transmog Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Shamen and Pax South

January 10, 2016 by Belghast

Prepping for Pax South

Tis the beginning of the year, and we are now roughly three weeks away from Pax South, and I have to say…. I am a bit concerned. It is going to be an awesome time no matter what because right now I know of like a dozen friends that are going to be there… so going to have plenty of people to hang out with. What concerns me though is it seems like Pax South as a whole is a much less hopping place. By this time last year, all three days of the show were down to “low” rating, and Saturday and the Three Day Passes had been sold out for a very long time. Additionally they had already posted a picture of the convention floor and who was going to be inhabiting what booth space. As far as the passes, Saturday was still available on Friday… and just looking at the schedule there don’t seem to be as many “big name” presentations as there were last year. Last year after all we had the world announcement of Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns happening, as well as I believe the first real information about Sid Meier’s Starships. Now… what I see instead is very light on the game content and very heavy on the youtube and stream celebrities.

All of this said I am going to have the best time this year…. because what made last year so much fun was running around with Ashgar and Rae. This time around I will be running around with Ashgar, Rae, Thalen, Dallian, Damai, Lonrem, Helkim, Paragon, Tick, Rylacus, and hell probably several others that I am failing to rattle off on the top of my head. It is the people that make the place awesome, and it is my hope to meet up with as many people as I can over the two days I am going to be there. So if you are planning on going to Pax South please let me know. I did a poor job of actually connecting with people last year and I hope to fix that. The other thing that is going to make this year awesome is that I am no longer going to have to worry about somehow abandoning my wife. Last year she went running around during the day, utilizing the hotels shuttle service, and by all accounts had a lot of fun, or at least enough fun to want to come back again this year.

The problem being that I always felt guilty for leaving her at the hotel and felt the strong pull to rush home at night so we could go out to dinner and such. This time around we are also bringing one of her friends so she now also has someone to run around with and wander San Antonio. What is hilarious is… she feels like I am being awesome, and I think its awesome because I will feel less guilty all the time. This also means I will probably experience a lot of the nighttime content of Pax and go to the concerts and such, and maybe some of the after parties. Granted on Saturday night I don’t want to be out too late… given that I will be driving the eight or nine hours home on Sunday. In any case…. if you read the blog or you listen to AggroChat, drop me a line and it is my hope to catch up with as many people during that weekend as I can. I will be getting into the hotel room late Thursday night, and I am staying about six miles away from the convention center out by the airport… in part because we had a great experience there last year…. and the whole free shuttle service to various destinations thing was awesome for my wife. So yesterday we did a bit of juggling to change our arrangements, and now have a double suite so it should be awesome. There was talk last night about maybe trying to get in together and see Force Awakens as a group while down there… since supposedly there is a theater a few blocks away.

Shamanism

One of the things I am really enjoying about World of Warcraft right now is the ability to fly. I realize that I was heavily in the “no flight in draenor” camp, and for the most part I still am. That said… having it makes everything so damned much easier, and questing through the zones is greatly improved. I feel like WoW content however desperately needs the grounding of players at the beginning of an expansion to keep folks from just blowing through everything instantly. In the past once you had a single character at the new level cap you could purchase flight for your other characters, and that was a great option…. but an extremely expensive one. I think personally I like the Draenor Pathfinder option because even though it was a pain in the butt to complete… now that I have done it the benefit can be used by every single character on my account. As a whole I am a huge fan of account wide unlocks and they actually make it far more likely for me to play other characters. In Final Fantasy XIV everything that I have exists on a single character, and as a result I am completely disincentive from trying any more characters. Same goes for games like Rift that while I have alts… I always tend to play the same main character because he has the best toys.

I feel like playing an Enhancement Shaman is a little broken…. in a good way. After having leveled several other characters, this one seems to be the easiest. I can just straight up shred most mobs without my totems, or heroism…. but then I always have those things waiting in reserve for big mobs and elites. The speed of killing things is just so damned fast, and since I have crafters that can feed me gear…. walking around with a pair of level 630 blue weapons really makes a huge difference. I still don’t fully understand why the crafted blacksmith weapons start at 630 unlike the 640 that all of the other gear seems to start at, but in any case I am fine with it…. it is a huge dps boost over the weapons I am getting in the zones. The thing that I cannot wait for in WoW however is the new transmogging system. WoWhead, being the awesome folks they always are has put up a preview system to show you all of the transmog gear your characters are going to get granted from quest completion. I am really really hoping that the new system is account wide like Diablo 3, because there are certain characters like this shaman that simply don’t have a lot of cool gear to work with yet. I guess I should farm more old world content to get him a decent set to run around in.

Sneaky McSneakybits

January 29, 2014 by Belghast

Persistent Stuff

It has been quite a while since I last talked about Trove on my blog. For a bit I had been recording regular segments of me exploring the world, then after roughly six of them I just stopped. Namely this coincides with me getting super into World of Warcraft raiding for a bit. I however have continued to explore the game each time they add a new build. At this point it is hard to remember exactly what the state of the game was when I last talked about it. Currently we have fully persistent cornerstones, and you can see mine on the right-hand side of the image above. It is still very much a work in progress, but essentially I was trying to maximize the space available and still look like something I could pick out at a distance as “mine”.

Currently there are four levels above ground and two below ground, the first of which below has my workbench and block transmuter thingy. One of the cool things that they added in within the last few patches is the ability for your crafting inventory to survive between server resets. This means I finally have a real reason to mass harvest materials for use later, since I am not constantly losing everything each time a patch goes in. My biggest wish however is that we could craft some weapons to replace the starter crap. Each time the server resets I rush around trying to get decent enough weapons to leave the first tier zones. In this present patch it feels like maybe they nerfed the drop rates a bit, as I slaughter a few dozen ladybugs and bees this morning and have gotten nothing at all but cubits… the crafting currency.

Another cool thing they are doing is replacing the in game weapon drops with ones created by players. When you get an item, it now says who the weapon was created by. It was pretty cool the other night when I got a nifty rapier drop and noticed it was created by a friend of mine CaptainCursor. Since the community is relatively small at present, this adds a whole new level to the game since you are constantly running into things created by names you recognize. You can check out the latest patch notes over on the Trove reddit.

Sneaky McSneakybits

Yeah I have no clue why I named this subsection and the blog post this… brain does things sometimes. Last night my most important mission was to finish leveling my rogue to 60, and consume all of the various loot boxes I had gathered up along the way. At some point they made it so that you are guaranteed a lockbox of some sort from your weekly patron gift. Since my warrior Belghast is already fairly well geared, or at least well enough to begin raiding… I figured I would stockpile them to give my rogue a quick gear boost upon dinging. Turns out it worked pretty well at doing just that. Between the lockboxes and about 50 plat in select purchases I was able to get well past the 300 hit requirement for expert dungeons. I did not however get to run one as we spent a good chunk of the evening out and about last night.

In theory the queue should go pretty fast since I am equally comfortable Barding it up as support or going dps as either my Marksman spec or my Nightblade primary dps one. Going back and playing rift has made me realize just how much I love the Rift Rogue and truly dislike playing a WoW Rogue. While I got Gloam to 90, and I am extremely happy I did so that I could do the living steel transmutes I needed to craft my Sky Golem… I really don’t think he is going to get much play. Quite simply put… Belgarou my feral druid is a better rogue than my rogue is… or is at least a more interesting one. I have just come to realize I don’t really like the way rogues in wow play. Not sure what it is about the play style but it just isn’t for me anymore, especially now that I feel other classes like Retribution Paladin do the rogue combo point thing better.

Ultimately my key frustration with WoW rogues is that combo points are built in the target instead of a buff that stacks on the rogue itself. Warhammer Online got this right initially with the Witchhunter class, which was by all purposes a “better” rogue. I realize at this point the combo points on target thing is tradition, but it simply does not work that well. While saying the Rift rogue is better, is a bit disingenuous since it is essentially a wow rogue, hunter, druid, and a few other classes that don’t exist in wow rolled into one. I think the main reason why it “works” better is that the combo point mechanism is on the rogue, not the mob. This adds a bunch of interesting gameplay elements like building your combo points on the boss, and then using your combo dump to execute weaker encounters. It is just at this point that the WoW rogue seems so much less interesting than the other “Rogue like” combo point classes.

Onyxia Mount Patrol

After the time in Trove and Rift, I settled in for a little bit of Tuesday raid reset madness over in World of Warcraft. For better or worse, there are several raids that I solo each week on multiple characters for an attempt at the various pets, tansmoggy bits, and every elusive mounts. The start of each week tends to be me making the trek out to Dustwallow Marsh to beat up on Onyxia. First off I have to bitch a little bit, because post Cataclysm they have made it a royal pain in the ass to get to Onyxia for Alliance players. The fastest route I have figured out is fly straight south out of Stormwind, hop the boat at Booty Bay, and then fly to Dustwallow from there. All of that involves flying across several zones and hoping that you happen to arrive at Booty Bay just in time to land on the boat.

Of course like normal she didn’t drop me a mount, or anything else of interest for that matter but at this point I can easily solo her as Retribution Paladin and Frost Deathknight, so I do this little interchange twice a week. I need to cycle through some of my other characters and see if I can build a spec for them that can bring her out of the air in phase two. I might be able to gather up enough timeless isle gear to make a passable Boomkin spec on my druid, and I think in theory I could probably do it on as Enhancement Shaman. I do not think however that my Rogue or Warrior will be of much use in my quest for her mount. I need to check with my friend Rylacus and see if he has any master tips for dropping her out of the air. The one time I tried to do the fight as a Blood DK it literally took 30 minutes for my diseases/icy touch/deathcoil to do enough damage to get her back on the ground.

The highlight of the evening in WoW however was me flying over to Ahn’Qiraj on a whim. Turns out that I now have enough physical damage to solo the Twin Emperors fight. This had long been a stumbling block for me when it came to soloing AQ40. The other big hurdle was viscidious, however since I dual wield frost… I simply switched my razorice enchanted one-hander to my main hand and that seemed to do the trick for shattering him. Past that howling blast was more than enough frost damage to freeze the big blob. I am still missing two pets from this place, so I can see adding it to the weekly faff farming rotation. I did not really have time to do my BWL run on my paladin, I am still missing a few pieces of judgement… so I am sure over the next few days I will be getting that in. Since the eggs are a pain in the ass on anyone other than my Deathknight, I generally grab a random person from the guild who needs transmoggy bits before venturing into the dungeon. My hope is to find a time when Scarybooster can be online, and drag his butt through with them.

Enter the Shado-pan

December 30, 2013 by Belghast

Who Needs Sleep?

It is amazing just how quickly your sleep schedule can be thrown off balance when you are on vacation. Generally speaking I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and tend to go to sleep around 11:30 to midnight at the worse. Since being on break for the last week I have managed to shift that to getting up around 10 am in the morning and having to take Nyquil to be able to have a hope of getting to sleep at 3 am. Sleep has never been something that came easy for me, and in High School I even took a series of sleep studies to try and figure out the source of my frequent bouts of insomnia. There would be days I just didn’t sleep at all, and as a result it became progressively harder to function.

The problem is because of my weight the doctor wasn’t actually looking for insomnia but instead he was dead certain he would find out that I really have sleep apnea. Clearly he didn’t listen to me at all, because I told him I simply could not sleep at times. So I got hooked up to all these machines, with electrodes super glued into my head… put in an unfamiliar room and told to sleep normally. Apparently I had to sleep six hours for the test to be valid… I don’t think I slept at all. As a result I have never attempted too investigate what is actually wrong with my brain that keeps it form shutting down at all.

I am jealous of my wife, because she can take two naps in the same day and still manage to get a full nights sleep. Me on the other hand if I doze off for 30 minutes during the day I am screwed and will not be able to get to sleep at all during the night. I have another week before I go back to work, so during this time I am going to work on trying to train my body back into a normal schedule. This morning I woke up at 9 am, so it is happening gradually. I just know 5 am next Monday morning is going to be pure hell if I don’t act now and try and do something proactive to fix this.

Enter the Shado-pan

Yesterday morning shortly after blogging I did my recent scan of the auction house and found another one of the extremely amazing Fist of Fate weapons. These things really are ideal for leveling a combat rogue or enhancement shaman, as they quite literally cannot be beat before 90. Since I had a pair of claws… I decided I had to go get my favorite claw graphic ever. During Zulgurub era the coolest you could think as a melee was the matched set of claws. One dropped from the tiger boss, and the other from the panther boss, and to my knowledge I have only known one person who actually wielded the set during the time they were viable weapons. Vexa looked amazing with both of them, and even more amazing when the weapons would proc and she would turn into this awesome were-tiger.

During Burning Crusade they introduced a set of rare vendor purchased claws that had the same graphic. So immediately after equipping the second Fist, I made the trek out to Dealer Jayden at Stormspire in Netherstorm and purchase the Nexus-Claw. In the above shot you can see me wielding the set and looking otherwise badass. Sadly the lookalikes don’t proc, especially when transmogged… but that would be a nice change for the future. If you transmog something it would be awesome if it also transmogged the proc graphics. Who doesn’t want to be a badass looking werepanther? Honestly the trinket that I am loving is the one my paladin has that turns me into a random troll tribe. I feel like I am one of the few people out there who is not sick of troll instances. I have a special love for Zul’gurub, Zul’Aman and was supremely disappointed that we never had a Frost Troll raid in Wrath of the Lich King.

Yesterday I had another one of those days where I simply did not want to leave the house (much to the chagrin of my wife who is getting more than a little bit stir-crazy). As a result I worked my way through my normal leveling path, taking off and going to Kun Lai as soon as I could, and then again transitioning to Townlong. I am currently 89 and working on the totem of rage quest series in the second Shado-pan hub. My hope is this evening to finish leveling to 90, but we may or may not have a flex raid. I have a feeling we are going out into the world today, as my wife wants to hit some stores. My hope is that Monday things will not be terribly busy as most folks will have had to go back to work today. I still have another week off, so plenty of time to faff about and finish leveling the rogue.

Faffing Overload

December 16, 2013 by Belghast

Holy Faffing

I had every intent Sunday to work on the various characters that I needed to run through LFR, however when other opportunities were presented I seized hold with both hands. A few members of the guild were running instances for transmog outfits, so I joined in the fun. The likelihood that I will play my little disc priest was just massively improved. Of all the priest sets, my favorite is absolution the Tier 6 outfit from Black Temple/Hyjal. Since I was the only cloth wearer along and the only other person on my class set did not need it… I managed to soak up an entire set of Absolution gear in the run. I also managed to get a pretty spiffy staff, that I remember all the priests desperately wanted back in the day.

I of course had to transmog to the gear immediately, even though I am only 80 and wearing a mishmash of quested greens. My hope is I can maintain the outfit as I level through all of the cataclysm content. I am sure there is a crafted set that will likely hold me much like the crafted gear has on my rogue. Belglorian my priest is also my tailor so hopefully he can take care of that as I level. I hope to get this character up to Pandaria level since I am stalled out 5 points away from maximum.

Twilight Faffing

While we were out and about our monk healer mentioned that he had a severe absence of flying mounts. Immediately we all thought about the three drakes achievement for Sartharion with its guaranteed mount drop. So very shortly we wandered our way over to Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight and formed up a quick group to do 10 man three drakes. It was insane just how fast we were able to kill it at level 90. It was pretty easy to do at 85, but Sarth just absolutely exploded with our current epic gear. We all passed on the mount drop, and let the healer pick it up unattested.

However since we all had an army of alts, we figured we would swap around a bit and go ahead and knock out the 25 man version as well. Several of us were missing that mount, so the monk healer said for us to roll on it as well. While not as much of a cakewalk as the first one, especially since we were all on alts… it was still rather easy. As you can tell by the image I am now the proud owner of a new twilight drake mount. For whatever reason I never managed to get this one in all the times we did three drakes after Icecrown raids during Wrath, so I was happy to knock out yet another mount.

Utgarde Faffing

We did a quick heroic Ruby Sanctum since one of the folks had a quest still active from the Wrath era, and with that most of us had hit our instance lock. I however still had one more to go before I hit it, so I logged back over to my Paladin who I had logged out at Wyrmrest. Since I was so close, I decided to fly over to Utgarde Pinnacle on a whim. I have run this place on heroic so many times chasing the mount, but each and every time I have walked away empty handed. Yesterday however, I was completely shocked to see a brand new Blue Protodrake mount in my loot window. I have always liked running the zone, and to some extent I am a bit sad I have no real reason to ever return.

While I cannot get the black or plagued protodrakes, this completes the set other than the Time-lost protodrake. I simply do not think I have the patience for that camp. Each time I am in Northrend I buzz through Storm Peaks just in case it is up, but so far all I have seen is the place holder and the time-lost corpse a few times. Similarly I make a trip to Deepholme every now and then and fly the circuit, but again I don’t really expect to ever find that stone drake up either. Both camps are extremely tedious things and I simply do not want the mount bad enough to go through it. I figure I will get my share of camping done when I start collecting spirit beasts on my hunter.

Faffing Overload

One of my really good friends Ashgar came back to the game this weekend, and similar to what I do he spent a lot of time running old raid content for fun. We had talked about going and doing Blackwing Lair earlier in the day, but it never really materialized until shortly after I had gotten the blue protodrake above. He was struggling to solo Razorgore, and I knew I very much could not do it on my paladin… but there were two items I really wanted desperately from there. The first is the Untamed Blade, that I am now modeling in the above screenshot. The second is a proper set of Judgment. While I love the blue/brown set from the opening of Northrend event, simply because it is super rare… I have always wanted a set of the red/gold judgment, that matches the untamed blade. To me that is the archetypal paladin look, and I will not be completely happy until I at least have that as an option.

Needless to say I managed to get the Untamed Blade, but over the course of the dungeon only a single piece of judgment gear dropped. We did however see every single pet, so at this point I am only missing Broodlord Lashlayer, as I managed to pick up mini Razorgore and mini Chromaggus. After we made quick work of Blackwing Lair we decided to wander over to AQ40, since thanks to Twin Emperors it is annoying to solo. There we did not have quite as much luck, but I did manage to pick up the mini Skeram pet, and Ashgar managed to get one of the other ones along the way. The highlight of the run for me however is that moments from joining up the Red Qiraji Resonating Crystal dropped.

The various colors of Resonating Crystals were a source of so much drama for our raid back in the day. We formed “teams” based on the color of mount we managed to get to drop. This was egged on by the fact that one of the raid leaders was strongly opposed to any color that was not “gold”, and as such tried to get as many people on his team as possible. My hunter was a member of this strike team… and we vehemently argued when someone called us “yellow”. The above screenshot was from the first time we saw a Red mount. Prior to that moment the mount war had reached a fever pitch, with various people not willing to accept the “wrong” color of mount. After a point the raid leader just started force-looting people various colors just so they would stop slowing down the raid.

However the moment we all saw the “red one” the mount war dissolved just as fast as it had begun. No one cared about the green, blue or “gold” teams… we were all somehow lacking because we were not riding around on a red mount. During our entire time raiding Ahn’qiraj I think we only actually saw two red mounts drop. The screenshot above was from the night we first saw it… we all lined up to pay homage to the new “red leader”. Lleandryn will always have the distinction of being the man who brought an end to the “mount wars”. I joke about it these days, but very seriously… the animosity over the color of mount we were using had really reached a point of ridiculousness. Lots of hurt feelings were happening over having the wrong color, so the fact that the Red mount “saved” us made looting one yesterday all the sweeter. Now if only blizzard would stop being a pain in the ass and let us ride them everywhere.