World of Warcraft Archives - Page 28 of 108

Anubisath and Whiterun

November 2, 2016 by Belghast

In all honesty, my world lately has been a sequence of fairly shit days. Yesterday was no difference, so by the time I got home I just wanted to chill out quietly for the evening. I started off over in World of Warcraft, completing the daily emmisary quest, capturing a new falcosaur orphan… and then on a strange whim I decided to poke my head into AQ40. The original goal was simple, for me to attempt getting an Anubisath Idol for the purpose of doing some actual pet battles. I had both Sol and Grace suggest Xu-Fu’s pet battle strategy guides, because at some point I would actually like to learn how to do pet battles in World of Warcraft. Unfortunately this is like the advanced guide… because I need something far more dumbed down to ease me into the process. Of note while I play Pokemon games… I never really “play them” properly because for me it becomes entirely about capturing new and interesting critters. In Warcraft battle pets are largely the same thing for me… I simply want to catch one of every pet. However to get very far at all… it feels like the game is expecting me to properly do the content as expected. As a result I really should spend some time to figure out exactly what the hell I am doing. I watched a few videos yesterday on pet battles, but most of them were very centered around “exploit this weakness to power level”, which is all well and good but I still feel like I am flailing helplessly. I like knowing WHY I am doing something, rather than simply knowing a gimmick that works. This is a big part of why I have never been a fan of exploiting glitches in boss fights… because once said gimmick gets fixed you are back at square one.

So while I set foot in AQ40 with a very clear purpose… I went a little nuts while inside collecting scarab coffer keys and by the time I finished a single run I was able to purchase all but one piece of gear from the raid. So I can look like the unmade bed that everyone looked like during AQ40, wearing some really bizarre looking bug themed gear. From there while I was nearby I also stomped AQ20, but didn’t get much of anything to right home about. After a bunch of false starts in Division and Destiny… I finally settled into playing some more Skyrim Enhanced Edition. This is the point where I left the path once more and am officially in “ineligible for achievement” territory because I installed a slew of mods through the official interface. I am not a big achievement hunter, but it does frustrate me a bit when doing the thing that a game is well known for… shuts off achievement tracking entirely. The achievements that I am running are largely quality of life changes, like the unofficial bug patch and the additional of lamps and sign posts to trails making it easier to navigate the world without having to constantly pop your map up. Last night I finally made my way to Whiterun to start the game in its proper, defeating my first dragon and getting the summon to High Hrothgar to hang with the Greybeards.

The interesting thing about this game is that while I have beaten various elements of it countless times… it feels no less fresh than the day I first played it… especially with this fresh coat of paint. The only problem with playing Skyrim and starting it relatively late in the evening… is that you pretty much lose the entire night. The next thing I realized is that it was after midnight and I really should be going to bed. I am honestly probably going to be playing quite a bit more of Skyrim, largely because it feels like right now I need an offline game without other people in it. Right now my job is filling my threshold of human interaction, and while I want to be doing stuff… I also need to distance myself from people to try and empty out my buffers. I mean I am looking forward to Karazhan on Sunday, and hopefully getting a Xavius kill tonight in Emerald Nightmare… but I also need some quiet time and few games handle that better than Skyrim.

Let Corruption Flow

November 1, 2016 by Belghast

This morning I have essentially wasted the time I would have normally written a lengthy blog post… on the mad quest for the Corrupted Ashbringer. Normally speaking each morning I log into Rift and GW2 to claim my daily rewards, and then maybe pop into World of Warcraft to check on my Class Hall missions before finally settling in to write a blog post. This morning I logged into my Paladin and fished a bit, and after a couple dozen casts finally received the item I had been so feverishly hunting for. So for sake of argument, the best I can tell I caught my Shard of Darkness after 1682 casts. Which places me significantly more than my friend Kel that got his in 149, but significantly fewer than the poor soul who was fishing Sunday and said he was somewhere in the 8000s. Of course after getting the shard…. I had to work my way through the rest of the quest chain this morning because there was no way in hell I could work a day without seeing this through. I get on these vision quests sometimes, where I have to do this one thing… and when I do finally get it I have a lapse in goals for a bit. Given how many things i put off doing for the sake of fishing up the shard… I have a feeling I am going to be just fine with finding something else to replace it.

The funny thing is… last night I actually felt the slightest bit of resentment that I was not spending it trying to get the shard while we were off doing a dungeon. In the grand scheme of things however I am largely glad it worked out as it did, because while this quest dominated my life for a few weeks I managed to do so in a fashion that didn’t really seem all that grindy. The final fishing part was only painful because each time I clicked that lure, there was a bump of excitement that only got squashed quickly when I noticed it was “more fish”. As far as finishing up the quest, I thought I would be clever and just manually fly up to Archerus. That however won’t work because it is actually completed in the version of Archerus that hovers over the Broken Isles, which meant another trip back to Dalaran to fly out with a special quest menu item. From here we talked to the modern Four Horsemen who infused the crystal with their powers… and after another trip back to Lights Hope chapel I am wielding my new weapon skin. This finally fixes all of my problems with the Ashbringer weapon, because this thing looks freaking amazing. I have even been sporting a transmog just waiting to get the weapon. Thanks so much for joining me in this journey… and tonight I am going to give it a trial run in some LFR in the hopes of getting some tasty upgrades on the Paladin.

My Plaguelands Home

October 31, 2016 by Belghast

Over the last week I have gotten various questions from guildies that all essentially equate to “What is going on in the Western Plaguelands?” because apparently it has been noticed that I have been spending an inordinate amount of time there. I embarked upon a path to madness and have been working my way through it. Essentially I have been courting the Heart of Corruption alternate appearance for my Paladin. There was a time that I loved the Ashbringer weapon graphic… but that time was 2006 and my graphical fidelity standards were maybe a little more forgiving. What seemed like a really awesome looking graphic at the time just feels extremely dated and part of a design ethic that has changed as World of Warcraft has matured. This is all the more apparent when you look at just how damned amazing Truthguard or The Silver Hand are in comparison. Options were essentially to keep staring at the weapon I didn’t really like, transmog it to something that I did like… or set down a path to farming the modern and updated corrupted ashbringer appearance. Clearly I chose the most annoying of these… and as a result have been living at the Thondroril River as a result.

Once upon a time when the Corrupted Ashbringer was introduced with the original Naxxramas, there was a sequence of items and quest text that pointed at the possibility of somehow cleansing the weapon and turning it into the proper Ashbringer form. During the Naxxramas patch cycle this was thought to be the next Legendary weapon to be added to the game… during an era when we actually thought every class was going to get a legendary that they could use. It only took a decade to reach that point, with the Artifact weapons… but whatever we were impressionable youth (not really youth). Most of these fan theories revolved around the two copies of Nat Pagle’s Guide to Extreme Anglin… the one that was looted off players in Alterac Valley, and the copy found laying on the ground in Dire Maul. I likely would not have started down this path were it not for the fact that Ashgar had recently picked up the book on a trip to Dire Maul, and happened to have a copy laying around. His copy acquired I decided that I was going to do this thing… and queued up for Alterac Valley. I however had the presence of mind to check the auction house to see just how much the books were going for. The AV copy was hovering around 25,000 gold on my server, however I noticed there happened to be one sitting at 5,000 g that I leap on. It was well worth that amount to not have to deal with Alterac Valley, or more so the RNG of trying to loot a bunch of bodies… in AV.

Book in hand I went to my Class Hall and spoke with the NPC that starts the quest… of note… this is not a traditional quest. This is more in the lines of the original Everquest, where you have to know who you need to talk to, in order to progress to the next part. The NPC takes your two copies of the book and merges them together giving you one complete book, and suggests that Prince Tortheldrin in Dire Maul West might know something…. but is only willing to talk to someone who has slain Nefarian. After a quick jaunt into Blackwing Lair, I had obtained my Head of Nefarian and was off to Dire Maul to have a chat. From there he pointed me in the direction of another person, who currently resides at Chillwind Point who was also looking for the Corrupted Ashbringer, but failed to bring him the head of nef. From there I found out that there is apparently a slime in the Western Plaguelands that is the remains of the mage Timolain, so it was off to find that and get the next step. This part took me a week of checking in on the supposed spawn point… with this weekend representing my first real attempt at camping it. There was a point on Saturday where I missed the spawn by about 15 minutes… because when we got home from running errands I logged back in to see a bunch of paladins furiously fishing. During the podcast I managed to finally find a group up in the finder, and port onto a server that happened to have it up. Getting my kill and looting the Phylactery of the mage turned Lich… allowed me to find out that he threw the corrupted shard in the near by river.

The next part is as you might expect… for a quest involving Nat Pagle’s fishing guide. You have to now fish up the shard from the river… and this is the step that breaks most people. At count I have fished up a mixture of 1500 or so Mithril Head Trout and Bristle Whisker Catfish. I’ve heard tale of this taking as many as 8000 casts before folks got their Shard of Darkness, the component needed to finally turn in and get the hidden appearance. I spent most of Sunday fishing, when not needed for running mythics or other things. I hung out downstairs with the laptop and kept dropping lures in the river… having a brief moment of excitement when I clicked each one… only to be disappointed once again when I saw fish. For those that are interested in this madness there is a full guide found in the comments section on wowhead. Much like with the Warrior hidden appearance, there is a handy macro you can use to check your progress on the various steps of the quest.

/run local p,q,t=print,IsQuestFlaggedCompleted,tostring p('Talked to Prince Tortheldrin: '..t(q(43682)))p('Talked to Alexia/Bardu: '..t(q(43683)))p('Slime can drop Timolain: '..t(q(43684)))p('Shard can be fished up: '..t(q(43685)))

This will give you some peace of mind that you really did get flagged for each step of the quest before you actually sit down and fish for hours without actually finding anything. I have literally checked this macro a few times just to make sure that I still am eligible to fish up the shard out of paranoia. The awesome thing about this process is that you end up making friends with several of the other paladins doing the various camps. I ended up btag friending a horde paladin that happened to be hanging out for the bulk of the vigil so that we could chat back and forth while waiting on the slime spawn. He was super lucky in that he got his shard after only a few dozen casts. My luck however seems to have been spent completely on the two legendaries for Belghast, and I figure I will be one of those 10,000 casts to catch the shard people. In any case… this is what I have been doing in the Western Plaguelands… now leave me the hell alone I have some fishing to do!

Issues with Quick Join

October 26, 2016 by Belghast

The last several days I have spent a good chunk of my time idling on this riverbank out in the Western Plaguelands… while often roaming around a completely different Plaguelands over in Destiny. However that is not what I am going to talk about this morning, I simply needed a screenshot to post and grabbed this one. What I am going to talk about is the 7.1 patch in World of Warcraft, or at least a small part of it. I acknowledge ahead of time that this post is probably not going to make a lot of sense to many of you, because you have to really suffer with anxiety brain to get it. Yesterday as part of 7.1 a new feature called “Quick Join” was patched into the game. To quote the page announcing this feature on the World of Warcraft site…

So whether it’s your guildmate, your Battle.net friend, or your Real ID friend, you’ll be able to find each other and take part in a variety of game aspects without the need to ask the age old questions of– “What are you doing?” “Any room in your group?” “Can my other friend join?” You’ll just be able to see all of your friends, see what they’re up to, and ask to join with just a couple of clicks. It’s so easy, a drogbar can do it!

It is hard for me to adequately explain how much anxiety this causes me. In Diablo 3 there is a similar Quick Join feature that is designed to let you easily get into games with your friends. How it works in practice is that folks randomly join into your game usually without actually talking to you first. After the generally jarring experience this causes, I wound up going into the settings and flipping myself to private so that I would not show up in the Quick Join list. My fear with the World of Warcraft feature is that it would work like this, but I guess fortunately that is not the case. What it does instead is whenever you are queued for content, you show up in the Quick Join list allowing folks to request to join your queue. From there you have to accept or deny that request, so no ninja joining. Unfortunately it still makes me deal with the guilt of turning down friends, and the possible social ramifications. What I really wanted to see was a sort of “opt out” private mode built into the system, or maybe this would have been the perfect time to roll in the much requested “Appear Offline” or “Invisible” mode to Battle.net.

Anxiety Brain

I am generally a fairly gregarious person, and I try and go out of my way to welcome folks when playing the guild cruise director role. I am also known for driving a van full of candy… that gathers people up and convinces them to join whatever guild I happen to be a part of. This is absolutely one side of me and I love being that person whenever I can. That said there is another part of me that comes out when I am overly stressed or just simply worn out from having to “act normal” at work or day to day societal constraints. This part of me just needs to duck my head into my turtle shell and hide from the world… and these are the moments when Battle.net scares the shit out of me. I love having easy access to my friends, but sometimes I cannot handle appearing to follow basic social norms. There are times I need to fade into the background and pretend that the rest of the world exists. Essentially I need my alone time, and it is important for me to recharge my batteries so I have the strength to confront those times when I need to be around others. The thought that at any moment someone could ask to join me in whatever I happen to be doing… and that there is now a system to make that easier… is completely terrifying.

Yesterday a friend who I know was not getting this equated this to “you’d rather group with strangers?” and that is not entirely it either. There are times that I queue to be an anonymous blip in someone else’s radar so I don’t have to think… or be concerned about anyone other than myself. There are times where I simply need to complete an activity, and I am not necessarily up for the burden that comes from grouping with people I know. When I group with people I care about… I feel responsible for their safety, happiness and enjoyment. Maybe this is just the gut reaction from playing tanks all of these years, but I feel like when I am in group mode I need to be fully there for the folks who are with me. Essentially I have to psyche myself up to be able to take on this mantle of responsibility and do the things I need to do to make a group happen. Having that whole thing thrust upon me, is just jarring and abrupt… and how exactly do I explain to someone who I legitimately care for… why I am going to click that deny button?

Ultimately I am going to deny a lot of group invites that happen through this system, and I apologize ahead of time. Sometimes when you say “It’s not you, It’s me” it really means “nope it is absolutely you”. However this is not one of those cases because in all seriousness there are just times when I cannot handle being a responsible adult. In theory I could start deleting people from my Battle.net friends list until I only had the people who understood exactly what this means, but that is also a bad solution. I use that thing for grouping, and especially lately I have been pinging folks to try and find a fifth for mythics or keystones. My Battle.net list is largely there for cross realm grouping options, and I shouldn’t have to give that up just because I cannot handle the thought of getting randomly grouped with people when I am not prepared for it. Of note… this isn’t even an issue yet because all last night I didn’t see a single item show up on my quick join list. That unfortunately is not the way runaway anxiety works… instead I am stuck thinking through all of the possible things that COULD go wrong… before they actually have. There are so many times I get mired in the feedback loops of “what is the worst possible thing that could happen” and I am certain this is one of them. I just find it frustrating that after all these years of asking for an invisible mode we still don’t have it. I know all of this is “all in my head” but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less valid either.