World of Warcraft Archives - Page 82 of 108

Carried through Garrosh

November 12, 2014 by Belghast

Strange Days

Of all of the things that I had planned to do yesterday, the events that unfolded were completely unforeseen. As it was Veterans day yesterday, I was off and took care of a few things around the house. Namely considering the extreme dip in temperature I wanted to get the heating and air guys out to do our winter check up. We have an air conditioning unit from 1980 the year our house was built, and it continues to limp along valiantly. At one point we had discussed getting a new unit, but the good folks from our heating and air company informed us that we were simply better off to just keep limping along with the one we had. Apparently they do not make units quite like the one we have any longer. So as a result we have paid for a yearly maintenance contract that mostly involves a winter and spring checkup. When things break, and they have in the past we get deep discounted parts and labor while under contract. The cool thing is that there have been a lot of little things that they simply did not charge us for, so I feel like overall it is a good plan.

Wow-64 2014-11-11 09-42-42-476 While waiting on the heating and air guy to show up, I spent a good deal of time running dungeons and raids in Final Fantasy XIV. Since Rae was off as well we managed to get her a Sunken Temple of Qarn run and would have gotten Snowcloak but she had still not done the Ramuh fight, so at last check was still catching up to the main storyline. Since I had been kicking around the notion of playing some World of Warcraft with the launch of Warlords of Draenor, I decided I should probably poke around in game and at the very least do the precursor quest out in the blasted lands. The quest chain itself was rather enjoyable, as you assist Murad in staving back the tide of Iron Horde that have come through the portal. I think Murad is going to be the character we get the closest to during the course of this expansion. Essentially I feel he is going to be this expansions Chen Stormstout as it were, and I am okay with this notion especially after seeing the motivation behind why he acts he way he does.

Carried through Garrosh

While fiddling around in game I bumped into so many people that were shocked to see me online. I joked that they were just seeing a shadow, and that I wasn’t really playing World of Warcraft. Mostly I don’t want people to think I am “back” because the last two times I have showed up in game… it didn’t last for terribly long. I was just there long enough for folks to get accustomed to relying on me for things again, and I really don’t want to disappoint them once more. Damai has done an awesome job of holding things together in the guild. In the time since the launch of Warlords of Draenor he has fallen into the role of General, keeping the raid group moving forward and organizing weekly flex raids to help pull up folks that didn’t quite have the gear to do larger things. He popped into the game while I was roaming about and said “you should really come get your Garrosh weapon tonight.” I of course protested, saying I was unprepared and undergeared… but he waved away all of this notions and said that I just needed to show up.

I figured what the hell did I have to lose. I knew the Siege of Orgrimmar raid at least somewhat form doing the LFR incarnation, and I had no firm plans for that evening. Last night was to be their final time running Garrosh, and one of the final times available to get the heirloom weapons from it. So after not having played WoW for at least six months I found myself getting pulled into the final raid of this current expansion. To make matters even more interesting, apparently we were doing Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar. In Damai’s words “Heroic is the new Normal” and as we got underway it certainly seemed as such… that is until I actually attempted to dps anything. Essentially it was through a combination of skill and gear that they were able to make everything look this easy, and clearly I had neither. In fact I brought Belghast, one of the last characters I had managed to push up to 90 organically and had not really geared much. He was sitting at 496 ilevel before walking into the instance, and through the course of the evening that improved to 540. I quite literally soaked up almost a full set of gear, and now he is in a far better place for the purpose of leveling in the expansion.

Rift Repaired

I’ve talked some about the Rift that existed when I returned to the game last time. I fought hard to try and mend it, but ultimately failed. What I did do apparently however was start to break down the walls between the factions within. It seems that once the two warring captains had moved on to other things… one of them to a mythic raid, and another to move on to his own guild… things seem to have repaired themselves. It seems as though there has been somewhat of a “Pax Stalwartia” as folks have flourished once the drama went away. I would like to think it was the forcing of sides to talk that helped this along, but really I think I was more of a hinderance than a help. I actively tried to keep the pieces of the puzzle together, when I should have surgically cut the damage limb from the guild. I have a problem with never quite wanting to give up on someone, that I keep seeing the best intentioned version of them buried deep under the bullshit.

Maybe if I had never shown back up, we would have reached a state of peace faster, or maybe the guild would have quite literally cleaved in two… I will never actually know. That is the fate that the guild seemed to be heading towards when I returned… two factions, one of which would win the guild, and the other would be exiled. Instead now we have the bulk of the guild cooperating together, and only a few ended up leaving. In any case I was extremely proud last night to see everything going so amazingly smoothly. It was a supremely odd sensation to be carried to victory on the backs of the guild that I founded ten years ago. I can’t take responsibility for last night, other than that long ago I set the wheels in motion and caused these people to meet each other. More or less I have been gone since the beginning of Cataclysm, and in that time they have really done amazing things as a team.

Pax Stalwartia

Maybe last night was what I needed to see. For some time Rylacus had told me that things had improved in the guild, but I didn’t want to believe it. I have talked many times about never being able to go back. If I could teleport to those days in Late Night Raiders, or Duranub Raiding Company… or even No Such Raid… I would have. Last night felt like a mix of all of these rolled together. Folks were jovial and happy, and not a single person got grumpy when we wiped. They enjoyed the presence of one another, and enjoyed what they were doing. There was so much excited talk about what was to come in the expansion, and tentative plans to raid come December 2nd when the raid opens. It did my soul good to see this happening. I feel like they deserve me going into this with an open mind, because maybe home does still exist after you leave it.

All of this said, my heart still belongs to Eorzea, and the amazing community that I have found on Cactuar. I have so many goals that I want to accomplish there, and we have this amazing mass of folks gathered. I am never going to play just one game, it isn’t in my nature. So while I am “playing” Rift, and by that I mean logging in every single day to run my minions on missions… I am not really “playing” the game. Nor am I really playing most of the games I log into periodically. For the time being I think I am going to be playing Final Fantasy XIV and allowing myself to also play some World of Warcraft at the same time. I find it comforting that both House Stalwart and Greysky Armada exist… and both are completely different guilds. I’ve left my mark permanently on both, and I think both are really amazing places to play. What I find the most comforting however is that in both cases I am not responsible for their destiny. That in both cases the guilds are taking care of themselves.

Old Friends

Last night was this strange trip down memory lane as I experienced folks in a way that I have not since the beginning of Cataclysm. So many of my friendships from World or Warcraft were forged in battle, and in a way it took battle once again for me to really remember why we were friends in the first place. I am thankful to have a group of friends that are still out there, keeping on without me. That seem to be willing to accept me for whatever I happen to be at the moment, and welcome me back time and time again with open arms. I am extremely lucky to have lots of pools of these kinds of friends scattered from game to game, that are happy to see me show up, and don’t hold a grudge against me when I ultimately leave. It is comforting to know that the universe is just fine in the absence of your presence.

I realize that might sound like a strange thing, that I am happy to not be needed. You have to realize however that all I ever wanted was for House Stalwart to give them a framework upon which to do awesome things. So much of my time in Vanilla, Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King was spent being a catalyst, and enabling things that didn’t happen when I wasn’t around. The guild was absolutely a cult of personality, and when the personality went away… people didn’t interact at all. So to see this guild that functions entirely without me being around, makes me happier than anyone would really know. I am thankful to have all these awesome people step up and take over the mantle of leadership. I have never been happier to be obsolete in my life, and it is my hope that I can continue to be so for a very long time.

Hunting Bookrocks

November 11, 2014 by Belghast

Deep Freeze

Last night was another prime example of the odd weather patterns here in Oklahoma. When I got home from work it had managed to heat up enough to kick on our air conditioning. Then over the course of one of the worst wind storms I can recall, that pretty much wrecked the gate to our backyard… it dropped from a balmy 80 degrees to 33 degrees and still really windy this morning. Being veterans day, and being that I am off work today… I had planned on having the Heating and Air guy out today to do our yearly “winter” inspection. I am guessing that I picked the perfect day because tonight it is supposed to plummet even colder. I realize that all of you northerners are thinking that the temperatures I am describing is nothing… but for someone raised to live in 70 degree to 115 degree climate this is pretty cold.

The problem with the heating and air folks coming out is the fact that my office was a mess. I have a bad habit of just tossing empty boxes in the corner and over the course of a year the pile of boxes had gotten pretty epic. It made me realize just how much stuff we order from Amazon. While we do not have curbside recycling here, we do however have these little bins called “Mr Murf” that I can take the cardboard to. So I have loaded the back of my jeep with the various assorted boxes, condensing them as best I could. In addition I went out into the backyard and unhooked the hose from the house in preparation for a hard freeze. The last step was to gather up all the trash and put the bin out next to the curb, feed the cats, feed myself and sit down to blog. All in all I have had a damned productive day and it is only 7:30 in the morning.

Hunting Bookrocks

I rushed around so much this morning so that, one it would actually get done, and two I could spend the rest of my day leisurely farming for bookrocks in Final Fantasy XIV. Before I finished the night last night I managed to cap my Tomestones of Poetics, and similarly I am close to another piece of armor with my Tomestones of Soldiery. Generally speaking running content on reset day yields some of the best results, so I will more than likely be hitting a mixture of Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower and Expert Roulette in an attempt to get the precious precious bookrocks. At this point I really want to get my pants drop out of Syrcus Tower so I can stop running it as a dragoon. Ultimately I would rather be running it as a class that has a higher likelihood of getting drops like my Bard. However given my past luck with MMOs, I know the moment I take anything other than the class that can roll “need” on them… they will start dropping every single time.

In The Burning Crusade I raided Karazhan every single Sunday for over a year. During this time tanking it, I managed to get Attumen’s mount, but never managed to get the tanking necklace that eluded me. After a years time I got tired of dragging a character in there that only needed a single item, so I started healing it on my paladin… letting another up and coming tank take my space. The first time I was in there as a Paladin… the tanking neck dropped. That has always been the case for me… I have exceptional luck early on and then there are one or two items that will not drop no matter how many times I attempt to get them. Then there are super rare items that everyone seems to be able to get but just end up taunting me. I am looking at you Headless Horseman mount. When I was farming that regularly, almost every time someone in my instance would get their mount… but I would not. I guess it could be worse… I could be Rylacus or Tamrielo… who simply don’t get drops at all.

Rapidly Backpedaling

I am still completely up in the air as to whether or not I will be playing Warlords of Draenor come Thursday. Had you asked me two weeks ago I would have said an absolute and resounding “Nope”. Then Blizzcon happened… and the extreme heartstring tugging of the Looking for Group documentary. That thing crit me straight to the feels for 9999… yeah I am still thinking in Final Fantasy numbers here. Unfortunately I felt things that I have not felt stirring in me about World of Warcraft since probably I last set foot on Draenor or at the very least last set foot in Northrend. This started an unraveling of my resolve against playing World of Warcraft. Basically there are two important pieces of data. The first being that my subscription does not officially run out for another 19 days. The second being that thanks to them opening preorders what seems like a year before the expansion actually launched… I’ve already pre-purchased the game and used my boost to 90 to push up my Night Elf Mage.

So there you have it… I have both access to my account to play, and the expansion already sitting there waiting on me. The problem is my problems with the expansion are still there. There is an excellent video from Qelric condensing her views about the Death Knight class in the expansion, and while I have never been able to be that concise she sums it up nicely. All that I have been able to say… is that they just felt wrong somehow. Like I never could quantify exactly what that meant. All of that said… if I do end up coming back I will more than likely do so on Belghast my warrior, with a return to protection tanking. I managed to get into Belghast a little bit right before I quit playing before the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and was having a reasonably good time with it. The protection changes seem to be mostly good, and the feel is solid. I would be kinda nice to set foot in Draenor on the character that came into its own during the Burning Crusade expansion. BC was the era where I transitioned from Hunter main to Warrior Tank main, so there is a whole bundle of nostalgia wrapped up in that setting.

The one thing I know for certain… I will never be leading the World of Warcraft House Stalwart again. When I came back last year, I fought hard to try and mend the rift that had built up in the guild in my absence. I tried desperately to get the two factions to talk to one another, but no amount of me acting as a bridge between… managed to actually help. This broke my resolve, and eventually the problem child in the equation left… and things apparently have been rather blissful in his absence. World of Warcraft is not a game I can play seriously any more. I tried to go back to raiding regularly with this last expansion and it just did not fit with the way I want to play the game. So long as I was a damned dirty casual I seemed to be enjoying myself, but the moment people started relying on me for anything… I was back in the position that I fought so hard to escape the first time. If I do play again, it would be as a secondary game the same way that I continue to play Rift. It is time for the Warcraft branch of House Stalwart to have a true leader, not just a figurehead that long ago stopped loving that position.

Given that it is Veterans Day here in the United States, I thought it fitting to show my thankfulness for the service of our men and women in the armed forces. This actually means quite a bit to me, because while I have never served in the Military myself… both of my grandfathers did. We lose sight on just how hardcore World War 2 must have been. The Grandfather on my fathers side was wounded during the D-Day invasion, and had a machine gun emplacement shoot down his back as he was trying to duck into a foxhole. Had he not happened to quite literally fall on a medic, he would have died as the machine gun and sliced through his lung and it was collapsing. They bandaged him up just enough to send him back out into battle, where he eventually participated in the Battle of the Bulge. During that leg of the campaign it was so cold that he lost half of his toes to frostbite.

My Grandfather on my Mother’s side was in the Tunisian front and captured during the Battle of Kasserine Pass, and spent time in a prison camp. Eventually he joined in with others and staged and escape managing to eventually get back to Allied lines. While on the run he was aided by various farming families in the Italian countryside. My wife’s step father on the other hand was a veteran of the Korean Conflict. He was a member of the Chosin Few, a group of service men trapped on a peninsula in the Chosin Reservoir that held off Chinese forces. The thing that I found the most interesting is that all three men were completely stoic about their service. Not a single one of them wanted any recognition for what they had done for our country. In fact none of them really wanted to talk about it at all. It was only later in life that each was willing to give us little tidbits of information regarding what all they had been through. I quite literally cannot imagine what they had to go through to survive, and I am thankful that I will never have to know. So on this Veterans Day I am thankful for all of the men and women who have served our country so that I can have the life of safety and personal freedoms that I lead.

#FFXIV #WoW

So Many Feels

November 9, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode #30

I still cannot fathom that we have made it thirty episodes into our podcast and are still apparently going strong. Technically it is 31 weeks since we started this adventure, because we missed one week for various sundry reasons. What shocks me the most is that we still have listeners and that it seems like we keep picking up new ones along the way. I feel Sally Field screaming “You Like Me, You Really Like Me!” but in this case its the Us that is liked not necessarily me. AggroChat is really about pushing record on the type of conversations we have always had over voice chat on a near nightly basis. We are unscripted and unprepared and yet still seem to never had a drought of things to discuss.

This week we go through a whirlwind of topics including: Magic the Gathering Online, Infinity Minatures Game, Dawngate being cancelled, Blizzcon, Overwatch, and the constant frustration over Gnomes being the butt of every joke. I think we were all caught off guard by the news surrounding Overwatch. If you remember several weeks back we speculated as to what might be announced, and while we brought up an FPS we just as quickly dismissed that ideal. The FPS genre is pretty stagnant so I didn’t see much room where Blizzard could improve upon it. Here is hoping this is not the case because the gameplay footage I have seen has me absolutely intrigued. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory was my favorite competitive shooter, and here is hoping that they bring this same level of detail and strategy to the maps. Also hoping that by some token I can manage to score a beta invite.

So Many Feels

If you recall yesterday I talked about the “Blizzcon Spirit” and how that this year I had not really felt it. Well last night it struck with a vengeance. My friend Syl mentioned the Looking For Group documentary and how good it was over twitter. I had already planned on watching it at some point, because I am a sucker for documentaries… especially fan produced ones. I have to say it is so amazingly good, and I am glad that something like that exists. The negative is I am absolutely overwhelmed with feels about Blizzard, World of Warcraft and the community surrounding it. Had it not been super late last night I probably would have logged into the game the moment the documentary had finished if for no reason other than to visit my characters. The documentary is like some crazy aphrodisiac that makes you love World of Warcraft again. One viewing and you will be wanting to scream “For The Alliance!” or horde if that is your persuasion.

Then the reality sets in… that all the same problems I have had with the game, and the players and just years of history… are all still there. If I could return to a snapshot in time, when we were still raiding Icecrown Citadel as the Duranub Raiding Compny… I would do it in a heartbeat. If I could return to a period in time when we were fighting to clear Ahn’Qiraj as the Late Night Raiders… I would also do that in a heartbeat. The problem is there are these epic vignettes of time where it would be amazing to return to and experience all the love and wonderment that existed in that little vacuum. Sad thing is none of those things exist… time happened, years of guild, server and raid drama happened. Folks don’t just stand still in one place, they evolve and move on with their lives.

Glory Days Revisited

When I log back into World of Warcraft amped up on Nostalgia… I feel just like that once upon a time Quarterback reliving their big homecoming win. That world that was meaningful to me and the people that I fought to protect and keep moving towards a goal… just don’t exist any longer, or at least they don’t exist in the same combination that they once did. I have tried to return to the game on two different times and rally the troops to rekindle the spirit that once made my guild a great place to be. Each time I end up frustrated that no one is wanting to work towards those ends with me. People are happy to exist in the comfortable place they have carved out once the epic nature of the game died away. The glory days really can’t be relived, at least not in the same way.

So here I stand wondering what exactly I will do. I know there is no going back, but part of me wishes there was. I have a paid subscription through December, and a fully paid expansion because they allowed me to order it a year ago when I was actually amped up about World of Warcraft once more. I have no idea if I will attempt to log in come release day, and start playing through the new content. One of the things about being open to change, means you can’t fully predict what you will do when a different set of stimulus is applied. I think my time leading the Warcraft House Stalwart is over, and it is time for them to find new leadership that can make them great again. That doesn’t preclude me from occasionally playing the role of war hero and popping my head in from time to time.

Feels

Since this post is in large part about feelings, and me struggling with them… I thought it was fitting to state that while often times frustrating… I am glad that I have them. It would suck to go through life with the inability to surrender to your emotions and get caught up in a moment. While society has attempted to teach me that it is somehow “unmanly” to feel emotion, and moreso be swayed by them… for whatever reason this indoctrination never actually took. I feel no shame in choking back tears during certain moments of a lot of movies. There is that moment where you just can’t help yourself, and that story of whatever you are watching has peeled back your layers of defense and landed a blow to your inner core. I embrace that I can empathize with people I have never met, and care even more deeply about them that they will likely ever realize. While it is often cool to be aloof and uncaring about things… I like to care, I like to know I am making a difference. So today I am thankful that I was raised with compassion and the ability to grant that same compassion to others.

Pre-Warlords Patch Time

October 15, 2014 by Belghast

Tis the Season

I have to say I am more than a little bit scared that this crap I have had for the last few weeks is not just “allergies” as I had originally thought. The last couple of days whatever it is seems to have settled into my lungs, and it is getting a bit harder to actually breathe. I still would not think anything about it really, apart from the fact that my boss has been out the last few days for a fairly serious case of bronchitis. I guess in truth it isn’t so much the bronchitis that is serious but more so the fact that he has bronchitis… and only one lung. In any case something appears to be going around, and considering the close proximity in which we all work together… it is likely if one of us catches something we are all going to catch it.

The positive I guess is the fact that today is my Friday. Since my wife is off for fall break the next couple of days I decided to take them off as well. As of yet we don’t really have any solid plans other than a few projects around the house. In any case even if I feel like shit, at least I don’t have to go into work right? Thankfully most of the projects are just time intensive rather than labor intensive so I can totally muddle through them with junk in my lungs. If things get much worse I will either go to the doctor or go to urgent care and hopefully get a steroid course or something to clear it up. I would probably call in this morning, but since my boss has been out for the last two days… and I have been attending meetings in his place… we need to actually do a bit of an information dump before I am gone from the office as well.

Pre-Warlords Patch Time

Yesterday twitter was completely abuzz over the release of the 6.0.2 patch in World of Warcraft that brought in all of the major changes that are always the precursor to a major expansion. One of the biggest of these was the entrance of the brand new player models for all but the Worgen/Goblins. While I had played quite a bit in Alpha… I had not actually copied most of my characters over to see what they would end up looking like. I copied my main Belgrave, but since he is a Worgen it really didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. I made a handful of premades, but when I last did that they still had the whole “single face” issue going on so it was really hard to see just how they would match up the appearances. So when I logged in last night I have to say I was a little shocked at just how strange the transition looked. Above is an image of Belghast prior to the patch and Belghast after the patch.

Something was just off for some reason in the appearance. It didn’t feel like “my” character that I had spent so much time playing and tanking on. So like everyone the first thing I did was run to the barber shop and try and improve the appearance. After some tweaking I finally landed on a look that feels “closer” to how I felt Belghast looked in appearance. What is strange about this entire process is how much I realize that the characters no longer feel like they are “mine”. I am not sure how to articulate that, because it wasn’t until I saw what my characters looked like that I realized how much the face apparently DID matter to me. The differences aren’t that massive, but they just don’t feel like they belong to me any more. They were just these higher fidelity things that happened to have the name and all of the gear of my previous character.

The characters I feel that translated perfectly however were the Dwarves. This shot is of Lodin my original raiding main from vanilla and his after the patch translation. I have to say it is perfect, it captures everything I intended for the character and feels just about perfect. So the handful of characters I have that were dwarves feel the same to me as they did previously. The big problem I seem to be having is with the Humans and Draenei. For whatever reason they just seem to be off in ways that I can’t fully articulate. If I did ever come back, I have a feeling I would be race changing most of my characters to be dwarves, because so far that seems to be the clear winner in this upgrade to me at least. Granted that could just be my natural affinity to the subterranean folk in the first place. In any case my curiosity was sated and other than things feeling odd, I didn’t really have much emotion about the translation either way.

Lalafell Badass

The real fun of yesterday was the fact that Tuesdays are reset day in Final Fantasy XIV. This means I was able to pop back into Syrcus Tower to try for another piece of gear, or one of the tokens needed to upgrade an existing piece of gear to ilvl 110. In addition this was the week that I finally would have enough tomestones of soldiery to be able to purchase the chest piece. Granted I already had a level 100 chest, but there is just something about this chest that the moment I saw it… I knew I had to get it. I have this thing for plate mail skirts in games, that I likely will never fully understand. In world of Warcraft, my favorite set of gear will always be the Paladin Judgement set, and in FFXIV it seems to be right now the soldiery chest. The problem with it is that my bunny samurai helmet no longer really went with it. Thankfully last week I managed to get in on a Behemoth kill which netted me the really badass looking plate helm I am wearing in the above image.

Tuesday nights are traditionally our raid night, but over the last several weeks we have been struggling with getting enough people online at the same time. Last night we sat there with seven for quite a bit, and then two of our newer 50s that are considerably less geared came online. We opted to get their weekly elite hunt done, which would allow them to get just enough gear to be able to enter something interesting. As a way of breaking them into what raiding in FFXIV is like, we opted to do Hard Mode Ultima Weapon. It had been quite some time since we had downed it ourselves, so we were all a bit rusty, but we managed to work through the issues and the massive lag issues our newest charges were having… and defeated the boss. Hopefully over the next few days we can start knocking out the various hard modes for them so that they can do the Hard and Elite duty roulettes for gear and tokens. If nothing else going into Ultima allowed me to take this really badass screenshot. I love my new armor, and while I will miss the bunny samurai hat… the behemoth helmet just looks amazing.

#WoW #FinalFantasyXIV