World of Warcraft Archives - Page 56 of 108

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

June 11, 2015 by Belghast

Flight in Draenor

This mornings post is going to be a little odd, because I have already written it once before. I sat down at the keyboard like normal this morning and started banging out a post, and within a paragraph of finishing it and hitting publish… we had a power outage. Unfortunately I was composing on my local machine, and also unfortunately it seems that LiveWriter only recovers if it crashes… and not the entire computer powering off. As a result I am composing a second post… in which I am going to attempt to say all the sage things I said before. This experiment is likely going to fail miserably. In my original post I got a little salty over the announcement yesterday that Blizzard was adding in a meta-achievement that would allow you to unlock flight in Draenor for all of your 90+ characters. The problem being I was grumpy for a silly reason, and now upon rewriting this post I have realized that. Sure it felt good to rant a bit, but overall it was largely meaningless.

What I do feel like yesterday’s announcement signals is that Warlords of Draenor has been a testament to the fact that Blizzard does not understand its core demographic at all. As a friend said last night, Flight is a Genie that you cannot put back in the bottle. Once it was given to the players they will always crave its freedom. While I personally agreed with the decision to take flight away, and supported the supposed line in the sand they drew, it seems like the villagers with pitchforks storming the ramparts made Blizzard change their mind. Warlords as a whole has been a bit of a comedy of errors, with extremely good aspects like the raid encounters… and extremely bad aspects like the facebook game style garrisons and the demolition of crafting. Ultimately my frustration with the flight move is it seems so rushed, and that they simply drew a card from the Final Fantasy XIV deck on how to deal with it. Last October Square announced that they would add flight, but through a system that forced the player to explore a zone and learn how to harness the winds. This meta-achievement seems like a rushed clone of that concept, and while it made me grumpy at first… I realize that every single game draws upon the best parts of every game before it. I guess next week when Heavensward head start begins we can determine if it really was the good idea that Square hopes it is.

Clockwork Mayhem

I spent a good chunk of my night playing ArcheAge and I have to say the more I play Kitty Belghast the more I enjoy him. Technically I am not Belghast at all… because apparently someone on Tahyang has my name. To make matters worse they made an Elf Archer… which is pretty close to being the “anti-belghast”. However I am getting by just fine with Belgrave the Nuian and Belglaive the Firran. I finished up my questing in the mines and have moved now into a junkyard of clockwork machines. I am really enjoying my Darkrunner build, because it just feels awesome to rush headlong into things with two swords drawn. Everything was going well until I stumbled onto a quest to kill 20 discarded clockworks. As I wandered through the junkyard I found them sitting there in several clumps of smaller mobs surrounded by an aggressive Harani. At first I thought these were like the other packs of mobs I had encountered, so I pulled and popped my AOEs… only to get murdered in the most horrible fashion.

It turns out that when ArcheAge says something is an “Elite” quest it means it. It also turns out that these are part of the Clockwork Rebellion event, which is the mirror of the Oblivion Rift event I had done before on the Nuian side. These are absolutely scaled for groups to complete them, but instead being the stubborn fool that I am, I tried to solo it. What I like the most is the fact that this game allowed me to do just this. Through careful pulls I was able to peel smaller chunks of the large packs off and take care of them in multiple passes. I found that I could take three or four of the little robots if I absolutely had to, and then would need to regenerate my health and mana back before trying another pass. In doing this I whittled down the quest until I was able to complete it and get an achievement for doing so. I have to say this sort of careful and methodical gameplay was extremely rewarding, and reminds me of an older era of gaming. My hope is that once Kodra gets the ability to play ArcheAge that he too will find the game he had been looking for with Pathfinder Online. In the meantime, I am having a lot of fun being kitty bel.

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

Several weeks ago I had ordered the Final Fantasy XIV Art Book from the Square Enix store, and last night when I got home it was sitting there waiting on my doorstep. The coolest part so far is the fact that it has almost all of the weapon and armor designs from the game, and shows the production art behind them. What makes that even more awesome is that each one of them has a sentence or two of notes below that explains some of their ideas that went into the design. If it is a weapon with animated parts it explains how the weapon bits actually move and function together and the idea behind them. If that was not cool enough it also included a tiny Enterprise minion that also has an even tinier Cid sitting on the deck. I am thinking this is the ideal minion to run around with as a Lalafell, because Tiny Cid actually makes me feel big.

I had logged out of ArcheAge and into Final Fantasy XIV last night because in theory it was the night our second static runs. Whenever my schedule works with it, I try and offer my services to make sure it can fill. Last night however after sitting around and waiting for a bit we were standing there with four people. The leader called the raid, and we instead shifted focus to running Art the bear tank from our WoW raid through some instances. The most frustrating part about leveling a DPS right now is the fact that the queues are so ridiculously long. As I have been leveling my Ninja lately my average wait time is around 40 minutes. So we built a free company group and I got the job of tanking. I tanked Copperbell as a Warrior, and Halatali as a Paladin and enjoyed both of them. I like tanking lower level content in part because it makes me realize just how limited my toolbox used to be, and how hard it was to actually hold aggro on mobs. Was a fun night all around, and I actually look forward to doing more of this as I work on leveling my Dark Knight eventually.

Blackhand Down

June 10, 2015 by Belghast

Gliders Away

Whatever has a hold of me allergy wise is driving me insane. I struggled my way to work yesterday only to be not so subtly asked to go home by my boss. Apparently I sounded fairly horrible. So I headed to the house and took a breathing treatment and attempted to be productive remotely. Last night I took several Benadryl before heading to bed so I am hoping that helped get me over whatever hump I was struggling with. This morning my head feels a lot clearer, but that might all change the moment I open the front door and are exposed to the world again. My friends have joked that I need a bubble… and there are days that I agree with them. To make matters worse we are under an Ozone alert day meaning that the air quality levels are already going to be horrible today. There is a whole list of things that we are not supposed to do during an Ozone alert day, but the show must go on.

Yesterday I was a little bit spread out in what I ended up playing. It was of course my World of Warcraft raid night, and at least on some level I was excited about getting in and getting more attempts in on Blackhand. I spent quite a bit of time last night playing around on Cat Belghast in ArcheAge and honestly the more I play that side of the fence the more charming I find it. I am naturally drawn the Nuians simply because it is the race I can create the closest facsimile of “Belghast” proper in. However it is pretty much a bland European fantasy world, with the same vistas and characters we have encountered in essentially every MMO. What makes Haranya interesting is they combine the tribal Firran with the Harani that are essentially steampunk engineers. Quite honestly the Harani remind me of the Al Bhed from Final Fantasy X, and doing quests just seem more interesting than the Nuia side of the house. I know Ashgar has a preference towards the cat people, and I guess I am developing that as well. In any case I am really enjoying my time spent piddling around in ArcheAge.

Blackhand Down

Last week on Thursday we had made a significant amount of progress on Blackhand. On our best attempt we managed to get hit to 11%, so it was my hope that after some time away from the fight we could pop back in and pick up where we left off. What made last Thursday challenging was that we were extremely short on melee so the walls were going down very slowly. Last night we had some of our normal melee which made that part easier, but we were also down two of our main healers which added its own challenges. However right out of the gate we managed to push to phase three like it was easy and at least match that 11% progress. The rest of the night was spent fine tuning things and on our very last attempt of the night our raid leader managed to bring in a additional healer which seemed to push us over the top. Unfortunately I spent the tail end of that fight in the lava as I managed to get clipped by one of the smashes while trying to execute spam Blackhand.

It feels extremely good to have defeated this raid tier, especially since Heavensward is right around the corner. This was functionally my last week of raiding in World of Warcraft before going on a bit of a sabbatical. I had hopes that we would be able to down him at least by Thursday, but now we are in the interesting position of not really knowing what to do with ourselves. I guess Thursday if we have the people we will venture back into Heroic and see what mischief we can get up to there. I know several of us are a single kill away from being able to get Mythic gear out of our Garrison loot boxes. So in theory it would be nice to knock that kill out as well. Similarly it has been talked about maybe just having a Heroes of the Storm night instead, since several of the raid are also playing that game. In any case it feels like I managed to squeak by another milestone fight before the buzzer. So that is two raid Warlords raid tiers I have managed to defeat in this expansion and I am pretty happy with that.

Closure

Even thought I am not enjoying World of Warcraft fight now as much as I had hoped I absolutely loved getting to raid with the guild again. Coming back I was in an odd situation where I simply did not know many of the folks that had joined the guild I founded in my absence. I am so happy to have been welcomed back with open arms and been allowed to get to know so many of them. I am not saying I am “done” with World of Warcraft, but if I was I would be able to end on a happy note. In a months time I might be raring to go and begin raiding again and pushing forward into Hellfire Citadel. Right now however I just know that I need a break from this game. I don’t want to try and split my attention between the new and shiny Heavensward content and Warcraft that feels very much like a worn in shoe. It is comfortable, but as you walk down the street you happen to notice every blemish and scuff and remind yourself that you really should buy a new pair of shoes. I am just thankful for the most part that people seem to “get” why I am taking a break.

I talked with Rylacus the man who wears the crown these days and explained it as this. If I was forced to play Warcraft, when there was another game I would rather be playing… it would ultimately lead to me quitting the game again. I think instead of I just back away for awhile, and let myself get Heavensward out of my system… or at least to a manageable level I will once again be able to juggle multiple games. The only problem I see is that there are a lot more people than just me that are in desperate need of a break. Yesterday it was revealed that once again World of Warcraft is timing their next infusion of crack with the launch of a major game. It seems that the 6.2 patch is going to land right around the time Heavensward officially launches. The current rumor is June 23rd, and for some that might be just enough to keep them from straying. For me personally, my heart already belongs to Final Fantasy XIV… I just spend time in Warcraft so that I can hang out with the friends that are still there.

Faction of Last Resort

June 6, 2015 by Belghast

Racial Enemies

Some mornings the inspiration for a blog post takes longer than others. This morning I have been faffing about on the web and on twitter desperately searching for inspiration. Then a brief interaction with the amazing @HeyHeatherBee spawned a topic that started spinning in my head. She was talking about taking the Horde decal off of her car because she had switched over to Alliance and I simply chimed in with the fact that I largely play Alliance because they have Dwarves. However I have always secretly had a desire for the Horde to get Dark Iron Dwarves as a playable race so that I would finally have a race that I enjoyed playing on that side of the fence. This was just enough to plant the seed of an idea for a post. I have long secretly wished that the “enemy” faction that each race has throughout their storyline, would actually be aligned with the opposite player faction.

What I mean by this is that in each racial story there are a number of “enemy” factions that get set up as sock puppet bad guys, but for the most part carry over through the entire main story. This to some extent breaks apart when you get out of the original races. Draenei and Blood Elves are set up as foils for each other, and Goblins are set up as their own worst enemy, and the Undead as the antagonist for the Worgen. These expansions aside there is a nice clean “racial enemy” for each other race in the game. Here is just a quick rundown of what we have to work with.

Humans – Defias Brotherhood
Dwarves – Dark Iron Clan
Night Elves – Satyr and Naga
Gnomes – Leper Gnomes
Orcs – Dark Horde/Blackrock Clan
Tauren – Grimtotems
Trolls – All Trolls that are not Revantusk, Zandalari or Dark Spear
Undead – Scarlet Crusade and Scourge

More Player Races

So the idea is what if all of these third party enemy factions were somehow swayed by their hatred of the group they oppose the most… to join the opposite faction. What if the Grimtotems decided that the best way to kill the Taurens is to join the Alliance, and similarly if the Leper Gnomes and Dark Iron and Defias cut deals with the Horde. That would allow for the creation of characters of essentially any race on either side of the Red/Blue boundary. The biggest problem I have with the horde in all honesty is that I don’t really like playing “monstrous humanoids” to borrow the term from Dungeons and Dragons. Worgen are probably the one exception to that rule… but that only exists because I have a love of all things Werewolf. Had they made them cat people… I probably wouldn’t have had the same attraction to them.

There are a lot of problems however with this idea. First with the Trolls, when I say all other trolls are their enemies… I mean all of the other troll tribes other than the three that I mentioned. The problem there is that ALL of those tribes hate everyone else on the face of Azeroth that is not also a Troll. I cannot see them aligning with anyone. Similar the “Dark Horde” pretty much hates anyone that is not Blackrock Clan, and have been doing their best to exterminate anyone that gets within their vicinity for a decade. Same goes for the undead as far as the Scourge goes, then the Scarlet Crusade has already been aligned with the Alliance in a few examples, but their batshit crazy zealotry makes them pretty much the enemy of everyone. So that already whittles down the list to a point where it just isn’t realizing to introduce all races to both Horde and Alliance.

Faction of Last Resort

So in a conversation with Jaedia she planted another seed in my head… what if instead of joining the Horde or Alliance, that these enemy groups became a third faction. Alternative Chat has long championed the cause of a neutral faction, but I think this would end up being a literal third group to act as a foil to both the Horde and Alliance. When you rule out the groupings that simply do not work you end up with a list that looks a little something like this.

Defias Brotherhood
Dark Iron Clan
Satyr
Naga
Leper Gnomes
Grimtotems

There are currently six unique races in a faction, with Pandaren making up the seventh race that can choose their own side. This list that I whittled down to fits that pattern, and looks like a pretty damned fun faction to play. You might ask about the Satyr and the Naga, but in theory they are both races that player characters have reasoned with in the past during quests. Both of them are essentially two different variants of “corrupted night elves”. Finally having both in a faction gives players a really unique reason to decide to go for that third faction. Players have been begging for both as playable races for years.

The combination makes no less sense than the original Horde does. I still cannot figure out how the Tauren ended up throwing in with the rest of the races that make up the Horde. Similarly the Undead seem to be thrown in there “by default” and have no real connection back to the group as a whole, and are lead by Sylvanas who is always off doing her own thing anyways. My theory is these races decided to join together because they were consistently losing their battle with whatever force they happened to be engaged in. This ends up being the “Faction of Last Resort” as it were, and of course there would be natural tensions between the members. Mostly I feel like it is time to revive some of these classic themes that they let die in the expansions. The Defias Brotherhood for example was one of the best quest sequences that we have seen in game, and it is a shame that it essentially dies at the Deadmines. I doubt Blizzard would ever do something like this, but wouldn’t it be cool if they did. Would also finally give them three faction combat in player versus player.

Waiting for Headstart

May 28, 2015 by Belghast

Death or Double Space

This morning I am struggling to find purpose when it comes to sitting down and writing a blog post. I know as I struggle through this something will magically happen and words will appear on the page. For the Newbie Blogger Initiative folks out there, this sort of thing happens often. Last night for example I didn’t do much of anything that would inspire a story. I guess in truth that isn’t entirely true since I did record a Bel Folks Stuff podcast with Jaedia, but that is still being edited and hopefully will be released on Friday. After we finished that however I attempted to hang out on the sofa and craft, but before long found myself nodding off at the keyboard. I actually chose to do the responsible adult thing and head on to bed around 9 pm. As I said nothing terribly exciting to talk about.

I will say one of the more humorous things that came out in the twenty minutes or so before we actually started recording was that I am old. Jaedia was talking about editing my posts and that I double space after every line. This is an artifact of my age and something that is so deeply ingrained in me that I cannot stop doing it. Our editor over on MMO Games apparently thinks it is “adorable” that I double space, so I have transcended that line of being cute for my outdated ways. Ultimately I could write a search and replace to remove them… which would be simple enough but for whatever reason I find posts that double space after the end of each sentence easier to read. Throughout my entire educational career this was the “correct” way to do anything, and I have the style manuals to back me up on this one. The whole single space thing has come into vogue in the meantime. I feel like the “oxford comma” folks on this one that I am willing to die on this hill as I continue to double space.

Waiting for Headstart

For awhile now I knew that I would essentially be done with World of Warcraft on or around June 19th when the Heavensward head start happens. Admittedly I took a similar break from Final Fantasy XIV around the launch of Warlords of Draenor, or at the very least dialed back my Final Fantasy time to only a few times a week. So this is one of those things that I always knew would happen, but I realized yesterday that I should probably tell my raid leader that he essentially only has me for two weeks. I guess he knew it was coming and was extremely cool about it, but I still felt the need to actually put it in words. I was not however able to tell some of my other friends yesterday so my hope is to do that tonight when we work on Blackhand. I would love to be able to defeat Blackhand before I go. This would give me some nice closure for this phase of the expansion.

I think ultimately everyone involved with the guild knows that sooner or later I will run away again. I don’t exactly have a history of much longevity with World of Warcraft since the Cataclysm expansion. I will show up for a brief period of time, get bored and wander off again… only to be drawn back later due to some inexplicable urge to play. Right now I have just reached that place where there is nothing that I care to do in World of Warcraft. I’ve been there so many times, and it is not actually a lack of things to do. There are TONS of things that I could be doing, farming pets, farming mounts, clearing old world content, or working on achievements. The problem being that none of these things are actually driving me to log in. There are times I think this funk is essentially the side effect of me raiding multiple nights a week, and has very little to do with Warcraft itself. I think I reach a point where I simply need a break, so I wander off for a bit and do other things only to return later in a much more casual fashion.

Not Quite Done

Right now my plan is to dial back my World of Warcraft raiding time to zero as I work on leveling in Heavensward. I am still torn as to whether I will end up playing a Warrior or a Dark Knight. I am pretty damned attached to Warrior as far as classes go, but the whole leap+aoe opener thing that Dark Knights are supposedly going to have makes me super excited. I loved that aspect of the Jedi Guardian in Star Wars the Old Republic. Ultimately I will likely have both to 60 and geared up, but there is going to be some serious nostalgia drawing me back to Warrior. I have loved everything about the way that job feels, and I have to say my Malignant Mogaxe is reason enough to play one. I am honestly just pumped to wander around the new zones. Last week during the Live Letter watching Yoshi P play in the zones reminded me so much of the way Kunark felt. Granted it is much higher fidelity than the original Kunark, but I am talking more about the scale of the zones. Everything feels big and expansive and I am hoping that because of this the hard edges and zone walls will be more disguised.

In the past when I have withdrawn from World of Warcraft I have made a big deal about it. I have almost always done one of those “quitting” posts, but this time around I don’t feel the need to do that. In fact I have no plans on actually cancelling my account. I still plan on piddling around in the game, just on a much more casual level. Hell for all I know after my month or so long sabbatical I might be right back raiding the 6.2 content like normal. I do admit that I am super interested in the Hellfire Citadel raid that is just about to come out. I liked all the “fel” stuff from Burning Crusade, so if Tanaan Jungle is going to be an entire zone of that I might really enjoy it. I am just going to allow myself time to back away from the game as a whole so I can experience Heavensward to its fullest without the sense of bitterness towards Warcraft for pulling me away two nights a week. I really think this is for the best because if I force myself to raid WHILE playing Heavensward that is the surest way to get me to actually quit the raid entirely.