This morning I feel like I don’t have an awful lot to talk about, but still feel obligated to say words and things. The last few nights have mostly been what I would refer to as maintenance gaming, where I log into something… do a few repeatable activities and then log right back out. The majority of this time has been spent in World of Warcraft since I apparently have set forth a goal of unlocking the alliance races which will involve copious amounts of reputation grinding. At this moment I am about 6500 out of 21000 towards exalted or some close equivalent in both of the necessary factions. At the suggestion of my friend Grace I have started hoarding faction tokens for the Darkmoon Faire buff, which admittedly is not a thing I have really partaken of in its modern format.
I still find it super annoying that the Alliance route to new races is way harder than the Horde route. As a “Mostly Alliance” player for most of my wow career I have always felt like Blizzard favored The Horde… not in the least because of the constant insistence that we should care deeply about Green Jesus. Weirdly enough however for the last while I have been almost exclusively playing The Horde and the character I am grinding up is my Orc Warrior not my Human one. There are certain things that just work easier on that side of the pond than the other… for example jumping the wall from the flightmaster to the Horde area in Dalaran is so much faster than having to fly all the way across the map to the Alliance area. Having a reasonable foothold on both continents is another nice point… with ways to get there quickly. Sure you can still use the Theramore boat as Alliance… but it feels weird to do so.
Grace had this idea of doing a sort of “raiding light” group one night a week that worked on trying to get the Mythic+ number as high as we could. So far however that is struggling to get off the ground given in our most immediate aggrochat crew we represent the only viable folks for this mission. I am heavily favoring Horde side since my Warrior there is 927 but most of the connections I would have to pull in people for nonsense are Alliance side. Over the coming days I might start reaching out to individuals that play horde side to see if they would be interested in shenanigans but for the moment the idea has taken root but not seen much progress.
As evidenced by the screenshot I used for this post I fired up Destiny last night and played around in it for a bit. The changes have made a lot of the weapons feel odd so in theory I will need to test everything out again to see what I do and do not like now. The fast rate of fire valkydyn that I am pictured holding above no longer feels that great. The general movement speed however does and it feels like Titan Skating is back to being a fairly viable thing once more. I am not sure if this is “just me” but I swear the grenade recharge rate was lowered once again, either that or I am still struggling to adjust to how generally slow that is. Even with double charges it was rare that it would actually be up when I wanted to use it while roaming around Mercury and doing events.
I miss Destiny 2, and more importantly I miss wanting to play it. I am not sure why I bounced so hard with the release of Curse of Osiris, and why I never actually managed to get any of the other classes in my stable through the story. Ultimately I was expecting something along the scope of The Taken King, and then was disappointed that we got something the scope of Dark Below instead. Additionally there just isn’t a grind I want to be doing there, because the weapons at least prior to yesterdays patch all sorta felt the same. Maybe now with the sandbox update there will be some reason to grind content to attempt to get masterworks for the things I want to be playing with.
The other side note is that I have started attempting to play some Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate over lunch, but quickly realized that if I want to do this thing I will need to leave the floor. We have a gaming area set up for folks to mostly play the WiiU that is hooked up there, but it does offer a bunch of really comfy chairs. Over lunch yesterday I attempted to camp out in one and do a few hunts, and within minutes had someone do a drive by and start up a conversation about some project we were working on. Basically now that I am 100% in the management world I cannot bump into someone without a conversation about something we need to deal with happening. Ultimately I like the concept of playing a little 3DS or Switch over lunch, but I need to find a hidey hole to go do this thing in.