burning crusade – AggroChat

Bad Engineer

September 19, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a weekend in many ways about finishing things that I left unresolved for years. Over the course of the weekend I managed to get in several heroic runs of Legion content. During Vault of the Wardens… we wiped a lot. So much so that by the end of the run we were all showing yellow on our paper doll armor portraits. It was around this time that I saw some text that I dread “Does anyone have a Jeeves?”. This was quickly followed up by a statement from my friend Grace, “Hey Bel, You are an Engineer right?”. To which I have to hang my head in shame every time this conversation comes up, because I am a failure as an engineer. The biggest problem that I have had is the fact that my warrior is the completely screwball combination of Enchanter and Engineer. Its like I chose the two worst things to level and slapped them on the same character. The truth is… I used to be the even stranger profession for a warrior of tailor. When I created this character I had no bag makers, so I decided to remedy that problem. Then during Burning Crusade I could not get a helmet to drop period. I went through all of Tier 5 and almost all of Tier 6 still wearing my Tier 4 helmet. Over the course of a weekend I decided to fix that, dropped tailoring, and power leveled my engineer from zero to the then level cap… and crafted myself a t6 equivalent helm. The very next week… a helm dropped for me.

From that point onwards I have been a shitty engineer, always lagging behind and never quite having all of the toys that I should for my profession. During Wrath of the Lich King I swapped mains and instead focused on Belgrave my Deathknight. So while I farmed the Jeeves pattern, I never actually got around to gathering the materials to craft it, which even at that time were pretty insane. This weekend during the AggroChat Podcast, I decided to remedy the failure and set forth to farm all of the materials to craft my Jeeves. The real credit for this process goes to the wowhead user Ketho for posting a breakout of the materials which made me realize this was actually doable. So during the podcast I farmed the following list of items…

6 – Copper Ore
32 – Thorium Ore
32 – Fel Iron Ore
32 – Adamantite Ore
4 – Khorium Ore
60 – Cobalt Ore
80 – Saronite Ore
48 – Titanium Ore
2 – Essense of Fire
2 – Primal Fire
8 – Eternal Fire
8 – Eternal Earth
8 – Eternal Shadow
2 – King’s Amber

Looking at the list now it seems even more like madness but I set forth to gather it up while we talked on the podcast. The first goal was Thorium ore, which I set forth to farming in Winterspring which I could get to easy enough through Hyjal. Remember I am not a miner on my actual engineer so instead for this job I grabbed Tallow my Jewelcrafting/Mining Shaman. This part went super quickly, and I decided to drop by Darkshore to pick up a few copper nodes to be done with the “Vanilla” section of the list. From there I took the Stormwind Mage’s Guild port to Hellfire Peninsula and farmed anything I happened across on my way to Zangarmarsh. I remember spending hours running/flying circles around Zangarmarsh farming Fel Iron and Adamantite… so I focused on this zone until I neared enough Fel Iron. From there I took the exit from Zangar to Nagrand and flew a path around that zone until I finally gathered the Adamantite I needed. I lucked out and found just enough Khorium while farming so I moved on to Northrend, where I flew circles around Grizzly Hills until I had gathered up enough Cobalt. Similarly to Zangarmarsh, I spent most of my Wrath farming time in Sholazar Basin so I quickly gathered up the requisite amount of Saronite I needed there. Lastly for Northrend was flying a bunch of circles around Icecrown trying to find Titanium. Here is the point where I cheat a little and tell you all that I had a handful of bars sitting in the bank left over from something so I didn’t really need that much to continue onwards.

The challenge was getting enough elemental stuff to create the Eternals and the Primals. Before leaving Nagrand I slaughtered a bunch of fire elementals at the elemental plateau which gave me enough to create the two primal fires. While mining I got more than enough Earth and Shadow, which left me in a similar position needing fire. I made an attempt at Wintergrasp but Horde was currently holding it, which means the elementals there have a greatly reduced drop rate. This is the point at which I went to the wowhead and found that apparently there is a lesser known farm spot in Storm Peaks. There is a cave full of mobs called Wailing Winds that are nearly instant respawn and have a pretty decent drop rate for the fire. So after about fifteen minutes of killing them I managed to gather up the mats to do my Eternal Fire. This left one last component… the King’s Amber which I initially thought I would simply buy off the auction house. We had none available, and after looking at how I might actually get my hands on some… it seemed like it was going to be the part of this equation that killed me. I instead restored to trying to transmute them… which required 2 Autumn’s Glow that caused me to once again fly some more around Sholazar Basin and this time prospect it hoping for the gem I needed. I transferred the materials to my alchemist… and then was disappointed that apparently old world transmutes still incur the once a day timer.

It was around this time when Thalen told me he would be re-upping his account and was certain that he probably had the needed gem sitting in a bank somewhere. We then played this game… of him trying to remember who was his jewelcrafter. Thalen has been gone from World of Warcraft since about halfway through Pandaria, meaning he has slept several times since then. When he finally landed on the right character, he didn’t have the gem… but instead said he could swap to his alchemist and do a transmute. So we played a similar game of trying to figure out which character was his alchemist. Finally we got the mats and I mailed everything to Belghast to start crafting the sub components. This is the point at which I realized that I apparently NEVER picked up the recipe for the original Repair Bot on this character from Blackrock Depths. Prior to Belghast I had another engineer, and I knew that I had grabbed it on that character, but I guess mentally I transposed that event to happening on my current engineer. I hopped on a mount and flew over to Blackrock Depths, ran in quickly… got the pattern and returned once more to the Dwarven Quarter in Stormwind where I finally combined everything into my shiny new Jeeves. I had enough mats left over to craft a Moll-E as well. It was a whirlwind of farming but during the three hours or so associated with the podcast and me doing post podcast editing I am now less of an engineering failure.

Imaginary Band

August 25, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday a good friend of mine from my Wrath raiding days, showed back up in my life suddenly. Now this isn’t exactly a strange occurrence because folks know that I tend to be the ring leader of a network of gamers. I am the one that tends to be good at maintaining connections with folks regardless of what game we happen to be playing. So an attempt to get in touch with me, generally also means an attempt to get back in touch with a gaming core of friends. The strange part of this whole experience however is when a few years pass between speaking. In this case, it seems like every few years our paths cross, the challenge being that large swaths of time pass between and my memory is often times spotty at best. Thankfully most people are super forgiving about me remembering the super granular details… and I seem to be relatively good at the large picture as a whole. The thing with the impending release of Legion next week is that this has been happening an awful lot in my life. Running around and doing Events, means that I have casually bumped into a lot of folks from my past… some of which I was interested in rekindling friendship… and others not so much. We talked about the mixed bag that playing World of Warcraft since launch is on the podcast this weekend. There are friends that I adored, and would still do damned near anything to help… and then there were folks who were super toxic influences and lead to a lot of the anxiety ridden struggles I had as a raid leader. Coming back to this game… and the server I have played on since the beginning of it all… means I am ultimately going to confront a good deal of both.

I remember thinking yesterday how cool it would be to “get the band back together” because I miss raiding with some of these people. The key word being “some”, because ultimately I don’t really want the band back together at all. I want a revised image in my head of the band. I want this amalgam of a bunch of different raid teams, from a bunch of different eras of the game. I want to create the “All-Star Team” from my memory, but the thing is… my All-Star team is not really the best players. I found out my ideals for who I wanted to play with were vastly different than that of my friends during Cataclysm. We built what we supposed to be the “best” team to raid with, for 10 man… but my best was completely different than their best. Ultimately when creating my team I would want to play with the folks I had the most fun with… some of them were also the absolute worst at standing in fire. They were fun to be around and invigorated my enjoyment of the game, and I didn’t give a damn if we had to take forever trying to learn this fight or another because their presence made me happy. It is moments like these that I realize I play a vastly different game than most people do. I play a game made up of the people sitting behind the screen at their keyboard, hanging out with me on a nightly basis… and not a game of abilities and number crunching. At the end of the day for me at least, playing for victories is ultimately a hollow experience unless I did so with the people I enjoy playing with the most.

In a lot of ways this is what makes the Final Fantasy XIV raid group so special is that it is a bit of an amalgam of the two. These are all people that I greatly enjoy playing with, but at the end of the day are also extremely good at the game. Hell there are so many nights I feel like I am the “bad” that is being carried to victory. While I largely said I would swear off raiding in Legion… there is a big part of me that wishes he could form this same sort of group in World of Warcraft. I want raiding to be a focus on having fun with friends and doing something together that we can’t necessarily do apart. By the same token though, I don’t want to be concerned with damage meters, or reviewing the logs after the raid. I don’t want to care if someone stood in the fire too long… or if we could do something more efficiently. I want to just have a night hanging out with friends, talking on voice chat and killing bosses… hopefully getting some sweet loot in the process. The problem being that I don’t think World of Warcraft is that game, or at least its raid game… isn’t that game. Final Fantasy XIV I can go into a fight not knowing anything about it… and learn everything I know from a series of attempts because it messages the mechanics extremely well. World of Warcraft, I realistically need to read the dungeon guide and some third party sites to fully understand the mechanics of the fight and what I am supposed to be doing to counter them. That is a huge difference, because one I can discover the fight with friends… and the other feels like homework.

Legion launches next week and I really don’t know what it has planned for me yet. I am enjoying the game, and I am enjoying making my own way through it. I am not sure if raiding will be part of that greater picture, but in the end I am going to try going with the flow. So many times I have had a raid that I knew I was gearing for, when an expansion launched. As a result I felt like I needed to push through the content to get raid ready within a weeks time. This time around… I am more focused on which character I am going to level first and which zone I am going to start in. I have never gone into an expansion before with a complete set of characters, and ultimately liking something about each and every one of them. If enough of these old familiar faces stick around… then I think I might want to try my hand at raiding again. I am not super concerned with doing much more than 10 player/flex raiding if I do however. Another thing that I would really like to do is set up a night to work on older raid achievements and get folks some awesome mounts. I know there are several tiers where I am one or two achievements away from my own mounts. The problem being that there just are not enough nights in the week to try and schedule things on, and continue to play other games. Whatever the case I am trying my best to go into the Legion expansion with an open mind, and not really focused too tightly on what I am going to do… and when I am going to do it. This is undiscovered territory for me, and it is going to be interesting to see what comes of it.

Sleepy Raiding

December 9, 2015 by Belghast

Bleary Eyed

For whatever reason this week has been significantly more difficult than most. I’ve been struggling with maintaining consciousness, and by that I mean it feels like I have just been dragging my way along through slowly drying concrete. I am not sure if this is still a side effect of letting me get completely out of my sleep schedule over the Thanksgiving break… or instead just that I slept horribly on Sunday night. It might also be that I seem to be fighting some cold like crap that just doesn’t seem to want to let go of me. Whatever the case, I’ve been tired enough to sleep at 8pm most nights, and generally finally give into its sirens call around 10pm. Since getting the new Kindle I end up reading for a bit until my eyes are too tired to keep propped open, and then finally I sleep. From everything I can tell I am sleeping extremely soundly because I when I finally wake up it feels like I’ve slept the entire night through. The only problem is I have been waking up 20-30 minutes ahead of the alarm clock. I know I should just get on up… but its cold out in the real world and the bed is so comfy.

I keep thinking at some point I will have repaid whatever sleep debt I have built up, but then again… I’ve never slept the supposedly needed 8 hours a night. Maybe I have decades worth of lost sleep waiting to be repaid and it is finally catching up with me. Whatever the case, I am struggling… which means that when I am actually online I tend to be wandering around aimlessly. Over the last several nights I have missed message after message in game by friends, and I always feel horrible when it happens. Sometimes it is simply the scroll of combat, other times I am alt tabbed out looking at something else. In any case right now in this current daze I am struggling to keep moving forward, let alone be functional when it comes to interacting with others. I seriously feel like I could take the day off… and sleep literally all day right now. Unfortunately I am not sure if that would do me a world of good… or simply make this whole situation worse.

Heading for Burnout

Last night one of my friends commented that I was probably heading for a burnout by trying to raid on both Horde and Alliance… and there is at least part of me that absolutely believes her. While I intend on making the Wednesday night raid tonight, I know at some point there is going to be a place where I simply cannot make both raids each week. In truth I have been feeling the desire and need to go off and level something new, instead of doing nothing but level capped content. Right now however it seems like all I have time for is to attempt running LFR on Belghast and Belgrace… and that simply doesn’t leave much time left for the rest of the activities. At least on Belghast I managed to pick up a 695 warforged baleful weapon, which gives me something decent to move forward with. On the cow I have a 690 two hander that has been valor upgraded twice, so once again a completely viable weapon. There are technically slots where LFR gear would potentially be an upgrade, but I am starting to question the logic of running it just for those handful of potential upgrades. I need to run Highmaul on the Cow for abbrogator stones, and Hellfire on Belghast for tomes… but past that I think I am going to cut out the rest of the LFR unless I am literally gearing a new character.

Looking for Raid is cool in the aspect of being on demand raiding with zero commitment. The problem being… it always feels like slamming your face against a wall even when it goes smoothly. Highmaul was really fun to LFR because it went so quickly, and you could pretty much ignore all of the mechanics. Hellfire however… the bosses just feel like drudgery when doing it with a group of randoms. Don’t get me wrong I love the feel of that place when I am running with players that are going to do the things they need to do to make it through the fights. But both Hellfire and Blackrock are both “real enough” to make them frustrating when folks are attempting to faceroll them. I seriously have yet to get a group that has a shot in hell of doing Archimonde. Generally speaking I get grouped into a raid that has already failed a few times… as a replacement, and we then wipe five or six times… and ultimately end up leaving because over half the raid abandons ship. I really think that the perfect LFR fight takes no longer than five minutes to kill, because that seems to be the absolute upperbound of PUG attention.

Timewalking

I noticed this morning that the Burning Crusade era Timewalking event has started, and I have to say… I am kinda amped. Granted I would have rather they simply made Timewalking a permanent part of the game, but I left the game before it actually went in. So I am hoping to be able to do several of the dungeons to get the feel of how they work. I have a whole bunch of nostalgia about the Burning Crusade dungeon running experience, and the thought of getting modern versions of the items I used to love… seems pretty awesome. Then again at the 675 ilevel cap… the items will pretty much just go in the transmog bin. I am not sure which side of the fence I will focus on, but whatever the case I just want to see some of the dungeons. Similarly I really want to experience the Mythic dungeon content, but in order to do that I really want to find a group to go in with. That does not seem like something that would be fun in any fashion to pug. Mostly… I am hoping I get over whatever thing I am going through, and can remain awake enough to function at a high level in content. Today already seems like a pretty sleepy day… so I am not holding out much hope. I guess my general answer is to feed myself enough caffeine until I begin to function appropriately.

Tinfoil Hats and Legion

November 21, 2015 by Belghast

Nostalgia is Strong

Once again this week I have not really consumed much media, so I don’t have enough material to really do one of my normal Saturday morning columns. Additionally I am still mired in this nostalgic bomb that is World of Warcraft Legion information. I’ve still managed to stay “clean” but I know at this point it is only a matter of time before I renew my World of Warcraft account, and at least take a “taste”. As quietly as Alt seemed to think, yesterday information about the Legion Beta client started trickling out on the data mining sites, and I have to say there is a bunch of interesting information. So this morning I thought I would talk a bit about some of the theories I have running around in my brain. Firstly there seems to be a much more heavy Vrykul theme than I originally thought. I realize that one of the islands we will be visiting is essentially run by the Vrykul, and since they have more or less lost their connection to the Lich King, I am assuming we will not longer have the Valkyr resurrecting them and creating undead versions.

Much of the armor we have seen datamined has that same feel, which only serves to damage my calm all the more. This expansion is starting to seem like an amalgam of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King which pretty much represent the pinnacle of my enjoyment of the game. I feel like this is absolutely what they had intended, and then when you combine actually letting us venture into the Nightmare… they are essentially throwing everything at the screen and hoping that we love whatever it is that they come up with. There are so many warning klaxons going off in my head telling me that the end result will never live up to the hype. The problem is there is a hyper kid in my head on a sugar rush telling me how awesome it COULD be… and is slowly winning out. Basically the adult in me is losing and I am finding myself paying closer and closer attention to Legion beta information. More than anything I am just hoping they give me a Death Knight that is fun to play again.

King Anduin

I’ve said before that in the Legion trailer, I thought we would be witnessing the death of Varian Wrynn because for a few moments… you think exactly that is going to happen. That is not in fact how the trailer ends up… but as I was preparing for it… it started me thinking that I believe over the last several expansions Blizzard has been preparing us for this. Bit by bit they have been grooming Anduin to take the throne, and in the datamined information we can see that once again he is getting a significant upgrade in model. Similarly we see Anduin not Varian as one of the avatars we the players get to play. I think it is pretty much an inevitability that something will happen to Varian and cause Anduin to take the throne, bringing with him a much more three dimensional and reasoned character than that of his father. I like Varian just fine… but he was always sold to us as “our” Thrall, but that promise has never really materialized.

The game as a whole is still to some extent dominated by the evolution of “Green Jesus”. Maybe this expansion will be different, and maybe this expansion we will see Varian as something more than a dude with two badass swords and a penchant for war. That has always been the problem with playing Alliance, it never felt like we had a really strong focus to rally around. The horde have such a strong identity, and that reverberates with the players that love that faction. The alliance on the other hand, has no shared struggle… no central driving focus that they can rally behind. We have a bunch of really interesting secondary characters, consistently rallied behind a significantly less interesting central character. I had hoped that we would exit out of Warlords with Yrel, but all signs seemed to point to her staying on Draenor. Then we have awesome characters like Genn Greymane that never actually got the promise of being a true and proper leader with their own city. You can see that Genn also got a really nice model update, but my working theory is that this has something to do with one of the artifact weapon quests… and sadly not that we might be able to actually use Gilneas as a proper city.

Lava Man

I find it hilarious that after all of these years… the model is still called “Lava Man” in the back end, instead of Bolivar or even the Lich King. This is obviously an updated version of the Lich King model, and I am wondering where exactly he will factor into the new content. My theory is that this is probably related to the Artifact weapon quest chain, but then a part of me wonders… if we are essentially creating an expansion with the best parts of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, are they going to set the Lich King up for a return as well? We are after all seeing Illidan as part of this expansion, and it is a high likelihood that after all of these years Bolivar would lose his control over the power of the Lich King. I always questioned the sanity of allowing Bolivar to hold this position… even though it seemed pretty badass at the time. Surely eventually the power of the throne and the helm would overwhelm him… and he would in fact turn into a proper “new” Lich King.

With Legion could we be setting in a chain of events that would end up triggering a reboot of the Lich King content essentially? Where the Scourge under the direction of the new Bolivar Lich King would once again ravage Azeroth? There is part of me that doubts they would do something that blatant… but then again I never expected to see Illidan again. There is of course another option.. we might end up fighting along side the scourge under the control of Bolivar as they serve as a nearly limitless army to take on the Burning Legion. I guess it all depends on just how big this conflict gets before the end of the expansion. The problem is… as I let all of these theories and ideas out of my head… the more I am wanting to log into World of Warcraft in its current state and play. I know that the same game is there that I left several months ago, and that most of the things I am really interested in wont be here until Legion. The stranglehold of nostalgia however is absolutely a thing.