warrior Archives - Page 9 of 18 - Tales of the Aggronaut

New Expansion Buzz

September 2, 2016 by Belghast

I have been having more fun in World of Warcraft than I have had in years. That at least feels like a true statement, but also one that makes me question it. Sure it seems like I am having a blast, but it got me thinking… don’t I always have a lot of fun at the launch of a new expansion? One of the interesting things about having a blog that has been active since 2009 is that in theory I should have evidence of how I felt at the launch of Cataclysm, Pandaria and Warlords. Around the launch of Cataclysm I seemed to be mostly focused on grouping and gearing… and grinding dungeons to get to the magical number needed for raiding. I think I was still very much in my “games are serious business” mode, so there really isn’t any talk about the expansion being fun or not. In truth remembering that time period I was very much not having fun, and I think in the grand scheme of things that is ultimately why Cataclysm was the expansion that caused me to “quit” World of Warcraft. The quit is of course a lie, considering that I am still playing the game… and never really went longer than six months without reactivating my account. The launch of Pandaria unfortunately happened during a serious lapse in my posting, and by the time I start back up… I was on the daily posting kick and talking about casually playing the game. With the launch of Warlords… I talk a lot about how nostalgic the game makes me feel, but in reality not much actually talking about how I am enjoying it. This was after all the expansion I had originally said I was going to take a pass on… so this quote makes sense.

I still stand by my original statement that if you have no interest in World of Warcraft, this expansion will do little to change that.

So if I set out to prove that I am always pumped about the launch of a new game expansion… I guess I disproved that theory? I guess at least on some level, any infusion of new content is something that I ultimately enjoy. There are new zones to explore, new quests to figure out… and lots and lots of tasty loot. However this time around something feels different, and I am having trouble quantifying exactly what that is. For the first time since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King… I have hope that the best days of the Warcraft franchise are not behind us. With all of the previous expansions… I felt like they did a decent job of stirring up nostalgia, but not really doing a great job of making me feel like the game has a new purpose. This time around so much feels fresh, from the class designs and reworks to the fact that they all seem to be focused on a clear vision of what that class does. I attempted to talk about this yesterday, but the fact that my airflow was pretty low ended up with the post being a jumbled mess. To be truthful I am still sick right now, so for all I know this post is also going to be a jumbled mess. However I love the feel of my Warrior for the first time since I really came into my own as a tanking main during Burning Crusade. The irony here is the fact that I am not really tanking at all, but instead dpsing my way through the content as Fury.

The only problem here is that we have just barely scratched the surface, and myself even more so than that. The game launched Monday night, and we already have four level 110 characters in House Stalwart. I am very much not one of them… but instead hanging back in the middle of the pack at level 105, having completely finished Stormheim and just started Azsuna. I have no idea what the “feel” of the expansion is going to be once we all kick off the training wheels and move into that sometimes glorious time known as the end game. Even Warlords had some really fun moments while leveling, and including some really amazing cinematic experiences. However once we arrived at the end there was a very hollow game waiting for us. I guess the difference this time is that with the launch of Warlords I absolutely expected to have bounced off of the game by about the three month mark. In truth it was a little closer to the six month mark, but the bounce did in fact happen at least mentally even though I don’t think I ever actually cancelled my account this time around. This time however… I have a blazing pyre of hope that maybe just maybe that won’t happen. Ultimately I really like what is going on… with the class design, with the storyline, with the zone creation, and heaven forbid with the lore itself. The bigger story of Khadgar being Khadgar and Jaina being Angry… well it can screw off. However the intricate intra-zone stories are awesome, and I totally want to have reasons to hang out with Havi during later content. World of Warcraft and Blizzard… please don’t break my heart this time.

Legion Without Rushing

August 30, 2016 by Belghast

This morning feels a little odd, for many reasons. Firstly I got a good nights sleep, when normally in the past I would have made a failed attempt to get up in time for the launch of a new expansion. In fact there was a point last night where I woke up at 3:30 in the morning… a mere 30 minutes after the servers went live and thought to myself… I could get up. Then instead I rolled back over and went to sleep again. Always in the past I have felt like I was chasing some goal that I never could quite catch. I knew I could not take the amount of time that my friends like Kylana did, and push through during 24 hours of solid play time. In fact when I logged in this morning I was shocked to see that he was only level 102, which seems slow for him. I’ve heard however that this time around, the process just takes longer and that power levelers who have practiced it on beta say it is going to be around a solid eight hours to get to 110. Which means for someone attacking it more casually you are looking at ten to twelve hours. The strangest thing about this expansion is that maybe I have finally realized there isn’t a rush. In the past I had my reasons… and those were namely an attempt to be a viable tank for folks to run dungeons with while we leveled. My favorite leveling experience was likely Burning Crusade, because I was a fledgling tank and excited that everyone seemed to need me to be able to run dungeons… which at that time were significantly better experience than doing pretty much anything else.

During the launch of Wrath I remember leveling mostly through dungeons in a similar fashion, but when the change happened to Cataclysm I noticed that worked significantly less well. It was as though folks just didn’t want to run dungeons in the same manner that I was used to. In fact I remember going through a bit of an existential crisis at that time because it felt like there was only one dungeon group worth of folks willing to run dungeons at a time. More often than not I ended up the tank left out in the cold and unable to get groups. Now the truth is if you asked other tanks they probably would have felt the same, because we went from being the most valuable commodity in the guild… to one of what felt like the least valuable over night. By the time Pandaria rolled around I found myself still rushing to keep up… but never actually running the dungeons until I hit maximum level and was desperately trying to gear. Similarly with Warlords I got drug through a few dungeons as dps, but mostly to knock out the quests as they came available and not so much as a leveling vehicle. With Legion I am not even planning on leveling my Tank artifact first, but instead focusing on Fury which seems extremely fun to me at the moment. So since I expect to be leveling almost entirely by doing the content… especially since saving up those dungeon quests can reward 110 level gear at the end, I also don’t feel that need to rush around.

I logged in this morning long enough to do the teleportation of Dalaran to the Broken Isles and to rebind at the now Gilnean run Inn there. I completed a few quests but stopped just short of delving into the lengthy quest that will ultimately end in me getting my artifact weapons. While it was odd to not try and push through it this morning, I knew that all it would end up doing is making me have to rush horribly to get to work. Instead I will have that waiting on me for when I get home and fight through the now inevitable server queue. The thing is… that is perfectly okay. If I am in a server queue that looks like it is going to take some time… I have other things that I can do. I can poke my head into Destiny since I have not been there in a good while, or I could go out into the back yard and go for a swim. In any case I am trying to approach this expansion at a much more measured pace. In the past I have rushed my ass off to get to the new cap, and with it beginning a lengthy gear grind. Every time in the past I have always managed to burn myself out in the process to where logging in every night is a misery. I now have a proper army of alts to tend to… and I fully expect to get each and every one of them to 110 before starting on the next round that have yet to be leveled. I say all this with certainty… but really in the back of my head I have my fingers crossed that it will work. I am hoping that I can fight my own tendencies and take things slow.

Confronting Change

July 21, 2016 by Belghast

Hotbar Construction

Yesterday was at least in part a continuation of the previous day. When I got home we ate some dinner and I plopped down in my comfy chair and began continuing to sort through my gear, getting almost all of the way through my characters last night. Early in the evening Grace and I had talked about running some older content for transmoggy bits, so I had a clear target timeframe in mind. In the meantime I had to somehow make sense of my hotbars and decide what the hell I was going to play that evening. Since I really only care deeply about plate graphics usually I knew it was more than likely going to be Warrior, Deathknight or Paladin. As a result I devoted a bit of time to each of them, and tried to make something functional for the purpose of running content. Of the three the most immediately recognizable was the warrior with the only thing really dropping off of my hotbar being Heroic Strike. There were various other tweaks as well but nothing that I could not adjust to rapidly, and within a few minutes I felt like my old self again. The biggest hitch being the significant change to the thunderstrike sound and animation. It is those moments when I realize how much I ultimately play by sound, and use audio queues to know if an ability actually fired or not. The animation is also extremely different being more of an earthquake than a shock of lightning… which I can only assume is part of their “aligning of class fantasies” business. More than likely we lost our lightning because they decided that only Shaman can have lightning effects or something along those lines.

The paladin was also a similar easy adjustment period, and I fell into that routine rather easy. I also love the fact that Paladins now have a movement speed buff similar to that of the Crusader in Diablo 3 which I have played the last few seasons. I may or may not have spent a good deal of time charging around my garrison. The big challenge however was that of the Deathknight, and I still have not quite figured out how I am supposed to be playing it. Compared to the other two tanks it just feels like a wet paper bag when it comes to survival. I straight up got wrecked by the dungeon tank dummy in the garrison and had similar problems in Legion beta. So far I have been able to breeze through the artifact weapon class every single time… but with the Deathknight. While doing that quest I wound up dying roughly five or six times before I was finally able to limp through it. The whole reason why I always gravitated towards the Deathknight was their ability to solo and their ability to quest rapidly. I am not discounting the fact that I probably am missing some key element that makes the class manageable, but whatever is wrong… it is a little maddening. I was truly hoping this would be the expansion where I could feel comfortable returning to being blood again. As it stands… for tanking main I am pretty much staying Warrior because it feels comfortable and like I have the ability to actually take some damage, and at the same time still have a lot of movement in the form of the new combo intercept/charge and heroic leap.

Collecting Appearances

I thought I would include this gem of an image as a clear understanding of why we need a good cosmetic system in this game. As I sifted through my various alts I encountered a whole bunch of reasons, but this one from Earthen Ring takes the cake. As far as the actual collection of appearances we ended up running a few panda raids… or at least tried to because one of the bosses on Heart of Fear kept resetting, and neither of us seemed to have Throne of Thunder unlocked. We did however successfully get through Mogu’shan Vaults and then finished off the night with a quick run through Black Temple where we honestly got more awesome greens than purples. I was making an attempt at getting the second warglaive for my warrior. Earlier in the evening I ran my warrior through MC at least up until the binding dropping mobs… only to get the same binding I had already to drop. I had a similar lack of luck in Black Temple, but there were a handful of plate appearance pieces that I had apparently never picked up along the way. Grace made out like a bandit in Pandaria, but seemed to get minimal drops once we finished the night up in the BC era content.

Right now my biggest frustration is with the whole collection of appearances being locked to armor type. As a result anything that was leather or mail pretty much went to waste, well other than selling it for gold. This is a similar problem to the one I have with the cata era cloth drop rate changes. There are certain characters I play just to have a complete stable of classes, and then there are other characters that I actually enjoy farming content on. My tailor is a Shadow/Disc Priest and that is the character I will probably never actually farm older content on because I don’t get along very well with finger wigglers. Similarly I gravitate towards plate wearers for the characters I actually repeatedly run content on, and it would be amazing if I could just pick up those items and commit them to my appearance library rather than being grumpy as I watch cool stuff going to waste. I can totally see making appearance follow class lines in parties to keep people from rolling on everything. However when you are out soloing it would be amazing if you actually got to collect those appearances. However the end result is likely going to be that I find a farmer of every armor class and wind up running a lot more old world content. Maybe that was their intention all along? Force you to dust off those alts and actually play them?

Low Sodium

This is one of those patches that I have seen a lot more salt over than previous ones. I am not sure if the World of Warcraft community is just more dramatic than it used to be, or if the changes really are that frustrating. I mean on some level I get it, because I quite literally had to rethink the way I play every character I have tried so far. All of the rules of how classes interacted changed, and for the players that tried to do a lot of things for utility purposes… I fear their gameplay is forever going to be changed. For me… I have a full stable of alts and if for some reason I don’t like the way one feels this time I can shift focus to another one and be equally happy. However for the player that spent over a decade playing this one class a certain way… the changes could be traumatic. I fully support complaining about World of Warcraft, because god knows I have done plenty of it over the years. I fully support the notion of feeling like your voice needs to be heard. However after doing both of those… you are ultimately left with a decision point of either adjusting to the changes or quitting the game and trying one of dozens of other good MMORPGs. Change has right or wrong been a constant in World of Warcraft, and if you are not willing to reinvent yourself every few years than chances are you are going to wind up bitter and frustrated.

This moment happened for me during Cataclysm, and several times since I have decided that I am simply no longer having fun with the game. Each time it happens I have tried to be more chill about it, to the point where when I quit these days it is not a huge ordeal. So if you are finding yourself having one of these moments over the Legion changes, take a bit of advice from someone who has been there so many times. Firstly it is completely okay to quit the game. The game will still be there, and you can absolutely return at a later date if you rethink your decision. I quit “permanently” at the beginning Cataclysm, around the end of Cataclysm, the beginning of Pandaria, the middle of Pandaria, the end of Pandaria, the beginning of Warlords, and then I’ve been more or quite often less active for the last six months. There are other amazing games you could be playing and would likely have a much better time doing so, at least until the present bitterness fades. If you need some suggestions hit me up sometime and I can probably rattle you off a dozen based on your previous Warcraft preferences. Essentially what I am saying is as someone who has been there… doing that is so much better than flailing impotently in the hopes that someone will notice your pain and rollback all of the offending changes. Sometimes it is better to walk away and return later… rather than napalming the community.

Playing Dress-Up

July 20, 2016 by Belghast

Quest for Bank Space

Be warned, I am really not sure how much this mornings post is actually going to be a proper topic… and how much it is just going to be show and tell. Essentially last night was spent sifting through so many characters on so many different servers to unlock all of the appearances I seem to have available to me. From there I started cleaning out the banks one at a time starting with Belghast my Warrior and for the time being my main. This was shockingly hard work, and I ended up installing an addon to help give me some confidence to actually go through with getting rid of an item. What I really wanted was a clear thumbs up or thumbs down on every single item much like Rift has stating that “you have this appearance”. Caerdon Wardrobe works at least in a way that is most critical, but still I really wanted to see that message for every soul bound item “just to make sure”. What the addon does do that is useful is for non-soulbound items it tells you that either you don’t have the appearance, or you have collected the appearance from another item. As far as the soulbounds… I just took the plunge and accepted that over a decades worth of accumulated stuff really was in fact added to my account appearance collection. This admittedly was a hard step, and one made no simpler by the fact that apparently Ark Inventory changed greatly… and with every character I logged in I had to do a bit of remapping of some of the styles to get things to load correctly. So I spent the night with Grace as moral support trudging through my bank… while the rest of the AggroChat crew listened in while playing Final Fantasy XIV thinking we were absolutely insane.

Honestly Tam thought this was some sort of limited time event… but I somehow doubt that the rest of the crew takes appearance items nearly as serious as Grace and I do. I mean Tam always has a spiffy glamour in FFXIV but he only has the one glamour and is not constantly rat-holing appearance items just in case someday he MIGHT want to use one for an outfit. I have joked and said that wardrobes are the true end game… but I am being serious. I have been more motivated in games when there is a cool piece of armor or a weapon on the line, than literally anything else you can dangle in front of me like a carrot. As a result one of my favorite activities has been doing old raid content and collecting nifty appearance items to line my vaults for another day. The problem being that quite literally on my Warrior I had seven inventory slots, zero bank slots, and zero void storage slots. Every last corner of that storage was filled with weapons and armor that I under no circumstances would be willing to part with. So a whole lot of my simply not playing the game… is because I had no room to keep accumulating items. Last night had been a long time coming, and was a bit of a purge of my digital hording of stuff. So in many ways selling all of those items was a liberating experience… but also one that terrified me at the thought that maybe just maybe the system would fuck up and I would end up losing everything. Of note… I got every single fashionista achievement other than the shirt one from logging in my first character. As the night went on the shirt achievement happened slowly while logging in a long list of alts that have otherwise been abandoned to the sands of time.

Show and Tell

Essentially the order of operations went a little something like this. I first logged in every single character on my account… which includes numerous characters on other servers that I have only ever played once or twice. From there I focused in on chewing through my mains… where I decided to sell off any gear that was not the current “best in bag” for my current spec. I figure with the expansion only a few weeks away, I was going to be just fine being confined to a single spec per character for that moment. I burned through my salvage crates and learned the appearances I did not already have… and mailed the extras off to Grace for her to sift through as well. Of note she is doing the same thing, but I just realized that it might not work as well as I thought it would… given that I think you can only learn an appearance on a character of that armor type. We will sort out the details of that later though. Then I started tearing into the bank, offloading anything that did not have a nifty and unique use effect and selling it. The only real speedbump here is the fact that a lot of the Naxxramas and Ulduar era class gear can’t be sold… so I will have to manually delete that at a later date. The final thing I did before logging out of any character… was to set my talents and give my character an outfit for the occasion. The rest of this post is ultimately going to be me posting pictures and talking about the outfits.

Belghast – Warrior

This is my “Ready for the Legion” outfit, rocking the Illidari tabard and shield, and using the red/fel green version of the Icecrown Deathknight look-a-like armor. As to whether or not this will remain my main for the coming expansion has yet to be seen, but for the time being I think I look awesome.

Belgrave – Death Knight

Character number two on the list was my Deathknight, and also the point at which I learned that I can apparently now transmog legendary weapons? I wanted to go with something fiery looking to match the Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros legendary weapon. So I ended up landing on the black hand armor set from the garrison appearance vendor. To go with it is one of the trading card game tabards, the Flame one to be specific.

Lodin – Hunter

When this game launched I tried to make Melee Hunter a thing, and wound up tanking a bunch of the instances with a combination of myself and my gorilla pet. Now that Survival is the honest and true melee spec… of course I am going to freaking use it. As a result I wanted to come up with an outfit that worked with the new PVP gear I picked up. This is one of those situations where it “sorta matches” or at least well enough to make me happy in combat, however as I look at it now I am starting to pick it apart a bit. I am going to be “happy enough” for the time being.

Exeter – Paladin

I tried a bunch of different things before finally settling on this outfit. I wanted something purple for my paladin, but didn’t want to use the purple judgement set that I have often used in the past. So I started with the purple tone deathknight icecrown set, and started shifting around bits until I was happy. Once again I am using one of the card game tabards, this time the purple Tabard of the Arcane. The end result is almost my favorite of the night… which is ultimately the next one.

Tallow – Shaman

When Cataclysm introduced the ability for Dwarves to be shaman… I immediately race changed my then Draenei Shaman to be a proper Wildhammer Dwarf. Ironically I also then turned my Dwarf Paladin into a Draenei one… but that is a different story. I have always been enthralled with the whole idea of the Wildhammer Clan, and for this transmog I wanted something that felt almost wildhammery but still looked nice and armored. So I ended up shifting to using one of the Warlords leveling sets… that I just happened to have the perfect set of hammers to go with. I then decided to go with the Fel Goggles to bring out the Fel coloring of the hammers. This was the last one I did last night before crashing but is hands down my favorite so far. So that was ultimately my night, and tonight I will hopefully do the rest of this server.