Good Morning Friends. I am going to admit this is probably going to be a bit of a melancholy post, and I want to give you a heads up as not to deflate your enjoyment. There are many riding the hype train from yesterdays announcement of the Dragonflight expansion for World of Warcraft, and I don’t want to do anything to diminish your joy. Lord knows that Blizzard gamers right now need a little bit of joy in their life given everything that has happened with the company and their flagship game over the last several years. Lets start off with just the facts. If you did not catch any of the coverage yesterday there is a slew of videos to watch on the official World of Warcraft channel.
For your viewing enjoyment and ease of use I am going to link them all here:
At a high level a brand new expansion was announced set in the Dragon Isles, and area that the player has not visited since Warcraft II (and even that was likely non-canonical). With it comes a brand new race for those who really like scalesonas, the Dracthyr. This is going to create a bit of a weird balancing situation because with them comes a brand new class that is locked to that race as well. The Evoker can be a DPS or a healer and blends the magic of the various dragonflights into its spells. I’m personally not terribly interested in playing a dragon and have had more than my fair share of opportunities be it the actual dragons in Horizon, or the Sarnak in Everquest II. Before I get into more editorialization, lets go with a quick rundown of everything that was discussed.
New Expansion, Level Cap bumps up to 70
New Race/Class combo of Dracthyr/Evoker
2 Specs – Healing and DPS
Hero Class – Starts at 58
Wears Mail Armor
Dragon Isles – 4 leveling zones, 1 new starter zone for Dracthyr
Dragonriding
Dragon mount that levels up over time and gains new abilities
Customizable with collectable bits of armor and such
Talent Tree Rework – Time will tell if it is freedom of choice or just the illusion
UI Overhaul – More customizable and cleaner
Profession Revamp
Ability to create an order to have something crafted by another player
That folks is World of Warcraft Dragonflight in a nutshell. Now I guess it is time for me to talk about my reaction to it. I will admit that I found myself looking forward to this reveal yesterday. World of Warcraft is much like a bad breakup that never really goes away, and I wanted to see a glimmer of hope. I’ve talked before about how Blizzcon is this concentration of nostalgia and joy that ultimately makes me resub to the game almost every single time. This is especially true when it comes with the announcement of a new expansion. I have this history of coming back in at the tail end of an expansion and coasting on the good vibes until the launch of the new content. Prior to Legion I leveled everything to the then cap of 100, and did something similar at the tail end of legion with my horde characters preparing them for Battle For Azeroth.
The weird thing is… it isn’t that ANYTHING I saw was bad. In fact I think Dragonflight is probably going to be a universally good expansion. There is a part of me that would have been super excited by this reveal. The problem is as I watched it yesterday felt nothing. It summoned forth the same amount of emotional attachment that I would have while watching the evening news. I have no clue what changed but I am starting to fear that I am too far gone to be revived. I know there are a lot of people who poured their hearts and souls into this expansion reveal and I think for the most part they did a good job. I expected SOME reaction to the news… but I just sort of feel hollow about it. This is in part why I tried to give the warning at the beginning of this post, because I do not want to suck the joy out of the room.
While I was not personally feeling it, I do think that the way in which the information was delivered was probably a good call. Blizzard had this bombastic rockstar persona built up over so many years… and we have learned that with that came a lot of exceptionally bad behavior within the company. It is sobering to see what a Blizzard reveal looks like when it isn’t trying to borrow the energy from a Jolt Cola ad from the 80s. I get the general feeling that the Dragon Isles are going to feel a bit like Northrend, which admittedly was one of my favorite expansions. It is a time of expeditions instead of military conquest, and it sounds like the scientists and archeologists are going to be leading the way. This is all really good, and a positive step forward for the game. I just wish that I felt something about all of this.
I signed up for beta like I have always done, and if I get access I will try it out and see if maybe the reality can sway me where the marketing material has not. The panel format does give the impression that the reigns of Blizzard are being taken over by the competent adults in the room and being taken away from the abusive aspects. I am really hoping that this is true behind the scenes because I have so many friends who work for this company in one aspect or another that I want to see it succeed. I am just uncertain if the fate of this company and my desires still align. I don’t want to give the impression that anything about Dragonflight was bad, just that for whatever reason I am not feeling it. That is not to say that will not change over time, but I do wonder if the magic is gone for me.
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Good Morning Friends! Thanks so much for all the comments yesterday. I always feel weird talking about “milestones”, like I am being overly self congratulatory. I honestly got up yesterday and struggled a bit as to whether or not to make that post or throw out a new Mixtape Monday, which incidentally will be released next Monday. I am still very deep into Guild Wars 2 and enjoying the heck out of it. I’ve wrapped up Living World Season 4 and am now chipping away at Living World Season 5 aka the Icebrood Saga. This season definitely feels like more than your average Living World Season, but not quite an expansion. It does make me wonder if there was a conversation happening at the studio about maybe just doing seasonal content going forward rather than expansion drops.
In other news I have finished crafting my Perfected Nightsword and am on to the third Twilight collection. This now involves me doing a bunch of content that I do not love… jumping puzzles and gimmicky mini-dungeons and then collecting “Gloom” in specific places. So far I have only collected Gloom from Tequatl’s lair, Shadow Behemoth, and one darkness themed mini-dungeon in Dredgehaunt Cliffs. So I have much work to go before I can craft my Dusk and begin trying to sort out what I have left to do before I can turn it into Twilight. Huge thanks to both Nogmara and Tamrielo for helping me with the Mithril because in total it came in just under 4000 ingots to finish the second step of this process. The expensive part of it was buying all of the Deldrimor Steel Ingots that I needed, but at least this part is done. The last step is more labor intensive but should not have near the gold cost associated with it.
The other day I happened to be running Tequatl early in the morning, because happenstance had made me miss the reset run the evening before. Low and behold I happened to notice that both Ammo and Sol were running it as well. I snapped a photo of me with Ammo because it honestly is not super often that we are both in the same area at the same time. I am getting super anxious to share with you her latest creation. As is often the case I have been getting periodic updates showing off progress… and I kinda griefed her this time with the inclusion of the raven mantle. However she has made short work of that challenge and it looks freaking awesome in drawn form. This is maybe going to be my favorite “Bel” that she has drawn.
Lastly I started tooling around on a Sylvari Engineer. There is something I found humorous about a plant person that is a gearhead. Originally I had a Charr Engineer, but honestly… I have to admit that as much as I like them as a people… I don’t love playing as one. Charr have the whole Tauren problem for me where they feel extremely bulky and slow. This is probably ironic considering I am playing the “Big Human” as my primary character, but Norn at least have Human motions that feel quick and nimble for their size. Sylvari is something that I am coming to appreciate the longer I have played Guild Wars 2. At first I pegged them as “Plant Elves” and you know me and my general dislike of most Elves… but they are way more interesting than that. Maybe the interesting story arc of Caithe has turned me around on my feelings about them.
The weird thing about the World Boss teleport trinket from the Black Lion shop, is that it takes you to places you don’t really have any business being yet. One of these places is to fight Drakkar, an ice dragon deep in the Bjora Marches. It is interesting seeing how this story unfolds and I feel like I am on the cusp of finally reaching this fight on the narration. There are so many excellent touches with this content, like when I met the Wolf Spirit the game acknowledged that as a Norn I was pledged to the Bear spirit and that he is proud of me. I’ve also really enjoyed the Charr homeland zone and all of the weird stuff that the various Legions get up to there. Bjora Marches has lasted much longer than I originally expected it would, so I am very interesting to see what the next zone brings with it.
Lastly today is the date that the next World of Warcraft expansion is going to be revealed. While it has been sixteen months since I last played the game, I still find myself interested in what comes next. I have a feeling that it won’t be enough to draw me back to the fold, but I also feel like I have said that before many times. I did not love Battle for Azeroth and I bounced in less than a month from Shadowlands, so I am wondering if I am just done with this game. We will see if what comes next interests me at all.
The post Perfected Nightsword appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
2009 – The WoW Theme Era
Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of my very first post here on Tales of the Aggronaut. I realize last week I celebrated the 9th year of AggroChat but apparently, April is just the month I start new things. It was April of last year for example that I started the whole Mixtape Monday thing for example… which incidentally is something I plan on revisiting soon. It always feels weird and self-congratulatory to do one of these posts, but also feels like something I should do anyway. Looking back I apparently missed my twelfth anniversary altogether and never saw fit to go back and talk about it. Technically I should have been making this post yesterday, but was releasing an episode of AggroChat and I have this weird hang-up about doing more than one post in a single day. According to the Wayback Machine, this is what my blog would have looked like around this time.
2011 – WayBack fails to Capture the Rift Theme Era
However, I am learning for a fact that the Wayback Machine is fallible. The graphical treatment on that first image is like the second revision of my blog theme. The very first one was a direct clone of an existing wow-based theme, given that my blog started its life as a Warrior Tanking blog. The “Sons of Hodir” themed banner would have come much later and the above image is a complete fabrication because I know by the time we reached September of 2011 I was sporting a Rift-based theme. I dove completely into Rift and was even registered as an official fansite. Truth be told last time I logged into the forums, my account was still flagged as a fansite operator. You can see a bit of evidence of this in the sidebar but this is when I switched to the blue-themed text over the brown masthead.
2014 – Non-Game Specific Theme
The ship begins to right itself around 2014 when you can see this blue masthead text actually being captured by the Wayback Machine. The main difference during the Rift years was instead of Chibi Bel wearing Zul Aman gear, it was a Chibi Bahmi seen here on the right. I am honestly wishing I had gotten in the practice of taking a screenshot of my blog every so often during its life span. For years I have mostly relied on the Wayback Machine as a way of transporting me back in time but I am guessing it is starting to succumb to the process of digital rot. This is a bit concerning because our digital memories are not going to be preserved nearly as perfectly as we might have hoped. I think this is one of those things that we maybe took for granted… but also maybe should not have. I guess I should add screenshotting my blog… to the long list of other things that I have preserved through my screenshot archive.
Chibi Bahmi Bel
Chibi AggroChat
All of the Chibi work that adorned my blog for years was done by my good friend Rae. She was one of the original members of AggroChat and is someone that at the time worked with me. I greatly appreciate all of the work that she did for me, but as the blog matured I found myself moving away from that art style. The original graphics for AggroChat seen above included Chibi versions of Rae, Ash, Kodra, and Myself… more specifically the version of my Elder Scrolls Online Imperial Dragon Knight character I was playing at the time. Ash being a bear that Rae was sitting on was not exactly a great representation, but given the other stuff, we were juggling this remained the artwork for far longer than I had intended.
2015 – The End of Chibi Era
The last era that still featured Rae’s Chibi work was in 2015. I had gone to a very streamlined look in the masthead and used a cropped version of the ESO Bel Chibi that I was at the time using as my Twitter avatar. This also begins the era of me stopping fiddling and trying to roll my own theme. I test drove several third-party paid themes and finally landed on Generate Press, and have more or less been using it since. I figure this is probably the beginning of the “modern” era of the blog as not a ton has shifted since this point. I desperately need to spend some time modifying my sidebar at this point. Some releases back WordPress added block support, and it would be so much easier to maintain if I just nuked it and started from scratch. However, that seems terribly daunting and I keep putting it off.
2017 – Beginning of Ammo Era
In 2017 we saw the first introduction of a Masthead featuring artwork from my good friend Ammo. The whole “how I met Ammo” thing is a truly contorted mess, and at some point, we are going to sit down and record an episode of Bel Folks Stuff to sort it out. Basically, I originally crossed paths with her mom Sol back in World of Warcraft as we were all on Argent Dawn US, but I am guessing I first met Ammo through Twitter. None of that really matters though because I love her artwork, and you should absolutely check her stuff out if you have ever experienced it. I mean she has a traditional website, but I still feel like the best place to experience it is via Tumblr. She cut her teeth on comics just like I did, and as a result, there is a very comic book nature to the art style. Right now she is working on enshrining my Guild Wars 2 Necromancer in artwork form, and it is so damned cool. I can’t wait to be able to share it with you all.
2019 – The Masthead Full of Ammo Art Era
Then by that time we reached the pre-pandemic Aggronaut, you have the masthead full of various individual commissions from Ammo. Each one of those was done separately but I have merged them into a single cohesive image. If you compare it to the current masthead it is missing the PSO2 and New World themed “Bels”. This madness all started however because I commissioned Ammo to draw an image for my seventh blog anniversary that I just fell in love with. I was enamored with the concept of having her illustrated the various versions of my primary “Belghast” character in each game because they all share some deep similarities.
Original 7th Anniversary “Faces of Bel”
So left to right you have my World of Warcraft Warrior, my character from Secret World, my Exo from Destiny 1 and Bahmi from Rift, then my ESO Dragon Knight, and finally my Lalafel Warrior from FFXIV. She still has the original shirt up for purchase on her TeePublic store. That all came about because I wanted a shirt made off this image, but wanted all proceeds from the sale to go to Ammo in case anyone else bought one at some point. Then when I decided to fiddle with my masthead I asked her to take the LalaBel featured in this image and blow it up into a full-sized graphic. Then one by one as I had her draw more things for me… we kept that same format allowing me to composite them together afterward.
The Streamer Moogles
Some years back I commissioned a series of moogles screwing around with “streamer” gear. Originally this was to be part of my Twitch page for a foray into streaming that never really happened. More recently I have used them to adorn the masthead. However, the next project that I am going to give Ammo is to do a similar treatment for other cute monsters from video games. I know for example I absolutely want an Arctic Quaggan and a Choya Pinata from Guild Wars 2. I am sorta brainstorming a list of cute critters I want to be done up, and at least mentally these are going to be part of a more broad site rework. I am hoping that by the time we reach the fourteenth anniversary of the blog, we have maybe moved forward a little bit in the way it looks.
I have to admit, this is not exactly the post that I had intended to make this morning but it is the post that came out. There are times that you just have to go with the flow when writing, and that has been one of the secrets to my maintaining this site for thirteen years. I wish I had been more prolific early in this site, because as I age… I find having this living journal to be a benefit for pinpointing exactly when various things in my life happened. Here we are some 2876 posts later and I am still getting up each morning to do this nonsense. That would average out to be 221 posts a year, but we all know that is a lie since my prolific nature did not really kick in until April of 2013. The part that shocks me more though is that I have had just shy of 9000 comments… especially when you consider how freaking bad I am at actually interacting with them.
Basically what I am trying to say in my very meandering manner is… thanks for reading and being here with me on this journey.
The post Thirteen Years of Tales appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we talk about Bel and his dumb luck that seems to follow him from game to game. More specifically we talk about three exceedingly rare things that took place in short order after he came back to Guild Wars 2. From there we talk a bit about the community and how awesome they are. We also talk a bit about wrapping up Path of Fire and Living World Season 4. From there we talk about Wobbledogs, which comes from of grand tradition of griefing each other with games… but this time in a good way. Finally we talk a bit about Kirby and the Forgotten Land and more specifically Ultimate Cup Z.
