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.

[Disney World] Min-maxing Test Track

TL;DR: We were vacationing this past week in Orlando. Our goal was to hit the high score on the Test Track leaderboard in which we had almost achieved (matched it at 230). I am pretty sure that the score cap however is 232; I haven’t seen any indication online or in the actual attraction that it can go any higher. We ended up riding test track 3 times, each with the following score: 208, 222, and 230. I am not quite sure where we lost 2 points, I suspect that it was either a screw up when drawing the contour of the car or wheel size. It is worth noting that only higher scores will override the current leader. If you want to stay on the board, ride early.

There are a total of four categories: Power, responsiveness, capability, and efficiency. Your overall score will be the total of all four categories combined. So, the trick is to max out your overall score not just a particular category.

For vehicle type, choose the sports car on the far left. When drawing the contour of the car, you will want to draw something resembling a normalish car shape (small curve for the hood, larger curve for the body). It should resemble something like this:

tt1

When sculpting the car, make the tail as tall as possible (drag it to the upper left). For length and width, make the car as short and wide as possible. The hybrid engine is by far the best choice as it gives you an additional accessory slot.

For accessories, the trick is to use the selection that nets you the most overall gain. It doesn’t matter what category it boosts so long as it offers the most points. So for example, if accessory #1 offers +2 power but accessory #2 offers +6 capability and -2 power, you will want to go with accessory #2 because the overall gain is +4 (vs +2). The max amount of point gain for accessories seems to be 20 (front +3, hood +4, side +2, top +2, rear +3, tail +6). Same deal for the wheels. I am not sure if there is an ideal ratio for wheel size.

[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.

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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.