World of Warcraft Archives - Page 27 of 108

Karazhan Clear

November 14, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely because of the extended holiday granted by veterans day. It is also odd because it felt strange to go so long without a post after the recent outage in my blog. Most everything is working as intended, but for whatever reason on the new hardware there is an artificially low upload limit which is causing me to have to shrink my images for a bit until I have that sorted out. In truth I doubt most people will really notice that much given that my theme tended to scale them down a bit anyways. The only real annoyance is I actually have to play which images I am going to use and shrink them down beforehand. As far as gaming went I was all over the place… playing copious amounts of Destiny, World of Warcraft and even a little Guild Wars 2. I also started Diablo II the December game of the month, in honor of the 20th anniversary. The strangest thing about going back and playing that game is… just how amazingly well it still holds up. Maybe I am viewing it through the haze of nostalgia… but other than some dodgy animations it mostly just “works”. Sure I miss some of the more interesting abilities that Diablo 3 added in, but it is also making me appreciate the game we have more. So instead of going on about a whole slew of topics, I am largely going to focus in on World of Warcraft. Firstly on a crazy whim I decided to de-Worganize Belgrave my Deathknight. He started out as a human and the more I played him in Worgen form the more I was annoyed at how small in general two-handers look on that model. Both my Artifacts for Blood and Unholy felt like I was swinging a one-hander which just felt “wrong”. Along with this shift however I managed to get into the groove of the Deathknight and in theory that is probably going to be my next 110. While I need the rogue and the alchemy it provides… I just struggle to get into a would be stealthy class.

The core of this mornings post however is about Karazhan. We managed to miss the first week because we were juggling trying to get attuned, with raiding and all sorts of other things… that by the time Sunday rolled around we didn’t have a permanent 5th player. After we snagged Kylana we went in on week two and managed to make a significant amount of progress getting six of the eight bosses. We made an attempt to pull together last Monday but scheduling conflicted with us as it was Ashgar’s On Call week. From there we largely plotted our revenge throughout the week and in truth I was more amped about popping into Kara than I was about our super smooth clear of Emerald Nightmare. I’ve talked before about that this is essentially what World of Warcraft was missing for me… a tight group experience for a fixed limited number of players. After Zul’Aman there really didn’t seem to exist a similar experience, and while 10 player raiding was essentially that… it just felt different. Raiding feels like raiding no matter how many people you bring, and while I probably had more fun during wrath in the 10 player group… it didn’t feel significantly different than the 25 player version I was already running regularly. Doing both 10 and 25 watered down the experience, so that by the time we killed the Lich King on 25… it felt like old hat already since we had done it months earlier in the as a 10. It also served to make me that much more frustrated when players seemed to struggle to grasp the mechanics… since they were exactly like the version I already knew like the back of my hand.

What Karazhan provides more than anything else… is a unique experience that fits within certain confines. This week we managed to clear significantly faster, but still a little bit behind the time we would need for a Nightbane run. By the time we hit Opera we still had around two minutes and thirty seconds on the timer… but the RP dialog before the event actually starts ate up roughly a minute of that time. Essentially if we are going to do this we need to be chain pulling the place, and at some point I hope to get there. For the time being however we have been working on getting stable kills. Moroes was still a pain in the ass that we BARELY pushed across the finish line… but a oneshot is a oneshot so we were happy with that. We struggled a bit on a few other fights but at the 1 hour mark we were sitting halfway through the raid. We made it up to the Mana Devourer and took a handful of tries before we managed to defeat it and start moving onto the final boss. I am not going to lie here… it took us a solid hour of attempts on Viz’aduum the Watcher because that fight is less about damage output… and more about trying to time all of these stupid things from happening at the worst possible time…. while avoiding as much damage as is humanly possible. This is absolutely the sort of fight where you can just end up getting screwed by RNG, and it reminds me of the stark difference between FFXIV raid design and WoW raid design. The encounter as a whole has as many moving parts as Coil Turn 9 for example… but it is far more RNG dependent and far less successfully messaged. However all of that said… we managed to finally get a good attempt where the stars shined upon us and managed to get our guilds very first clear of Karazhan. Now just to speed up the process and get us a Nightbane as well.

Rainbow Tentacles

November 11, 2016 by Belghast

This morning is a getting to a bit of a late start because reasons. Firstly I am off for Veterans day, and I want to take a brief moment to thank those who fought to protect our country. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, my wife’s step-dad fought as part of the Chosin Few in Korea, and various sundry other family members have been in the military during peace and war time. If you see anyone out and about, take a moment to thank them for their service. The little things like that, feel all the more important during these last few days because of the sequence of events that has happened from essentially Tuesday onwards. As for me… its been a weird series of days. Firstly I just couldn’t put myself in the mindset of being able to write a blog post, so instead you got an intermission. I genuinely expected to pick up Thursday morning and begin blogging as normal once again. However fate seemed to conspire against me because in the middle of the crushing depression that I was going through Tuesday… my blog disappeared off the face of the internet. It seems my web host had some sort of catastrophic hardware failure, and that since I had yet to migrate to newer harder… partially my own fault… the site went down until it could get moved completely. The positive is that I seem to have lost nothing in the process other than I am sure readers who probably thought I was going dark… given the post that I had left that morning. It feels odd to have taken a somewhat forced break… and then be back just for Friday before taking the weekend off.

As far as my own mental state… I have to say raiding with the guild on Wednesday helped it immensely. For some reason it has become what seems like a new tradition to paint me with the rainbow generator before battles. Here we are waiting on the Xavius fight to begin… and I am glowing with really strange rainbow tentacles as I tend to think of them. I always feel like I am straight out of whimsyshire. On a more serious note though… I could not be more proud of my guild and the raid attached to it. The position I have assumed in the world is vastly different, because I am not leading the guild… and to some extent that still feels odd. Kylana assumed the reins after Rylacus went into Final Fantasy XIV… and I have to say that while Ry and I were essentially the same sort of leader… Kylana is way better than I have ever been at the day to day administrata. That is really the place where he shines, and doing things like making sure everyone gets guild rank promotions on time… without having to be pestered about it a dozen times. As for me… I pretty much live in this position of guild mascot. Folks still ask me to do responsible adult style things, but mostly I try to defer to the judgement of Ky. I am still very much the chief recruiter and tour guide, but it feels okay to not be the king.

As for raiding… there are certain fights where I am taking a much bigger role at least in communicating the mechanics. I’ve started barking orders on Iggy and it seems to go more smoothly when I let folks know what they should be fighting and when… and roughly how much time we have left to burn. As far as Emerald Nightmare in general… other than us tanks completely screwing up Ursoc… we had probably the smoothest night we have ever had and made a really quick work of the entire instance. We had enough time to put in about thirty minutes of attempts on Heroic Nythendra… which is way rougher than the original. I remember rolling into Emerald Nightmare for the first time and feeling amazing when we oneshot her… only to feel frustration again when we struggled with SpiderBirb. Ultimately more than anything I feel happy we have made progress. It feels like we started as a disconnected group of folks that sometimes ran dungeons together… and have exited a highly functional team. I mean I had worked in the past a few times with Art, when I had to fill in tanking during our Warlords raid… but he is a super dependaeble tanking partner. Of course I also love tanking beside Ashgar who fills in when Art has not been able to make it.

As far as other matters go… I am trying my best to focus on the positive things in life for awhile. This is not me burying my head in the sand, but me trying to return to a sense of normality for my own mental health. I am just as confused and frustrated as anyone by the recent turn of events, but I also know that there is very little that is directly in my realm of control. So I am going to focus on the things I do control, and try my best to get happy again. For those of you who are reading this… thanks so much for sticking by me throughout the years. You all mean so much to me.

AggroChat vs Karazhan

November 7, 2016 by Belghast

For much of the last two weeks Karazhan has dominated my gaming life in one way or another. Initially it was trying to get all of the mythics run needed for attunement, and trying to coordinate between the four fixed members of Team AggroChat that are still playing the game. When the Karazhan raid was first announced we knew that the four of us… Ashgar, Grace, Thalen and Myself would want to run it together if for no reason other than providing lots to talk about on the podcast. Unfortunately that first week after the patch launched was insane and it ended up with several of us disconnected in the progression through the four Mythics. As a result it took us a bit to get through all of them, and we had to grab more people at various points in the process… and I am just realizing that I really should check to make sure they did in fact make it through the attunement process and if not help them out. The goal was to try and get into Kara that first Sunday. For almost two years I ran Karazhan every single Sunday and we used it as a way to pull up new characters and gear alts. It seemed extremely fitting that we would be doing the new incarnation of Karazhan as a Sunday thing as well. While we managed to get all four of us across the finish line, and attuned and ready to go… we couldn’t find anyone that was not already locked to kara, or did not already have plans to run it elsewhere. So we wound up running a Mythic Plus for the keystone and gave up on running the raid on the first week.

Somewhere along the way this week, we found out that Kylana had not yet run the dungeon… and also had no plans on any sort of a static group. We had checked with a few other people that had scheduling conflicts, but thankfully he was able to commit to the Sunday thing and from that point on… I simply didn’t think much about it other than knowing in the back of my head that I would finally get to experience the raid. The only negative is that I never really use the calendar invite system in World of Warcraft, and since I am used to seeing in game time converted to my local time thanks to Titan Bar… I scheduled the raid thinking it was at 8 pm my time and that everyone else’s calendars would adjust accordingly. However apparently that is a feature that I only dreamed up in my head, and I did in fact schedule the raid for 8 pm server, so an hour earlier than I had intended. The truth is that this worked out just fine and I happened to be sitting at the keyboard ready to go an hour ahead of when I had intended. Now in the days leading up to our run we had been hearing from guildies how rough the raid was, but in truth I think they were treating it as though it were another Mythic dungeon. I fully expected to zone in and have to learn as we went, while clearing a brand new raid… rather than simply roflstomping our way through yet another mythic. However the discussion of difficulty did prompt me to make sure I had plenty of food for buffs and flasks to get through the content.

In so many ways the zone feels just like Karazhan used to feel. What I mean there is that while it is functionally different in places… it is just as rough to get through as it was those first times. I remember spending weeks working on various encounters, and being extremely proud the first time we downed Maiden of Virtue for example. I am similarly proud of us for doing the same thing last night, as it took several tries for us to figure out the mechanics since we essentially went into this without planning. I realize this is something that would frustrate most people, but over the years of raiding together in various games… we’ve developed a taste for going into encounters completely raw and then learning as we go and adjusting. Tamrielo would have been proud because for the most part we talked Kylana into following us down this pathway to madness as well. All in all we managed to drop Opera: Westfall Story, Maiden of Virtue, Moroes, Attumen, Curator, and Shade of Medivh. We finished the night working on Mana Devourer but simply ran out of time for more attempts. We ran from 8pm EST to Midnight EST, and I am certain that much of that will be sped up significantly next week. We are talking about trying to pull things together tonight and give another poke and clearing the zone completely since we literally just have two bosses left. It is going to be a long time before we can clear this fast enough to get Nightbane as the 9th optional boss.

I have to say this is honestly some of the most fun I have had in World of Warcraft… since most likely I worked my way through the original Karazhan. I am really hoping that this is not a one off encounter, and that we might see a revitalization of smaller scale raiding. I realized a lot of that went by the wayside when Blizzard introduced the 10 player raid size, but really something has been missing since that point. Karazhan, Zul’Gurub, AQ20, and Zul’Aman all held a niche that progression content never really did, and I am really hoping that this new 5 player raid content is going to bring that back. After spending a night with my friends doing Kara, it definitely feels like it is… I just want to make sure that this is not simply a fluke. What I liked the most about this is that in truth we all had to perform to our best to make it through these fights. Moroes was every bit of the challenge that it once was, and we just barely limped across the finish line on that fight. In truth I am trying to figure out how we can do better next time, because garrote is just as brutal as we remembered it being. The truth is that none of us really got much in the way of upgrades from any of the encounters, but the encounters themselves were reward enough. That said I would not look down upon getting something awesome from one of the two bosses we have yet to defeat. This raid… and the news from Blizzcon honestly have me more excited about the World of Warcraft franchise than I have been in years.

Dream Cleansed

November 3, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was madness… but in a mostly good way. Firstly it started on a bizarre note because I had not been reading the raid slack during the evening, and had not quite grasped that it was up to me to pull things together. I was busying myself with trying to get shit ready for the raid, and was fishing up some mackerel to make the high end versatility food. During this time folks kept asking me if I was running the show that night, and each time I answered “Sure if Ky doesn’t show up”, never fully grasping that in fact that was what was happening. I remembered Ky saying something about not being there, but for whatever reason I had that linked in my head with the “people attending blizzcon” list, so that when he said he was not in fact at BlizzCon I just sorta deleted that tidbit of information from my brain. As a result what ended up happening was me realizing five minutes before the start time of the raid that I probably should have sent out invites fifteen minutes before hand. There was a last minute flurry of activity, getting people invited and summoned and this also caused me to feel like I really needed to pull faster than normal. Apologies to the healer team for putting up with my shit.

In truth a huge thank you to the entire raid for dealing with my shit. It has been years since I have attempted to lead anything larger than a five player group. Even then I am not entirely certain I am completely qualified to be responsible for the lives of others. The truth is I was a little concerned that we were down both Zea and Kylana who traditionally are locked in an eternal struggle for first and second place on the dps meters. However in the past week it seems like that quite literally everyone has improved their gear a bit, and the result felt like we possibly cleared trash faster than we have ever done. Similarly a lot of the boss fights felt really solid, namely Il’gynoth that felt like our smoothest kill yet with no last minute panic or the feeling of it being an extended wipe race to the finish line. The only negative of the night was that we struggled a bit on Spiderbirb, but I think most of that was simply bad luck. It was about then that our flasks were wearing off so we took a break and came back refocused, and wrecked it on the next pull.

The real highlight of the night however is that we finally downed Xavius. Honestly the timing of this could not have been more perfect, because after we had made a few attempts and were regrouping we saw that Zea popped into game. So we ninja invited him… and he opted to bring a friend of his along as well. Then when we went out to summon that friend… Kylana popped online, who we also ninja invited. So when we managed to get the kill we had our entire raid team, which makes it feel all the more awesome as a result. Sure I realize this is “only normal” but screw it I am happy as hell and I will fite you if you poop on this moment! The fight felt like madness from a tanking perspective, but it is amazing how much confidence comes from having downed and encounter the first time. I know without doubt that we will come back next week and wreck him all the harder. At some point I am certain we will start dipping our toes into some of the heroic versions of these fights as well. We essentially have one more Cenarius kill from being able to skip directly to Xavius, so at a minimum we can start working on heroic while still clearing the final boss. It was a good night.