BfA pet battling

BfA pet battling

I’m not sure why I suddenly got back into pet battling, but I’m enjoying it. I didn’t finish many of the pet battle achievements in Legion, and now I’m considering going back. At least I should probably go and capture all the wild pets I’m missing.

I did catch every wild pet in BfA for this achievement. I really like some of the new pet models, especially the bees and butterflies. The most annoying one was the glutted bleeder. Not only is it super gross looking, but it has the “burst” ability. That makes it hard to catch, since it would rather explode and kill itself than let you capture it. I ran around in Nazmir for a while until I found one that had a different ability in that slot so I could actually catch it.

I’m not worrying about making sure all of my wild pets are rare for now. I have such a huge stable of pets that I only worry about specific ones if they have a useful or unique skill set. I do want to be able to beat all of the pet battle world quests so I can get enough currency to buy all the vendor pets and toys. There are a lot of things to spend pet charms on this expansion!

The Magic Number

The Magic Number

Last night was a good night.  First off I am finally starting to feel a little more like human, as it seems that whatever crud I have been fighting for the last week is starting to subside.  Second I think I found the source of my annoyance in Discord mysteriously turning itself from push to talk to voice activated all the time.  Finally I got to run some dungeons with Mor, Grace and a friend of theirs from the Star Wars the Old Republic days.  At this point I think there are a couple of dungeons I still have yet to see on normal, and it is my goal to remedy that before sitting foot into heroics.  There are still several items that I need…  namely a good shield, good main hand weapon, and another reasonable trinket.  Those are the slots that are dragging down my magic number down from what it could potentially be.

The Magic Number

Speaking of magic numbers however…  I have now hit 305 which makes me physical capable of queuing for heroics.  However this is not quite something I want to do yet.  I want to finish getting those missing slots and see if I can sort out why I feel so damned squishy.  It could be that Protection Warriors are just in a shitty place right now and one that will improve later as gear scales.  This has been the case in past expansions, but what I am going through at the moment is that I feel completely rage starved.  It is like I don’t have enough active rage to be using revenge and keeping up Ignore Pain/Shield Block.  This is completely new for me because always in the past I had all the rage in the world to play with.  So last night I shifted around my talents after the few dungeons we ran and I am hoping tonight…  I maybe see an improvement.

The Magic Number

The image may state that this is Lord Stormsong…  but in truth it is Squid Pope.  Originally we thought he was Fish Pope but he transformed over the course of the instance.  Squid Pope and his friends were very annoying, but we managed to make it through the effort and get some loot in the process.  So far I am thinking that the dungeons that the Alliance gets natively are maybe a little cooler than the dungeons the Horde gets.  The blood troll instance for example… is annoying as shit and I still have not figured out how the ticks work given that sometimes I die horribly to them exploding and other times I am just fine.  The end result is me running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to avoid standing near them as they die.

The Magic Number

My hope is that tonight in our adventures I manage to find a weapon and a trinket… and preferably a new shield so I can go forth into heroic land with great confidence.  It is taking me a little longer than normal to ease into my comfort zone with Battle for Azeroth content, but I am thankful I have a trusted healer to ferry me along in this journey.  She is showing great restraint in not just completely blowing past me and leaving me in the dust.  I am already feeling super behind the curve given how often people in guild chat are asking for Mythics…  and I have not even set foot in a Heroic.  They are on a vastly different trajectory to me so far, and that is okay.  I will get there eventually, and hopefully at some point I get enough gear to have offspec options.

Reading Challenge #74: Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

It’s reading challenge time again. After the months it took me to get through The Diamond Age, this one only took a couple evenings. This time I’m reading John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, published in 2005. I enjoy Scalzi’s work, which is often fairly light and humorous. I read this novel a few years back, and was curious how I’d feel about it on this re-read. Spoilers Ahead!

This story follows John Perry, an old man whose wife passed away. On his 75th birthday he enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces for a term of at least two but as many as 10 years. Nobody who enlists is ever heard from again, but the rumor is they will turn you young again so you can fight. That’s sort-of right. In truth they clone new bodies for all the recruits, and swap their consciousness from their old frail bodies into shiny new green super bodies full of patented technology.

There is a fun section of the book where John gets adjusted to space and the CDF, meets new friends, and they try out their fancy new bodies. This ends up being bittersweet, as throughout the book we see most of that group of friends end up as casualties of the sprawling conflicts the CDF is fighting on multiple planets. The book has a lot of humor in it, but it also doesn’t let you forget that it’s a military sci-fi novel where there is lots of war and horrible death. There’s even a moment where our protagonist is hit with the emotional weight of all the strange horrible things he’s seen and done. Instead of being removed from combat, or told to repress those feelings, he’s basically told “good, everybody goes through this sooner or later, and now you can start working your way through it.”

Perry keeps moving up the ranks through a combination of dumb luck and occasional quick thinking. It serves him well right up to the point where he is severely wounded. This is where the story gets more interesting. As he is nearly dying he sees what looks like his dead wife, Kathy, there to rescue him. It turns out that it wasn’t a hallucination. Ten years before John enlisted, he and Kathy went together to the recruitment office to declare their intent to enlist and do a pre-screen. It turns out that people who do this and die before they can actually join up still end up serving the CDF. Kathy’s DNA was used to make a clone. If she had lived it would have been set up for her to swap into when she enlisted. When she died they started making modifications to it to prepare it for the special forces “ghost brigade.” John was rescued by his wife’s clone, Jane Sagan.

It turns out the special forces of the CDF is made up entirely of these “ghosts.” They are independent people with no memories from their DNA donors, with extra upgrades. While the infantry gains value from the lifetime of experience their recruits come with, special forces soldiers have the benefit of never knowing what it was like to live in a fragile, normal human body. They do crazy, superhuman things in combat because they are superhuman and they never had any reason to doubt it.

The rest of the book involves John and Jane getting to know each other a little, and John having the unfortunate opportunity to repay Jane for saving his life by saving hers. While they never actually see each other again during the novel, they do still communicate and eventually plan to meet each other again, if and when they both retire.

I enjoy Scalzi’s style and I’ve read several of his other novels. Re-reading this book actually made me realize how he has grown as a writer. His newer works like Lock In and The Dispatcher have a bit more depth and subtlety while still bringing his trademark humor. There are a few places in this one where it feels like things could have been fleshed out a bit better, or the connective tissue between sections could have been a bit more developed. Still, Old Man’s War is a very enjoyable read and I would recommend it.

TL;DR: Military sci-fi with heart and humor. Definitely worth the quick read.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

Rating: 4/5 stars

Next up: The Legend of Drizzt Series by R. A. Salvatore

Disposable Items

Disposable Items

I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning, apart from just how badass my Orc Warrior Lady looks in the Blackhand set combined with the revamped version of the crazy Black Temple shield and Mechanar sword.  As much as I generally did not like the story arc of Warlords of Draenor…  it produced a bunch of gear that I absolutely love.  The Iron Wrath set still is among my all-time favorite Warrior sets and I really need to put some time into farming the transmog bits that I am missing.  One of the things I realized last night is that my attachment to the Sun Eater’s appearance is at least in small part because I farmed Heroic Mechanar for ages to try and get it.  It also made me realize how different the economy of gear is now as to when it was back then.

There were items worth farming because when you got them… they would actually serve as a pretty good weapon for a good while into raiding rather than something you toss in the bin immediately.  I remember in Burning Crusade when they introduced the long and contorted weapon specializations for Blacksmithing…  those items were actually worth working towards because they would serve the player for more than a day or two.  Anything I could craft for myself right now gets tossed in the shredder the moment I step foot into a heroic or at the very least a mythic dungeon.  Those long tailed goals are largely gone from the game, the things that are worth striving towards.

Disposable Items

I think the problem for me is that my core gameplay loop has shifted from seeking specific objectives, to gaining the next disposable item that will increase the magical number that gates all of the tiers of content in the game.  I remember there used to be a time when I would create “Hit Lists” of the items that I wanted from specific dungeons, and then set forth to run those dungeons until I completed that set.  Back then however the items in each dungeon felt unique to the location… not just super similar draws from the same item pool.  The transitory nature of the items however makes each new acquisition feel completely unimportant…  the equivalent to the commons in a pack of Magic the Gathering cards that you just skip over hoping that maybe just maybe you got something really cool in the Rare/Mythic slot.

I miss caring about the drops.  I am not sure how you go back to that era especially when the modern era is actually way more open to varied styles of play.  Right now I am largely gearing through a mix of World Questing and running the occasional dungeon.  If I were super serious about things I would be abusing the fact that I have instant dungeon queues as a tank and pug my way to glory.  At this point I am sitting at 300 item level and I need 305 to start doing heroics.  That said in truth I probably need to have a full compliment of 310 items to make heroics really viable as the person who is soaking all of the damage.

The thing is… I used to feel confident running dungeons with strangers.  Somewhere along the way that changed and I no longer feel as bulletproof and steadfast as I once was.  I used to feel like I really had a handle on all there was to know about warrior tanking.  Now I just sorta feel like a pretender in plate armor, and I think that lack of confidence hinders me so much when it comes to random groups.  Last night Grace and I ran a dungeon, and I felt like I was screwing up all of the time…  and doing all the wrong things.  I am not entirely certain how to get over that, apart from just bashing my face against the random group finder until I become desensitized again.

The funny thing is though… I don’t have reason to feel this way.  So far all of the random people we have grouped with on Horde side have been awesome.  I generally start the group with a “Hey Folks!” and unlike Alliance side I almost always get a response back which starts an open dialog that often continues during the dungeon.  I do however miss the days when I used to have a ton of active social channels on the server, and had to build groups by hand…  because then I actually got to know more people.  It is all too easy for me to stay in my comfortable bubble of people I am already familiar with rather than branching out and making new connections.  I think in part that is why I am enjoying Mastodon so much… is because it is forcing me to meet and entirely new world of people.