Hi Friends. I am struggling a bit this morning to cobble together something resembling a post. I did not run mythics last night quite the way I would have hoped. I contemplated joining a party in the group finder, but was uncertain that I could handle that level of frustration. Ultimately I struggled finding a healer and in the “Bel School of Group Building” the first rule of business is to lock down a tank and a healer. I had the tank since I was willing to do that… but at every turn I was missing a healer. Ultimately I need to make more hordefriends that are mythicable healbutts that are not Grace.
We ultimately ended up running a heroic with the purpose of trying to get Kelion and Merrymoo some gear, but I am not sure if any of that actually happened. I know Moo walked away with a few pieces but I don’t think Kel managed to get anything other than a frustrating evening. I pinged a few friends that were playing classes that could heal, but much like me they had wisely chosen other paths. Whenever Grace manages to get to dungeon level I am going to devote myself to grinding for gear until we can once again do really fun things together. However in the meantime I need to start adding up a list of hordefriend healbutts that I can build groups around.
Other than that I spent some more time on my Demon Hunter and pushed further into the Maldraxxus storyline. Originally I had planned on just having a chill evening but really I should be helping out more in the guild to help gear people. I pugged my face off until I got Retribution geared, but that is an unpleasant proposal for most folks. I know my friend Mor has also been pugging his face off so at some point we should join forces so at least we won’t be alone in our madness. I am looking forward to reset because it should mean some additional things unlock giving me more stuff to do. The gating has been pretty extreme, but it also has meant that I was not done with the expansion in a single week.
Unfortunately there are also a lot of things that are just downright frustrating. One of these mornings I am ultimately going to end up doing a giant “airing of grievances” post. I mean Festivus is just around the corner so I might save it for then. This is one of if not “the” least polished World of Warcraft expansion, and in many ways it feels unfinished. However I will save all of that for another day. If you are hordefriend healbutts, especially if you are mythicable… let me know so we can be friends. Even if you are not mythicable I am also amicable to helping you get there.
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Morning Friends! This is the weekend that Christmas finally came the rest of the way to our house. If you have watched any of the Catfriend Television channel, you will have been able to see that it arrived at our front door some time ago. However a combination of laziness and the desire to progress in Shadowlands caused me to delay a bit in the more tedious task of assembling the indoor decorations. We have a tiny RGB tree on top of our entertainment center, because that is a place that the cats can’t reach. We’ve gotten three Christmas cards so far so I am starting the menagerie on the side and working left to right. Various ornaments that we have been given that the tree can’t support on its own are sorta around the tree skirt.
As far as gaming goes I have been spending my time in Shadowlands chasing the unknown goal of the item level required for raiding. As it stands right now, even though the time slot is not stellar for me… I am planning on joining in the madness with my guild Facepull and setting forth into Castle Nathria on the opening week. Currently I am item level 170 in my tanking gear and 171 in my DPS gear… with the real sticking point slots being the lack of a decent shield and the lack of a heroic or better belt. The shield could be remedied quickly with an outlay of gold, and the price of those is in the reasonable range right now. The belt however… is just going to require me grinding my face at either heroics or mythics a bit longer.
Since the last time we talked, I did manage to finally get a serviceable two handed weapon from a heroic. Sadly it was the worst possible one, but for now I am living with it. Haste is good but versatility is the worst possible itemization for pretty much any item. If we still had the wonderful system called Reforging in the game, this would have been corrected to Crit the moment it dropped. However I said I needed a weapon and I got a weapon, so for at least this very moment I am satisfied and in theory if I keep doing mythics and start into the raid I might be able to correct that soon from one of those locations. The one BOE weapon that would be viable is going for upwards of 500k now which is so far out of the range of reasonable that I don’t even want to think about it.
Last night I tanked my first two dungeons of the expansion… and they were mythics. I have mostly been dpsing as a Ret, so that all of the heroic grinding I have done has been in that spec and towards that goal. However if I was running a dungeon that didn’t drop a two handed weapon, I would flip it over to protection spec for the loot rewards and as a result I had managed to pick up a solid weapon. Still had yet to see a shield but I did have at least a 155 since I do all of my world quests as a tank. All in all I think it went pretty well and we managed to complete De Other Side and Sanguine Depths. The last was a bit annoying on that final boss gauntlet but we managed. I felt fairly squishy but I figure that will stop being the case once I get some more gear.
Other than that I have unlocked the final of my Abominations from the Factory, and I can now ride around on the shoulders of Flytrap which is mostly a novelty at this point. The one that I seem to keep using the most is Roseboil which offers me a heal. I had kinda hoped that Flytrap which costs more to create would be a combo of multiple different abominations, but alas that was not the case. I would never not use this one if Abominations were usable in the Maw because it would give me a functional mount down there.
Lastly I have been working on my Demon Hunter, and that was my original intent for last night until Mythic groups started forming and they needed a second tank. I just finished Bastion and am starting Maldraxxus. I think the character that I am going to start next is my hunter and I am probably going to use him as a test of the Threads of Fate system to see how I like that for leveling purposes. It seems sorta like doing adventure mode from Diablo 3, and to be honest… that might be a fairly relaxing option. Just log in each day on that alt and gobble up the World Quests and then log back out and do something else.
All told I am still enjoying myself in this expansion and that might be a remnant of the forced gating. I have not been allowed to run out of content because they are feeding it to us very slowly. I still miss systems that would come in really handy like the Flight Whistle and Reforging… but for now I am having fun.
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Featuring:Â Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra and Tamrielo
Tonight a sequence of scheduling conflicts happened and we wound up with what felt like a fairly classic show given we were down to the cast members from the early years of this podcast. We start the show with a bit of a micro topic as Bel talks about the nonsense he is doing called Catfriend Television where he uploads security camera footage of the neighborhood cats to youtube. From there we talk about the severe drought of PlayStation 5 units, the battle with the scalpers and Tam maybe finally joining the ranks of those who managed to snag one. Bel talks about the problem happening right now with the Shadowlands expansion in WoW with folks mass abandoning heroics because they didn’t get the thing they were chasing to drop. Finally we talk a bit about Lancer a pen and paper RPG that Ashgar has wanted to play for quite some time and finally managed to run a game.
Well friends… my evenings have now apparently become the time when I run a bunch of random heroics hoping for rewards. I am still spending my time mostly in Retribution, since if I do manage to raid with my Facepull family… I will likely be doing so as a DPS. As I talked about yesterday my hit and miss schedule for that sort of thing is not exactly the material fitting a tank anymore. The hard truth is that I have not actually raided legitimately since the very beginning of Legion. We fully cleared The Emerald Nightmare, Trial of Valor and started on The Nighthold before I buggered off and wandered away from the game. The be truthful a similar story happened during Warlords with me sticking around until we had defeated Blackhand and then never returning to raiding that expansion. Basically the last time I was a dedicated raider was Wrath of the Lich King.
One of the big challenges that I have encountered is trying to find a reasonable DPS weapon. Thankfully yesterday there was a world quest up that rewarded a 158 strength two handed mace, which was a sizable upgrade over the 146 weapon I had been using. There are sadly only three two handers that drop in the heroic dungeons and as a result I have been focused on trying to at least make one attempt at Necrotic Wake, De Other Side and Mists of Tirna Scithe. Some of them like Tirna Scithe I often queue more than one time a night given that something curious happens in that dungeon. The axe drops off the first boss… and folks seem to be farming something specific off that one encounter because we almost always lose our tank and healer immediately following that fight.
Of course there is also the BOE epic sword that is a world drop that would be completely lovely. However I missed out on the exploit-a-thon of the first few days where BOE epics were dropping like candy and that particular one seems to be going for upwards of 400k. Very much not in the cards which leaves either farming one up from Heroic/Mythic or doing something that I have been really wanting to avoid doing because it is a colossal pain in the ass.
In the Theater of Pain arena in Maldraxxus there is a sword sticking out of the ground with an arm attached to it. When you click on the weapon it informs you that you are not strong enough to pull it out of the ground. There is a way to do this but it involves a specific set of circumstances and perfect timing. Essentially it involves the following:
You have to go to a region of Eastern Maldraxxus and collect 4 stacks of a buff from a specific mushroom that respawns slowly… which means it is impossible if there are multiple people attempting to do this thing at the same time. Side note this slows you by 80%… and only lasts 2 minutes
You then need to get back to the Arena of the Theater of Pain and consume the following potions giving you 25 seconds to click the item in the ground.
Basically I have gathered up all of the necessary items including a Teleport Scroll to the Theater of Pain which should allow me to complete the quest. Now I just have to wait for the world quest to spawn again and hopefully be during a time when the server isn’t super active so I have a shot in hell of actually getting the 4 mushrooms I need. In the meantime however… I am going to keep farming for a 171 Two Hander out of Heroics because that seems more likely.
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