World of Warcraft Archives - Page 15 of 108

Bad Grind Good Grind

March 27, 2018 by Belghast

I am still reeling a bit from a dream I had over night. I guess in theory you could call it a nightmare, where I ended up leaving my current job and ending back under the yoke of the one boss in my work history that I hated working for. I’ve always been one of those people who tended to naturally get along with bosses. Pending they are coming from a place of logic, I get why they want the things they want… and especially now as a “boss” myself I get how orders that seem disconnected from reality end up having to be passed down. This boss however was petty and vindictive and gave me nothing but a constant stream of conflicting information. If I did what I thought was right… he would rail on me for not doing it however the hell he wanted me to do it. If I stopped and asked for directions in how he wanted me to do a thing… he would rail on me for not taking initiative. In the end it was two and a half years of the lowest point in my career that did some serious damage to my psyche that I am apparently still sorting out.

On the gaming front however I have been playing quite a bit of World of Warcraft, mostly because I want to unlock the two Allied races that I have yet to. Let me take a moment to talk about how much bullshit the way these races are unlocked is. Primarily that it is grossly unfair that two races for a single faction are unlocked by doing content that has been in game more or less since the launch of Legion, and the other two gated behind the newest content and honestly the most frustrating to do. So I have the two horde races of the High Mountain Tauren and the Nightfallen unlocked and a monk and rogue create respectively. Now I am working on the frustrating rep grind that is roaming around Argus and doing daily quests barely watching the needle climb at all.

Argus just feels bad and was only slightly improved when I got the reputation to unlock the improved flight whistle. Why in the hell this was not a default thing makes zero sense to me. I get that they rushed this content out the door and did a lot of visual tricks that are easily dispelled the second you lift off the ground. However the constant tug of war of achieving flying only to have it arbitrarily taken away from you is maddening. We experienced this with Pandaria and then suddenly losing the ability to fly on the Timeless Isle and Isle of Giants and in both cases it felt horrible. Having a speed bump in the form of Argus still feels horrible… but I am gritting my teeth and dealing with it for the sake of racial unlocks. As to why this suddenly matters to me now? I have no clue… it could have been simply spurred on by having access to the races in Alpha.

The other game I have been playing a significant amount of lately is Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate on my new pokeball edition 2DS XL. Unfortunately the shut down of MiiVerse and the lack of having any sort of a native screenshot functionality will keep me from actually capturing any shots of my gameplay. However this has sorta become my evening retreat as I chill out doing some monster hunter from bed before finally heading to sleep. I find having some sort of a wind down activity helps a lot and at least thus far this fits the bill nicely. I do however have a USB to 3DS charging cable at work so I might start taking this with me and playing a little over lunch now that I am getting into some of the more exciting activities.

I’ve not made it terribly far but at this point I have taken down two monsters: Velicidrome and Seltas… both of which I need several more parts from. I have the mission to hunt the Great Jaggi so I am likely to attempt that next because I need a single hide to upgrade my current sword and shield. Not sure why I have not broken out my beloved Longsword yet, but for the moment I opted to stick to the starter weapon. In truth in Monster Hunter World, the Sword and Shield is probably my second favorite of the weapons so I am in part using MH4U as a way to get more familiar with its quirks.

How quickly I have taken to this game in the relatively short amount of time I have been playing it… tells me that Monster Hunter World is not necessarily a fluke for me. Sure it was this amazing gateway into a very complex game… but the core mechanics are ultimately the thing that is keeping me there. I’ve had similar experiences with Generations, but I feel like 4U does a much better job of easing you into the game and giving you some semblance of a story to care about. At some point I fully expect to return to Generations and push a little further given that I have yet to actually get to a single real monster there.

World Scaling Thoughts

January 19, 2018 by Belghast

Firstly since I was absent in making a blog post yesterday I feel like I need to address said lapse. I’m dealing with this horrible strain of the flu that has been going around. I was in fact one of those people who had the flu shot early in the season as soon as my work offered it, and still managed to catch it. Last week I went to the doctor and they misdiagnosed me with a bad sinus infection. As the week carried forward and I was not getting any better I went back to the doctor and this time around they thought to swab me for influenza. I feel horrible because I probably infected a bunch of people during that weeks time considering people are dropping at my work like flies. The biggest challenge of this batch seems to be thinking… as in stringing together a sequence of thoughts into something that makes sense. I tried it yesterday and failed… primarily because the topic I want to post about involves a little finesse. However here I go attempting to make a post work in between the coughing spells.

On Tuesday January 15th the World of Warcraft was once again forever changed with the introduction of patch 7.3.5 and World Scaling. You have to understand I have been thought a lot of emotional tinges about this sequence of events and it really has taken me this long to be able to sit down and formulate my thoughts. Now this is something that I had been wishing would arrive in World of Warcraft for so many years before there are lots of games out there that do it really well. Prior to the patch I had been furiously leveling a Tauren Hunter and upon logging in I had the immediate guttural reaction of “Gah! This Feels Horrible! LOGOUT!!!”. The longer I have lived with these changes the more nuanced my opinion has become, and today I am going to try and weave it all together into something that makes sense. Firstly lets talk about what leveling has been like for the last few expansions in the heirloom economy. Putting on a full set of heirloom items turned you into a god and you could pretty much roll though content with impunity. With zero hyperbole… on my beast mastery hunter I could pretty much oneshot every single mob in the game while doing level equivalent content. This had a bunch of positives and a bunch of negatives… the negative being you weren’t actually doing any of the content legitimately. The positive is it allowed you to tackle all of those boss level encounters and made up for the fact that the zones you were leveling in were effective ghost towns and you might never actually see another player.

The other side effect is that you could level exceedingly fast because of the sheer volume of things you could kill in your wake. You could pull big and pull sloppy and shake it off knowing there was virtually nothing the mobs could do to you that would actually kill you. This meant that on a really good night I might be able to do twenty levels of content, and on average something along the lines of ten to fifteen. It was not unusual for me to do literally all of outland in a weekend afternoon buzzing from 58 to 68 in a single sitting. The changes have firmly closed this era of the game. Speed leveling is probably still possible but the definition of fast has changed considerably. In the nights after the patch I have played with many variables but for the most part it is a really good evening if I see two dings. In addition to the lack of speed is the constant fear of death as even wearing a full set of heirloom gear I feel just as weak as if I were wearing greens. I am constantly in peril of pulling too much or the wrong combination of mobs at the same time and maybe not being able to live through the damage. Previously food and bandages had no value at all because you simply did not need them… but I find myself utilizing both again. The big boss encounters however are the problem because once again… there is no native population of players leveling through these zones anymore. There is no one in zone shouting that they need help cleansing ursoc for example… an encounter that is still mostly unsoloable for anyone but a tank with some sort of health regeneration of their own. The island full of all of the boss encounters in Grizzly Hills… I couldn’t even get through one of the mini-bosses let alone the final encounter that requires burning down the boss while also managing large waves of adds. Essentially if a quest rewards a blue item… it is probably off the menu for solo players to ever attempt because due to world scaling there will never be a time when it is far enough beneath your level to comfortably solo.

So do I mourn the old fast and silly leveling with heirlooms? Admittedly a little bit. Because it was fun to feel that powerful and get through the content that quickly. However I also realize it was a bit much and lead to all sorts of problems like being unable to kill something slow enough to complete any of those “use item while weakened” type quests. Level scaling in truth is good for the health of the game because it means everyone will be actually doing the content in the game rather than buzzing past all of it. Essentially everyone will be leveling every alt now like they were leveling their first. I am sure Heirlooms do speed things up still, but it isn’t nearly as noticeable as before. The problem I see however is that in the new economy… the survival capabilities of various classes are likely going to need to be tweaked. I’ve been playing a bit as Survival Hunter… and there are just certain encounters that I cannot handle by myself. I take too much damage and cannot chew my way through the hitpoints before they chew through mine. Survival is a fairly sturdy class, so that tells me lots of other classes are going to have pure hell in this new world order. I am not sure what sliders they have to tweak how the content feels, but this first pass feels like it lands a bit to much on the side of unforgiving brutality at times. There have been several times I have had to log out and walk away from leveling… because it was annoying me too much. Leveling alts was always my moment of zen and my happy place… and now it is stressful. Again a lot of the problems are with the fact that while the world is scaling I am still utterly alone in all of these zones with no help to be had from another player happening across my path and maybe seeing I am in trouble. The general world sorta feels the way that Argus feels at times when you are a little undergeared…. and maybe that is the problem. Heirlooms previously were supposed to scale like you were wearing the best blues you would wear at a given level. There should never be a time when you feel undergeared for the content… but unfortunately that is mostly how I have felt every moment after the patch.

Essentially it is an adjustment period, and I will have to get used to feeling weak again. I think in the grand scheme of things this is probably a good step for the long term health of the game. I just have to learn that I can’t fly nearly as close to the sun as I used to.

On The Mend

January 16, 2018 by Belghast

I am mostly among the living. Yesterday was a federal holiday here in the United States and with me being off work… it also mean’t that I largely treated it as part of the weekend for blogging purposes. I am still fighting the same crud that I had last week, but it feels like at some point on Monday I turned the corner. While I still have the vestiges of whatever bronchial mess has inflicted me, I am starting to feel better and less like an appendage of the couch and or bed depending upon the time table. it truly was a miserable weekend and while I attempted to game I was not terribly successful at anything until yesterday. I spent most of the break working on the Tauren Hunter who has now finished the Outland and is knee deep in Northrend just starting the Grizzly Hills area. My hope is that when I ding 74 the bear spirit beast will be up and I can collect it for my pet. Up until this point I am mostly running a Fel Corehound that I got from the Blasted Lands. I took the Beast Mastery talent that allows your pets to shadow step… so it is entertaining watching him leap up on targets rapidly. At this point however I can kill most mobs well before my beast even has time to interact with it… which is the life of running full heirlooms.

Sunday I indulged a really weird whim and decided to reinstall the Arc client and give Neverwinter a spin. I’m on the PR feed still from Perfect Worlds and they are constantly putting out press releases about content releases to this game. It got me wondering what the current state of matters is when I have literally not heard anyone talk about it in almost two years. It turns out the game is in pretty great shape as far as actually logging in and playing it. As far as doing its best to feel insidious from a loot box standpoint… it is also working on winning some awards. I don’t remember much about the game if I am being very serious, but you know that thing that we chastised Call of Duty WW2 for doing at the beginning of the year? Where if you get a drop the game announces to the rest of the world what you just got? That apparently happens in Neverwinter as most of my time spent in the central hub area was a constant stream of people getting loot drop rewards. In the very short time I played yesterday I got somewhere around 25 loot crate drops from random stuff while doing quests. Each one of these crates would require a key which runs roughly $1.25 each without any of the “buying in bulk” discounts applied. Through the quests I wound up getting three free keys to open three sample crates and if the ones that drop in the wild are at all similar to what they gave us as “examples” for why we should buy into this system… they were full of utter garbage. If you can however do what I started doing and just vendoring the damn crates for a few copper each time you saw one drop… and loot past the money grubbing nature of the game… the core feedback loop is actually rather enjoyable. I think when I logged in last night I was around 16 left over from my initial push around launch and I believe I logged out for the evening around 25/26ish. During all of that time I enjoyed the core game quite a bit so long as I completely ignored the multiple currency cash shop nonsense. If you can do the same then you too will probably enjoy yourself.

Last completely random thing I did last night… is patch up and log into Elder Scrolls Online. This game is in fact the same as I remember it and still rather enjoyable. The biggest problem I will have is trying to sort out exactly what I was doing when I was last playing. I am still being insanely stubborn and wanting to finish all of the original three story arcs before doing any of the newer content. As a result I believe I am somewhere in the middle of Malabal Tor during my Aldmerri Dominion play through. From there I will at some point venture forth into Ebonheart where maybe just maybe I can play long enough to see the character that was inspired by me and some of the folks we play with. I think the fact that I jumped around so much last night… but still managed to get a bunch of play in with each jump… is probably proof that I am on the mend. In truth a good chunk of this weekend was spend with me just staring blankly at things without really doing a lot of interaction. There were several times that I would start up a YouTube video that would then cycle through a whole bunch of things before I even realized I was still watching something. Now however I need to go warm up the car and prep myself to venture forth into the frozen tundra (for Oklahoma at least). Tonight will likely either be more Neverwinter or ESO because I had a lot of fun playing both.

Bad Concierge

January 10, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I failed miserably at making any sort of a post. In truth by the time I had realized I had not logged in and created a blog post it was mid afternoon… and figured I might as well just call it a day off. First off this morning I feel like I probably need to update considering my Monday post. I saw a Doctor Monday afternoon but good or bad the pain had subsided by that point. The pain in whole lasted roughly 3 1/2 to 4 hours and without it being “acute” the only way they really had to diagnose things was some scans. Their advice to me is that if the pain comes back at all… go to the Emergency Room immediately. Based on my description they thought it might have been either a kidney stone or my appendix… since I still have one of those so in both cases something dangerous if I allow it to go unchecked. While I was there however they also told me I had a pretty significant sinus infection and prescribed a round of antibiotics to help clear that up. I had been coughing up a storm the last few weeks and apparently I actually had an infection to back that up. The doctor suggested that I not return to work until Wednesday, to keep down the odds of me infecting someone else… which I guess makes sense given this is a sort of work based free clinic thing that I went to. So for the bulk of yesterday I chilled out while something cooked in the crockpot and piddled around in World of Warcraft while consuming Netflix/Amazon shows.

One of my favorite things about ElvUi is the AFK screen thing. Not sure why it makes me happy to see it pop up and I have a directory littered with screenshots of my character sitting down while dancing on the side. At this point I am level 52 on my newish Tauren Hunter and spending time in the greater Gadgetzan area. In truth last night before logging for the evening I got the precursor quest to take me to Ungoro crater, so I will likely be heading there shortly. Being fully decked out in Heirlooms makes the leveling experience really odd given that things rarely last long enough for my pet to even reach the target, let alone need any form of “tanking”. This means that I am largely running a pet for the flavor of it rather than for the functionality. Traditionally when I need a pet to be a barrier between me and the target I tend to favor bears… however for the moment I am running around with a golden brown Owl I picked up somewhere in Feralas that I named Bubo. The hunter is ridiculously relaxing which has been exactly the sort of thing I have been looking for lately. One of the things I enjoy about hanging out in Facepull on the Horde side is that I can be a fly on the wall mostly, that interacts every so often but also has the room to simply not interact at all if the spirit doesn’t move me to communication.

I ended up going off on a twitter tear yesterday talking about guild leadership and being the person in the background that makes sure things are happening. When I first started leading guilds… I was very young and lacked any sort of responsibility apart from just showing up at work and making sure I was getting my tasks accomplished. In fact when House Stalwart hit its stride about a year into the release of the game… I was in quite possibly the worst job I have ever been in. I had a horrible boss and felt like I had no control over my work environment, and as a result having a smooth running community to come home to and spend my evenings with was almost refreshing. During this time my home life was in a bit of a disarray due to the large number of deaths that were occurring in the family, and Stalwart wound up being my stability that I so desperately needed. As we entered Wrath of the Lich King I changed jobs and wound up in a much better place where I had a support structure and actually started taking on more responsibilities. As such I found myself starting to back away from the same sort of things that I did during Vanilla and Burning Crusade and begin placing myself in more of a distant advisory role. By the time Cataclysm launched I had moved up to being a Team Lead, and was responsible with juggling planning and task assignment, and similarly I found myself completely checking out of the guild leadership role and even going so far as to quit World of Warcraft when Rift released. During that time I have shifted from Team Lead, to assumed supervisor, to actual supervisor… to now interim manager of three groups. While I have kept trying to be the social glue for guilds… by the time I get home I just have no social capital left to make things happen.

The truth is that every guild you have ever been in that felt active… had one or more people behind the scenes making sure that things were going smoothly. I used to have a motto among our officers that I wanted our actions felt but not necessarily seen, and so long as I had the focus it worked smoothly. From Cataclysm on Stalwart has changed hands numerous times and as a result has kept going forward without me. While now it takes a more raiding focus, it is still functional and still doing things. However if you take away the people who are actively moving the ball forward… you end up with 30 people sitting in guild chat and nothing happening. That has been the problem with so many of these guilds that I have formed as new games come out.. I don’t have the drive to be the cruise director anymore… and while I gather up the people I don’t have the strength to actually do things with other people. This was extremely noticed in the recent foray into Destiny 2 where I spent 99.9% of my time soloing, all the while people around me were trying to make things happen. Guilds work when they have a concierge making sure needs are being met and I just cannot fill that position anymore. I have transitioned to being one of the players that just wants to log in and have a good evening escaping whatever stresses piled up during the day. The key difference for me at least is that I do most of this through solo play and am completely happy to piddle along with alts. There are times that I miss big group activities… like I wish we had beat Calus in Destiny 2, or I wish we had made a bigger push into Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. Then I sit back and think about the frustrations of having to remember to log in on time with all of the materials needed for raiding on a specific night of the week… and I question if I could ever go back to that. So yes… I play tons of MMOs as single player games and am mostly okay with that, and yes I realize I am doing it wrong. I do like knowing people are out there in spite of me not being capable of actually interacting some evenings, so I will always seek out potential communities because someday… maybe… I might shift back out of whatever turtle mode I have been in for the last year.