World of Warcraft Archives - Page 34 of 108

Legion Without Rushing

August 30, 2016 by Belghast

This morning feels a little odd, for many reasons. Firstly I got a good nights sleep, when normally in the past I would have made a failed attempt to get up in time for the launch of a new expansion. In fact there was a point last night where I woke up at 3:30 in the morning… a mere 30 minutes after the servers went live and thought to myself… I could get up. Then instead I rolled back over and went to sleep again. Always in the past I have felt like I was chasing some goal that I never could quite catch. I knew I could not take the amount of time that my friends like Kylana did, and push through during 24 hours of solid play time. In fact when I logged in this morning I was shocked to see that he was only level 102, which seems slow for him. I’ve heard however that this time around, the process just takes longer and that power levelers who have practiced it on beta say it is going to be around a solid eight hours to get to 110. Which means for someone attacking it more casually you are looking at ten to twelve hours. The strangest thing about this expansion is that maybe I have finally realized there isn’t a rush. In the past I had my reasons… and those were namely an attempt to be a viable tank for folks to run dungeons with while we leveled. My favorite leveling experience was likely Burning Crusade, because I was a fledgling tank and excited that everyone seemed to need me to be able to run dungeons… which at that time were significantly better experience than doing pretty much anything else.

During the launch of Wrath I remember leveling mostly through dungeons in a similar fashion, but when the change happened to Cataclysm I noticed that worked significantly less well. It was as though folks just didn’t want to run dungeons in the same manner that I was used to. In fact I remember going through a bit of an existential crisis at that time because it felt like there was only one dungeon group worth of folks willing to run dungeons at a time. More often than not I ended up the tank left out in the cold and unable to get groups. Now the truth is if you asked other tanks they probably would have felt the same, because we went from being the most valuable commodity in the guild… to one of what felt like the least valuable over night. By the time Pandaria rolled around I found myself still rushing to keep up… but never actually running the dungeons until I hit maximum level and was desperately trying to gear. Similarly with Warlords I got drug through a few dungeons as dps, but mostly to knock out the quests as they came available and not so much as a leveling vehicle. With Legion I am not even planning on leveling my Tank artifact first, but instead focusing on Fury which seems extremely fun to me at the moment. So since I expect to be leveling almost entirely by doing the content… especially since saving up those dungeon quests can reward 110 level gear at the end, I also don’t feel that need to rush around.

I logged in this morning long enough to do the teleportation of Dalaran to the Broken Isles and to rebind at the now Gilnean run Inn there. I completed a few quests but stopped just short of delving into the lengthy quest that will ultimately end in me getting my artifact weapons. While it was odd to not try and push through it this morning, I knew that all it would end up doing is making me have to rush horribly to get to work. Instead I will have that waiting on me for when I get home and fight through the now inevitable server queue. The thing is… that is perfectly okay. If I am in a server queue that looks like it is going to take some time… I have other things that I can do. I can poke my head into Destiny since I have not been there in a good while, or I could go out into the back yard and go for a swim. In any case I am trying to approach this expansion at a much more measured pace. In the past I have rushed my ass off to get to the new cap, and with it beginning a lengthy gear grind. Every time in the past I have always managed to burn myself out in the process to where logging in every night is a misery. I now have a proper army of alts to tend to… and I fully expect to get each and every one of them to 110 before starting on the next round that have yet to be leveled. I say all this with certainty… but really in the back of my head I have my fingers crossed that it will work. I am hoping that I can fight my own tendencies and take things slow.

Imaginary Band

August 25, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday a good friend of mine from my Wrath raiding days, showed back up in my life suddenly. Now this isn’t exactly a strange occurrence because folks know that I tend to be the ring leader of a network of gamers. I am the one that tends to be good at maintaining connections with folks regardless of what game we happen to be playing. So an attempt to get in touch with me, generally also means an attempt to get back in touch with a gaming core of friends. The strange part of this whole experience however is when a few years pass between speaking. In this case, it seems like every few years our paths cross, the challenge being that large swaths of time pass between and my memory is often times spotty at best. Thankfully most people are super forgiving about me remembering the super granular details… and I seem to be relatively good at the large picture as a whole. The thing with the impending release of Legion next week is that this has been happening an awful lot in my life. Running around and doing Events, means that I have casually bumped into a lot of folks from my past… some of which I was interested in rekindling friendship… and others not so much. We talked about the mixed bag that playing World of Warcraft since launch is on the podcast this weekend. There are friends that I adored, and would still do damned near anything to help… and then there were folks who were super toxic influences and lead to a lot of the anxiety ridden struggles I had as a raid leader. Coming back to this game… and the server I have played on since the beginning of it all… means I am ultimately going to confront a good deal of both.

I remember thinking yesterday how cool it would be to “get the band back together” because I miss raiding with some of these people. The key word being “some”, because ultimately I don’t really want the band back together at all. I want a revised image in my head of the band. I want this amalgam of a bunch of different raid teams, from a bunch of different eras of the game. I want to create the “All-Star Team” from my memory, but the thing is… my All-Star team is not really the best players. I found out my ideals for who I wanted to play with were vastly different than that of my friends during Cataclysm. We built what we supposed to be the “best” team to raid with, for 10 man… but my best was completely different than their best. Ultimately when creating my team I would want to play with the folks I had the most fun with… some of them were also the absolute worst at standing in fire. They were fun to be around and invigorated my enjoyment of the game, and I didn’t give a damn if we had to take forever trying to learn this fight or another because their presence made me happy. It is moments like these that I realize I play a vastly different game than most people do. I play a game made up of the people sitting behind the screen at their keyboard, hanging out with me on a nightly basis… and not a game of abilities and number crunching. At the end of the day for me at least, playing for victories is ultimately a hollow experience unless I did so with the people I enjoy playing with the most.

In a lot of ways this is what makes the Final Fantasy XIV raid group so special is that it is a bit of an amalgam of the two. These are all people that I greatly enjoy playing with, but at the end of the day are also extremely good at the game. Hell there are so many nights I feel like I am the “bad” that is being carried to victory. While I largely said I would swear off raiding in Legion… there is a big part of me that wishes he could form this same sort of group in World of Warcraft. I want raiding to be a focus on having fun with friends and doing something together that we can’t necessarily do apart. By the same token though, I don’t want to be concerned with damage meters, or reviewing the logs after the raid. I don’t want to care if someone stood in the fire too long… or if we could do something more efficiently. I want to just have a night hanging out with friends, talking on voice chat and killing bosses… hopefully getting some sweet loot in the process. The problem being that I don’t think World of Warcraft is that game, or at least its raid game… isn’t that game. Final Fantasy XIV I can go into a fight not knowing anything about it… and learn everything I know from a series of attempts because it messages the mechanics extremely well. World of Warcraft, I realistically need to read the dungeon guide and some third party sites to fully understand the mechanics of the fight and what I am supposed to be doing to counter them. That is a huge difference, because one I can discover the fight with friends… and the other feels like homework.

Legion launches next week and I really don’t know what it has planned for me yet. I am enjoying the game, and I am enjoying making my own way through it. I am not sure if raiding will be part of that greater picture, but in the end I am going to try going with the flow. So many times I have had a raid that I knew I was gearing for, when an expansion launched. As a result I felt like I needed to push through the content to get raid ready within a weeks time. This time around… I am more focused on which character I am going to level first and which zone I am going to start in. I have never gone into an expansion before with a complete set of characters, and ultimately liking something about each and every one of them. If enough of these old familiar faces stick around… then I think I might want to try my hand at raiding again. I am not super concerned with doing much more than 10 player/flex raiding if I do however. Another thing that I would really like to do is set up a night to work on older raid achievements and get folks some awesome mounts. I know there are several tiers where I am one or two achievements away from my own mounts. The problem being that there just are not enough nights in the week to try and schedule things on, and continue to play other games. Whatever the case I am trying my best to go into the Legion expansion with an open mind, and not really focused too tightly on what I am going to do… and when I am going to do it. This is undiscovered territory for me, and it is going to be interesting to see what comes of it.

Can’t Quit It

August 24, 2016 by Belghast

Finally Finished

For most of this week I have been coming up with events in time when I thought I would be finally finished with the Legion Event. Last night by all purposes should have been the end for me. I managed to get the final item I was missing on my Demon Hunter, and you can now see the pretty spreadsheet is now at least largely complete. Early on I decided that trying to get an offset weapon for everyone was going to be absolute futility. Instead I started focusing on the weapon that I thought I would actually level my character with, so for my Paladin that meant a Retribution Two-Hander and so on. Lodin my hunter I managed to get both a spear and a bow just because on my very first invasion I got the spear and had the foresight to immediately swap loot specs. On all of these characters, I am not squabbling over who has Warforged and who doesn’t because I realize about an hour into the new content everything I am wearing will have been replaced. All I was really looking for out of these events was a way to ease the leveling transition from “just dinged 100” to “ready for legion”.

Most of my characters before this event were sitting in a pretty raw 630ish state because I leveled them up and then never really played them. My goal is to change that with Legion since on every single character there is a spec that I really find enjoyable. The weird part about this for me is how I am suddenly no longer mentally blocked against casters. I had a lot of fun recently leveling my Priest and Mage through the Legion Event, and I had an absolutely blast leveling my Warlock legitimately. For years I have had this thing against “Finger Wigglers” and anyone around me for more than a few minutes in a game is likely to hear about it. I am not sure what changed, but I have a feeling it is related to Final Fantasy XIV. Over there I actually and legitimately enjoyed leveling as an Arcanist, and have been enjoying doing the Palace of the Dead as a Scholar. Similarly I really enjoyed the little bit of time I spent leveling Black Mage, all of which maybe whittled down my resistance to not wearing plate armor and wielding a huge weapon? The only bad part about all of this is that I have next to no good cosmetic gear for cloth wearers, so at some point I will be wrecking old content as a Warlock in the hopes of fixing this transmog gap.

The Keep Pulling Me Back In

So last night for a brief period of time I thought I was good and done with the Legion Event… then I got home and noticed that they were active in all six zones at a time. So I decided to dip my toes into the pool and see how the waters were… and next thing I know it I am running around zones with only a ground mount chasing the wave of folks clearing the content. Doing the events on a low enough level character that cannot fly is frustrating… but shockingly effective. At the beginning of the night, this was my level 24 Orc Warlock named Belghula… and at the end of the night I was sitting at level 54. Remember a few days back when I posted about Lore’s comments? It doesn’t matter if their intent was to allow players to catch up their alts or not, the end result and the subsequent tweaks have made that exactly what the Legion Event shines at. I realize I could be doing something else… and I even should be doing something else… but I am having a really hard time stopping the machine. This elevator ride has such good music and interesting prospects that I keep getting right back on it. I am honestly not sure if I have enough time to get this one all the way to 100 before the end of this event, especially given that I really need to be doing other things… but if nothing else I have leap past the old world content that I find the most frustrating right now.

Cataclysm was not good for the old world, and right now the leveling experience feels extremely disjointed. The clear flow of zone to zone feels broken, given that a few minutes into each zone you’ve leveled to the point where you really should be moving to the next one. There are two sides of me that are in constant competition when I am leveling. The side that wants to finish quests… and the side that realizes the most efficient way to level is to jump zones the moment the Adventure Guide highlights and shows you have a new quest to start a brand new area. I realize I am leveling with full Heirlooms… and that is a side effect of that, but in truth I am largely doing that so that I don’t have to worry about gear until I reach the end of the tunnel. Nothing would make me happier than them releasing heirloom items for the rest of the slots, because that helms me circumvent one of my instincts while leveling characters. I love getting gear… but more than anything it is that I want to be as well geared as I can be at any point in the process. So I keep looking for upgrades so that I don’t feel “weak” while leveling, and the presence of heirlooms means I am at least geared “well enough” at every step in the process. At least on some level though, it would be nice if the experience boost was something you could toggle off if you wanted to “stay awhile and listen” as it were… and experience the content as it was originally designed.

Listless

August 22, 2016 by Belghast

The past week was hyper focused on a single goal… getting Belgaoh my monk from 53 to 100. The weird thing about this process is that once completed… I am finding myself drifting a bit without purpose. The above screenshot is unrelated to anything, but I thought it looked cool so you are getting it with this mornings post. Starting yesterday I begin finally running my stable of characters through the Broken Shore content. I managed to snag all of the toys, and troll shoes transmog from my single leel 100 horde character, and on my second time through on an alliance character successfully got the bonnet cosmetic item. I am assuming that tomorrow there will be a new step on the quest chain being patched in, and this time around we will actually do the moving of Dalaran to the Broken Isles bit. Tonight is our Final Fantasy XIV raid, so that means I will go into this weeks patch not having run Broken Shores on the bulk of my characters. At least in theory the content isn’t going anywhere so I shouldn’t feel that much of a rush to push through it. I think this content will essentially be the “welcome to Legion” content for everyone from this point on wards. I will say it was really strange buzzing right past the quest starter for Cataclysm, Pandaria and Draenor on the monk. I think I have all of the quests sitting in my log, because they are given automatically when you zone into Stormwind, but I am not sure when if ever I am going to do them. At this moment I am contemplating using the Timeless Isle port to get to Draenor, but then again that would mean I need to open up Pandaria to get to it.

Even though I have completed one journey to 100… I am finding that I cannot seem to quit the Invasion Event. A good chunk of yesterday was also spent running characters through the event trying to get the last few 700 items for each. I managed to finish off Lodin and Tallow last night, which leaves Gloam, Exeter and Belglaive all needing a single item slot. Belglaive is a little more complicated because I used that character to purchase the pet, and as a result he is still missing several of the purchased pieces of gear. I just need to run ANY instances on him to get that finished off. I do have his Glaives upgraded to 725, and I have started a second set mooching off of everyone else’s spare tokens to upgrade them for my eventual Horde demon hunter. I wish the other weapons worked like this, in that they were bind on account and you could pass them around as needed. Some characters I have gotten more than my fair share of weapons… and then others like Exeter have yet to see a single one. I have this feeling that ultimately it is going to be Ex my Paladin that I will continue to run events on, as I try and get three weapons for him. The other big thing that I need to accomplish before this event is over is to try and find the Demon that spawns in Orgrimmar and Stormwind and get a Fel Spreader toy. I failed to get one the two times I tried it yesterday, with the one in Orgrimmar bugging out and running back to the Doomsayer and fading.

The big thing I have learned over the years is that I have a lot of fun playing World of Warcraft, so long as I have a goal in mind. For example this last week has been a blast as I leveled my way through to 100 doing events. In theory I could pick a Horde character and start doing the same, but I don’t really have any that are nearly as close to finish as my Monk was. Doing the event without flight was a pain in the butt, and I am not sure if I want to go back to that frustration right now. If I was going to pick a character on that side of the fence I would probably pick my Warlock since I have really enjoyed playing my Alliance lock… and I have full cloth heirlooms. Similarly I have full leather heirlooms, but of the leather classes the one I am most likely to play… is the Demon Hunter, which is easy as hell to get to 100. I do however have the cash to just go ahead and outfit my plate heirlooms up to 100 and then push something else that I would likely play. My Orc Deathknight is sitting at 60, so flight is possible, even if it is a slow version. I might be fun to be able to use this event to play with one of the other specs like Frost or Unholy. If the next goal is NOT the event however… I need to pick something be it Mount Farming or Dungeon Achievements because so long as I can keep a list of things I want to do… I will be able to stay engaged in this game. I really am having a lot of fun being around all of these people again. It is a bit like a reunion, because everywhere I turn on Argent Dawn I keep running into familiar faces from the past. I know we have roughly a week until the official launch of Legion, and with that comes a whole new set of goals so I just need to keep busy in the meantime.