Playing Dress-Up

Quest for Bank Space

Be warned, I am really not sure how much this mornings post is actually going to be a proper topic… and how much it is just going to be show and tell.  Essentially last night was spent sifting through so many characters on so many different servers to unlock all of the appearances I seem to have available to me.  From there I started cleaning out the banks one at a time starting with Belghast my Warrior and for the time being my main.  This was shockingly hard work, and I ended up installing an addon to help give me some confidence to actually go through with getting rid of an item.  What I really wanted was a clear thumbs up or thumbs down on every single item much like Rift has stating that “you have this appearance”.  Caerdon Wardrobe works at least in a way that is most critical, but still I really wanted to see that message for every soul bound item “just to make sure”.  What the addon does do that is useful is for non-soulbound items it tells you that either you don’t have the appearance, or you have collected the appearance from another item.  As far as the soulbounds… I just took the plunge and accepted that over a decades worth of accumulated stuff really was in fact added to my account appearance collection.  This admittedly was a hard step, and one made no simpler by the fact that apparently Ark Inventory changed greatly…  and with every character I logged in I had to do a bit of remapping of some of the styles to get things to load correctly.  So I spent the night with Grace as moral support trudging through my bank…  while the rest of the AggroChat crew listened in while playing Final Fantasy XIV thinking we were absolutely insane.

Honestly Tam thought this was some sort of limited time event… but I somehow doubt that the rest of the crew takes appearance items nearly as serious as Grace and I do.  I mean Tam always has a spiffy glamour in FFXIV but he only has the one glamour and is not constantly rat-holing appearance items just in case someday he MIGHT want to use one for an outfit.  I have joked and said that wardrobes are the true end game… but I am being serious.  I have been more motivated in games when there is a cool piece of armor or a weapon on the line, than literally anything else you can dangle in front of me like a carrot.  As a result one of my favorite activities has been doing old raid content and collecting nifty appearance items to line my vaults for another day.  The problem being that quite literally on my Warrior I had seven inventory slots, zero bank slots, and zero void storage slots.  Every last corner of that storage was filled with weapons and armor that I under no circumstances would be willing to part with.  So a whole lot of my simply not playing the game… is because I had no room to keep accumulating items.  Last night had been a long time coming, and was a bit of a purge of my digital hording of stuff.  So in many ways selling all of those items was a liberating experience… but also one that terrified me at the thought that maybe just maybe the system would fuck up and I would end up losing everything.  Of note… I got every single fashionista achievement other than the shirt one from logging in my first character.  As the night went on the shirt achievement happened slowly while logging in a long list of alts that have otherwise been abandoned to the sands of time.

Show and Tell

Essentially the order of operations went a little something like this.  I first logged in every single character on my account…  which includes numerous characters on other servers that I have only ever played once or twice.  From there I focused in on chewing through my mains…  where I decided to sell off any gear that was not the current “best in bag” for my current spec.  I figure with the expansion only a few weeks away, I was going to be just fine being confined to a single spec per character for that moment.  I burned through my salvage crates and learned the appearances I did not already have… and mailed the extras off to Grace for her to sift through as well.  Of note she is doing the same thing, but I just realized that it might not work as well as I thought it would… given that I think you can only learn an appearance on a character of that armor type.  We will sort out the details of that later though.  Then I started tearing into the bank, offloading anything that did not have a nifty and unique use effect and selling it.  The only real speedbump here is the fact that a lot of the Naxxramas and Ulduar era class gear can’t be sold… so I will have to manually delete that at a later date.  The final thing I did before logging out of any character… was to set my talents and give my character an outfit for the occasion.  The rest of this post is ultimately going to be me posting pictures and talking about the outfits.

Belghast – Warrior

Playing Dress-Up

This is my “Ready for the Legion” outfit, rocking the Illidari tabard and shield, and using the red/fel green version of the Icecrown Deathknight look-a-like armor.  As to whether or not this will remain my main for the coming expansion has yet to be seen, but for the time being I think I look awesome.

Belgrave – Death Knight

Playing Dress-Up

Character number two on the list was my Deathknight, and also the point at which I learned that I can apparently now transmog legendary weapons?  I wanted to go with something fiery looking to match the Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros legendary weapon.  So I ended up landing on the black hand armor set from the garrison appearance vendor.  To go with it is one of the trading card game tabards, the Flame one to be specific.

Lodin – Hunter

Playing Dress-Up

When this game launched I tried to make Melee Hunter a thing, and wound up tanking a bunch of the instances with a combination of myself and my gorilla pet.  Now that Survival is the honest and true melee spec… of course I am going to freaking use it.  As a result I wanted to come up with an outfit that worked with the new PVP gear I picked up.  This is one of those situations where it “sorta matches” or at least well enough to make me happy in combat, however as I look at it now I am starting to pick it apart a bit.  I am going to be “happy enough” for the time being.

Exeter – Paladin

Playing Dress-Up

I tried a bunch of different things before finally settling on this outfit.  I wanted something purple for my paladin, but didn’t want to use the purple judgement set that I have often used in the past.  So I started with the purple tone deathknight icecrown set, and started shifting around bits until I was happy.  Once again I am using one of the card game tabards, this time the purple Tabard of the Arcane.  The end result is almost my favorite of the night… which is ultimately the next one.

Tallow – Shaman

Playing Dress-Up

When Cataclysm introduced the ability for Dwarves to be shaman… I immediately race changed my then Draenei Shaman to be a proper Wildhammer Dwarf.  Ironically I also then turned my Dwarf Paladin into a Draenei one… but that is a different story.  I have always been enthralled with the whole idea of the Wildhammer Clan, and for this transmog I wanted something that felt almost wildhammery but still looked nice and armored.  So I ended up shifting to using one of the Warlords leveling sets… that I just happened to have the perfect set of hammers to go with.  I then decided to go with the Fel Goggles to bring out the Fel coloring of the hammers.  This was the last one I did last night before crashing but is hands down my favorite so far.  So that was ultimately my night, and tonight I will hopefully do the rest of this server.

 

Setting Priorities

Return of the Deathknight

Setting Priorities

I’ve already talked at length about how we know without a doubt that Gladiator will be dying with the launch of Legion.  As a result this will greatly hamper my enjoyment as a Warrior since in truth I have never really liked Fury or Arms that much.  Sure I could go back to tanking full time… and that would be pretty awesome…  but my prospects for returning to a main tanking role are not entirely that great.  I mostly shifted to DPS so that if I missed a night… it wouldn’t be the end of the world.  Missing a night as one of the primary tanks however…  that is a big deal and causes great hardship on whatever raid you are part of.  That said…  everything I am hearing about Blood Deathknights is telling me that they are returning to the awesome feel they had before Warlords turned them into finger wigglers.  I mean there are lots of people that don’t get my complaints about the class… but having a lot of caster animation abilities in your standard rotation ended up making them feel less of a big sturdy melee class.  I mean I play Blood when I need to survive, especially while questing on Tanaan but I pretty much hate every moment of it.  The class has always been tied to that spec for me.. and even before it became the main tanking tree…  I was a blood Death Knight.

Granted there were times I flirted with Unholy for DPS, and Dual Wield Frost for Tanking…. but in each of those times…  Blood was still my other spec, the one I never got rid of because it just felt awesome.  With it returning to glory, I have to say I am kinda excited about dusting off Belgrave again.  The problem being as you can see above… he is wearing this horrible mishmash of whatever gear I happened to find along the way.  So one of my goals over the coming weeks is to get him as geared out as I can given the meager scraps he has access to through Hellfire LFR, Kazzak, and Tanaan jungle drops.  I figure whatever effort I put into gearing him now… will only serve to make him easier to level in Legion.  I am still not giving up hope completely on getting in Alpha, because there is honestly just a bunch of stuff that I want to test out.  However in the meantime there is a bunch I can do to improve his status in life, and some of that might even mean pugging a normal Hellfire raid at some point.  The thought of that scares the shit out of me, but if nothing else… I want to get to a point where I could survive tanking a Mythic Dungeon.

The Hunter

Setting Priorities

The second goal is to find some time and get Lodin my hunter through the Shipyard quest and unlock that part of the garrison.  There is an absolute certainty that when Legion comes out… I will be switching him to Survival hunter and never looking back.  My main character in Everquest was a cleric, but my primary alt… was a Ranger…  a dual wielding melee ranger.  So when World of Warcraft was released, I absolutely tried to make Hunter into a melee ranger class.  I’ve posted plenty of screen shots of me “tanking” early dungeons as a Hunter, and to be honest… when I found out that the class was never going to be viable as melee…  I lost interest in it as my main.  Other circumstances however lead me to raid as it in Vanilla… which by default turned it into my raid main.  However from the moment I had to abandon survival and hitting things with big two handed weapons…  the class just wasn’t for me.  Now I have played it off and on since then, and I really enjoy Beast Mastery and the aspect of taming interesting creatures to fight for me.  But the player fantasy of being a badass ranged character… has never been one that I shared.  In preparation for my eventual spear wielding days as Survival, I want to spend some time gearing up Lodin and getting him ready for the expansion.  Right now he has a pitiful smattering of gear out of gear from Highmaul, augmented with a handful of Baleful shipyard drops.  It is my hope to get him into fighting shape soon, or enough of a shape to be able to survive farming Tanaan.  Right now however…  he is sub 640…  which greatly limits my options.

The Dwarflock

Setting Priorities

The other character that has been calling my name lately is my Dwarf Warlock Belganon.  He is currently somewhere in Northrend in the mid 70s, and represents one of only two characters Alliance side that are sub level 90 and that do not already have a Garrison.  It is my hope to push him up, because of all of the finger wigglers… the one I am most likely to play is the Warlock.  I feel like the lessons that I learned playing an Arcanist/Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely make me a better warlock player.  I’ve always leaned heavily towards Demonology… because just like Beast Mastery…. they have the really awesome pets.  Especially now that all of the Warlock pets have been updated with higher quality Warlords/Legion era models, I think its time to revisit the class and see if it works for me.  I will never likely main a caster of any sort, but from time to time I have fun playing them.  If I can manage to get this guy up… that just leaves the Monk…  which I have admittedly struggled with.  In both cases I am kinda hoping to be able to dungeon most of my way to maximum level.