Reevaluating Azeroth

Good Morning Folks! Hopefully, this morning’s post is going to be what I intended to write yesterday… a general rundown of my thoughts upon returning to World of Warcraft. I’ve been back I think four days now, and in that time I pushed through enough of Shadowlands to hit 60, and then immediately swapped over to Dragonflight. First I have to say that one of the best decisions that I made was accepting the Gear Upgrade that appears to be available for all of my old characters. This did a few things… firstly it made sure I had a vaguely competent item level for the content I was about to be starting. Secondly, it whisked away everything that was not absolutely needed from my inventory… mailed those items to me… and then made sure I had a good set of bags. Now on that last step… there seems to be no logic applied to that process because it removed much larger bags than the ones that it gave me so I had to fish those out of the mailbox.
This tells me that the WoW Team has done some research in what can make a player bounce from the game. For me… it is absolutely the sorry state of my bags when I last played the game. I’ve been gone from these characters for at least three years, and I have no clue at all what half of the stuff that was rotting in my inventory is even used for. Having all of that painlessly shoved into my mailbox… where I have over a hundred days to deal with it before caring… was the right choice. This allowed me to focus on what was good and interesting about the game and not on inventory management… the part of any game that I enjoy the least. Now there are folks who said not to take the gear upgrade, so maybe the shift between Shadowlands and Dragonflight is less valuable but for me… who last played the character I decided to play in Battle for Azeroth, and even then only half-assed it… it was very much a needed step.
Another thing that I have greatly enjoyed upon returning is the Dragonflight talent system. I admit I was a Talen Point system enjoyer, or at least I was prior to the great watering down of talents to a series of three choices… one of which was almost always the correct choice. The new system feels like I can more closely tailor a character to the way that I want to play it. For example, I loved Shield Charge during the short-lived Gladiator stance days of Warlords of Draenor, so I was super happy to see that I could in fact get that back and since I love charging all over the place it essentially gave me a second charge button. I love Paladin Shield Bounce for pulling mobs and Titanic Throw turns my existing Heroic Throw into something very similar where I lob five attacks at mobs in a cluster and can pull entire packs. Both of these are purely optional things and someone who doesn’t quite have the fondness for either can easily pick around them. The best part of all of this is how easy it is to change this up, because anytime I am sitting in a town I can fiddle with my talents to get rid of the things that didn’t work out the way I wanted them and try something new.
The big feature that everyone seems to be in love with is Dragonriding, and on some level, I agree with them. Having access to a flying mount on day one of a new expansion in World of Warcraft is pretty amazing. I love the customizability of the mount itself and being able to swap up the appearance as you find new unlocks out in the world. However the mechanics of Dragonriding itself… I am sorry folks but I am going to be that guy. Dragonriding is just a universally worse version of the Skyscale from Guild Wars 2… specifically, my key complaints are that it takes about three times too long to summon your mount and similarly takes about four times too long to regenerate stamina for doing things with it. I am so used to having almost instant mounts from Guild Wars 2 and the flight pattern of a Skyscale where you take a pause on a cliff for a few seconds and are back to where all of your stamina is regenerated again. Like it is a good system, and completely revolutionary for a game like World of Warcraft… but the Skyscale is still much better.
Another system that I find interesting upon coming back is the Trading Post and the World of Warcraft loyalty currency the Traders Tender aka colloquially “Tendies”. I was surprised at how shockingly easy it was to rack up a decent number of these while doing random stuff in the game. I am sure at some point I will have collected all of the low-hanging fruit but then having the ability to choose what I want to buy from the shop is also pretty great. I can see this as being anxiety-ridden for the “gotta catch em all” players out there… but for me, there are only a handful of items that I am actually interested in. I think a lot of the stuff on the store looks not great… but I am waffling on whether or not I need this giant shield with a scarab on it.
Shocking to no one… the first things that I went for are the mounts. I am by no means a completionist, but mounts are at least something I will enjoy using on all of my characters. I went for the cute copper scarab with pink wings as my first choice. It wiggles its butt while you run, which is adorable. It also gives me a Scarab that works outside of Ahn Qiraj which is sorta cool. I also picked up the other mount which is one of those giant Pterodactyls from BFA. The contents of the store rotates every 30 days, so that seems like enough time to gather up tenders to pick up the item you want. You also have the ability to save a single item that you are trying to save up for that will not rotate when the shop inventory does. All of this seems pretty cool for a loyalty system designed to make players log in and engage with the game every day.
As far as Dragonflight goes… I really enjoy the zones. The first zone while interesting is a bit of a wet blanket, but the second zone is very Nagrand-inspired which wins some big points for me personally. Nagrand in both forms was one of my favorite zones in the game. The third zone seems to be taking notes from Grizzly Hills in Northrend, which again… is a favorite zone of mine. I’ve found myself caring about the Dragonflights way more than I have since Wrath of the Lich King. There was a moment in WoW storytelling that bothered me more than any and really soured my interest in larger themes. We did so much work with the Dragonflights in Wrath, and then interacting with Alextrasza in Twilight Highland and her treating us as someone who has not already saved her bacon more than once… annoyed the fuck out of me and made me stop caring about dragons. Shadowlands restored a bit of that faith when Lady Vashj made specific references to me having killed her… and so far that same attention to detail seems to be carrying forward with Dragonflight.
I think more than anything though I am mechanically enjoying the Warrior. I’ve had the freedom through the talent system to tweak it and create some of my favorite features on the same character. I will always be a sword and board enthusiast and being able to feel powerful as a tanky character is great. I love charging into entire packs and slowly whittling them down with my PBAOE and Cone-based attacks. The other thing that I have found interesting is just how damned fast I am leveling. At this point, I am just about to hit 69, so I will be 70 WELL before I run out of content by a relatively huge margin. WoW has done this for a while but I appreciate that they have begun to focus on clearly outlining what are the main story quests and what are filler fluff… because as I go deeper into “overtime” I can see myself probably dropping some of the side quests to focus on the MSQ entirely. Though to be fair… the quirky side quests are often the best aspects of World of Warcraft.
All in all, I am enjoying myself quite a bit. I’ve not engaged with any other players in any fashion yet… but I figure at some point once I have finished leveling I might actually do that. One minor annoyance that I am dealing with is how limited the tradeskill system is in this game. I hate that harvesting abilities are not universal… which means that leveling trades on the character I happened to choose to play is a pain in the ass. Belghast as a raid leader and as a result I chose professions for reasons other than fun… I was an Engineer because at that time it gave me access to the best tanking helms in the game. I was an Enchanter because it was really handy to have your master looter be someone who could disenchant gear and then dump the materials into the bank. This means I am an engineer with no means of harvesting the materials that I need to level that profession. So that means if I care about professions I am going to have to level one of my other Alliance characters next that can then feed resources to this character. I just greatly prefer the Guild Wars 2 methodology of timed node spawns that everyone can harvest, and the ability for EVERY character to harvest EVERY resource.
I will say though that I find myself in a scenario where I have far fewer complaints about World of Warcraft than I have at any point in the past. Like that might not sound like a resounding positive but it really is. Hell, if you are curious go back and read any of my rants about this damned game from the past… almost all of those issues have been fixed. Faction no longer matters and everything is effectively cross realm… and with the upcoming systems with War Within everything is going to largely be account-based not locked to single characters. Talent points are interesting and character respecs are free and easy to do allowing you to try out some wild ideas and then shift back to something comfy if they don’t work out. Leveling is fast and painless and so far it seems like gearing might be as well… and the story appears to be improving greatly. So my greatest hits list of complaints are being narrowed down to… Tradeskills still suck and Dragonflight doesn’t feel as good as the system it copied. That is an overwhelming net positive for this game in my eyes, and it really is in a much better state than it has been at legitimately any other period in history. It feels like the devs have listened to complaints and have pivoted really freaking hard to being far more pro-player than they used to be. I am on board. I am not sure how long I will actually play this time, but I am trying very hard to remove the bitterness that I have always had when discussing this game. I like it folks, and the team has done a really good job with it. The post Reevaluating Azeroth appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #220 – I Am Gorb!

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat220

Tonight we record a show that has almost nothing to do with Gorb…  but you are going to get that as a name anyways because reasons. This is another one of those shows that has a bunch of topics that kept rolling over from other shows until we managed to align enough of them that sorta made sense together.  Tonight we talk about MMOs an awful lot covering the life cycle of the new player experience, returning player experience and the completely and total nonsense that happens at end game with power creep.

Rough Approximation of Topics

  • DPS Shortage
    • Why We Apparently Only Know Tanks and Healers
  • The New Player Experience
    • World of Warcraft
    • Final Fantasy XIV
    • Destiny Series
    • Warframe
  • The Returning Character Experience
    • All of the Above Again
    • How The Secret World did it Poorly
  • Power Creep
    • Why did we stat squish only to be irresponsible again?
    • Mudflation the term that actually came from MUDs
  • Nintendo Direct
    • We accidentally talk about stuff coming out on Switch

 

Kindle Arrives

A New Toy

Kindle Arrives

Sunday I wrote a bit about my troubles with Amazon and shipping recently, and I guess maybe that complaining worked.  Not only did I get additional prime subscription time added to my account to appease me, but yesterday mid day my new Amazon Fire 7 inch tablet showed up.  As a result I spent a good deal of last night fiddling with it, and I figured I would write a little bit about it as a result.  The tablet I am talking about is the one that has been widely advertised as being sold in six packs…. and singles go for only $49.99 so that the marketing can say “under $50 dollars”.  Over the recent holiday consumer madness… they were selling the tablet for $34.99 which finally got me to jump on buying one just to see what it is like.  I already have owned several android tablets, and even got a used ipad 2 since my wife loved hers so much.  After all of that I had pretty much decided I simply was not a “tablet” person.  If I have time to use a tablet… I am probably at home and could just play on my PC, PS4, Vita, PS3…  you are getting the idea.  What I lacked though was a really good device to read on… because the iPad and Android tablets were just too bulk to use in bed comfortably without nodding off every so often and whacking myself in the face.

The first shocker is the size, because really when you think about it… 7 inches sounds like a large size.  The tablet as a whole feels more like a large phone… so something along the lines of a Samsung Note and less like a tablet.  The build quality is solid, and the device feels nice in your hand… but the plastic back makes it feel a little on the cheap side.  Then again this is a tablet that I just paid $34 for…  and in the past that would have gotten me some shanzhai reject and not a perfectly viable device.  There are some caveats to know going into it.  Firstly there is no Google Play store on the device by default, and in theory it is set up in a way to keep directing you at the Amazon ecosystem for music, movies and everything else related.  This is good in one aspect, especially if you are a Prime user… since well it has one of the better interfaces for actually watching the free streaming with Prime.  The whole lack of Google Play would have potentially been a deal breaker since, as someone already embedded in the Android world… I already own pretty much all of the apps I need to function there and have zero interest in repurchasing them from Amazon.  Thankfully I did a bit of research before jumping into this device and apparently it is a relatively trivial experience to load the Play store, it simply involves loading four different android apps on your device in a specific order.  Luckily however the above video shows you the appropriate order and provides what seems to be a clean link to the downloads.  I personally just downloaded them from my device to save having to try and swap them over through a computer.

It Plays Hearthstone

Kindle Arrives

The other thing that I would really like to do with a tablet is to be able to quickly get into Hearthstone and play it from bed.  Previously most of my Android devices simply performed like crap in Hearthstone, with the best possible version being on my Samsung Galaxy S5… and even then it was super sluggish.  This device however, took a bit of time initially to boot into Hearthstone and sign into Battle.net the first time, but from that point on I have been able to get in and doing stuff pretty quickly.  The interface ends up being a little small, so things like the settings gear can be a bit awkward to click on at first, but the base interface of the game performed smoothly.  I played a few games last night, and experienced real issues, and even as multiple effects were firing on screen I didn’t see any noticeable lag.  So for my purposes the device passes with flying colors when it comes to gaming.  At some point I will throw other games on it and test those out as well, but since I was mostly concerned about running what is normally a fairly intensive mobile game like Hearthstone…  that is what I went with first.  Please excuse the kinda crappy photo but I wanted to take a photo of me running hearthstone ON the device…  which meant taking a photo with my phone since I have not figured out how to do a screenshot on Kindle Fire OS yet and the normal methods from my phone did not work at all.

As far as the other purpose of the device, it also passes with flying colors.  Any device can read a book, so that wasn’t really what I was concerned about… so instead I booted into my Marvel Unlimited account and attempted to read some comics.  I wanted to see if a full comic page was readable with the small screen size and my less than perfect eyes.  I have to say I was pretty happy with the end results, and the slightly strange format as you might expect fits a page size perfectly.  Laying in bed last night I read around a dozen or so comics and my eyes never felt like they were being strained.  The only time things got awkward is when I needed to read a double panel spread, at which point I had to mostly zoom in and move around the screen to read the panels.  These were still awkward as shit on my full sized iPad, so I am not really too shocked about this.  These are one of those things that only really works well in a physical book.  The next step will be to load the puppy up with books, since right now our Amazon account is loaded up with quite literally thousands of books that I have zero interest in… since my wife and her mother are the primary users of that account.  In the past I always preferred reading through Aldiko so I will have to install that and test it out as well.  All told though… I am really happy with my $34 purchase… which after using some built up Discover cash back bonus…  ended up covering the entire cost.

Best Laid Plans

Kindle Arrives

Last night I had every plan of running a bunch of LFR in the hopes of getting a main hand weapon.  However in the middle of piddling around in Tanaan jungle I got a Baleful Armament to drop for me.  Unfortunately… it turned into the lowest possible version I could get.  That said it is better than nothing and matches the 650 shield that I have as well.  I am at the very least “viable” as a tank, though I need to do some stuff to set up my bars.  It is my hope that at some point I will get a decent sword and shield to drop in normal that I will roll offspec on.  In the meantime I need to get used to tanking as a Paladin, and this at least gives me the ability to run the daily heroic relatively easily for Valor.  As to how much pug tanking I will be doing… that is an entirely different question.  The main problem with last night however… is that I did not really sleep well Sunday night.  So by the time I spent awhile fiddling with the Kindle, my wife suggested that it was bedtime… and for once I agreed.  Admittedly I went to bed and continued to play with the Kindle, but sitting on the couch was invoking the most furious of yawns.  At the very least tonight I want to run the Black Gate on both characters, in the hopes that Tuesday night LFR is still the best possible time to run it.  In theory I should probably do the entire LFR on Belghast in the hopes of getting an upgraded weapon before the Wednesday night normal raid with Jed and crew.