Odds and Ends: I Still Exist

Hah, long time no post. In short, I started using the other domain as a personal blog and then more-or-less fell out of interest with blogging in general. Kind of want to write on the other blog, but kind of don’t know what to do with this one. I mean, I’ve had this domain for over a decade and a half… I think it’s more of a, we don’t play nearly as many computer games anymore thing.

That said, we are currently continuing the cycle of: Resubscribing to WoW for the current expansion, playing for a few months, and then probably quitting for another two years when the content gets overly grindy. No BlizzCon this year because November is going to already be a pretty packed month, but maybe next year.

Legion and Storytelling

The topic of storytelling came up the other morning while my husband and I were discussing how much we were enjoying Legion so far. We had both decided that Legion may actually mark the first WoW expansion (at least since Wrath of the Lich King) in which story has been a primary motivator for content completion.

Each zone in the Broken Isles has its own distinct story to tell, all ultimately tying into the legion invasion (thankfully different stories with a different flavor, aka not all green fell shit). That element in itself isn’t unique to Legion, but I feel that this expansion pack is the first in which I am able to actually complete each zone before moving to the next one. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Level Scaling: In the previous expansion packs, each zone was designed for a specific level range. Since it was pretty easy to out level any particular area, the general flow of things was to half complete a zone, move onto the next one once all of the mobs and quests turn green, complete the questlines at max level when there isn’t anything else to do. Since Legion content scales with your level, there’s really no pressure to continuously zone hop.

2. Non-Prohibitive Gameplay: For example, not having to compete with other players in tagging mobs and not having to wait indefinitely for named quest mobs to spawn. Few things in a new expansion pack are more of a bonerkill than huge questing bottlenecks.

Maybe I just have a short expansion pack memory, but without spoiling anything, the quest lines seem more…personal this time around. I feel like there are a lot more character driven events and quests. So far, Blizzard has done a great job of communicating just how dire the invasion is. It certainly feels more ‘important’ than alternate dimension orc slaying.

Legion Day 1: Paladin Things & Azsuna

Sitting at work while everyone is having fun playing Legion kind of sucks but adults gotta adult I guess.

Thus far, no queue, no lag, no disconnects, no waiting to tag named mobs, or really any of the typical expansion release bullshit. Smoothest launch to date; Having 4 starting zones + level scaling = best idea ever. No more funneling half the server into one zone or feeling rushed to drop a quest chain in one area for the sake of moving onto a more level appropriate zone. Good on you Blizzard.

….it’s still weird though not having any new talents.

There are three paladin artifact weapons, each corresponding to one of the three paladin specs. Everyone, or at least all true paladins of course know that there is realistically only one choice, and that choice ain’t no hammer or shield. So alas, after a decade and change of pining for it: The Ashbringer is mine.

Pretty zone.

I started in Azsuna because it was located in the lower left hand corner of the Broken Isles map. If there are no obviously breadcrumbs, I will probably just go left to right.

Going to honestly resist the urge to power level to 110. What’s the rush?

Progress report for day 1: Hit level 101, managed to complete one-and-a-half quest chains in Azsuna, obtained Ashbringer, did some of the class hall quests, sighed at Khadgar. I don’t know what the other class hall content is like but the paladin quests so far are fantastic in both content and lore. They feel more connected and important than anything from WoD if that makes any sense. I am also enjoying having a secret paladin clubhouse, though we will see how they pan out after the novelty wears off.

[Spoilers for Azsuna] Favorite new NPC so far has to be Runas the Shamed. I was expecting a betrayal but he kept his word, helped save the oldest blue dragons and in the end, thanked you for giving his last sane moments meaning before slipping away. I didn’t expect that to come from an NPC that initially felt like a parody of Tyrone from the Chapelle show. Feels.

On the second to last day of WoD, my garrison finally gave to me…

…That stupid S.E.L.F.I.E Camera that I have been wanting since re-subbing a month ago. And with that my lovely garrison, I bid you adieu. You were a cool idea but ultimately ended up being an elaborate iPhone game that killed half the social aspect of the game. So, here’s to a new expansion pack’s worth of good times and stupid selfies. Going to try to avoid spoilers and screenshots while at work tomorrow.

[WoW] The Invasion

Huh well image that… If you add content to a game, it becomes fun again; Who would have known? But in all seriousness, we enjoyed the invasion scenarios and cutscenes quite a bit and are currently enjoying catching up on the bits and pieces of content missed during our absence from WoW. The invasion gear has also rather quickly replaced a fair amount of the crappy LFR and Timewalking gear that I have been slowly accumulating. Overall, it is a suitable farewell to WoD and transition into Legion, which we are looking forward to playing at the end of the month.

I really wanted to boost either my Shaman or Druid to 100 but the Shaman is only 20 and the Druid is 45. In order to get the profession boost, which is what I really want (because screw grinding anything, especially JC, from 1 to 700), the boosted character needs to be 60+. The only character even remotely close to 60 would be my DK, who had previously been at 58 since Wrath of the Lich King. I guess if we are being totally honest, the likelyhood of me even playing a 4th alt beyond profession muling is abysmally low. In that regard, I suppose it doesn’t matter which character I boost so long as it is above level 60.

WoWScrnShot_081116_221117

The hunter is finally 100 as is my newly rolled Demon Hunter. This marks the most max level characters that I have ever had (up from 2 to 4). I think my favorite part of the new class is either the eye beams or being able to jump off of your flying mount at great heights and gliding around with the wings.

I was hoping to get Draenor flying before Legion, but I have a feeling that Saberstalkers rep is going to take too long to grind out. Everything else can be completed relatively trivially.

Draenor Flying

Odds and Ends: FFRK, WoW, and Fallout Shelter

FFRK
Photo-2016-08-01-21-48-57_7636Record Keeper was put on the back burner a bit in light of Pokemon Go and our return to WoW. I still need to clear the FFV U+ fight as well as Ifrit. The Support Nightmare fight wasn’t that hard once I had the timing down, but it did take a few tries and party configurations. The general idea is:

  • Phase 1: Shout and zerg the two nodes down. Keep in mind that when a node dies, it will respawn in about 1 to 2 turns.
  • Phase 2: The CPU will cast the physical barriers first so keep your Power Breakdown and Armor Breakdown (and Multi-Break if possible) users on standby. Finish off the nodes with other party members, PBD and ABD need to be queued as soon as the nodes respawn to avoid double barriers.
  • As soon as the nodes respawn: Queue PBD on the top one and ABD on the bottom one. Wait a second then queue Multi-Break. The idea is to time it so that Multi-Break goes off after PBD and ABD, doing this will make the nodes go haywire.
  • DPS the boss when the nodes to haywire. As soon as the second Barrage and Heal go off (from the nodes), queue Multi-Break. The idea is to cast Multi-Break before the CPU has a chance to put a barrier up. If you do it right the nodes should go haywire again.

WoW
WoWScrnShot_073116_145644Hopped straight on the gear treadmill despite Legion looming off into the not-so-far distance. My retribution set is sufficient enough to do okay damage in LFR HFC raids. Working on my healing set. I may actually start healing again; If for nothing else, so that we don’t have to sit in the LFR/LFG queue for 30 to 40 minutes. There were literally two healing buttons the last time I had bothered healing back in Vanilla so we will see how that goes…

My hunter has a near full set of 630+ gear tokens from the Tanaan dailies, garrison missions, etc. I can’t however, seem to bother to quest out the last 60% of a level to 100 so that he can use it. I’m bad at alting. I am not sure which character I am going to burn my insta-100 boost on. I am thinking that it will most likely be either a my lowbie druid or lowbie shaman.

Fallout Shelter
I was surprised to hear that a significant amount of content had been added to this game so I redownloaded it on my phone and have been poking at it on-and-off over the past week. The missions are pretty fun though I can tell that my interest in the title is starting to wane.

[WoW] Pre-Patch Impressions

For the first time in about forever, enough people have been back on WoW to socialize and do stuff so we caved-in and resubscribed. Luckily, the majority of my user interface seems to have survived the patch. I will though, need to find replacements for a few deprecated addons. Since my interface feels a bit top heavy, I think that I am going to spend part of my pre-expansion play time thinning out and redoing most of my UI.

I’m not sure that I would necessarily describe Retribution 7.0.3 as streamlined. It feels more, pruned than anything else. I find muscle memory moving my finger towards the buttons that I would press for Hammer of Wrath and Exorcism quite often. But that said, it has literally been almost two years since I have touched WoW and even then, it’s not like I was all that familiar with Retribution 6.x so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hopping on the gear treadmill once a gain. My gear is slowly getting better. It is up from a paltry 645 iLevel to a slightly less paltry 664 iLevel. The goal of course being to be non-shit geared by the time the invasion occurs.

My Pending Return to WoW

Like much of the player base, my husband and I are planning to return to the World of Warcraft, albeit for a brief month or so, when the Legion expansion launches at the end of August. The pressure however, of seeing more and more friends filter back into World of Warcraft over the past month or so has been increasing. Now that the pre-expansion patch is out, I am quite tempted to re-subscribe a bit earlier than originally planned.

I haven’t really been “into” WoW for about two years, so Legion has felt like more of an obligatory/out of curiosity purchase more than anything else. As such, I have neither paid much attention to any WoW related news nor am I versed in any way on any of the changes that have been made to the game, classes, etc.

That said, let’s say that I do re-subscribe. What do I do? I guess I can try out the new class, LFR old raids, or see if enough people are playing at the same time to do something. Or I guess, I can take the extra time to re-learn how to play this game…

In any event, I have already re-downloaded the game, updated my interface, and re-configured my gamepad so I guess it’s just a matter of time.

PS: I did actually re-download the entire game this time onto the new drive (yada yada bought an SSD for Prime Day) instead of just copying over the same WoW folder that I have been using for a decade from computer to computer. It was kind of funny though, having a WoW directly full of old patch files stretching all the way back to Vanilla.

WoW Loses 2.9M Subs

According to Blizzard’s recently released quarterly financial report, World of Warcraft is down 2.9 million subscribers since last quarter. WoW had rose from 7.4 million subs in Q3 2014 to about 10 million subs in Q4 2014 after the Warlords of Draenor launch. It is now back down to 7.1; Slightly below the pre-expansion numbers.

Not really that unexpected but still somewhat surprising as losing nearly 3 million subscribers is a pretty sharp decline, even for a 10 year old MMO. The fact that Warlords of Draenor has offered literally no player retention has to sting a bit. The recent expansion has thus far represents bot the largest expansion spike as well as the largest expansion drop to date.

If I had to take a guess at what I thought the main culprit would be, garrisons are a fairly obvious choice. They kind of had a lot riding on the garrisons and though I liked them a lot at first, investing that much time in the garrisons in my opinion at least, did not pay off. The garrison quests and benefits are little more than a chore now. I think guild housing would have been a better option. One can only spend so much time sitting in their own personal instance.

The Untamed Blade [WoW]

I was going to make this a Throwback Thursday WoW post, as a part of my campaign to update this site more, but I forgot. I finally got around to cleaning up my paladin’s bank and adding the remaining legacy gear into void storage. Items that I regret disenchanting/selling: My tier-2 armor set and The Untamed Blade. I would love to have that sword in my transmog list, but it was either sold or disenechanted along with all of my tier-2 at the beginning of The Burning Crusade for the sake of making bank space (not too keen on wasting time farming it).

So when my guild first started doing Blackwing Lair, we had a fairly long string of bad loot drops off of Razorgore. He would drop warlock loot nearly every single kill and then for literally 2 or 3 weeks straight, he dropped nothing but the Nemesis Bracers. Great for all 3 or 4 warlocks in the raid, but that sucked for everyone else. The excess warlock gear drops started happening when we were doing Vaelastrasz as well as Chromaggus if I recall correctly. All of the warlocks got their shoulder pieces at least 2 times over whereas very few other classes did by virtue of our crap-ass RNG luck. That string of bad drops gave birth to about a year or so of odd loot conspiracies and instance loot seeding rituals.

It was confirmed by Drysc about 6 years ago that loot was generated as soon as the mobs spawn. We had a theory that it was seeded by whoever created the raid ID. So every raid, we would rotate who would “seed” the loot table. Apparently if I recall correctly, a time stamp is or at least was used to seed the loot generator and not the raid leader, the first person who sets foot into the instance, or anything like that. So we were pretty off in that respect.

Anyway, I really really wanted The Untamed Blade so when that actually dropped, I bid a fairly significant portion of my DKP to grab it. I don’t even remember why I wanted it so badly given that I didn’t PvP all that often and Retribution wasn’t a viable raid spec back in vanilla. The funny thing though is that after finally getting the sword and blowing most of my DKP, it continued to drop off of Razorgore every single week for at least a month straight. You know, I distinctly remember thinking that I would most likely regret my actions at some point in the future but alas, I had literally no space left in my bank at the time.