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Tauren Flight Form

December 1, 2015 by Belghast

Rose-colored Lenses

Last night was the night when I finally realized that playing Horde was not some magical and happy place free from assholes. Over the last several days it has been pretty great, and I have casually bumped into people that I have slantwise known on the server. I was beginning to think that the Horde were simply more mature players than the Alliance folks that I had been so used to dealing with. That apparently is not the case… I simply had a really lucky streak. I have to say the Facepull guild has been amazing, and it is actually drawing me out of my own little world that I seem to get stuck in so many times. Last night Laughingly that everyone calls “Gigs” convinced me to join her and Martoxis in a Supreme Lord Kazzak raid. Now me and Kazzak have a long history, namely from the days when people would pull him to Stormwind and he would ultimately need to be despawned by a GM because it got too powerful. So I guess in a way I knew what I was getting myself in for, but Gigs promised this version was no big deal. She even went so far as to give us a Mammoth ride to the location, and everything seemed pretty awesome for a bit.

Then we started summoning people… and I was simply doing my part and clicking the portals to get people here faster. At some point during this rush a mage perfectly summoned a portal to Hillsbrad Foothills… aka where Dalaran USED to be. A handful of us mistakenly clicked it… including myself and Gigs… and we quickly fell to our deaths. At which point someone pulls the boss, locking us out of the loot. So while I was raging inside… I attempted calmly rez and get my way back to Tanaan Jungle. I honestly didn’t even think of that being a thing that someone would do… but I guess now I know to be cautious. It feels like however fate rewarded me for my frustrations, because on the next attempt I managed to get a drop both from the boss and from the token… which gave me not one but two different 705 trinkets: Chipped Soul Prism and Mark of Supreme Doom. Well worth a fall to my death… that honestly I should have survived with a bubble, but I was simply too shocked to react in time.

Last Call LFR

On the Alliance side of the house, there has been a long standing rule… that you do not under any circumstances do Looking For Raid content any night other than Tuesday and MAYBE Wednesday at the latest. The closer you get to Monday the worse the groups get, and you only ever set foot in an LFR dungeon on a Monday night if you have a significant death wish. Once again I thought maybe the rules of the universe simply didn’t function the same on the Horde side, because I did several LFR runs on Saturday and Sunday and had a pretty good time of it. The groups were calm and reasoned, and we simply wrecked stuff and got loot as a result. So even thought I had the shitty experience with the asshole mage in Kazzak, I decided to brave the unwashed masses and venture forth into Monday LFR. My first sign that something was wrong, should have been that the DPS queue was roughly an hour. I however had stuff I wanted to do out in Tanaan Jungle so I queued up and before I knew it… it was popping. At first things seemed to go more or less pretty well. We downed the first boss with ease… then when we got to the second boss… it took two attempts. Finally the third boss took three attempts… so things seemed to be going downhill. However with the miracle of determination we were able to get through it.

Then I queued for Archimonde… aka the Black Gate. Firstly I have to say how awesome I think it is that you are essentially fighting the demons that besieged Mount Hyjal. I’ve been running quite a bit of Mount Hyjal attempting to get that really awesome two handed sword for my paladin. The end game of World of Warcraft or any game… is really collecting outfits for transmogging. Needless to say… Archimonde did not go well. I was assured by my guildies that this fight was a little overtuned even for LFR, and that most groups struggle with it. However after our fourth wipe, we lost literally half of the raid and I found myself exiting as well. So in my first week of really being “back” I managed to raid Normal Hellfire Citadel through Gorefiend, all of Blackrock Foundry LFR, and all but Archimonde in the Hellfire Citadel LFR. The only thing that I wish I had managed to squeeze in there was Highmaul LFR, simply because I am in desperate need of Abrogator Stones. Playing catch up on the legendary ring quest is going to be a massive pain in the butt, because I remember just how many weeks it took me actively raiding Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry to get all the necessary bits to complete that thing.

A Reason for Facebook

Another interesting side note is that it seems Facepull hangs out pretty much exclusively on Facebook. This is the one social media network I have actively shunned over the years, namely because of some bad first experiences with it. I technically have a Facebook account because it is connected to this blog, and I namely use it to syndicate my posts to the Tales of the Aggronaut page. What is going to be interesting is this may give me a reason to actually use it on a regular basis, seeing as they seem to use it in place of the traditional guild forum. The other funny side note is that apparently yesterday they found my blog posts thanks to Nubzy linking it to said facebook group. So hey folks if you are reading this! Apparently Obi was a bit grumpy that I didn’t mention him in my blog post, so I am going out of my way to remedy that today. I’ve known Nubzy and Obi since I believe Vanilla, or at the very least since early Burning Crusade. They have followed me into many games and I have always considered them both to be part of my extended family. I am just happy to finally make good on my threat of playing something on their side of the fence. I still say however that World of Warcraft would be a better game if they just tore the fence down, letting battle.net friends play together regardless of what faction they happened to enjoy the most. That said I really am starting to enjoy being a bull.

Hellfire and Horde

November 30, 2015 by Belghast

Adulting Sucks

This morning I am sitting here trying to eat my oatmeal and drink my coffee… and this Monday guy keeps pestering me and trying to make me adult. Really freaking annoying. This weekend was a tale of my wife and I avoiding adulting.. so much so that finally yesterday we had to get out and do things in the world. Essentially yesterday was the day of doing all of the things we put off the rest of the break. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t too bad, but the world was cold and rainy… and when I first set foot outside yesterday morning my first instinct was to rush back inside and swear off breakfast. Then my tummy kicked in and told me that it was hungry, and it was also sick of the options we had available in the house. So I ventured out and got breakfast, and realized that I could in fact survive outside of my house shaped bubble with its blanket cocoon. You can tell the hibernation instinct is strong… because we bought the fixings for a bunch of various crock pot meals… so we don’t have to leave the house at all once we make it in from work.

Unexpected Activity

A good chunk of my weekend was spent doing things to get gear for Belgrace my newly 100 Tauren Paladin. When you boost a character they end up giving you a full set of green 640 gear, which is a significant increase over the sort of gear you end up with by natively leveling. Also apart from having to get silver in the proving grounds… you are level appropriate for heroics and the first two LFR raids. I however had pretty crappy luck in Blackrock Foundry with getting upgrades, but I did have a fair amount of luck picking up Baleful drops in the Tanaan Jungle campaign area. So last night I was sitting at 656 with a decent purple weapon… that was sadly as good if not better than Belghast’s alliance side. I had settled down into my blanket cocoon on the sofa prepping to watch my Sunday evening television binge of Once Upon a Time > Walking Dead > Into the Badlands > Talking Dead when I got a random invite from my friend Nubzy.

I knew that they raided on Sunday nights, but I had no clue they planned on dragging me into Hellfire Citadel. I had told her that I was working on gearing and that I had managed to get to 656, but that did not necessarily mean I was expecting to raid. They were resetting the instance apparently and were grabbing a ton of other people into what was their largest raid group to date of around sixteen people. Brerhoof has always been awesome, and he set to making me some upgrades for my remaining 640 green slots. So before I had even really set foot into the dungeon Brer handed me Gauntlets, Pants and Boots that were significant upgrades. Then off the very first drop I managed to pick up Shell-Resistant Stompers and luckily I had not bound the boots yet so I equipped the drop and holding onto the BOEs for the time being. Either I will get an upgrade for them, or pass them on to the next guildie that needs them. The night as a whole saw me getting a bunch of really nice upgrades… in addition to the boots I picked up a Helm of Precognition, an Warlord’s Unseeing Eye for offspec… and most importantly a 690 weapon upgrade Fel-Burning Blade.

Old School Feels

While the gear upgrades were awesome… the real take away from the night was just how much fun I had. The horde guild is named Facepull, and that should tell you something about the attitude and demeanor. More than anything running with them… reminded me of the nights raiding with Duranub before Cataclysm. It was an old school kind of fun, and even when we did something stupid… no one really got pissy about it. We just kept pushing forward and making progress. For having a bit of a strange balance we did really well making it up to Gorefiend before hitting a bit of a wall. At that point we had a few members of the raid have to leave… one of which was a healer leaving us with a fairly unbalanced party. The big surprise of the evening is I guess I did not realize that Nubzy was now one of the tanks. I guess I knew her most as a Shadow Priest, so I guess in the back of my head I just assumed she was booming it up on her Druid. Right now the plan is to gear out my offspec for tanking, but if we continue to need healing… I might change those plans at some point.

Paladin is the only class I have really successfully healed on… but that was back during Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King. I know Paladin healing is far less whack-a-mole than it was… and for some people that is probably a good thing. For me that really has no healing instincts left anymore from my Everquest days… that is definitely a bad thing. The only sort of healer I am is really the “mash button faster for more heals” kind. Granted I did level as a healer in SWTOR on my Scoundrel, but good at healing companions is one thing… good at healing people is a completely different one. In Final Fantasy XIV I kinda fail at my Scholar and I am not exactly the sort of healer you really want on my White Mage either. In any case I had a lot of fun, and the Sunday evening thing is something I could potentially get used to. They don’t start until almost 8pm EST, which by that time I am always downstairs watching television anyways. I managed to dps just fine while watching my shows last night, so in theory this is a decent fit. I have to say I could get used to this raiding as a cow thing… and the group of people seemed pretty damned cool as well.

We’ve Got Cows

November 25, 2015 by Belghast

Another Realm

I have briefly talked about this in the past, but I’ve lived in this strange place when it comes to World of Warcraft. Sure I played lots of Alliance because that was where most of my characters that I cared about existed… but I’ve always been one to bridge the gap. It was thanks to my involvement in the Argent Dawn server forums, and the later unofficial server forums that I created and hosted that I got to know tons of people on that side of the fence. For years I said I would level something on Horde to play with my “other” set of friends, but that never really panned out. During Wrath I ended up pushing a Deathknight to 80, but unfortunately the account it is on… is not the account I play most of the time. When it was announced that Scryers would be merging into Argent Dawn… I went somewhat crazy and created a full account worth of Horde characters because quite honestly… I had no clue how the merger would work. I did not know if all of the sudden there would just be this one amalgam server… and we would have 22 characters on it. The end result however is that both Argent Dawn and Scryers exist as distinct worlds… but everything from guilds to the zones themselves spans across the two realms allowing me to officially guild up with my old school Horde friends.

This has allowed me to do some utter madness… and ultimately have both a Horde and Alliance version of every single character. The big problem came with the fact that I had one of each on the Alliance that I did not want to lose access to. So now after some juggling Argent Dawn has become the server I play Alliance on and Scryers the server I play exclusively Horde. The only challenge is the fact that I had nothing leveled on Scryers, whereas on Argent Dawn as you can see above all but two of my characters are over level 90, and even then the lowest is 53 which is still a significant amount of levels. Prior to this week on Scryers I had managed to get an Orc Deathknight to 60, and a Tauren Paladin and Blood Elf Warrior to around 20. With the announcement of Legion came the pre-order process, which I went ahead and did giving me a boost to level 100. I was extremely torn on this one… do I take the boost and potentially get to do some stuff with my friends now… or do I level it the old fashioned way. Having not seen much of the Horde content, I actually do want to level there eventually.

Moo-Cow-Adin

Essentially I arrived at a thought process that is level the Blood Elf Warrior and Orc Deathknight legitimately… but boost the Tauren Paladin giving me access to do “big kid things” right away. I largely went with the Paladin because I really do enjoy both Protection and Retribution, but more importantly it gives me a character that I can in theory fill three different roles on. While I don’t really like healing as a Paladin, I have done it in the past and in a pinch I could do it again. I am however completely comfortable doing LFR and the likes as a Retribution Paladin allowing me to hopefully gear up both my Retribution set and eventually get a Protection set. The problem is… I knew if I was ever going to play the character for real I had to look cool doing it. This means I had to find something that I could enjoy to transmog into for the time being. My go to set for Paladins is the Tier 6 Lightbringer set, because it is relatively easy to farm. So last night I set off to go do Black Temple, Mount Hyjal, and finally Sunwell.

I am convinced that the game goes out of its way to screw with players trying to farm a full set of gear in a single attempt. It seems like there is always a single piece of gear that refuses to drop… and generally speaking it has been the helm token for me off Archimonde. This is extra insulting because as far as a raid goes… I HATE running Mount Hyjal. This is namely because you are a slave to the timers… and it seems to take significantly longer than most any other raid due to this aspect. Namely it is the Horde section of that raid that drives me insane… because I tend to play Melee focused characters, which makes knocking Gargoyles and Frost Wyrms out of the air a major pain in the ass. All told I was pretty happy with the results, and the only piece I did not manage to get were the legs from the Illidari Council fight… because for some reason it glitched and only gave me two pieces of loot including a single leg token. I have zero problem farming Black Temple to get the legs, and in the meantime I got a drop from Sunwell that will fill in well enough for the time being. At some point I need to get a better weapon, but for the moment I am rocking the big damned glowy orange axe from Black Temple, which makes me happy enough.

Onwards to Tanaan

My guild suggested that I spend some time digging into Tanaan Jungle to get some upgrades from the 640 set they start you out in after being boosted. I also really want to start the Legendary Ring quest, which I just picked up last night. From there I plan on throwing myself at the LFR and seeing if I can get some decent upgrades, and hoping to complete the ring quest along the way. It is really my hope that they upped the drop chances of those items out of Highmaul that are needed for the ring, because otherwise… this is going to be a thoroughly frustrating experience. I remember how long it took to get those on Belghast when we were actively raiding every week. In any case I seem to have sorted out how to actually play a Paladin again, and gearing my Moocow is pretty much my side gig from this point onwards. It is my hope to be able to get geared enough to actually join in some of the reindeer games happening on this side of the server. The only footnote there is that I really need not to raid actively, and I am hoping that won’t be a problem.

For a period of time I was really damned happy playing both Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. I enjoyed the mix of the two games because they both scratched a distinct itch. World of Warcraft is this really enjoyable experience when played casually. I enjoy doing older content for transmog bits, or casually leveling alts… but when I was raiding both Warcraft and FFXIV… the differences just started frustrating me. Ultimately I prefer the FFXIV raid game better, because it feels like the boss encounters are simply messaged better. Granted if they just added telegraphs with clearly identified edges of effects like they have in both Wildstar and FFXIV it would go a long way to my enjoyment. Ultimately I think I simply got burnt out by trying to raid two different games at the same time… and ultimately ended up choosing the one that was causing me less frustration. So now… I am hoping to go back to playing both games casually… and in theory maybe starting to raid once again in FFXIV. We have started doing this Saturday thing again, where we do older content and it was a lot of fun this week. My hope this will ease me into doing more content in that game as well, and in the mean time I am planning on diving into LFR on the Paladin in WoW. Granted I won’t be doing any of it tonight… because this is the first of our Thanksgivings, and I also need to stage a proper Thanksgiving post for tomorrow.

MooCowadin

March 2, 2015 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff 5 – Evening with Qelric

We are going to put on our timey wimey stuff hats and pretend that this show is being released during the month of February, as it was originally intended. When I record a Bel Folks Stuff I tend to give the victim as much time as possible. So I approached Qelric back in January to talk about this show… and she every so graciously accepted. The problem is that life happened in the time between, with her getting an absolutely horrible case of chicken pox towards the beginning of the month, and me dealing this this insane bronchitis mess towards the end. The result is we recorded the “February” episode in March… and that I supposed is just fine so long as it came out in any form.

Qelric is quite literally one of the only youtubers I watch with any regularity because she brings to her craft a style that you don’t generally see on youtube any more. She presents extremely content dense videos in a news like format, making them far easier for me to digest without the rambling exposition. If you are not familiar with your videos, I highly suggest you check them out. On top of this however Q is just a downright interesting person, and we have interacted for what feels like years. I had a delightful afternoon/evening sitting down to record this episode. Before we knew it a couple of hours had passed and we had a mammoth hour and a half long show. The awesome thing is… even after the mic stopped recording we wound up talking for another thirty or forty minutes. I love it when the conversation is natural and flowing. Hopefully you will all enjoy this as much as I did recording it.

[download the podcast]

Moocowadin

Yesterday was a surprisingly busy day, with dealing with the publishing of two different podcasts and a normal blog post. As a result especially while waiting for Qelric to get online, I wanted to play something but did not want to get too terribly engaging. With the introduction of the Heirloom system and the 6.1 patch, it has greatly increased my desire to alt. My number one frustration while trying to level a character is trying to make sure I have level equivalent gear. I realize that gear is never as important as I seem to make it, but I like to have at least as good of a weapon as possible while pushing through the levels. Now previously I had some heirlooms, but I had to choose which character would get to use them. Even with the ability to send them cross realm, it became a mess trying to track who had what and I was constantly afraid I would end up losing heirlooms in the mail… because I have done this before. The new system however is pretty much ideal for me, since I can generate copies of heirlooms on any and all characters.

When The Scryers server merged with Argent Dawn I set about creating eleven place holder horde characters, since I did not know how the actual merger would work. It makes me extremely happy that I can have 11 Alliance characters on Argent Dawn and 11 Horde characters on The Scryers… and use them to play with my AD Horde friends. I have always been one of those players that tried to span the faction divide whenever I could and through various community efforts I developed just as many bonds on the red side as the blue. I always feel like a louse however for never really spending much time leveling a character on the “other” side. As a result I started working on Belgrace my Moocowadin yesterday while waiting for Qelric and while recording the podcast. As of this morning I am now level 18 and starting the Ratchet area. It is insane just how fast the levels come when you are completely kitted out in heirlooms. The only slot that I do not have is the ring, and I am simply not a good enough fisherman to get that.

A Confidence Boost

Over the last few weeks since the launch of the Final Fantasy XIV 2.5 patch I have greatly tapered off the amount of time I am spending in World of Warcraft. It has become a Tuesday/Thursday experience for me largely which means simply showing up in time to raid. Now granted I am logging in periodically throughout the week to run garrison missions but in the grand scheme of things that takes ten minutes or so at a time, and I am really not online that long. I’ve felt kinda horrible because one of my long time friends has been slowing improving her ilevel gear wise on her priest. Every so often she would give me an update and yesterday she told me she had hit ilvl 626. I knew the answer before I asked it, but I asked her if she had managed to do any LFR yet? As I suspected she said no, that she was wary of raiding… and didn’t think she was ready for it. I hopped on Lodin my hunter, that could still use gear from Highmaul LFR and offered to queue with her for moral support.

Finni had raided before during the early days of World of Warcraft, and as such the bulk of her experience dated from the 40 man era. So when she thinks “raid” she equates it to super serious business. Fortunately and unfortunately at times… Looking for Raid is anything but serious business. Within what felt like fifteen minutes of queuing we were through the first section, and she got a much needed confidence boost… and thankfully a little bit of gear. I remember the first time I queued for Looking for Raid upon coming back during Pandaria. I was scared as hell because the concept of a raid for me too was “serious business” time. Thankfully we have this wonderful system that allows players without the time to dedicate to at least be able to get in and see the fights in one form or another. She ended up walking with a few upgrades, and I did as well… and can now queue Blackrock Foundry on my hunter. I think we both benefited from yesterday equally, because it seems like she won’t be quite so frightened of the LFR queue.

#WoW #Paladin #BelFolkStuff

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