This is one of those mornings when I contemplate not writing anything. I am just not feeling it, and as a way of pushing through I tend to post a few photos of whatever I happen to be playing and chat about it for a bit. There are going to be days when you just aren’t feeling it and as far as I am concerned you have two options. The first option is of course to just say you are not going to be posting anything that day and come back the next day renewed. However more often than not I tend to take the second avenue which is to just start writing until a post magically appears before you. Granted with option two you are not always guaranteed that the post is going to be interesting or even worth reading.
So this morning I am going to talk once again about the ridiculous speed of leveling in World of Warcraft right now. For those that are unaware there is currently a +100% buff to experience gained and this seems to stack with all of the other sources of buffs like heirloom gear and the darkmoon “whee” buff. However in my case the only additional buff that I have are the heirloom slots which add up to I think an extra 65% experience gain or something like that. At the beginning of the night last night I was sitting at level 47 in Tanaris, which admittedly is ONLY the second zone I have been in on my Druid. At the end of the night I had wound my way over to Ungoro Crater and closed the evening at 54. The pace of leveling was greatly impacted by the amount of travel time between objectives, and because of that it felt like I was completely flying through the levels.
I’ve more or less been focused on pushing up as many of these Horde characters as I can until either the resolve of purpose or my desire to be playing World of Warcraft fades. At the same time I am still cycling through my 120 characters to see if there is any World Quest upgrades that I can snap up easily. This more or less is my ideal way to play WoW because I am focused on the casual stuff in the game, and don’t get so bogged down in my frustrations. I have a mountain of frustrations with World of Warcraft, because honestly you can’t play anything for almost sixteen years without finding the things you find maddening. The game is exceptionally good at giving you something amazing… but also sorta making one or two aspects of it horrible. I have long joked that Blizzard can’t give you anything that is just universally good for the players.
However saying that… this buff seems to be one of those occasions when it is just good and as a result I am soaking up as much of it as I can while it is still in place. I remember the crazy leveling elevator that was the pre-Legion launch events, and during that time I managed to get every single character Alliance side that I had up to 100. I would love if the buff stayed in place until the launch of Shadowlands, because then I might manage to get all of my Horde characters up to 120… and maybe even a few more Alliance for good measure. I am nowhere near close to unlocking the BFA Allied races for the Alliance and I would rally love to play through the game as a Dark Iron Dwarf of some sort. I just can’t seem to bring myself to grind out the reputation on my single 120 on that side of the house.
… and there you have it. I somehow willed a post into existence. I wanted to take a pass on actually writing something today but I knew that once I started typing I would begin to find a bit of a groove. At the very least I would find enough traction to begin and wrap up a short post. I hope you all have an excellent day and that you are happy and healthy out there in pandemia.
For years in World of Warcraft our character has been referred to in voice dialogs as “The Champion”. I believe this more or less is just an easy way of addressing the character without actually having to care about whatever your character’s actual name is. Actually you are being called by your name in the text messages, but I want to focus on this concept of the Champion for a moment. Essentially this to me is the Warcraft version of the Warrior of Light. We play this character who is constantly put upon by the leaders of our faction or whatever other groups we find ourselves wrapped up in. While the game doesn’t necessarily call this out, we are clearly more pivotal of a character than just being another soldier in the army. Which has lead me down a series of ideas for a World of Warcraft expansion I would like to see.
After a decade of being pushed into making decisions we had no control over, our Champion effectively leaves the service of whatever faction we were part of. In doing so we move to an island with a Tuskarr fishing village and some ancient ruins, with the goal of effectively “retiring”. You would go through some initial set up phase of making yourself a home on the island and maybe doing a few quests to help the locals. After a short period of time Magni would show up telling you about some grave new threat that he needs your help with. You begrudgingly offer to help, but you tell him that you are going to do it your way or not at all.
This begins a sequence of events where you effectively build your own faction, that take up residence on the island. First you would need to go recruit someone who can create a portal network, and I am thinking you would maybe have a series of options based on your past experiences in the game. For example if you were exalted with Suramar you could go on a mission to recruit Chief Telemancer Oculeth to come help you set up the network. My thought being that these missions would work a lot like the recruitment missions in various RPGs like Mass Effect, where in order to convince them you have to go do some other things for them.
After getting the teleportation network set up, you could start drawing upon your past experiences… recruiting folks from your Garrison, your Order Hall, or even individuals that you encountered during the War Campaign. Each bond you created would strengthen your island and open up new options. I am thinking for a system as detailed like this that the Island probably needs to exist an account level, which I realize would piss off the roleplayers… but the level of detail I am visualizing would be a major pain in the ass when it comes to trying to level the island up for alts. Maybe you could have a point based system and that the points themselves are shared at an account level, allowing each character to make their own specific choices.
Ultimately the sequence would involve you negotiating with both the Horde and the Alliance and deciding whether or not to include them in your plans. Essentially you are throwing off the shackles of red versus blue and instead creating your own faction that gets to be created in the way you see fit. The other thing that I would love to see is quest to recruit grandmasters from various tradeskills. In order to start the quest you would need to have mastered that tradeskill on one of your characters, and probably have to craft some difficult to make items to prove your worth. However upon recruiting them they set up shop on your island and start offering that tradeskill to all of your alts. So if you want to craft some armor for a lowbie, you could just walk up to the vendor and access blacksmithing or alchemy or any number of other trades. My idea being that the island as a whole would have a shared crafting inventory that you could just dump your resources into and offer it up to any of your characters.
At this point you will realize that I have not talked at all about the bad guy we would be facing… because in truth that is irrelevant. This would be setting up a new structure for the game going forward and shifting us away from dictating a specific faction narrative to players, and instead allowing them to choose their own path. Sure it would be way more complicated to create content for… but it would also feel immensely better for those of us who throw some serious side eye each time one of our faction leaders makes horrible decisions for us and we have no real say in what is going on narratively. I don’t love the Night Elves… but I would have never willingly taken part in the burning of Teldrassil for example. I also would have told Genn to go fuck himself when he goes on an anti-horde rant as an Alliance player.
I realize I will never see content like this in World of Warcraft, but man it would be awesome if we did. The game needs to evolve past the simplistic us versus them story-line. The game feels best when we are all allied against something stronger than ourselves be that the Scourge, The Legion or the Old Gods. Shifting the story to be about the evolution of what started out as your vacation home, to turning into a fledgling island nation… would be an interesting story to experience. I also have some ideas about the mysterious ruins on the island serving as effectively a Diablo style endless dungeon where the progression of the island unlocks new areas of the dungeon to explore and with it more interesting loot available. The island could even have a shared Guild Hall available that would show up on the islands of everyone in a specific guild and zoning into it would take you to a shared instance for just your guildies. There are so many possibilities, but mostly I just want to walk away from the mistake that was Battle for Azeroth and forcing a specific PVP story down our throats.
Good morning everyone. I need to order a new keyboard because the one I have been typing on randomly seems to repeat characters. So if you ever see a word with one too many of a specific letter I am going to blame it on this phenomena. This week in Blapril is “Get to Know You” week, but I am not really sure what I can tell you that I have not already told you in the other 2312 posts on this blog. I’ve always tried to be open with my readers and share large swaths of my life. There are of course a few edits here and there to hide the identities of the innocent, but the core truth is always there. Anything prior to about 2013 makes me cringe massively when I have attempted to re-read it because I think it was written by a very different version of me.
I will tell you one thing I have been kicking around in my head is whether or not we should do an actual Blaugust this year in addition to Blapril or not. I think there are positives and negatives to it in both ways. That might be a little too much blogging and togetherness in one year, and at least for the folks who are actively participating in Blapril it might feel a little weird to turn around and do it again in another four months. All of that said who knows if we will be getting back to normal by August or not. I will say five weeks into isolation mode, a new sort of normal is starting to settle in and I am not entirely certain if I like it or not.
The only analogy I have for what I am feeling is that I go through something when my wife has a work trip. I go through a day or two of enhanced freedom mode, where I order pizza exactly the way I want to and do other minor random acts of defiance… before I am mostly just wanting her back because I am not sleeping right without another body beside me in the bed. The first few weeks of remote work were really fun… until it set in that this is now the reality rather than the escape from it. There are a lot of days where I would much rather drive into the office and be present there, than work remotely. Like I have said before I have a brand new respect for folks who have been doing this for years. All of that said I am probably way better suited to deal with this than a lot of folks given how generally solitary I tend to be by nature.
On the gaming front I hit 120 with my Hunter and have gotten his item level up to 380ish. The hardest part are the weapons and the trinkets, and I am largely just gearing through soaking up free world quest gear. On the 8th I was sitting in my 70s and on Sunday night I dinged 120. I am not sure how many total hours it took me but it absolutely felt faster than it has any right to be. Legion and Battle For Azeroth were the slowest part, largely because a lot of the quests that you end up doing are more complicated and simply take more time. I am finding that I am really enjoying the Beast Mastery Hunter, and I am contemplating doing further nonsense and trying to farm up missing set pieces from a few Hunter sets.
As far as my next victim goes… I decided to start pushing up my fresh Zandalari Druid. The entire goal here is not necessarily to gear out a single character, but to abuse the fact that leveling is insanely fast right now to build out my stable of horde characters. I spent a decade exclusively playing Alliance characters, so it makes sense that I have one of everything over there above the level of 100. On the Horde side however I have a bunch of “youngins” that my goal is to get several up to the cap before this buff runs out. I spent the better part of last night running around the Barrens doing quests that I have not done in quite some time.
I have to say it is hard to explain how much better the post Cataclysm version of the Barrens is than the World of Warcraft Classic version. This really is driven home by the fact that I spent so much time leveling in it last August during the crush of Classic. The flow of the quests just works so much better and there seems to be much less randomly ping ponging from various corners of the map back to the Crossroads. What is also making this exceptionally fun are the really cool dinosaur druid forms. I am not sure exactly what I am when I am in “cat form” but it looks badass and I am all there for it. I also randomly decided to make my Druid my Alchemist, so I need to spend some time working on that at some point.
I am having a lot of fun leveling random things in World of Warcraft, which is about the level of engagement that I need right now.
Over the extended weekend I played an excessive amount of World of Warcraft. Namely I leveled my Tauren Hunter from 70 to 120… which sounds more impressive than it actually is. There were a lot of those levels that took me only a few minutes and in most cases I never managed to finish the starter zone of any expansion thanks to the bonus currently in place. I’ve been working on creating a stable of horde characters similar to those I have on the Alliance side after a decade and some change of playing there primarily. I now feel significantly more comfortable playing Horde than I do Alliance and as a result I am feeling the absence of that army of alts and have set it into my mind to fix that.
Last week I set forth to tame Arcturis the Spirit Bear and managed to get him on my first attempt. He was just sitting there waiting on me to tame him, and over the course of the weekend I realized something. I was essentially playing with the perfect avatar of Ashgar, who tends to personify with mystical shape changing bears. As a result I thought it would be fun to name my pet Ashgar, and weirdly the act of doing so made me care way more about never letting him die. Weirdly it also made it feel like he suddenly got better at AOE tanking. I know this is all in my head, but it did send me down a rabbit trail of wanting to name pets after my friends.
In my travels trying to find some of the other Spirit Animals, I happened across King Krush… which is probably as close to Godzilla as you get in World of Warcraft. It is an irradiated looking green devilsaur, and since this is also probably as close as you get to a proper Kaiju that is tameable… this personifies my friend Grace. Also I really just like the concept of a giant Devilsaur being named Grace. I just wish it had kept the size of when I originally tamed it, because that would be even more perfect given how tall her Roegadame towers over me in FFXIV.
This is a bit of cheating because I have had this own in my stable for quite a while. I tamed it because it reminded me of the Great Owl from Secret of Nymn. Pulling it back out of the stable made me think of how much I have always personified Thalen as the wise Owl of our group. He was our mastery of strategy back in the Duranub raiding days, and I’ve always considered him to be a source of sage advice. He also never really gets rattled and approaches most situations with a calm and rational head. So it seemed deeply fitting to name this great owl after him.
Kodra required a bit of research, because he is known for the garish color schemes of his characters. In fact he is the reason why we have the Purple/Pink and bright Green color scheme that we do for AggroChat. I set forth searching through pet models that were available on Petopia and landed upon this particular basilisk that is green with purplish pink highlights. So I flew over to Zul’drak and tamed one specifically for the honor of Kodra. The thing about basilisks is that they are tough as nails and make really good protectors… which are also traits that I would align with Kodra as well. Anyone who used to chat-roulette to have political conversations for fun, can take on just about anything in the world.
I will admit, Tam was really hard because there are so many aspects of him that I have gotten to know over the years. However in World of Warcraft terms I will always think about his rogue, and the one that got away. During the heyday of the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, Tam set forth to questing and farming his ass off chasing the goal of being the first person to actually open the gates on our server. I remember contributing a little bit to the cause and going out to Silithis a few times to farm with him, namely because I also needed bits for resist gear. He worked his ass off and the grind broke him, an broke his enjoyment of the game… especially since we ultimately were about five hours too late in pushing across the finish line. However in my eyes, he will always be the Scarab Lord and since he truly is good as gold to every single one of his friends… I had to track down a Golden Scarab Beetle and name it Tamrielo.
Ammo was a situation of trying to figure out which of the many options I would go with. If you know her even a little bit you know she is a tried and true cat person, so without a doubt I had to choose that family. Other things you should know about Ammo is that she is an amazing artist and responsible for most of the artwork associated with Aggronaut and AggroChat both. However there is also a certain low key shyness that she has anytime someone mentions how damned good she is. So in my search for the perfect cat I with with this gorgeous Indigo Purple mana saber… that also spends most of its time stealthed and trying to blend in quietly to the world. In my head at least this fit my good friend Ammo perfectly and hopefully you will all agree.
While I didn’t set forth on this mission for the purpose of doing something for the anniversary of AggroChat, that also sorta just happened along the way. Today marks the release of our very first show titled “Finding the Format” back in 2014. The show is super cringey to listen to these days, but as we near our 300th episode I find it staggering just how long we have kept this ball afloat. It is a thing that has sorta morphed and changed as we have. I am super thankful to have this awesome group of individuals to call my friends, and I also want to thank all of the people who have guested on the show over the years. Here is a quick rundown of the various folks who have joined us:
Dallian
Inky
Nephsys
PizzaMaid
Rae
Shiana
Vexa
Warenwolf
Weiward
Now Dallian and Rae get special shout outs since they were involved an awful lot in the early days of AggroChat. Dallian was sorta the pinch hitter for a long time and was that guest I kept snagging any time it looked like we were going to be short some folks. Waren, Shiana and Neph are semi regular extras because they may or may not be hanging out on the voice chat server we record on and it feels real bad to lock them out of the podcast channel. We have a big village of people that make up the extended AggroChat family, and I am thankful to have all of them in my life. Who would have thought that six years later we would still be doing this thing.
