Month: September 2016

Nithogg and Mythics

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Nithogg and Mythics

I am convinced that time slows down when you wake up early… and then attempt to go back to sleep.  This happened to me today, and between 5 and 5:30 I am pretty sure several hours passed.  I kept waking up thinking that surely I had forgotten to set the alarm, and that I had now overslept significantly and would have to rush around in the morning.  However I would look at my watch… and see that it was only 5:15, 5:22, 5:26 etc until finally the alarm went off.  At this point as a person of reasonable life experience… I know that I am probably far better off just getting up and dealing with the fact that I am awake a bit earlier than normal.  Instead I attempted to go back to sleep and I am pretty sure I will now be sluggish the rest of the day.  Yesterday was of course an important maintenance day in World of Warcraft because it unlocked both raiding and mythic+ dungeons.  I however don’t yet have a proper raid team, and last night represented the first mythic I have done yet.  This expansion has been a significantly more casual pace for me… yet still somehow I managed to end up just about as well geared as anyone else out there starting raiding.  I did a doublecheck this morning looking at a friend of mine in the warrior class hall and inspecting him… and I am maybe a couple ilvls behind him in total, and he is a serious progression raider.  This is absolutely been the expansion so far of multiple paths to the end game… which is ultimately what I always wanted out of warcraft.  You can craft your way to madness, or dungeon, or world quest, or raid… but in the end we all wind up in roughly the same destination allowing folks to swap paths at will rather than allowing choices within the first few weeks of a new expansion to forever dominate their fate.

The other cool thing that started up last night was the first of the world bosses.  Apparently from this point on we are going to get a new world boss every week, and the first of these was Nithogg, a monster I have slain in so many games with so many different spellings.  In World of Warcraft I have a particular vendetta against this creature for doing bad things to my Ravenbear friends.  Even though I was reminded during the day… I absolutely forgot to go fetch my re-roll tokens.  This time around they are located where the daily dungeon quests used to be during Wrath on ArcheMage Lan’dalock.  Similar to the birbfolk in Draenor we can purchase the seals with Gold or Garrison… I mean Order Resources.  Once again the prices go up not to subtly nudging you to spend multiple kinds of currency to get them, so the first seal will be 1000, the second 2000 and the third 3000 of either gold or resources.  With the absence of Apexis Crystals… or some equivalent currency we are missing the option to buy three of the “cheap” tokens and are going to have to choose either resources or gold to escalate the cost with.  As far as the boss fight… I did it a total of three times.  The first time I didn’t have any stones, the second I did.. and the third I was testing to see if I could spend more than one token a week.  The answer to that last question is no… and as a result I am stuck with earning 60g for my two attempts.  It is at this point Tam should be happy because he always complains about my good luck…  which in truth is not really a thing, its just that I do a lot of content that can potentially drop good stuff so in the end I get a lot of stuff.  The boss itself is a bit boring, and reminded me quite a bit of the zerg dragons of old but mostly the boss is designed to be that.  I was not in a proper raid group in any of the three times that I took Nithogg on, and sooner or later enough people amassed that someone pulled and the fight was on, with me furiously trying to dodge lightning patches while obeying the rules of fighting dragons…  stay away from the head, stay away from the tail.

The other big happening of the night is that I finally did my first Mythic dungeon.  The biggest problem I have had is when I feel like doing something like this… I lack the stalwart team to pull it together (pun intended).  There are in truth few of us who are really at “mythicable” level, which seems to be around the 830 mark if you want to be safe.  So while we might have 20-30 people on during prime time… a lot of them are still leveling and or gearing.  What I assembled instead was a team where myself and the warlock were the only folks safely in mythic range, and the rest of us were a bit on the undergeared side.  We felt it, but in the grand scheme of things I think we did just fine, especially considering it was my first mythic to tank, and Grace’s first mythic to heal.  The long and short of it is…  shit hits really hard.  Like from the first trash pack onwards it was noticeable that the incoming damage on my side had stepped up a few notches.  It was not unmanageable but it was a constant mitigation tug-of-war with my trying to maintain shield block and ignore pain whenever possible.  Out in the world it always feels like I have all the rage in the world… in mythics however I am constantly hoping for enough rage to set up that next active mitigation.  What they reminded me the most is the way that Burning Crusade Heroics felt, in that if we wanted to…  crowd control would probably smooth out the difficulty curve significantly.  Namely I am thinking somewhere around the Shadow Labyrinth difficulty, for those who are long enough in the tooth to remember how that felt the first few times.  Our particular run was made harder probably because we had a marksman hunter…  which are going to ultimately be the bane of anyone trying to carefully pull a dungeon.  All in all we did well enough and other than the final boss only suffered a single wipe, which I found surprising because I was absolutely expecting issues with the serpent.  It took significantly longer than your average dungeon, but we were being extremely cautious… which is something we are going to have to pick up the pace for when we start attempting keystone runs.

 

Panda Hero

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Panda Hero

Yesterday I talked about my journey from bad engineer to not so bad engineer, but that was not at all the only thing I accomplished this weekend.  For some time I had been sitting at three achievements from completing my Glory of the Pandaria Hero meta achievement and obtaining the purty mount you see in the screenshot above.  I guess leading with a screenshot pretty much kills any suspense, but I am going to talk about this regardless.  I actually accomplished most of this during my periods of playing Pandaria back in the day, but for whatever reason I simply was not with the group when they completed Rattle No More, Seeds of Doubt, and I never messed with the super annoying Polyformic Acid Science.  What ultimately jogged my memory is that I wound up getting an enchanting quest requiring me to go gather up various components…  two of which were located in Scholomance and Stonecore which meant me going to the respective areas and soloing a dungeon.  It was during this process that I got one of the empty vials, and remembered how the whole Polyformic Acid thing worked.  As a result I managed to do five of the six kills needed for that achievement during a single 60 minute charge… before using the empty vial and removing it.  What I did not remember is that apparently when you remove and reapply a charge… it gives you a fresh 60 minute buff and not a partial buff based on what the previous timer was when you last stowed it.  From there the actual chore of doing the last two achievements was minimal because with level 110 gear things just sort of fall over.  However regardless I now have one more mount to add to my collection.  The thing is I am in similar places on most of the other “Dungeon Hero” achievements because for whatever reason I never really prioritized them.  I have never been the achievement hunter that Thalen or Rylacus was… but maybe it is time to start changing that.

Panda Hero

As far as last night went, I spent most of it working on questing Exeter my Draenei Tankadin.  I did not realize what a difference harvesting makes to the total amount of experience you can squeeze out of a zone.  Belghast had no harvesting skill, but instead a double crafting combo of engineer and enchanting.  As a result it took me all five zones to be able to reach 110, or at least a fraction of the last zone for me which was Highmountain.  On Exeter however I have done nothing but complete Azuna my first zone… and I am sitting at 104 and roughly half of the way to 105.  I’ve run zero dungeons, and the only real difference is that I am harvesting every ore node I happen across.  However at 900 xp or so a pop those nodes I guess add up, as does the fact that I have plenty of rested experience since I am only playing him a few times a week right now.  The push however is to get to 109 quickly so that I can have another character to start running the upcoming Coren Direbrew fight that comes with Brewfest…  that should start showing up after the downtime today.  Now however is the point at which I am going to ascend my soapbox.  One of the things that the Legion pre-event showed off is just how damned well the content scaling works, and how much more enjoyable an event can be when you allow players of all levels to complete it.  Direbrew has never really been a difficult fight and honestly most of the time you could complete it without a tank in previous years. It just feels odd that in an expansion driven by scaling of content, that they would not also update this event to use it.

As much as I am loving this expansion, there are a lot of things that still make me wonder.  For example Stormheim is this amazing zone…  so long as you completely ignore any factional crap that happens in it.  This is really the expansion of two stories happening at once…  a faction tale of red versus blue that feels grossly outdated, and deep and rich zone specific tales that feel fresh and new.  I realize they probably did not have time to do everything in this expansion and update Brewfest… so they instead simply bumped up the item levels a bit and moved on.  However I feel like at some point they really need to do an update pass on all of these seasonal fights to bring them in line with the newest tech.  Imagine how much cooler it would be if anyone in the game could participate on all of their characters.  Right now this event feels like it is setting an artificial deadline on when we should have been leveled by in order to keep from missing out.  Then there is the issue of the fact that I am pulling 840/850 items from World Quests and the face value of the Direbrew trinkets is only 810…  something that I am hoping can easily War and Titan forge up in level.  In any case I will be doing this event every day on Belghast, and attempting to get my nearest character up to the appropriate level range of 109 so that I can get multiple characters trying to farm goodies.  If nothing else I need to have more characters at the level cap since this does not appear to be something they are going to scale…  because I still am chasing that ever damned elusive Headless Horseman mount.

Three Weeks In

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Like the title says, we’re 3 weeks into Legion, and about to have access to raiding and mythic+ dungeons. Are you prepared? I am not prepared. Or rather, I’m actually in a pretty good place personally but I have no solid group to do these activities with. My gear level is pushing ever closer to the pre-raid cap of 850 on my mage, and my monk is now heroic-capable or possibly even mythic-capable too. What I need is a squad, a team, some pals to do all the new stuff that comes out tomorrow with. My self-imposed casualness has deteriorated in the face of a really fun expansion that I can’t get enough of. Unfortunately most of my friends are still exactly as casual as we all said we’d be. So I’ve done only one mythic dungeon so far.

This may come off as me complaining about my friends, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact I’m frustrated at myself, for not being able to go slowly like I said I would. Or alternately, for not recognizing that I get into  “do all the things” mode every time I am enjoying a new game/expansion and planning accordingly. I shrugged off some invitations to join more hardcore groups because I wanted to go slow and not have pressure. Now I’ve gotten raid-ready anyway in spite of myself.

So in the interest of keeping momentum without running off to do things without my friends (which has already gotten me in trouble a few times, stupid lockouts!) I’ve been working on alts. Mage is still my main but is holding on to that title by a thin thread. DPS queues are a thing, and everybody needs a healer. Monk is leveled, class campaign finished, and heroic geared, ready to run mythics and drag me back into healing forever. My horde priest, my main for many many years is 102 and has all her weapons, even the disgusting evil holy one. She’ll be leveling as shadow and gearing up enough to do LFR as disc. I don’t love disc for dungeons this expansion and I hate holy so I don’t plan on doing much other than healing LFR with her. Horde pally, and both alliance and horde druids have unlocked their class halls and first weapons, so I have tons of options in front of me. I just have to figure out what I want to accomplish first.

Are you raiding tomorrow? Getting ready for mythic+?  Or are you still slow and steady, enjoying all the new content of Legion?


Three Weeks In

Bad Engineer

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Bad Engineer

This weekend was a weekend in many ways about finishing things that I left unresolved for years.  Over the course of the weekend I managed to get in several heroic runs of Legion content.  During Vault of the Wardens… we wiped a lot.  So much so that by the end of the run we were all showing yellow on our paper doll armor portraits.  It was around this time that I saw some text that I dread “Does anyone have a Jeeves?”.  This was quickly followed up by a statement from my friend Grace, “Hey Bel, You are an Engineer right?”.  To which I have to hang my head in shame every time this conversation comes up, because I am a failure as an engineer.  The biggest problem that I have had is the fact that my warrior is the completely screwball combination of Enchanter and Engineer.  Its like I chose the two worst things to level and slapped them on the same character.  The truth is… I used to be the even stranger profession for a warrior of tailor.  When I created this character I had no bag makers, so I decided to remedy that problem.  Then during Burning Crusade I could not get a helmet to drop period.  I went through all of Tier 5 and almost all of Tier 6 still wearing my Tier 4 helmet.  Over the course of a weekend I decided to fix that, dropped tailoring, and power leveled my engineer from zero to the then level cap… and crafted myself a t6 equivalent helm.  The very next week… a helm dropped for me.

From that point onwards I have been a shitty engineer, always lagging behind and never quite having all of the toys that I should for my profession.  During Wrath of the Lich King I swapped mains and instead focused on Belgrave my Deathknight.  So while I farmed the Jeeves pattern, I never actually got around to gathering the materials to craft it, which even at that time were pretty insane.  This weekend during the AggroChat Podcast, I decided to remedy the failure and set forth to farm all of the materials to craft my Jeeves.  The real credit for this process goes to the wowhead user Ketho for posting a breakout of the materials which made me realize this was actually doable.  So during the podcast I farmed the following list of items…

  • 6 – Copper Ore
  • 32 – Thorium Ore
  • 32 – Fel Iron Ore
  • 32 – Adamantite Ore
  • 4 – Khorium Ore
  • 60 – Cobalt Ore
  • 80 – Saronite Ore
  • 48 – Titanium Ore
  • 2 – Essense of Fire
  • 2 – Primal Fire
  • 8 – Eternal Fire
  • 8 – Eternal Earth
  • 8 – Eternal Shadow
  • 2 – King’s Amber

Looking at the list now it seems even more like madness but I set forth to gather it up while we talked on the podcast.  The first goal was Thorium ore, which I set forth to farming in Winterspring which I could get to easy enough through Hyjal.  Remember I am not a miner on my actual engineer so instead for this job I grabbed Tallow my Jewelcrafting/Mining Shaman.  This part went super quickly, and I decided to drop by Darkshore to pick up a few copper nodes to be done with the “Vanilla” section of the list.  From there I took the Stormwind Mage’s Guild port to Hellfire Peninsula and farmed anything I happened across on my way to Zangarmarsh.  I remember spending hours running/flying circles around Zangarmarsh farming Fel Iron and Adamantite… so I focused on this zone until I neared enough Fel Iron.  From there I took the exit from Zangar to Nagrand and flew a path around that zone until I finally gathered the Adamantite I needed.  I lucked out and found just enough Khorium while farming so I moved on to Northrend, where I flew circles around Grizzly Hills until I had gathered up enough Cobalt.  Similarly to Zangarmarsh, I spent most of my Wrath farming time in Sholazar Basin so I quickly gathered up the requisite amount of Saronite I needed there.  Lastly for Northrend was flying a bunch of circles around Icecrown trying to find Titanium.  Here is the point where I cheat a little and tell you all that I had a handful of bars sitting in the bank left over from something so I didn’t really need that much to continue onwards.

The challenge was getting enough elemental stuff to create the Eternals and the Primals.  Before leaving Nagrand I slaughtered a bunch of fire elementals at the elemental plateau which gave me enough to create the two primal fires.  While mining I got more than enough Earth and Shadow, which left me in a similar position needing fire.  I made an attempt at Wintergrasp but Horde was currently holding it, which means the elementals there have a greatly reduced drop rate.  This is the point at which I went to the wowhead and found that apparently there is a lesser known farm spot in Storm Peaks.  There is a cave full of mobs called Wailing Winds  that are nearly instant respawn and have a pretty decent drop rate for the fire.  So after about fifteen minutes of killing them I managed to gather up the mats to do my Eternal Fire.  This left one last component…  the King’s Amber which I initially thought I would simply buy off the auction house.  We had none available, and after looking at how I might actually get my hands on some… it seemed like it was going to be the part of this equation that killed me.  I instead restored to trying to transmute them… which required 2 Autumn’s Glow that caused me to once again fly some more around Sholazar Basin and this time prospect it hoping for the gem I needed.  I transferred the materials to my alchemist… and then was disappointed that apparently old world transmutes still incur the once a day timer.

It was around this time when Thalen told me he would be re-upping his account and was certain that he probably had the needed gem sitting in a bank somewhere.  We then played this game… of him trying to remember who was his jewelcrafter.  Thalen has been gone from World of Warcraft since about halfway through Pandaria, meaning he has slept several times since then.  When he finally landed on the right character, he didn’t have the gem…  but instead said he could swap to his alchemist and do a transmute.  So we played a similar game of trying to figure out which character was his alchemist.  Finally we got the mats and I mailed everything to Belghast to start crafting the sub components.  This is the point at which I realized that I apparently NEVER picked up the recipe for the original Repair Bot on this character from Blackrock Depths.   Prior to Belghast I had another engineer, and I knew that I had grabbed it on that character, but I guess mentally I transposed that event to happening on my current engineer.  I hopped on a mount and flew over to Blackrock Depths, ran in quickly… got the pattern and returned once more to the Dwarven Quarter in Stormwind where I finally combined everything into my shiny new Jeeves.  I had enough mats left over to craft a Moll-E as well.  It was a whirlwind of farming but during the three hours or so associated with the podcast and me doing post podcast editing I am now less of an engineering failure.