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

Setting Priorities

December 15, 2015 by Belghast

Return of the Deathknight

I’ve already talked at length about how we know without a doubt that Gladiator will be dying with the launch of Legion. As a result this will greatly hamper my enjoyment as a Warrior since in truth I have never really liked Fury or Arms that much. Sure I could go back to tanking full time… and that would be pretty awesome… but my prospects for returning to a main tanking role are not entirely that great. I mostly shifted to DPS so that if I missed a night… it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Missing a night as one of the primary tanks however… that is a big deal and causes great hardship on whatever raid you are part of. That said… everything I am hearing about Blood Deathknights is telling me that they are returning to the awesome feel they had before Warlords turned them into finger wigglers. I mean there are lots of people that don’t get my complaints about the class… but having a lot of caster animation abilities in your standard rotation ended up making them feel less of a big sturdy melee class. I mean I play Blood when I need to survive, especially while questing on Tanaan but I pretty much hate every moment of it. The class has always been tied to that spec for me.. and even before it became the main tanking tree… I was a blood Death Knight.

Granted there were times I flirted with Unholy for DPS, and Dual Wield Frost for Tanking…. but in each of those times… Blood was still my other spec, the one I never got rid of because it just felt awesome. With it returning to glory, I have to say I am kinda excited about dusting off Belgrave again. The problem being as you can see above… he is wearing this horrible mishmash of whatever gear I happened to find along the way. So one of my goals over the coming weeks is to get him as geared out as I can given the meager scraps he has access to through Hellfire LFR, Kazzak, and Tanaan jungle drops. I figure whatever effort I put into gearing him now… will only serve to make him easier to level in Legion. I am still not giving up hope completely on getting in Alpha, because there is honestly just a bunch of stuff that I want to test out. However in the meantime there is a bunch I can do to improve his status in life, and some of that might even mean pugging a normal Hellfire raid at some point. The thought of that scares the shit out of me, but if nothing else… I want to get to a point where I could survive tanking a Mythic Dungeon.

The Hunter

The second goal is to find some time and get Lodin my hunter through the Shipyard quest and unlock that part of the garrison. There is an absolute certainty that when Legion comes out… I will be switching him to Survival hunter and never looking back. My main character in Everquest was a cleric, but my primary alt… was a Ranger… a dual wielding melee ranger. So when World of Warcraft was released, I absolutely tried to make Hunter into a melee ranger class. I’ve posted plenty of screen shots of me “tanking” early dungeons as a Hunter, and to be honest… when I found out that the class was never going to be viable as melee… I lost interest in it as my main. Other circumstances however lead me to raid as it in Vanilla… which by default turned it into my raid main. However from the moment I had to abandon survival and hitting things with big two handed weapons… the class just wasn’t for me. Now I have played it off and on since then, and I really enjoy Beast Mastery and the aspect of taming interesting creatures to fight for me. But the player fantasy of being a badass ranged character… has never been one that I shared. In preparation for my eventual spear wielding days as Survival, I want to spend some time gearing up Lodin and getting him ready for the expansion. Right now he has a pitiful smattering of gear out of gear from Highmaul, augmented with a handful of Baleful shipyard drops. It is my hope to get him into fighting shape soon, or enough of a shape to be able to survive farming Tanaan. Right now however… he is sub 640… which greatly limits my options.

The Dwarflock

The other character that has been calling my name lately is my Dwarf Warlock Belganon. He is currently somewhere in Northrend in the mid 70s, and represents one of only two characters Alliance side that are sub level 90 and that do not already have a Garrison. It is my hope to push him up, because of all of the finger wigglers… the one I am most likely to play is the Warlock. I feel like the lessons that I learned playing an Arcanist/Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely make me a better warlock player. I’ve always leaned heavily towards Demonology… because just like Beast Mastery…. they have the really awesome pets. Especially now that all of the Warlock pets have been updated with higher quality Warlords/Legion era models, I think its time to revisit the class and see if it works for me. I will never likely main a caster of any sort, but from time to time I have fun playing them. If I can manage to get this guy up… that just leaves the Monk… which I have admittedly struggled with. In both cases I am kinda hoping to be able to dungeon most of my way to maximum level.

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.

Nostalgia Continues

November 23, 2015 by Belghast

Eleven Years

At this point eleven years ago I was spending the morning with a friend and coworker desperately trying to raise the money to buy a guild charter on one of the two original roleplaying server… Argent Dawn. I remember we rolled a set of toons that we had no interest in playing, and wound up selling literally everything we got from quests and drops all in the hope of hitting that magic number. From there I mailed all of this to my would be main character and started the guild, running back to Coldridge Valley to get signatures. At which point a bunch of people made Dwarves or Gnomes and we got our charter up for House Stalwart in rapid fashion. WoW was the first game that I had a planned entrance into, because it was that one game that everyone seemed to be able to agree upon. So we pulled folks from Everquest, Horizon, Dark Age of Camelot and City of Heroes all together into one large organization. We had noble amibitions of having both an Alliance guild on Argent Dawn and a Horde guild on Silverhand. Most folks that have worn the House Stalwart tabard probably don’t even remember that the crusader cross that has become so recognizable… was not even our original design. You can see in the screenshot to the side that the colors were similar… but instead we went with the tree logo.

It was not until the first “reboot” of the guild that we went with the crusader cross, as a bit of a way of signifying that things had changed. Hell there was a period of time when I didn’t even have my mains in the guild. About six months into the game I took a hiatus and went off to play Everquest II, which I talked briefly about during my MWP post a few weeks back. When I came back to the game pretty much the entire guild had disappeared. Later I found out that some of those that remained ended up going and creating their own guild, and rather than shaking the boat I decided to move most of my characters there as well. We had some good times, but it didn’t last and before long I was asking my friend Finni to help me move my characters and pass back the leadership from my bank alt to my main once more. Before we knew in… within twenty four hours we went from being a guild of essentially one… to a guild of like sixty players again. This began the golden age of the guild, and with it we started dipping our toes into regular raiding with what was our sister guild at the time… Silent Strike. Granted we never really did anything much more serious than Zul Gurub and AQ20, but we had a lot of fun doing it when we raided as a guild.

Misplaced Intentions

One of the more interesting things about this game is that I became known as a tank, but even now there are folks like my friend Eralia that still call me Lodin my original Late Night Raiders main. I played a hunter for the better part of Vanilla, but I never intended to do that as my role in the game. It was shortly after the launch of the game that we had a pretty horrific death in the family. So while I was keeping up with my Paladin for a long while… I quickly fell behind and when I came back… the only thing I could seem to level quickly was my hunter. I pretty quickly realized that the class was not really for me once I started raiding. However my good friend Shiana needed a replacement for a less than reliable hunter, so before I knew it I had become a regular cog in the Late Night Raiders machine. Once I was geared… I felt like I simply could not swap to another class. It was during this time that my fellow hunter Ailah decided that she really would rather level a priest… so we rolled Belghast the Warrior and Finni the Priest and started leveling them as a duo to make life easier on both of us. At that point the hardest possible thing to level was a Holy Priest, and the second hardest was a Protection Warrior… and we figured as a duo we could burn through the content quickly.

It was not terribly long before both Belghast and Finni had become our “unofficial” mains, so when Late Night Raiders disintegrated at the end of Vanilla, I took that opportunity as my change to be the class and role I had actually wanted to play. I tore through Burning Crusade with a vengeance and became one of the folks that people relied on to make dungeons happen. When LNR finally called it quits I transitioned over to another raid group that I had been tanking for on the side. NSR or No Such Raid became a second family, and through that raid I met so many of the people that I keep in contact with on a daily basis. We had a really great run with the raid and made it to the start of the Tier 6 raid content before various things happened, and the leader dumped the raid in my lap. I tried to make it work as best I could, but week by week we were hemorrhaging folks. We started with baring being able to pull the group together, then the next week we were down around five people… and the bleeding continued at that pace until three weeks in I just called it. I felt like a failure and honestly was uncertain what my future would bring. I talked to a handful of the highest tier raid guilds on our server… and had essentially made my way through the recruitment process on a couple of them.

Durable Nubs

It was around this time that a good friend of mine from the days of Late Night Raiders pulled me aside to talk about an idea that he and some of his friends had. The theory was simple… pull together a raid group in the style of Late Night Raiders and go off and tackle the content on our own. There were a lot of things about the methodology of NSR that never set right with me. I’ve never felt like yelling orders at a team was really that effective. Basically I had a choice… do I go with my friends and start a brand new raid, having to train people up from Tier 4, or do I go off and join a hardcore raid guild and continue my progress into Tier 6. If you have read this blog much, it would be pretty obvious which choice I made, but I have to admit that choice haunted me. As we wiped to Gruul or later Leotheras the Blind… I kept thinking… what did I give up to make this happen. I spent a good deal of Burning Crusade being grumpy about my decision but in the long run I absolutely made the right one. When Wrath of the Lich King launched we were prized to be a real force for awesome raiding. The atmosphere that evolved was awesome… but we did a few things that I think ultimately hurt the raid. We had this policy of “never let the children see the parents fight”, so while we raided the entire group of officers remained connected to a second voice server. The problem being is that when heavy deliberation was going on… the normal raid chat could be deathly quiet as we sorted out what we needed to do to fix the situation.

To the members this felt like a vacuum of information, and we also failed to take into account the possibility that some of those folks might have some really good ideas that would help solve whatever problem we were having. LNR was the example that we were following, because almost all deliberation there happened in a separate and private server channel. The problem being… we had no clue just how contentious that channel could end up being. I had zero intention of being the voice of the raid… but over time that is precisely what happened. The thing is… as burnt out as I eventually became… I still look back on the moments of us raiding together in a positive light. Namely because so many of the people from the raid groups I have been in… make up the folks that I converse with on a daily basis. Like all things… Duranub came to an end, but this time it was only slain by the Cataclysm release and the shift of focus to guild based raiding. There are several moments that I wish I could go back to, and several raider line-ups that I wish I could pull together again. With Cataclysm we ushered in a plot by some of my friends to create the raiding dream team… the problem being… it wasn’t my dream team. It ended up feeling like a really forced thing, and while the team was called “MellyBelNore” it felt like neither myself, Elnore or Melyloss really had any control over where the team was heading. This frustration… combined with a brand new shiny game on the horizon called Rift, ultimately got me to leave WoW on a semi-permanent basis.

Always in Your System

The problem being… that World of Warcraft is one of those games that I can never seem to fully flush from my system. Over the weekend I spent chunks of it playing around on my Blood Elf Warrior that I rolled ages ago on Scryers… as a way of having both Horde and Alliance characters on Argent Dawn. Once upon a time I was a forum junkie, and with that came pretty frequent postings on the Argent Dawn server forums. Through them I met lots of horde players on my server, and cultivated a pretty great relationship with many of them. I’ve never had a lot of faction loyalty, I just tended to prefer the look and feel of alliance races and cities. I’ve never had that streak for playing “monstrous humanoids” to borrow the dungeons and dragons term. One of my big regrets has always been that I never really got a character high enough to be useful on the horde side. I have an account that I no longer play that managed to catch up during Wrath of the Lich King, and I raided a bit with the Batteries Not Included raid… of which lots of folks are in the guild that I am hanging my hat in currently. For years we had a relationship with Bloodmoon Chosen, and I guess there was a bit of a major dramasplosion there. As a result the folks I was actually friends with ended up leaving and creating their own guild called Facepull, and as a result I moved my characters there over the weekend.

I’ve been having a lot of fun, because there is just something about leveling in World of Warcraft that makes me happy. I’ve not spent much time on the House Stalwart side of the fence, namely because I have no clue yet how long I will actually be around. I always feel like a dick when I have one of these relapses and folks start saying things like “Yay! You’re Back!”. I don’t like letting people down, because for all I know I will be gone in two weeks time when something else catches my fancy. If you were to look at my subscription history since the launch of Rift, you would see each expansion there are two or three of these relapses, and of all of them… only two managed to stick for any length of time. What is ultimately going to hurt this time is the fact that I really don’t have much of a guild to return to. That also feels like my fault, because when I left again this time after us defeating Blackrock… a large chunk of folks followed me into Final Fantasy XIV. In the resulting vacuum, the guild as a whole just vanished. I am looking forward to us ramping back up to doing things as a group in Eorzea, and this past Saturday night before the podcast was a lot of fun. That said… WoW right now is like slipping into a warm sweater…. or fixing a hot cup of soup. It is comfort gaming, and works perfectly for being wrapped in a blanket cocoon on the couch watching stuff on Netflix. It is the mode of gaming that I need right now, and I have stopped fighting the desires for the moment. Only time will tell if this is just another outbreak of nostalgia, or if I really truly want to be playing the game.

Mourning The Past

November 19, 2015 by Belghast

Another Time

Lately I have been struggling with fits of nostalgia, mostly surrounding World of Warcraft and in the middle of it I had a revelation. I know the moment I started to distance myself from raiding, and the events that lead up to me ultimately checking out mentally. When the Cataclysm patch went live, Blizzard in their infinite wisdom decided to deeply incentivize guild-centric raiding. This was probably a no brainer for them, because in truth this is more than likely how the vast majority of people raided. If you wanted to raid… you went and found a raid guild… and life moved on normally from that point onwards. Since the early days of Vanilla however… we never really raided like this. There was a clear distinction between “The Raid” and “The Guild” that was significantly harder to maintain after Cataclysm. The reason being that we raided as an entity that was distinct from any of the guilds that came together to make it up… we raided as a coalition of sorts. In Vanilla it was the Late Night Raiders, in Burning Crusade it was mostly No Such Raid… and from late BC through Wrath we formed the Duranub Raiding Company. In each case the “raid” was an organization with a distinct leadership, made up of a bunch of people from different styles of guilds, with the one thing in common… that they wanted to clear content.

There was relatively no pressure to join any of the guilds, though folks did from time to time filter back and forth between them… nor was the fixed and set number of guilds that made up the roster. It allowed us to recruit people to fill slots, without asking them to give up everything they knew about the game from that point… just to raid. It also allowed people who were far more comfortable in five or six player guilds to remain in their small close knit groups, while still having access to a larger raiding life. It also solved some of the problems that you run into with guild based raiding, where individuals have the impression that if they join X guild they will have an automatic guaranteed spot in X raid. We were able to keep a completely separate infrastructure, with its own rules and tenets, and then fall back on our larger social guild for non-raiding interactions. It was a structure that felt so natural to me, and it almost seemed like a personal affront when the Cataclysm changes showed that they would be shifting focus away from this style of raiding, and only crediting kills to the guild with the largest number of members.

Death of Duranub

When Cataclysm launched we tried an experiment that ultimately failed. House Stalwart, the guild I had lead since the day World of Warcraft launched… attempted to consume all of the smaller satellite guilds for the purpose of “keeping the raid together”. So over night we quite literally went from a 600 character guild to an over 900 character guild. With this came so many different cultures and so many different “norms” that it rapidly became a jumbled mess. We also made the decision to focus on 10 player raid groups, and ended up splintering the raid into a bunch of teams. The problem there is that not all teams were created equal, and some of the teams had the deck stacked heavily including more of the seasoned raiders. So when the progress was not equal, it caused strife and competitiveness between the groups, where it had never existed before. Previously we were there Duranub Raiding Company… we were a group that made the easy things look hard… and the hard things look easy. The phrase “Duranub” tied lineage back to a saying that Shiana the leader of my first raid group said about the Late Night Raiders… that we were a “Durable Pack of Nubs”. In fact Duranub was our attempt to pull out the best things we experienced during Late Night Raiders and congeal them into a modern raid group.

In the process all of the officers sacrificed a lot of their time… and for me a lot of my sanity to keep it going. So when that disolved and we splintered into smaller raid teams… it introduced a whole mix of things that I just didn’t care about any more. I have never been a competitive player, and I have never cared about clearing content first. I am all about working together with my friends to make bosses dead, and to get new and interesting pieces of gear. So when I felt like I was in a competition with those same friends, it somehow tarnished the experience. When Rift launched it became all too easy for me to walk away from World of Warcraft, because the thing that had been keeping me in the game for so long… was this concept that I believe in so deeply. That you could gather up a bunch of disparate parts and make them into a raid group… and have fun doing it. The problem with raiding as a guild… is often times there are people that you end up raiding with… that you don’t want to share a guild with. They are great raiders, but lacking in the human being department. The end result causes you to make compromises… and either diluting the atmosphere of your guild… or sacrificing talent for the sake of culture. This is the part that I was never really able to put into words before now.

Extended Family

I have been nostalgic lately, and it seems to be far less about what we did in World of Warcraft, and more about who I was doing it with. When I said the other day that I didn’t wan’t World of Warcraft, I wanted the WoW that existed in 2009 during the Wrath of the Lich King patch cycle… I meant more than just the game. I experienced that game with a certain set of individuals and a certain feeling of togetherness… and that is the game that I want back more than anything. So many of the people I’ve raided with, I keep in touch with today on a regular basis… definitely more that any other group of people that have been in my life. I don’t talk to anyone from High School, and there is only a couple of folks from college that I keep in touch with other than my wife. I have a notoriously bad track record at keeping in contact with folks I have worked with in the past… but when it comes to folks I have raided with… three of the five other people in the AggroChat podcast are folks I have raided with since Vanilla. Rae and Dallian I’ve raided at least on some level with since Burning Crusade. Other than that there is a huge list of people that I have raided with in one fashion or another that I talk to on IM or Slack, which shows how much more important this group is to me than pretty much any other.

When you spend year after year with these people, even though it is only on voice chat… you develop a bond that is forged in shared struggle towards a goal. Having never really been serious about sports, maybe this is the same sort of bond you develop between your team mates, or the same sort of bond that soldiers come out of conflict with. Whatever it is, it is important to me… and what Cataclysm and our decision to abandon 25 player raiding did was to force me to choose between which group of friends to play with. House Stalwart forged on without me, and when I came back during Warlords out of the ashes of numerous groups was forged a really fun raid team. I got to experience the content with people that I had not played with in years.. and for a moment it was magical. The problem being… even then, it just wasn’t quite the same. It is impossible to sort out guild drama and raid drama… when both are mixed into one big amalgam. So as I sit back being nostalgic… I miss the era of non-guild raiding. If I could bring back any one element of the past, it would be that… and even put in systems like formal raid alliances to bolster that style of game play. If there is one thing I have learned throughout the years… it is that raid guilds are just not for me. What I want is to be able to have my friendly social guild… and raid effectively at the same time. While that might sound like wanting it all at the same time… I did have it for years, which is why I miss it so much looking back upon it.