World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft Post

Plenty of Tinfoil

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Lately it has felt like there has been a bit of a mass exodus of folks leaving Blizzard or at least the World of Warcraft team.  The highest profile of these of course was the departure of Chris Metzen, but yesterday another fairly high profile name joined the group.  Tom Chilton posted a note on the forums stating that he would be leaving the World of Warcraft team to join an as yet unnamed project.  This leaves Watcher… aka Ion Hazzikostas in charge of the team.  This of course is simply two folks leaving a game… but in between there have been a number of lower profile departures as well.  The rumor mill of course starts churning and contemplating what might be going on at Blizzard to spawn these events, and honestly I think something more benign is at work here.  For some of these folks…  they have literally been working on the exact same project for over a decade.  Imagine if you, in whatever your line of work… had to work on exactly the same thing every single day.  Granted at Blizzard there is a lot of room to branch out and work on other teams as new games come down the pipeline, but I have long felt that WoW was essentially the product that no one seemed super excited to work on.

I feel like it is time once again to dredge up “The List”.  Years ago there was a supposed leaked list of expansions, that in theory covered the entire planned arc of the World of Warcraft franchise.  Of note… this list was floating around the interwebs before the launch of Burning Crusade, and I remember seeing it roughly the same time as the original Naxxramas patch was released.  I myself wrote about it prior to the announcement of Cataclysm, trying to draw upon it for wisdom as to what the path forward might be.  Cataclysm honestly threw a giant monkey wrench in the proceedings, and from that point onward it stops being terribly accurate, but for both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King it was down right prophetic.  What I think we can draw from it now however is that the “Legion Set” was always something that was planned to wrap up the cycle of World of Warcraft.  I believe that from day one, it was the intent of the original WoW team to bring us back into conflict with The Burning Legion, and it was simply a matter of figuring out what path we would take to get there.  For the sake of having this list in a more modern post I am reprinting it below.

Draenor Set

Azuremyst Isle – 1 to 10
Bloodmyrk Isle – 10 to 20

Eversong Forest – 1 to 10
Quel’thalas – 10 to 20
Hellfire Peninsula – 58 to 62
Zangarmarsh – 60 to 64
Terokkar Forest – 61 to 65
The Deadlands – 63 to 67
Nagrand – 64 to 68
Blade’s Edge Mountains – 66 to 70
Netherstorm – 67 to 70
Shadowmoon Valley – 69 to 70

Northrend Set

Borean Tundra – 67 to 70
Howling Fjord – 67 to 70
Dragonblight – 69 to 72
Grizzly Hills – 70 to 73
Crystalsong Forest – 72 to 75
Zul’drak – 73 to 76
Sholazar Basin – 75 to 79
Storm Peaks – 76 to 80
Icecrown Glacier – 78 to 80

Maelstrom Set

Gilneas – 77 to 80
Grim Batol – 78 to 81
Kul Tiras – 79 to 82
Kezan – 81 to 86
Tel Abim – 83 to 85
Zandalar – 84 to 87
Plunder Isle – 86 to 88
The Broken Isles – 87 to 90
The Maelstrom – 89 to 90

Plane Set

Pandaria – 1 to 10
Hiji – 10 to 20

Wolfenhold – 1 to 10
Xorothian Plains – 10 to 20

The Green Lands – 88 to 91
The Dying Paradise – 91 to 94
The Emerald Nightmare – 94 to 97
The Eye of Ysera – 97 to 100

Deephome – 88 to 91
Skywall – 91 to 94
The Abyssal Maw – 94 to 97
The Firelands – 97 to 100

Legion Set

K’aresh – 96 to 99
Argus Meadowlands – 97 to 100
Mac’Aree – 99 to 100
Maw of Oblivion – 100+
The Burning Citadel – 100+++

So at least in part…  I think some of the recent leaves from Blizzard or the WoW team… are because the job if finished.  Now please do not mistake me saying that I feel like World of Warcraft is done… but what I am saying is that the original story arc has reached its conclusion.  There were a lot of changes and reworks as time went on.. and we ended up fighting the Legion at level 110 rather than 100, but we got there nonetheless.  I think for some of these folks who have been working on the product for over a decade now, there is a sense of closure.  They can make a break and walk away feeling like they accomplished whatever job it was that they set out to do in the first place.  I imagine were I in their shoes, it probably would feel like a great time for me to go do something else now.  Among the AggroChat crew there has been a lot of discussion about the way Legion feels… and more than anything else that it feels like the first truly “fresh” content that we have seen in a really long time.  There is something going on in the game, and a stark difference between the feel of the awesome intra-zone stories and the bigger factional story that feels forced in there.  I think what we are seeing is the evidence of two different teams at work, with different visions and goals for the game.

So while we might be losing the old guard, it definitely feels like there is some fresh new talent coming in to infuse something exciting into the franchise.  I’ve said this several times but it bears repeating.  This is the first time since the launch of Catalysm that I have hope for the future of the Warcraft franchise.  What I mean by that is that this is the first time in all of those years that I feel like maybe just maybe the best days of this franchise are not something we will remember fondly from the past, but instead something that is on the road that lay ahead.  Almost two months into Legion I am still completely smitten by it, and that seems like a really good thing.  By this point in both Pandaria and Warlords at least I was losing significant amounts of steam.  Here I am still more than happy to run almost anything someone points me in the direction of.  I am absolutely enjoying raiding and happy to be sitting at 4/7 Emerald Nightmare now with our super casual raid.  I am interested to see what comes next, and what news might filtered out of BlizzCon about where the future will take us.  More than anything I hope that the awesome Class Halls can be a bridge to get us to finally bury the hatchet and take a step away from the vision of the red versus blue game play and storytelling.  I want the next decade to be one I get to share with my horde and alliance friends both.

Three Bosses Down

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Last night was an interesting night raid wise.  It seems like we reached some critical mass of gear to make the content largely doable.  Either that or we simply spent too much time fighting with the harder encounters first.  We’ve been able to down the first boss of Emerald Nightmare since our very first hastily thrown together raid on that Friday of the first week it was open.  However for the last several weeks we have had a slightly shifting raid composition as folks filtered in and out of the group, including several different tank and healer teams.  Last night however felt like things have started to solidify, and it really feels like a fairly solid team.  The biggest problem that has been facing us was the shifting from boss to boss trying to find the next one that worked for us.  On our first outing we gave Spiderbird a shot, and decided that maybe that fight had too many moving parts.  Then for whatever reason… we collectively decided that Il’gynoth was the next best target.  After a few weeks of wiping to the eyeball, we decided to shift focus back to Spiderbird at the tail end of last weeks raid and then were shocked we managed to get it easily to the 30% range before shit fell apart.  So this week we came back and focused on this boss and after about four or five attempts we managed to push it across with a victory that felt pretty solid.  Sure we were down several people at the point of the kill, but we had enough that after a little bit it felt certain we would get it.  Granted we were about 45 seconds away from the enrage timer due to the missing dps.

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From there we moved on to working on the Ursoc encounter because it seemed largely to be a tank, healer and coordination check.  On I believe our second attempt we managed to get the victory after a bunch of shifting bits around to figure out how to handle the charges more effectively.  As a tank however I have to say Ursoc is a bit of a heart attack.  I was constantly praying that I would have enough rage to hit my next reactive ability to help curb the insane damage that was coming in.  The constant tank swaps were a little strange to get used to as well, but Art and I managed to largely figure it out, and with it…  another new boss kill.  From here we moved to Dragons…  and on our second attempt hilarity ensued.  Several of us were down… and we THOUGHT we were wiping….  so Kylana started going into the whole spiel about how we could improve on the fight.  However the remaining living tank and the dps and heals that were still up just kept on pushing forward.  Apparently we were a lot closer to victory than we realized, because in the middle of this speech about the things we need to tighten up…  we saw the Dragons of Nightmare killed message pop across our screens.  It reminded me so much of the time we killed Sindragosa… with everyone dead.  Thalen had fired the last shot and then gotten frozen…  and the boss was dead but we all had to rez up and run back to be able to loot the body.  Because of this fact I didn’t get a screenshot of that kill, as I was running back at the time.  We put in some tries on the Eyeball but ultimately called it since it was getting close to our normal stopping time.  However I will absolutely take three new boss kills in one night.

Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker

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In yesterday mornings post I showed off briefly my transmog to go with the hidden protection warrior artifact appearance, but I have yet to really talk about it.  I have to say when I saw the protection warrior artifact during the lead up to the legion launch, I was more than a little underwhelmed by it.  However over time I came to love it, largely because of the lore behind it.  This is of course a spoiler so if you have not unlocked the protection artifact, and want to be surprised… then I guess skip this post for now.  Essentially the shield that you pick up as part of the artifact quest chain was crafted from one of Neltharion’s scales.  Yes I mean Neltharion… not Deathwing… as in before the transformation happened.  So that alone made me a bit more excited to wield the weapon, however when I found out that the hidden appearance was a Deathwingy version…  I knew sooner or later I had to get it.  Now apparently in beta this appearance was just sitting out in the open in the Vault of Neltharion area in High Mountain, so for awhile I started making the occasional trip through that region to see if it happened to be up.  I had largely forgotten about the appearance however in the hustle and bustle of gearing and tanky bits.  A few weeks ago however I found out that apparently the appearance was alive and kicking in game, and that supposedly there was an easy way to get it.  That easy method involved standing at the torch in the Vault of Neltharion and running a  script to see if the quest trigger that makes the shield appear had fired.  Now unfortunately I learned about this… two days after they had applied a hotfix to make the logging thing stop working… and instead give players a single chance each day to get the quest.

/run print("44311:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44311))
/run print("44312:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44312))

So for the last few weeks it has been a nightly occurrence to log in, make a beeline over to the Vault of Neltharion either by running through the path of Huln from Thundertotem or flying directly to the vault via Obsidian Overlook.  To explain what the above script does, is that when placed in a macro the first check is to see if the shield has spawned for you and is lootable.  The second check is to determine if you have already spent your once a day attempt to get the shield.  You are going to see an awful lot of “false, true” on those two before you finally see one that shows as “true, false”.  Basically running the script saves you wandering through the cave checking every single kobold gold pile, because apparently it can show up on literally any of them.  The biggest problem is that I am not exactly sure what triggers eligibility for this quest.  The only certain requirement is that you be at least Artifact Knowledge 5 to unlock it.  However others are claiming that you need to have read the artifact book in your class hall, and still others are claiming that it has something to do with the Xe`ra quest chain that lets you see events through the eyes of Illidan.  Supposedly when the quest triggers you see an emote in game and hear a gigantic roar…  this never actually happened for me during the time when the script actually returned true, so don’t count on that part.

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Here is a shot of me standing beside the shield on the pile of gold.  Note this is not the same pile of gold that I saw in earlier screenshots of how the process works, so I think that quite honestly it can be any of various gold piles that are guarded by kobolds.  Another thing of note… I have also heard that if you die it can reset the flag so I highly suggest you do not take the level or risks I did in trying to get the shield.  I did the traditional warrior tank thing and pulled literally everything up to the pile where the shield was and tanked it down.  On second thought this was probably not the most prudent way to do this… but dammit I was excited.  There is a certain level of paranoia and superstition now associated with this quest for me.  As a result I thought I would basically run through all of the various things that might be triggering it.  I cannot state that any one thing did it, but I had just wrapped up a bunch of stuff the day I finally got my shield.  So here was the status of several variables on that day.

  • Had obtained Artifact Knowledge 7
  • Sitting at Revered with All Legion Factions
  • Had just finished Xe`ra quest chain before attempting
  • Read the Artifact Book in Class Hall before attempting
  • leap down from Skyhold to Highmountain
  • flew to Obsidian Overlook
  • entered Vault from that direction firing script as soon as I saw the “vault” name text show up

Like I said… none of these or all of these could be significant… or this could just be the ramblings of a madman.  Either way I am happy to have my new shield and mace combo and now I am working on the other hidden color schemes.  It seems like these are the same requirements regardless of hidden artifact appearance or class.

  • Complete 100 Dungeons using a hidden artifact appearance.
  • Complete 200 World Quests using a hidden artifact appearance.
  • Kill 1000 Players using a hidden artifact appearance.

or you can just do what I do and periodically run this script from a macro to see what your present status is.  I basically just recycled what was my Vault macro, and turned it into this one.

/run local q,x,_,a,b = GetAchievementCriteriaInfo,0 for i=1,11 do _,_,_,a,b = q(11152,i) x=x+a end local _,_,_,c,d = q(11153,1) local _,_,_,e,f = q(11154,1) print(“Dungeons: “..x..”/”..b) print(“WQs: “..c..”/”..d) print(“Kills: “..e..”/”..f)

Which simply causes some numbers to print to screen indicating how many of each item you have completed.  In any case good hunting and hopefully you too will find your silly shield so we can stop caring about the Vault of Neltharion!

 

Raiding Upkeep

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This is not exactly a topic I planned on talking about this morning, but in truth it is a pretty fresh one for me as well.  This morning while doing my early morning trying to find excuses not to start blogging thing… I encountered this topic come across my feed.  The interesting thing about it is that I am currently living on both sides of this statement.  Firstly…  I have lived most of warcraft life in a perpetual state of poverty.  For years I dealt with tanking repair bills, and even then never really got used to using the whole making gold off the auction house thing.  My preferred method of earning gold is laying waste to zones… but that has never really been that lucrative.  By now any profits that I gained from the era of hot and cold running garrison gold is disappearing rapidly.  On the other side of this coin I am part of the leadership of a fledgling raid, and our folks… myself included are running into the same lack of ability to really afford the normal trappings of raiding.  For now we have been eating up the stock of Warlords era flasks… just to feel like we are doing something, but those are not that useful with the mudflation of this expansion.  Right now in theory every raider needs cloak, ring and neck enchants, gems, flasks, and if we want to get really serious about things two potions per attempt.  At this very moment the prices for these items on my server are kinda madness.

  • Good Ring Enchants – 10,000 g (each)
  • Good Neck Enchant – 25,000 g
  • Good Cloak Enchant – 2000 g
  • Primary Stat Gem – 25,000 g
  • Secondary Stat Gems – 2,000 g (each)
  • Flask – 2,000 g (each)
  • Potion – 1,000 g (each)

So to walk into a raid night as good as you can possibly be, carrying a single stack of potions you are well over the 100,000 gold mark.  I have long since ceased to have that sort of money, and am presenting sitting around the 17,000 gold mark on my Main, with a few other characters that I could potentially steal gold from in the 20,000 range.  In theory I should be selling enchants to make money, but getting the materials has been its own challenge.  With everything functioning off of personal loot, the only way I get materials is if something is simply not an upgrade for me.  Now my guild is pretty awesome because it has been tradition lately in runs that they trade over anything that cannot be used for me to disenchant.  The challenge there however is that I have gotten enough materials so far to do one and a half neck enchant.  The material cost for everything is just insane right now, and as a result…  since we are not really a progression raid we have not pushed the point.  I personally have gems and enchants on everything, and have been using last generation flasks just to feel like I am doing something.  I am passing out as many ring enchants as I can since that represents the cheapest thing I can do, but even then…  a single ring enchant is 10 dust, which represents me eating 3-4 green pieces of gear or shattering 3 blue crystals.  My stock of materials is pretty much spent at this point, and I have only outfitted a handful of people in enchants.

We are in a similar boat with wishing the raid bank could be chipping in more.  We just are not getting enough of anything to be able to pass it around freely so right now…  folks are largely dipping into whatever profession they have on their alts.  Traditionally when a new expansion launches I play through whatever characters interest me, leveling alts as a method of relaxation.  This time around… I am absolutely leveling whichever alt has the profession I am finding myself really needing.  I pushed up Exeter my Paladin because I felt like I needed a miner to feed engineering on my main…  however I am wishing I had instead pushed up either my gemcrafter or my alchemist.  Presently I have been working up the alchemist, but so far it feels like there are just so many other things that I need to be doing, especially considering we are under a world quest faction bonus event.  More important than that… I through some strange string of luck have managed to get two legendaries already… so I absolutely need to have that 15,000 order resources ready and waiting in a few days for me to start researching that final trait that will allow me to equip both of them.  Ultimately it feels like there is simply too much to do right now, to shift into the mode of trying to find ways to make money to be able to afford your raiding upkeep.

The real challenge is of course this is the sort of expansion that brings back folks from the mists of time.  We have had so many people renew their accounts that have not touched the game since Cataclysm, or at least since Pandaria.  The problem is these folks did not have a pile of gold built up from the era of free garrison money.  I admittedly did not milk that as much as I should have because I was off playing other things.  Alt proposed that if it is that important that we have the Token system, but that seems horrible.  Not that she said it, because I don’t necessarily think she was being completely serious, but that it is something to consider.  The problem with this theory however is that right now those tokens are only going to get a player about 35,000 gold which seems insanely low when confronted with the price of things.  That would be able to afford you a neck enchant and a single ring enchant at the prices things are going for your $20.  My personal theory is that all of the crafting materials are purposefully painful, as a way to soak up all of the excess gold that is floating around on the server from the garrisons mistake.  Then at some point in the near future, be it 7.1 or a hotfix…  across the board crafting materials are going to be reduced making literally everything easier to create.  As a long time enchanter, I have seen this happen so many times over the expansions where enchants are mindboggling insane at the launch and then are later tempered considerably.

Where the real pain is happening is that those of us who did play Warlords are going through a bit of whiplash.  Tradeskills in general have gone from a complete polar shift, going from being extremely casual and something that everyone can do…  to being something extremely difficult to even get materials for.  As an example… even after crafting goblin gliders for basically anyone in the guild who wanted them this expansion…  I am sitting on a stockpile of over 2000 True Iron Ore on Belghast.  Comparatively I have less than 300 Leystone Ore so far… and that is from both my miner actively mining anything I come across in the world, and my main running the salvage armor shoulder enchant.  This post might be coming off  as complaining at the current state of things, but in reality I am mostly okay with it.  That said I have just had to come to realize that we are not going to have a raid of fully flasked players every single week.  If I cannot bring myself to spend that kind of gold just for the privilege of raiding casually…  I am certainly not going to expect anyone else to do it.  Similarly I also remember a time before flasks in raids was an expected thing at casual levels.  Hell our progression vanilla raid maybe had a flask on the tank, or on a handful of overachievers… but the other 34 of us seemed to get along just fine taking bosses down without consumables.  I realize fights are scaled completely differently now… but my ultimate hope is that consumables become an edge that players can use if they choose to afford it, but less of a hard requirement.  I realize this is going to mean we are progressing slowly, and I am largely okay with that… given that I am raiding this expansion to hang out with my friends more than anything.