World of Warcraft Archives - Page 25 of 109

Helya Defeated

December 8, 2016 by Belghast

In the past I have talked about our youngest cat Kenzie and her proclivity for playing fetch with rubber bands. Well the game has changed… and it has shifted from being one of those “once in awhile” things to an all the time thing. We will often times wake up with a rubber band beside us in bed and her expectantly prancing back and forth next to it waiting for us to throw it. This morning for example as I got up, showered, and got dressed I threw the rubber band a couple dozen times. Sometimes she would shift things up and bring the rubber band back to my wife instead of me… but nonetheless it was certainly clear that it was fetch time. I am wondering however if I can also change the game… and teach her how to fetch things like balls. The first cat that would play fetch that I had ever seen was Dee Dee the now fat and sassy cat that a neighbor of ours has. She however tended to favor these foam balls that you could get from PetSmart. We tried this with several of our cats but it never really took… however now that the fetching behavior has firmly planted itself in Kenzie I am wondering if we can also teach her to fetch balls.

We had a pretty great raid night as far as raid nights go. Some time ago we shifted into having a progression night which is Wednesday and a farm night which is Friday. On the farm night we attempt to clear Emerald Nightmare normal as fast as we can, and on the progression night we have been working on Trial of Valor with the initial hopes of being able to clear it in time for the launch of Nighthold. However with the 7.1.5 patch being pushed back… it seems like we have all the time in the world for that goal. Last week we managed to get our first Guarm kill and we were able to repeat that feat this week… however it took a few tries. The part I am proudest of however is the fact that we managed to defeat Odyn this week as a one shot, which given how many moving parts there are on that fight…. I am pleased and amazed and even phase three felt pretty solid. I think folks finally started dropping things where they should be dropped which allowed the tanks a lot more flexibility of placing Odyn where he needs to be during that final burn. As far as Helya goes… it still feels like a mess but the attempt where we managed to push her into phase 3 with most of the raid up… we also managed to kill her. I was recording last night while we raided so was able to pull screenshots of the exact moment she went down and in truth… the raid as a whole was still in a pretty decent position.

Since we still had a lot of night left to go we went over into the Emerald Nightmare and started working on heroic bosses. Previously we had made a few attempts on Nythendra and more or less had the correct positioning and such down. We lost a handful of people between the zone switch because they needed to go for early work and such, and we adjusted a little bit. The shocking thing is… in theory we made a one shot as we were sorta in a slow wiping state when the boss finally went down. As you can see in the screen shot my entire team was dead, and I had just literally blown up from the rot debuff when the boss went down. It was messy… but I will take it because she dropped the best possible loot. She dropped me an exact upgrade, stat for stat… simply the heroic version of the Insect-Etched Chestplate that I was already wearing. From the previous encounters of the night I got a few pieces of loot… that I am unfortunately going to have to do some simulation to determine if they are truly upgrades or not.

There was a bit of back and forth to determine what exactly was our next encounter to attempt. Some folks were leaning towards Ursoc, but even on normal that is a healing battle to try and keep the tanks alive. Emerald Dragons however seemed to be a little more attempt-able for the next step… and did not actually introduce any new mechanics. So we set forth to take down the dragons that used to give us nature resist gear back in the day. All in all it went pretty smoothly with the first pull almost netting us a kill. We reached a point where normally we thought we could simply burn them down without doing a tank swap… and because we didn’t swap it stunned the entire raid. Still kicking myself a little bit about that judgement call, because while I asked the raid… it was ultimately myself and Art that decided not to swap. We did however come back and get the kill almost immediately after. There was a vote to see if we wanted to keep moving… but we were already sitting at our normal raid end time and considering that I didn’t get much sleep last night I voted against it. I like the way our raid does this thing… in that if we want to extend and make attempts on a boss after our normal raid end… we simply throw up a readycheck and if anyone… or at least a significant unrecoverable portion says no we stop. I have to say this whole recording thing is handy as hell because it was super easy for me to pull screenshots of the moment of death this morning.

Favorite Addons

December 6, 2016 by Belghast

This morning I decided to sit down and write up a post I had been meaning to for awhile. Lately I have been having a significant number of friends returning to World of Warcraft, and among the first questions is always… what Addons do I need? This is as always a personal preference question, but I thought I would take a moment to talk about some of the addons I use and why. I will be snagging screenshots from curse for the purpose of representing the addon given that it is always a pain in the butt to find circumstances that show them off properly.

One real quick note… I use the Curse client to update my addons and generally I find it the best possible option. I highly suggest you check it out.

ArkInventory

This is probably the number one addon that I simply cannot function without. At face value it takes all of your bags and presents them in a single window pane, and does the same for pretty much any bag like structure like your bank. What sets this one apart from everything else that essentially does the same thing, is that you can configure virtual bags. This allows you to sort all of your trade goods, or filter your gear in a way so that the highest item level items appear at the bottom of the bag. I also use this as a way of finding what I have gotten that has dropped that is BoE because it appears in a different virtual bag. Configuration has gotten a bit more cumbersome since it first was released but it is well worth the time.

Download Here

Can I Mog It?

We all know the real end game is looking cool on your characters, and with the release of the Legion pre-expansion patch we got a brand new overhauled Transmog system. I rejoiced at the thought of being able to finally reclaim all of that bank and void storage space that I simply used to keep cosmetic gear around for the purpose of transmogging. However I was a little gunshy about simply just selling it… and the default Blizzard interface made it a little cumbersome to see if you did in fact have an item appearance. This is when “Can I Mog It?” comes to the rescue showing you at a glance on the item tooltip if you have already collected the appearance or if you should send the item to an alt of a specific class or armor type. For me this little peace of mind was super important before I actually started liquidating all of those hard fought appearance items.

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TransmogTokens

If you are anything like me… you are farming old world content to try and get new transmog options. Look I may or may not care more about this system than pretty much anything else in World of Warcraft. As a result you end up with a ton of the various tier tokens that you may or may not remember if you actually have the appearance for. This addon does two important things… firstly it shows you how many appearances you have yet to collect that are unlocked with the token. Secondly it shows you who you actually turn the token in to… which is often times even more important because I don’t always remember which tier turned in at which location because… there have been a lot of raids I have done in World of Warcraft.

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NomiCakes

Nomi is horrible. NomiCakes makes dealing with him significantly less horrible. What this addon does is simply tell you how many more recipes you can learn with a given consumable. That way you don’t waste resources on something you don’t actually care about. Granted at this point I have not learned everything that is available from any given food item… but at some point I hope to and NomiCakes is going to be there to remind me when that glorious day finally arrives.

Download Here

GTFO

This addon doesn’t really need a screenshot because… it isn’t really a screenshot sort of thing. If you raid… get GTFO simple as that. The addon does one thing and does it amazingly well.. and that is play a god awful klaxon noise that you want to stop at all costs… any time you are standing in something bad that deals environmental damage. It is super simple, requires zero configuration and will immediately improve your awareness of bad… because you really don’t want to ever hear that noise again. I especially love this as a tank because sometimes the boss is partially obscuring things that I shouldn’t be standing in… and this addon tells me that I need to move or make my healers hate me.

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Loot Toasts

I love this addon and I am not entirely certain if I can explain why. Largely I go on murderous rampages rather often, and I have definitely been the sort of person that ends up with a world BOE epic in their bag…. and didn’t even realize it. I also sometimes go on farming trips, where I need a specific amount of this or that material… and don’t want to keep having to check my bags to see if I can stop yet. In both cases Loot Toasts helps me to keep an eye on what I just looted. Essentially it allows you to have an area of the screen where things pop up briefly for items you have looted. If it is something that stacks, it shows you both how many you just looted and how many you happen to have in your bags with you. The tooltip is colored based on the rarity of the item so it is pretty easy to see out of the corner of your eye that you might have just gotten something interesting.

Download Here

World Quest Tracker

World Quests are amazing, and pretty much in my experience the best possible way to gear your alts without tons of effort. On the mobile app you are treated with this great view that summarizes what World Quests are available and what the rewards are… so if you are like me and mostly interested in the ones that drop gear, you can find them quickly. The only negative is that logging into the mobile client, logs you out of the game. What World Quest Tracker does is give you an in game interface to see the same sort of information, as well as adding in hooks for things like TomTom to give you waypoints to find where the quests start. You have all sorts of filtering options that allow you to show say only Order Resources quests, or only quests that will help you complete a certain Emissary quest. To make things even better… when you are on the flight map you can see all of the available World Quests so it makes picking the nearest flight path an ease. I could not seriously imagine existing in Legion without this addon… much in the same way as Master Plan seemed to be a requirement for functioning in Warlords.

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Saved Instances

One of the big challenges this expansion is the fact that Mythic Dungeons are essentially the new Heroic Dungeons, and that they come with a bizarre weekly lockout timer. I always struggle with remembering who is locked to which zones, and while I can simply hit /raidinfo to see this information… I found that I didn’t quite have the all in one interface that I really wanted. Saved Instances is a widget that is added to your map border that gives you a quick chart of who has a lockout to which content. I find this especially handy for farming old world content and raids, when I am trying for mounts or pets. It will also keep track of the reroll tokens and who has used them… and who has yet to redeem them for the week.

Download Here

Enemy Grid

One of my favorite things about tanking in Final Fantasy XIV was the way that they chose to display threat. It not only gave me an awareness of all of the targets in play, but gave me a quick at a glance view of which ones I had aggro on. In the past I used a custom them for Tidy Plates to do this same sort of thing, but in coming back to World of Warcraft I happened across Enemy Grid. It gives you a quick list of all of the available targets and if grays out the ones that you do not currently have aggro on. Simple and easy and something I have gotten used to having in my arsenal of information.

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The Boring Stuff

This is by now means a complete list of my addons, but more a list of the ones that I find particularly interesting. My base UI is cobbled together from a bunch of addons that I have used for as long as I can remember, and it creates an interface that I am comfortable and familiar with. I don’t generally go for the whole minimalist thing… and my UI is way more busy than most people would like… however it works for me and is what I am comfortable with. Here is a run down of some of the things that I didn’t talk about that I am simply too used to now to give up.

Weekend Hibernation

December 5, 2016 by Belghast

It was a truly bizarre weekend for a whole lot of reasons. Primarily because whatever illness my wife had seemed to strike with a vengeance during the tail end of last week. As I said before I was originally planning on going to RiffTrax with work friends on Thursday night but by the time I left work I realized there was no way I could make it through an entire evening. Instead I begged off and went home and crashed on the sofa in my fuzzy blanket cocoon. By the time Friday came around I was really doing considerably worse and took a sick day… which in turn screwed up our evening plans. We were originally slotted to do this monthly family dinner thing, but we rescheduled it for next weekend because I was not sure how well I would be to drive. Instead I returned to the blanket cocoon once more and was as a result available for our normal Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear run. I wound up tanking it, with the stipulation being that I was not going to talk at all. In fact to prevent myself from doing this I muted my microphone…. which lead to a weird run since I am fairly vocal as we make it through the content. To make it even more odd, we were without the OTHER vocal leader Kylana which meant a whole slew of people had to step up to the plate and help make sure the run went smoothly. So seriously huge thanks to Mort, Phy, Beist, Bledd, and I am sure a whole slew of other people who also were chatty and helpful but I am not remembering at this very moment. It was once again a super clean run, and in the end I wound up swapping off for Erry for the final encounter since it generally requires a bit more vocal tank coordination.

Past that night I spent a lot of time piddling around in stuff by myself. Namely this meant an awful lot of Final Fantasy XV, and I think maybe just maybe I am finally to the point where I am willing to move on past “world 1”. As I said before there is a point where the game warns you that if you continue on you might not be able to return for awhile. I took this warning to heart given that I just came from playing Final Fantasy XIV where this sometimes means that a two and a half hour long cut scene is about to happen. Instead over the weekend I found out from some of the other folks playing it that at least in this case… the game is talking about a ten minute process and not a thirty hour long one. In past games these warnings often times meant that you would not be able to return until you found the airship, and I am pleased to find out that this is not the case. At this point though I am running out of things I can actually do in the starter world, and all of the hunts are of a significant level difference from my current level so I think the game is not so subtly telling me to move the hell on.

Another thing that took up some time this weekend is that I tore down a chunk of my office and set up my new Xbox One. For awhile now I have been interested in owning an Xbox One to be able to play the titles that don’t exist on the PS4. Similarly there is an entire group of friends that I have that are on the Xbox path, and I have not been able to play with them. Unfortunately there were really no titles that supported Xbox 360 crossplay with Xbox One, so as each of them has upgraded… my options similarly narrowed. While I have had this latent desire… I also just could not justify the street price for the console given that I am primarily a PC gamer first… and a Console gamer second. However on Black Friday I actually partook of a deal on Dell.com for an Xbox One, Extra Controller, Headset, and Five Games: Halo 5 Limited Edition, Farcry 4, Ryze Legendary Edition, Sunset Overdrive, and Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes all for right at $200. For this I was willing to jump on it and the box arrived at my house Saturday during the day… and I wound up setting it up after editing the podcast on Sunday morning. There was another deal on Cyber Monday to pick up a copy of the Destiny Collection for the Xbox One for I believe $25 and I jumped on that too, so while I was installing other things… I ported over my Xbox 360 copy of Destiny. Firstly since I am largely a digital only gamer on PS4… I did not realize the whole download after installation was as much of a tedious chore as it actually was. Halo 5 took a good three hours worth of download time, which I found insane and shocking. Is this what disc copy gamers on the PS4 have to deal with as well? or is this largely just an Xbox One thing? In any case… I was kinda happy to see that my PS4 clan tag ported over to the Xbox One, and while I will still primarily be playing Destiny on PS4, I want to level something to hang with my friends playing on the Xbone.

I’ve decided to start linking the podcast on Monday mornings in what generally ends up being a weekend rundown post. Not that I think there is anyone who doesn’t have access to it… but just in case the youtube version embeds nicely. The other big take away from the weekend was all of the food that we cooked. We wound up having a weekend full of comfort food, cooked in the crock pot. So Friday night before going to bed I threw our breakfast casserole on to cook so that when we woke up Saturday morning it was ready. This dish consists of egg, cheese, potato, ham and sausage and it amazing. We wound up eating on it for breakfast and lunch on Sunday as well… and still have a bunch left over. My wife had the bright idea to turn it into a breakfast burrito with a little salsa. We also cooked our Chicken and Cheese Tortilla soup, which we only got two meals out of… well and an extra helping or two. Finally on Sunday we tried out this Orange Chicken thing… that is close but not quite there. It was good enough but it needs something to make it work properly… and I think I screwed it up by putting the rice directly in the sauce and letting it cook. I should have simply made a couple cups of rice and then ladled the sauce over it instead. In any case… my wife and I are both largely on the mend but we pretty much spent the entire weekend hibernating. We started taking some OTC meds when it initially hit and I think it helped out quite a bit.

Darth Scrapheap

December 1, 2016 by Belghast

If appearance systems are the “true” endgame… them I am woefully losing right now. Last night I managed to push my Deathknight across the line and ding 110, to which I immediately abandoned all attempts at questing and instead focused on World Quests. For those who do not know when you hit 110 all you need do is walk over to Khadgar and you can start up the madness on your alts without needing to do the faction grind. Now I look like a random assemblage of crap… or very much like a raiding dps warrior did in vanilla. I know that helm is supposed to be menacing and Deathknighty… but it just keeps reminding me of a lizard or turtle… or something similar. After a round of “complete the gear quests” I am sitting at 795 and I absolutely plan on exploiting the hell out of the Timewalking dungeons this weekend to help push that higher. As much as I wanted to like the Paladin… it was mostly just a choice to push up so that I could have a miner to feed my engineering. Similarly I started the Rogue with the thought of pushing up a Herbalist/Alchemist but stalled out because Rogues are squishy and annoying. Instead I started working on my Deathknight because deep down inside I still have a lot of love for the character… the fringe benefit however is that now I have a reasonable Herbalist as well to at the very least feed my Seed-Battered Fish Plate habit.

In other news we had a pretty good night of raiding with us coming in and killing Odyn once again after a weird off week thanks in large part to Thanksgiving. It still took a few tries and there are a lot of fiddly bits we can improve on to make it less horrible at the end. From there we had a crazy pull that never ended because we did not learn our lesson properly and or they said they patched something they didn’t actually patch. From there we set up and changed a few things on Guarm and had an amazingly smooth one shot… which is pretty damned awesome considering this was only our second night of attempts. We then continued on to Helya and by the end of the we were pushing her into phase three and phase two was seeming less suicidal. All in all I will count that as significant progress, the only negative being there just aren’t that many gearing options yet from this raid. I am super bummed that I am going to have to miss our now “a thing” Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear this week. I have a family thing that happens once a month, and this just happens to be that Friday. Thankfully I think we have more than enough reasonable tanking options to make something work in my absence. I am just bummed at losing a shot at maybe just maybe getting those last three corrupted essences.

I also played a significant amount of Final Fantasy XV, and I have decided it is far less a boy band simulator and more Final Fantasy Entourage. All of that said… I still like it quite a bit and it is absolutely priceless when Prompto sometimes hums the class FF battle victory theme after you finish a combat engagement. Right now I am heavily engaged in a life of murder-hobo-ry as I am roaming the country side looking for baddies to vanquish and looting interesting cooking materials. The key take away from yesterday however is that I gave the official Sony PS4 Remote Play a shot and man… have they seemingly improved it greatly. Sure there are still moments when it wigs the hell out and you are best to simply hold still until it stops struggling. Those however are few and far between and for the most part the end result is an extremely smooth play experience. For reference my PS4 is hard wired into my router, and I was connecting into it from my laptop over the wireless network. I did some tests in Destiny to see if this was simply a “good enough for an RPG” thing or if it really was reasonable for playing other games. I could notice a little bit of controller lag while running and doing some patrols… but it was more than reasonable enough for me to play. I am not sure if I would be willing to go into the Crucible or something extremely difficult, but I had a good enough time killing random splicers in the Plaguelands remotely. In truth it is “good enough” for 90% of the stuff I do in Destiny and I would absolutely be willing to try something like farming Archon’s Forge while remoted in through the laptop. It is definitely good enough for Final Fantasy XV which greatly increase the range of play options I have… and I am going to want to test this theory out on the Vita pretty soon. I still think the performance of the unofficial “Twisted” Remote Play was better… but he has just been unable to keep it updated to function on the latest version of the PS4 firmware… and the bonus features of playing with a keyboard, mouse and xbox 360 controller simply are not worth being behind in the firmware version especially given that it will bar you from accessing the PSN store. I am super happy though to see that Sony seems to continue to improve performance.