Grace – Page 56 – AggroChat

Season Journeyed

May 11, 2017 by Grace

I can hardly believe it, but last night I finished the final step for the Guardian level of the season journey in D3.

When the season journey was first introduced in its current incarnation, it was something I was excited about for the cosmetic rewards far more than anything else. Since I’ve been participating, I’ve grown to love the “new game smell” of the start of a new season, complete with a decent sampling of my friends flocking back to the game to see what’s on offer, level together, and get the new goodies. I was completely casual about my playtime, enjoying murdering demons for the fun of it without pushing myself too hard. A few seasons in, I started hanging around with a few friends who would go all out at the start of the season, and were willing to carry me around so I could progress a bit farther. Those carry seasons saw me get my first bonus stash tab, and saw me start to push myself a little bit in terms of difficulty even when I was playing solo. The evidence that it was possible to meet the goals of the season was in front of me, and I got the urge to spend less time getting carried.

The past two seasons have seen me push way outside of my original comfort zone. I unlocked all my bonus stash tabs, and pushed into higher and higher greater rifts. Last season I got pretty close to completing the Guardian level of the season journey. I had all my conquests done, I just stopped short of a few other goals. The current season has been a little strange, since way fewer of my friends decided to come back for this one. Other than a little bit of paragon level farming in the first few days, I didn’t get carried to anything this time around. In fact, I was the one carrying some of my other friends more often than not, or at worst trading power leveling so we could do the set bonus conquests.

I pushed myself to get to GR70 solo as soon as I possibly could, so I could unlock the sweet sweet primal ancient drops. (Sadly this determination was repaid in a primal ancient Blackthorne’s piece and yes I am still bitter.) I ran rifts and bounties to gear up and level gems. I worked my way through 8 set dungeons and GR55 with 6 different set bonuses. And last night I soloed Adria in under 15 seconds on torment XIII and finally finished the Guardian requirements and officially completed the season journey. It was stressful sometimes and frustrating at others, but in the end it was an achievable goal and I’m glad I finally got motivated to follow through on it. I’m not sure whether I want to keep going in the season or switch to my non-seasonal stable. I am sure I will probably be taking a break from D3 soon, but maybe not right away. A friend recently asked if I was going to try for the achievement and wings for mastering all of the set dungeons for every class and I dismissed it because I figured I’d be working on the season journey for a while longer. Maybe I will try to get those wings after all.

Legion’s Profession Problems

May 8, 2017 by Grace

After my WoW alt update post last week I decided to level my druid next. I just couldn’t resist the joy of flight form, cheering many quests and sniping all the herbs. For some reason I enjoyed the process way more than when I leveled my Alliance druid. I’m not sure if it was having flying, or not being an elf or what, but I had a lot more fun. I’ve been tempted to get the new flight form glyph because it looks really nice, but I just can’t bring myself to give up my awesome bat form.

Speaking of herbalizing from the skies, I also decided to give professions another go, mostly because I knew Darkmoon Faire was coming up and I figured at least I could get 5 free skill-ups that way. Unfortunately professions in Legion are still completely awful. I wanted to focus on my priest, who has tailoring and alchemy, since she’s my most nostalgia-heavy character and those professions made me a ton of gold over the years. Sadly the biggest moneymaker she has is still probably the 30 slot bags from WoD. Meanwhile leveling tailoring requires doing the Suramar questline, which I was avoiding like the plague on my alts. I loved Suramar, but it was long and had a rep grind and I don’t have any desire to repeat it if I can help it. On the alchemy side I’ve run up against the RNG of learning upgrades. Having to make a billion potions that are too low to give skillups to try to learn new ranks that might give skillups does not appeal. On top of all of that, you also have to run multiple dungeons for each profession. At least now that I’m 110 I can be carried through heroics by people with way more gear in a matter of minutes, as long as I don’t make myself depressed by looking at the damage meters.

The huge disconnect between how easy it is to level up an alt and how annoying it is to level their professions is really messing with my normal path to expansion/patch lull enjoyment. This is the time in prior expansions where I’d be raking in gold. Sure, we all got spoiled by how easy that was in WoD, but even in prior expansions I could level an alt and be useful making flasks, bags, gems, or transmutes pretty quickly. This time around even my main only got her professions maxed by staking out the Darkmoon Faire, and my alts are getting to around rank 760 (out of 800) at best before I hit a wall of dungeons or RNG or both. It has been fun to see a bunch of the class hall stories, but feels really strange that these alts aren’t being useful like they should. All that investment into leveling alts feels very hollow if I stop logging into them as soon as I’m done with their story. Oh well, at least I can keep selling plenty of Draenor-era bags. Maybe I should park my alts back in my garrison again…

AggroChat #155 – Men Are Terrible Land

May 21, 2019May 7, 2017 by AggroChat

Featuring: Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

This week we dig more into Horizon Zero Dawn… or as it was called early in the show Aloy’s Adventures in Men Are Terrible Land. Tam is nearing the end of the game, and Belghast and Kodra have made it a bit further… or at least enough to be able to talk about some of the things going on in the game. Bel has fallen into a rather large Star Wars the Old Republic shaped hole and talks about his experiences with the new systems… and insane experience boost. Grace has been playing a lot of World of Warcraft and we talk about how playing that game when you really don’t care about progression can be an extremely relaxing time. Bel talks a little bit about Prey, or the game where you bash things with a wrench just in case they are a mimic. Kodra has been doing some drafting of the new Amonkhet set in Magic the Gathering Online. Finally we get into a discussion about our recent foray into Heroes of the Storm, and Overwatch.

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WoW?! Alt Overload

May 3, 2017 by Grace

If you had told me at the start of April that I would get heavily invested in WoW again that month I would probably have laughed at you. For better or worse I’ve gotten back in the habit of messing around in Azeroth. It turns out that lifting the pressure of trying to keep up has done absolute wonders for my enjoyment of the game. I’ve still been logging onto my main to do occasional world quests and each new piece of the class quest when they are available, but otherwise it is alt time all the time.

After leveling my pally I got my warlock up next. Leveling as affliction was incredibly easy, which is good because when I swapped to demonology for the weapon quest I was totally lost. I guess it has been a while since I spent any quality time with demo. Much like beast mastery hunters they seem to have put the focus on quantity of pets instead of quality, and I am not a fan. Once I hit 110 I struggled a bit more with soloing than I did on the pally, but I’m still pretty functional. The artifact knowledge 25 token that I can buy with resources from my main makes a huge difference, as does the cheap nethershard gear from the broken shore.

My plan is to at least finish the original class hall quest line with everybody, and make progress on the class quests for the mounts as much as I can. I’m prioritizing that on my monk, and waiting to see if there are any bottlenecks in terms of difficulty or resource requirements that will make it a waste of time on alts. I’m hoping I can get at least the priest and druid ones done if they’re reasonable.

Running the same four leveling zones over and over is starting to get a bit tiresome, so I’m not sure how many more alts I’ll get to 110 before I get sick of it. I still have a lot hordies sitting at 100 and in need of love*. If I’m still motivated to play but need a break from leveling in the broken isles I can always either work on professions (hahahahahaha no…professions in Legion are awful) or level something I don’t have near 100 yet horde side. Raiding is still firmly off the table for now, because I am enjoying not worrying about the pressure of learning the fights and showing up on a schedule.

I’m still slightly baffled at how much I’m enjoying being back, but that’s the allure of comfort gaming – it works best when I don’t think about it too much.

*My current roster on my primary Horde server (yes I have even more alts at 100 elsewhere, please send help) looks like this:
Priest 110
Pally 110
Warlock 110
Druid 103 (have 110 Alliance-side)
Mage 100 (have 110 Alliance-side)
Hunter 100 (have 110 Alliance-side)
Rogue 100
Shaman 100
DK 100
DH 98
Warrior <10
Monk <10 (110 main Alliance-side)

What would you level next?