World of Warcraft Archives - Page 86 of 108

Stormtalon’s Lair

June 26, 2014 by Belghast

Sleeping Soundly

When my wife travels I always have trouble sleeping. You get so damned used to having another person laying in bed beside you, that something just feels off. The cats try really hard to make up for the fact that there is another person missing from the bed, but it doesn’t quite work the same. When my wife is gone I end up with one cat pushed up against my face on my pillow… another one burrowed against me on the side my wife would normally be, and a third pretending the bed is lava by standing elevated on my legs. The end result feels like I am trapped in place for fear of upsetting some crazy version of kitty jenga.

Last night however I picked my wife up from her latest trip, which should be the last of the season. So when I hit the sack around 10:30 I conked out soundly and sleep that way for the majority of the night. Its funny how amazing a good nights sleep feels when you haven’t been getting them. I am still a bit groggy, but things feel like they just function better. I should try getting this sleep thing more often. By the time I finish this Monster Zero Ultra I should be feeling right as rain. However it will never cease to amaze me what an effect having my wife home can have on me and my overall happiness and well being.

Nipplegate

So yesterday blizzard released the images of the new Male Human model as part of the reworking coming with Warlords of Draenor. Overall I have to say they seem to have done a pretty good job of translating the original look to a more high fidelity version. It has been compared to Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as well as the “Human” Shrek from the second movie. I can definitely see the human shrek thing, but overall it doesn’t really bother me. Belghast is a human male warrior, and I can see being just fine with the look and feel of the new model once you slap some facial hair on it. The only thing I don’t get are the nipples. What the hell is going on with those… like I sincerely hope this is a texture mapping issue deforming them and not the intended final look. They remind me somewhat of a pair of pepperoni slices glued to the canned ham like pectoral muscles.

It makes me wonder if the Dwarven male had the same issue, but we just didn’t notice because there was always a beard covering them up. So I did some digging and the emotes manage to allow us to see the nipples on the Dwarven model. Maybe it is just that they are smaller scale but they look less like something pasted onto the chest. Yes I realize the irony here in pointing all of this out… because this is precisely the same sort of thing that women have had to go through every time a game releases a female model of anything. Hell Wildstar as much as I love it… I am convinced the animators have never actually seen a female form, because the proportions for the waists especially are anatomically impossible. Anyways… twitter is freaking out. Since I don’t tend to run around shirtless in an MMO, at the end of the day it doesn’t really effect me much.

Stormtalon’s Lair

At this point we had run Ruins of Kel Vorath a few times, but there is a completely different level 20 dungeon that we had yet to touch. So last night we managed to pull together a workable team and run Stormtalon’s Lair. After the mess that was the last time I tried to tank one of these things wearing something other than tank gear, I opted to craft a bunch of new gear and augment it with a few careful auction house purchases. The end result was that I had what felt like enough support power to do the job, and sure enough I had none of the threat issues that I had the last time. It seems like if you are in tank gear, you will do just fine controlling the mobs in an instance, which is somewhat of a cool thing. For awhile we had heard this dungeon was considerably harder than Kel Vorath, and by the difficulty we had with the first boss and some of the trash mobs I would have agreed with those people.

However once we got used to the trash, it felt far more manageable than that of Kel Vorath. While there were quite a few annoying things they did, there seemed to be far fewer of the “Random group wiping” type effects. The first boss honestly was probably the hardest boss in the instance for us. We managed to down the second boss in one try and the final boss I think took us two, and we finished it up with only three people standing. As far as a dungeon to run multiple times… I would honestly far rather do Stormtalon now that I am used to it. I don’t really want to give away any of the fight mechanics, because for us at least that is one of the most enjoyable things about going into a new MMO is hitting the fights completely cold and trying to figure out the mechanics on the fly.

That said we did encounter an optional boss that completely beat our spirit down. We made five or six attempts and never could quite land on the right strategy for dealing with it. During the encounter he summons some adds, and if I try and tank both the boss and the adds I get absolutely wrecked. I am wondering if this is going to be one of those situations where I have to kite the boss around while everyone burns the adds. The problem is… the adds don’t go down terribly easily, and he summons more waves rapidly. While we don’t have the answer yet, I look forward to going back in another night and trying to figure the encounter out. Right now I am loving the feeling of the boss mechanics in these dungeons, because whoever did their encounter design is really doing some interesting stuff.

For the longest time I have wished there was such a thing as 5 man raiding, and really the type of mechanics we are seeing are the level that normally accompany raid encounters. I would say that the 5 man normal dungeons here are at least as difficult as LFR is in WoW. I can see these encounters being an absolute nightmare to try and PUG your way through them. There are moments where the entire group has to pay attention and do something or they die in almost every boss fight I have come up against. While World of Warcraft tended to recycle boss mechanics from one expansion in the next expansions dungeon content… this is something wholly different. It is introducing a raid level of responsibility into encounters that I have not seen before. The existence of Interrupt armor is going to be the death of many a PUG group.

#WoW #Warcraft #Nipplegate #Wildstar #StormtalonsLair

Pairing Down

June 24, 2014 by Belghast

The Struggle

One of the biggest challenges about this whole “blog every day” concept is that some mornings there is just nothing at all in my head to talk about. When I am sick like I was yesterday, I tend to turtle and pull my head up inside my shell, disconnecting me from the interwebs and all of you fine people. Unfortunately when my biggest source of inspiration is gone, I can get a little bit of writers block. It is mornings like this that I feel outline the importance of just allowing yourself to write whatever happens to pop into your head. It might not be epic and exciting, but it is staying true to the mission as a whole. Unfortunately we are well based the NBI 2014 initiative, otherwise I would spin this into some sort of an inspirational post about struggling through.

This is not a slight in any way to the previous NBI groups, but I have been really impressed with just how tenacious the Class of 2014 has been. Generally speaking there is a significant drop off the month after the initiative as folks take a massive breather after having survived being the focus of so many folks attention. When the spotlight fades a bit, it is rough to keep posting when you inevitably notice fewer people are reading. However this group either is blissfully oblivious to the existence of blog statistics, or they really are writing for themselves, because they seem to still be going strong. A few of the “newbies” are among the most prolific posters in my blog reader, and I am amped to still see them enjoying the whole experience.

Pairing Down

WoWScrnShot_061314_062051 Right now I have come to realize that I am playing entirely too many MMOs to feel like I am making any significant progress in any of them. Over the last two months I’ve played Warlords of Draenor, Rift, ArcheAge, Wildstar, Star Wars the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, Defiance, Everquest II, Landmark, The Secret World, Diablo 3, Lego Minifigures Online and Trove. While I embrace the whole polygamerous thing, I think even for me this is a bit too much especially when you throw in League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm on top of those… and occasionally some Hex and Hearthstone. Mostly I think I need to drop some of the games that feel similar to me from the rotation, or at least games that scratch the same itch.

I feel like I have to keep testing Warlords of Draenor in part out of remembrance for River, and him being so damned excited to have gotten into the alpha process. While I won’t be playing with the same wide eyed amusement that he would have, I am trying my best to enjoy the experience in his honor. However I can safely say that I will not be playing the actual live World of Warcraft anytime in the near future. I think maybe WoW has run its course with me for awhile, and Wildstar has stepped in to take its place in my heart without me really wanting it to. Wildstar really is a much better version of WoW, and I am just embracing that fact. As a result Rift and SWTOR are also losing out, because to me they still fill the same “wow-like” niche. As a result I won’t be renewing my patron account in Rift.

The Non-WoW Itch

It was fun trying to get into Defiance, but the problem is I got into the Destiny alpha… and it was pretty much everything I had hoped Defiance would be. So I won’t be spending much more time trying to get into that game when I know there is something I will like much better coming later this year. ArcheAge I want to like, but it has without a doubt the worst community of griefers I have experienced anywhere. So unless Trion comes out and announces there will be a co-op server… it is pretty much a nonstarter for me and no sense really spending much more time on it. Landmark on the other hand has an amazing community, but right now there just isn’t much game there for me to play. They have built this amazing crafting sandbox, but without combat it isn’t all that interesting to me past the initial build phase. They have added caves so I figure at some point I will poke my head back in, but exploration without combat just sounds boring to me. I’ve officially allowed my claim to be repossessed at this point.

I still have a special place in my heart for Everquest II, and I can’t say I won’t return to it in the future… but for now I think there are just too many other options. EQ2 was one of those games where I hated the combat system but loved everything else about it. Wildstar with its systems within systems is really filling the niche that EQ2 always did, which might be why it is feeling so sticky considering it is replacing both EQ2 and WoW for me. The Secret World is one of those games I love to remember fondly, but never seem to have a desire to log into on a regular basis. I know there is a bunch of storyline that I have yet to participate in, and I keep thinking that some weekend I will play through all of it. That weekend just has yet to arrive, and lately the only time I seem to log in is when I get new hardware and want to test how it performs.

The Also Rans

Diablo 3 is enjoyable, and at some point I would really like to get a crusader to 70… hell I would like to get my monk to 70. I just struggle to find any drive to play it when my own personal internet zeitgeist… aka the folks I hang out on voice chat nightly, are not also playing it. It was really fun up until the release of Elder Scrolls Online and then boom we all vacated the premises. For the time being I am pretty much crossing it off my list until there is another upwelling of desire among my friends to play it. Trove is similarly really fun, but without a lot of people that I know playing it on a regular basis I have fallen back out of love with it. I will likely continue to poke my head into the game irregularly but when I do play… so much has changed that the experience feels very off-putting. The game is in a pretty much constant state of flux, which is awesome if you are devoted to this game, but confusing if you are a “sometimes” player like me. League of Legends will be a permanent fixture in my gaming rotation so long as I have friends who are devoted to playing it. I don’t necessarily love the game, but I enjoy playing with my friends. I personally like Heroes of the Storm so much better, but the problem is with it being in a limited release “technical alpha” state there just are not enough people around regularly to play with. The MOBA genre is really only fun for me if I am playing with a group of friends, and in this scenario League wins out every time. That is not to say that I won’t keep poking my head into Heroes especially as they add new waves of players. As far as Hearthstone and Hex… I am back playing Magic the Gathering in real life with friends at lunch time… so the draw of these games is minimal right now.

Those Who Made the Cut

So after spending all of this time culling games for this or that reason, I figure I should talk about the games I am deciding to keep in the rotation. Warlords of Draenor I am actually enjoying when I do manage to get in and play it. So yes I am partially doing it in honor of River, and his desire to be in the Alpha, but there is something charming about the new content. I don’t feel like it will be enough to keep me in WoW, but for the time being I am enjoying it while I can. Wildstar has pretty much filled the corner of my heart that desire to play a theme park MMO, and it really is the most glorious theme park of experiences once you give yourself over to it. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface on what it has to offer, and I am intrigued at the schedule they have put out before us. I really like that they are choosing to put in “hardmode” single and small group content before augmenting the raid game. That says a lot that they understand that they need to focus on both going forward to keep players.

I still feel like I have so much more that I want to do in Elder Scrolls Online. I want to finish the Aldmeri Dominion content and see the Ebonheart Content, as well as spend time exploring Craglorn. I love this game even though I am not playing it much, and I can’t see dropping it from the rotation anytime soon. I realize that not many players feel the same way about the game as I do, but really for me it is like the best possible version of Skyrim. I have been out so long at this point that I feel like I am going to be extremely rusty. There game has problems, namely it is awkward as hell to do anything as a group other than Cyrodil. They really need to fix this, and I hope that the good folks at Zenimax are looking into things like mentoring. Right now it is a really awesome single player experience, but gets cludgy when you start adding in more people. That said it still does have amazing dungeon design, and there are so many of them that I have yet to experience.

Last but not least is a game that has come in and taken my heart by storm. Lego Minifigures Online is absolutely adorable and I love everything about this game. Last night this was the only thing I actually played, and grouped up with Rae she managed to catch me up almost to her level in experience. Right now we have a vastly different set of mini figures, and it is really enjoyable to group together. We have both opted to get memberships, and the pocket dungeons are awesome… some of them ending up extremely challenging like the Dragon’s Lair dungeon with I think five different boss fights in it. I’ve already gotten more than my moneys worth of enjoyment out of it, so this is definitely going to be in my weekly rotation for a long while. It basically scratches the itch that Diablo 3 did, and cashes in on my absolute love of all things Lego.

So there you have it, going forward I am mostly going to be focused on Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online and Lego Minifigures Online. I of course reserve the right to change my mind and undo all of these in the blink of an eye. That said I do have a ton of single player games that I want to play through, and both the PS3 and PS4 ready to stream content. I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Assassin’s Creed 4 for example… and I am absolutely horrible at it, but enjoying myself quite a bit. As far as online games, I am going to try and limit myself to just these games above for the time being. I know in September I will be digging into Destiny and playing that online with friends quite a bit, but it doesn’t directly conflict with the types of games I chose above. Maybe with this abbreviated list, I won’t constantly feel overwhelmed when I sit down at night and try and figure what exactly I am going to do.`

Enter the Warlords

June 13, 2014 by Belghast

Home Warden

As I talked about at the beginning of the week, my wife the teacher has started her whirlwind summer tour of the country and she ping pongs between various mathematics related conferences. As a result I am holding down the fort here at home, and at the same time having to take care of our neighbors pets. In the past there has always been this mad dash the few days before my wife gets home to pick up and house and make sure everything is in proper working order. However this time around I have been doing a much better job of picking things up as they happen. Here is hoping there will be no 11th hour cleaning fest… which admittedly is mostly just picking up trash around the house that I have allowed to stack up when I reverted to full on bachelor mode.

The hardest thing about being home alone has been maintaining my walking regiment. I am letting it split a bit, in that I am not walking a “three loop” around the neighborhood each night, but instead I am simply adding additional steps into my day so I don’t really have to. Admittedly I should be pushing myself harder and doing the loops anyway, but without my walking buddy I have lost a good chunk of the reason why I walked past 10,000 steps in the first place. So for now I am getting to 10,000 and then calling it good… even going so far as to walking loops around the living room one night to get the last couple of hundred steps in. All in all I am pretty proud that I have survived thus far and not really let any balls hit the ground. This weekend however… who knows how well that is going to work since it will be hard to fight the desire to be sedentary.

Enter the Warlords

Several days ago I apparently got into the Warlords of Draenor Alpha program. Based on the time that passed between the launch of it and me getting in, I am guessing I was in the second wave of invites overall. With all the excitement of my wife getting ready to go on her trip, I had stopped checking my inbox for such things… and it ended up getting filed away under “promotions”. So I did not actually get in and attempt to play it until the night before last. Since for some time I had settled on Blood Deathknight as my “favorite” wow class, I opted to create one of those. Right now the only content available is the Horde content that centers around a campaign to build your Garrison in Frostfire Ridge. As a result of this I created an Orc Deathknight given that generally this is my favorite Horde Race when I actually play that faction.

Wednesday night was our regularly schedule “Faff About in Cyrodil” night, and as such I got over to actually booting up World of Warcraft pretty late in the evening. So I was tired and probably a bit confused… so when they landed me in Frostfire Ridge with a toolbar full of abilities that made no sense… I had a very much “wtf is this shit” moment. I knew going into the Alpha that they had removed Blood Boil and merged it with Pestilence. I did not however know that they also removed Rune Strike and Heart Strike… and even Blood Strike. So I could not for the life of me that night figure out how to set up a Deathknight Rotation. After consulting the Sage Qelric, I managed to reason out a rotation once you filled in the missing bit of the information. They are apparently expecting us to use Pestilence as our Blood Rune consumer now.

Getting Into Things

Once I figured out the rotation and remembered how I normally set up the rest of my bar, things started to fall into place. Its funny how many abilities I didn’t even remember using but where just muscle memory for playing a Deathknight. Each time I used one of these… I had to track it down and put it on my bar in the “correct” place. This would have likely been less jarring if I had essentially not been playing much wow for the last five months. I made another attempt to play last night before our League of Legends night, and found it still pretty lousy feeling. However afterwards I finally started to get back into the swing of things. I still keep wanting to do things that wildstar allows me to do, and I keep trying to sprint… but overall I have managed to get through the first few quests and ding 91.

I have an Inn and a Barracks in my Garrison and my very first follower that I can send away on missions. So far I am digging the way Garrisons are just integrated into the storyline. At first I was concerned that they might be this big mini-game that was entirely skippable. However they have managed to integrate it into the storyline of building a base in this foreign land. I managed to find an ogre merchant that I could bribe to come trade with me at my Garrison. I am wondering if he will eventually show up there and become a merchant that I can buy and sell from. For the time being as far as I know that has not actually happened. I will probably play some more tonight and stream some of it. The Deathknight rotation still seems off somehow… like there is way too much downtime waiting on my runes to recycle. I guess it gives me plenty of time to weave in Soul Reaper and Death Siphon… which I am finding I like considerably more than Death Pact.

Warlords of Draenor

For at least some of tonight I will likely be playing some Warlords of Draenor. Since I am one of the few people in Alpha Currently… I feel like I need to do my job as a tester and… test content. When I say few… that is a bit of a misnomer because it seems like everyone and their brother are in the friends and family alpha. Blizzard has without a doubt the biggest family I have ever seen. If you are also in Warlords Alpha, you should totally throw me a Battletag invite (Belghast#1752). If you do so however please tell me how the hell I know you. It would be nice to have some friendly faces on the alpha server until they hook it up to the “real” battle.net accounts. Going to also start joining an “AofA” server channel if any of the other Alliance of Awesome community members happen to be playing.

#WoW #WorldOfWarcraft #WarlordsofDraenor

Remembering River

June 12, 2014 by Belghast

High Latency Rememberance

I am at a bit of a loss of words on how exactly to start this post. Yesterday was a very sad day for the gaming blogosphere. It was early afternoon when we got the news through a post on his blog, and the sorrow reverberated through the community like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Christopher Cavelle, the man we know better as River the author of the “A High Latency Life” blog passed away due to complications from an emergency surgery. It seemed like we had all just talked to him the other day, and it seemed absolutely impossible that this man was now dead. He had recently gotten into the Warlords of Draenor Alpha program for World of Warcraft, and the last discussion I had personally was with him regarding his excitement. So it seems completely impossible that he is now gone.

River was like this elemental force of mischief. He had a way of showing up at exactly the right time and adding exactly the right quip to any conversation that involved him. While often bawdy, he carried with it a genuineness that made everyone love him, even if they were on the opposite side of a discussion from him. The way he crafted his blog was a thing of beauty and something I can only aspire to be able to do. He could take a rant and wrap it in an easy to swallow coating of humor that made you forget why you might be mad about his point of view by the end of the reading. It will always be his sense of humor that I remember the most, because he had this unique often self deprecating style that just worked. Even when he was being aggro, there was this loveable curmudgeon characteristic to it that made you smile.

A Small Tribute

The other characteristic that his blog was most known for was the fact that he almost always included a scantily clad woman to go along with his post. Unfortunately this was also the reason why I generally kept his blog out of my feed reader due to the often “not quite safe for work” nature. My boss has always had a habit of just swinging by my desk the moment I decide to take a break and read some of my RSS feed, and the last thing I needed was a picture of a woman doing questionable things to an ice cream cone sitting there. This however became one of those hallmarks that the community joked about, and yesterday when the news broke Syp suggested that today we all post a “scantily clad woman” in honor of @TheeRiver. So today I am following that suggestion and posting some really awesome Vi cosplay, since she is not only amazingly hot… but a brutal force to be reckoned with.

One of my regrets going forward will be that I never really got to know River on a personal level. He was genuinely one of the nicest people on twitter, and was quite literally one of the first people to ever befriend me. But I feel like I only really knew him on a surface level. There were many times where it felt like we were friends mostly through the other friends we happened to have in common. For me at least, I tend to get extremely close to someone when we share a guild or have struggled through something together, and that just never seemed to work out right. You can measure the weight of a person by the impact they have on their community, and this man left so many people changed in his wake. Recently he had gone through his own change when he decided to take an impromptu poll on the topic of gender and gaming. HIs post “Yes All Women” was his post about having his eyes opened that, yes the problem was really that prolific. I had hoped that we would get to hang out and play together in the Warlords alpha, and finally get to know him more closely, but unfortunately he was taken from us before that happened.

Our Community

There have been so many times that I have tackled with whether or not we actually have a community here in the gaming blogosphere or instead just a series of island states with temporary alliances. I’ve reversed my view significantly since that rather cynical post, but you cannot look at something like this without realizing that we really are a community in every sense of the word. Yesterday Syp once again said something rather cogent, that “Times like this, I wish there was a real world hangout for all us bloggers to get together and hug.” And it is true… I wish I could give all of the people in this community that are hurting from this loss a big damned bear hug. That is one thing that @Ardua and I have in common… we are huggers, and there are times when nothing else will quite do as much as a big heart felt hug. So while I am at still at a loss of words and bewildered by just how sudden this happened… my role in this is to be there for the people who did know River on a more personal level and are broken in side over his loss.

In a way Twitter and the blogosphere is his ephemeral thing… that was just expect to always be there even when we cannot be. The show must always go on, and our absence does not somehow stop the proceedings. As a result I find that we tend to take for granted that every member of this community will always be in exactly the same place as they will always be. I feel like this is an opportunity to reach out and let the people we deeply care about in this community know it. There are so many people that make every single day a better place for me. It has been popular lately in the media to talk about how the internet is pushing society apart. I submit to them that for introverts like myself, the internet opens up a new world full of people we would likely have never met otherwise, and as a result we are enriched by these experiences. There are people in my life that I love dearly, and would do anything in my power to help… and will likely never actually meet face to face. Just because distance and circumstances separate us… it does not make us any less of a community and in many cases a family.

River you will be missed.