count towards the weekly.

Crafting Hates Enhancement

My general theory is that this glaring hole was intentional… and by making it they did not want to devalue completely the 502 crafted weapons. I have my own opinions on the whole “crafting should be best” line of thinking, but I can see why they would want this. The problem however with this line of thinking is that there are simply not weapons available for every itemization. For enhance… they tend to favor slow weapons… so that rules out the daggers. That leaves Fist, Mace and Axe that are all usually 2.6 speed. In the 502 weapon itemization there is not a Fist, Mace or Axe that is agility based. The “rogue” weapon that is craft-able is a sword, which shaman simply cannot use.

I know in the past this has happened with Druids and other “weird hybrid classes”, but the fact that other players can nod and say “I know that feel bro” doesn’t really make it any better to try and work around. At this point I will start queuing my way through Siege LFR each week and hopefully in the process I will luck my way into a weapon. If not hopefully one of my nightly guild heroic scenarios will pay off and I will get one or more 516 random stat weapons. No matter which path I take however, my shamans fate is now in the hands of the random loot gods, which is never really a fun place to be.

Unicorns!

December 17, 2013 by Belghast

Unicorns!

Quick… type Unicorns if you want to live! I had to share this picture as it was pretty much my favorite thing from yesterday. Typing of the Dead was one of the most quirky Dreamcast games I owned, so I was super shocked to see that there was a newer version available on steam. I have no real interest in playing it to be honest, but this image particularly caused me several chuckles throughout the day. I am using it this morning as a crutch to get me started typing. So far this morning I have overslept, and since I really did not do a whole lot of gaming last night, I feel fairly empty of ideas.

My last night was spent with my wife, taking her shopping. I feel overall it is a noble if not maddening pursuit, but since she would be in teacher conferences tonight and Wednesday night… I figured it was a needed one. At least I got a good meal out of the ordeal. She has decided she wants to look more “put together”, and stop wearing so many neutral colors. As an art major, I keep getting called in to coordinate color palettes for her. If left to her own devices she tends to try and match everything, instead of pick a simple but coordinated group of colors. Hopefully overtime she will pick up what I am doing and I will no longer be quite so needed in the process. However for now I am her shopping buddy… but in truth I always really have been.

The Quest For Weapons

I really like my dwarfy elemental shaman, and I pretty much play him whenever I have the chance. Right now I am on a mad quest to get him a couple of decent weapons. He currently is using two matched blue weapons, and I have been pestering the guild to run nightly heroic scenarios on the hopes that I will actually luck out like I did on the paladin. I feel like even one weapon swapped would be enough to get me into Siege of Orgrimmar LFR, which is ultimately my goal. The problem that I have mentioned before is that there are really no good weapons you can get for characters. The weapons out on the Timeless Isle are 20,000 timeless coins for a onehander, which involves quite a significant amount of grinding. The problem with them is that they are only 476 ilevel which is not really that much better than heroic blue/crafted 463.

I might be insane, but I really do not see that it is worth the copious amount of grinding that it would take to knock one of these weapons out… to wind up slightly better but still very much undergeared to do the latest content. Another option generally are the 502 living steel weapons that are remakes of the weapon specialist items from burning crusade. Two problems here, firstly they take a month of Living Steel transmutes to get. Secondly there is nothing agility based that a shaman can use, the only agility weapon is a sword. Lastly there is the option that I have been avoiding like the plague, PVP.

PVP Gear without PVPing

I am not a PVP player at all, and I believe the last time I did any PVP was Baradin’s Hold. Even then it was an extreme rarity that I participated in that unless I also had a bunch of guild members backing me up. PVP is the worst sort of treadmill to me, and each time I do it I feel like a hamster as I quickly run back from the grave yard only to be sent back again. There may be a loophole I can exploit however. It seems you can convert 375 justice points into 250 honor through a vendor. So that means I need to get 2625 justice points per weapon that I can comfortably grind out in heroics. That would get me a 498 Axe or more likely the Fist weapon, as I seem to prefer those on my shaman.

This is something I can likely do, as I can probably even convince guild members to “roflstomp” some heroics with me to fill the guild bank with money. We did some the other night to bump me across the threshold of being able to buy the heirloom axe for my orc warrior. This seems to be the stopping place for all of the alts in the guild, we simply cannot get decent weapons. I could probably even organize some group effort of running heroics to get people the pvp weapons. The stats are not ideal, as it has that nasty resilience stat on them… but overall just the damage alone makes it worth it. They would be more than viable for Siege and would let people get their weapons up enough to do quite a lot of other things. Granted these are not as good as the 516 ilevel weapons from heroic scenarios… however it is something you can actually work towards without having to rely entirely on that mean on random number generator.

Transmutation

December 7, 2013 by Belghast

Trolls of Thunder

Yesterday went pretty much as I had intended it. I hung out around the house and ran first my Paladin and then my Shaman through a bunch of LFR. Things went a bit slower than intended since I kept getting in on the end of a run and having to queue again to catch the first boss or two. I managed to get both characters up into the 480ish range. Still no real luck with the weapon drops, which seem to be the issue with catching characters up enough to be able to do Siege of Orgrimmar. As a result my warrior, paladin and shaman are all using 450 level weapons still, and I have not really had much luck with getting spirits of harmony on the smith to be able to bump those up to 463.

Of the options I have at my disposal for weapons, none of them really seem palatable. I could queue for heroic dungeons and have a random chance of getting the dungeon that drops a weapon… and a random chance on top of that of getting the weapon to drop. This would only take me to 463, so not really great in the grand scheme of things. I could farm timeless isle coins, but it takes 10,000-20,000 to be able to purchase a weapon… and in those cases the weapon is only 476 which really doesn’t help that much. So the best option still seems to be to queue for Throne of Thunder each week and hope, all the while trying to accumulate Spirits of Harmony for the smith.

Transmutation

With all of my crafters going, I have really felt the lack of my alchemist. There are some pretty sweet items you can make as a blacksmith that are 502 ilvl but they require lots and lots of Living Steel. Once again the only way to get living steel is to get it transmuted by an alchemist. As a result I have been directing my extra effort towards leveling Gloam my rogue high enough to be able to raise his way through the Pandaria alchemy. Currently he is capped out at 450 and cannot progress again until I level 75. As a result I have been working on quests out in Borean Tundra and I almost have him up to 72. Thinking about just making a serious push to try and get him to 90.

Rogues are way squishier than I remember, and while they have recuperate it doesn’t seem to offer the level of survival I am used to with my other characters. As a result leveling the rogue has been less than enjoyable. I am not really a stealthy person, and I have always played my rogues more like a swashbuckler than an assassin. However the only time combat goes really smoothly is if I make sure I stealth up and get my opening attack. Hopefully with time I will get back into the swing of playing one, as in the past… burning crusade especially my rogue was my favorite alt.

The thing I find most humorous is that Paladins now kinda play like rogues. I have been doing a lot of Retribution paladin, and the mechanics are almost exactly like a rogue. Thing is in many ways it works better. Instead of everything being based on 5 combo points, all of the attacks seem to be based on 3 even though your bar can fill to 5. I keep thinking that rogues as a whole would benefit if most of the combo point dumpers capped at 3 as well. I think this is why I enjoyed my warrior in rift so much as opposed to my rogue. The three mechanic just seemed to work better, it made the game play feel more “in the moment”.

Too Many Choices

Right now I feel absolutely deluged with choices anytime I play the game. At this point i have yet to run Siege of Orgrimmar LFR on Belgrave or Belgarou my two best geared characters. I am 4 coins away from getting all of my sigils of power and wisdom, so I would not mind finishing that off so I can continue down the legendary cloak line. I have not even begun to work on Belghast, so in theory I could get his gear in order and start doing heart of fear or something like that to get him high enough to queue for Throne of Thunder. Additionally I really do want to get my rogue up so I can have a transmute spec person again. I spent a good amount of last night prior to our 10 man catching his herbalism up so he can now at least harvest whatever I come across in northrend.

In the past when I have quit the game I feel like it has been because I lost sight of the things I wanted to complete. I feel like I almost need to create a World of Warcraft Bucket List. There are so many little things that I forget about that I do want to complete. There are so many pets and mounts that I could be spending my time farming. The entirety of all of this is really almost overwhelming. I have never completely loremaster for example, and that’s a thing I have always wanted to do. I doubt I will ever work on the Insane title like Rylacus, but I am sure there are hundred of other little bullet points that I would actually enjoy. I feel as though if I had a list of these all, it would be much harder for me to lose sight of the progress I am making towards the total.

As a result I think I am going to add a new section to my site, similar to my beta list for my WoW Bucket list. As I think of more items I will add them to the list and then as I complete them… I will check them off the list. Probably will keep it as a google spreadsheet for ease of use. I’ve seen a few other players with these and I thought they were pretty cool. All I know for certain is that I am having a blast with all the players that seem to be back from their own hiatus. It is wierd to see my battletag/realid lighting up with players I have not seen in years. At the end of the day, this game really is about the people you play it with.