World of Warcraft

This weekend was a lot of fun, and was a blend of Warfronts, Mythics, Heroics and at the very end dipping my toes into the raid with Facepull.  By the end of the weekend the Demon Hunter is 337 item level, and the Warrior still 332 since I have yet to do the Warfronts and get the 370 item.  Tonight is going to be me grinding away slavishly on Warfronts because thing I did not realize…  you get a 340 or better every single time you do them.  I thought I was just lucky in getting a 340 and a 370 for turning in the quest, but apparently that 340 is a reoccuring thing.  Based on what I am hearing there can be weapons and armor both that drop…  which given my track record with weapon drops in this expansion probably just means armor slots I already have better items in.

Since Facepull is a very well established raid, it meant that I would be filling the very uncomfortable spot of DPS which is not really a thing I do well as evidenced by how bad my parses will ultimately be.  I’m a tank… I think like a tank and act like a tank and when you tell me to burn something I get a very confused look on my face.  However I was apparently not a bad enough impediment to keep us from downing Taloc after a handful of tries.  Of course I got nothing but crafting materials, because that is the way of the world.  It supposedly drops a really sweet two handed mace that would have been a nice dps upgrade for my warrior…  but that wasn’t going to happen because weapon drops don’t exist for me in this expansion.

This is a lovely shot of me dead on the floor in the room of MOTHER which apparently is actually supposedly to be in all caps.  You know what Titan servitors like the most… burning and purging corruption.  MOTHER appears to really enjoy it, and the fight is all about trying to stop her from doing this thing while also not being purged yourself.  On this particular attempt Ary and I zigged when we should have zagged and got a wildly unexpected mace to the face.  Ary got a battle rez because he is a useful member of the team, I stayed on the floor because I was just barely keeping up above the tanks.  We made progress but also sorta went too long and lost progress as well, with our last handful of attempts being significantly worse than some of the ones in the middle.

I feel like MOTHER is either a gear check issue, or we are just doing something not quite right during the process.  Since most of us were hovering around the 325 range I figure we probably hit a gear wall, which became a subject of much lamentation over discord.  All in all it was a quirky and enjoyable night, and I managed to die most spectacularly when I accidentally clicked on a Warlock portal and went zooming into a firey death pulling MOTHER in the process.  I had no clue what was going on and apparently I instinctively screamed “OH SHIT!” to which my wife freaked out trying to figure out what was wrong.

The only negative of the experience is the fact that the Sunday time slot is really horrible for me.  Pretty much ANY weekend time slot is horrible, but especially Sunday night because that is generally when we finish up anything that needs to happen for the week.  I felt like an ass sitting there and raiding while my wife had to struggle with things I would have normally helped out with.  So there in lies the problem… I enjoyed myself as I generally have any time I have raided with Facepull…  but the timing is horrible and I am not likely going to make it every week… which means I stay in an under geared pupa state and am likely more trouble than it is worth?  I would like to get a raid going on a week night that is much easier for me to manage attending on a regular basis.  We will have to see how things shake out, but ultimately my hope is something workable can happen via RoboSquid Armada.  Being on the computer from 6:30 pm to 10 pm on a Sunday when I should be swapping loads of laundry and what not isn’t going to work for me as a regular thing sadly.

This morning I had a startling revelation.  I am not only maining Horde this expansion…  but I am also maining an Elf.  What in the living hell has happened to me as a human being to find myself in this state.  The Horde thing is a logical progression since I played mostly Alliance for well over a decade that it was high time to see how the other half lives.  The Elf thing…  I am completely clueless other than the fact that with Demon Hunters you literally have no other choices.  Blood Elf demon hunters look so much cooler than the Night Elf ones with their damned floppy hairy eared nonsense, so it was really a no-brainer than last expansion I gravitated more towards the Horde version of Belblight.

For anyone who has read this blog of any length of time will realize that in general I am pretty Anti-Elf as a whole.  There are however some exceptions…  I have always enjoyed a good Dark Elf in most of the games that have them.  Similarly I really dig the Bosmer because they are awesome and cannibals.  Orcs in the Elder Scrolls setting are technically fallen elves…  so I like them as well.  However High Elves in pretty much any form can fuck the hell off.  In Skyrim I used to take glee at going completely out of my way to kill Thalmor and the parts of the Aldmeri Dominion quest lines that really focused on High Elf matters made me get a little bloodlusty.

So for me to play a Blood Elf which is effectively a fallen High Elf…  is really sorta shocking.  I am going to basically lean on the fact that I have horns… and that it somehow makes it palatable.  After all I would probably be more than happy to play a Satyr, which has a similar relationship to a Night Elf.

The other thing that I did last night was take on an Island Adventure thing…  which shockingly I had not actually done until last night.  They are kinda fun but also fairly grindy given it is just killing a lot of mobs for no real reward.  Grace claims that she got a mount out of there, and I got a brief flash of excitement when I saw something purple colored pop up in the auto loot window…  however they were unfortunately just doubloons the currency used to buy things associated with the island aventures.  In theory I need to try and get all three of the islands available this week since I need to do five different islands in order to move forward in the war effort thing that is effectively the same as what we were doing with our order halls.

Lastly the spawn rates of certain things are still completely borked.  I did what I have been doing the last several weeks and logged in this morning to see if there was any loot on world quests that would be an upgrade.  Sure enough there was a quest out in Vol’dun for the Bloodwing Bonepicker offering a 330+ cloak which would be an upgrade over my 325 cloak.  While writing this blog post I have been watching my WoW window in the background and a larger and larger crowd has been gathering during this time… all the while the mob in question has not spawned in.  Unfortunately this seems to be one of many quests that are in slightly bugged states right now.  I wrote about the Azerite Mining quest a few days ago where the mobs simply don’t spawn in during reliable rates.  This seems to be maybe one of those cases, but I am largely going to give up now and head in to work.  My hope is maybe this will be “unbugged” by the time I get home tonight.

I want to start off this mornings post with a business note.  Yesterday I wrote about the RoboSquid Armada initiative that we have started, and there was a problem with the Battle.net social link.  For whatever reason the first one I generated didn’t seem to work for anyone, so I have since replaced it with one that is actually working.  We didn’t do a lot last night other than run the Sethrak Temple dungeon on heroic real quick to complete the world quest that awarded a weapon for us Demon Hunters.  That has been a weird point of contention this expansion, is that the look feels really off for whatever reason.  Weapons are far harder to get to drop than they probably should be which means that I have been running around using some jank for most of my mythic dungeon running.

In truth the whole loot drop experience feels weirdly limiting, and it is starting to cause some pretty negative behavior in the dungeon finder.  There are a number of times where we have been doing a heroic and see a player drop immediately after getting a piece of loot, since it is highly unlikely that you will walk away from any dungeon with more than one item.  This ends up feeling horrible, but in a way I absolutely get why they are doing it.  Especially as a dps your queue is insanely long, and the sooner you drop out and get in another queue… the sooner you get another piece of gear.  However for the players running the instance it feels like you are constantly adjusting to the revolving door of players.

At the beginning of the expansion we were able to bolster a little bit of in dungeon chatter with a simple “Hey folks!” as soon as I zone into the instance.  However lately that banter has turned to complete silence as we all sort of go through the motions required to get to the end of the dungeon.  Now for me personally most of the time when I am running a heroic I am running it with at least a handful of people I know, and as such we are often talking back and forth on some sort of voice.  However I keep trying to prod text chat and make comments when something odd happens, trying to draw players into actually having a conversation.  The loot grind however is in full force and everyone seems to be falling back into the gulf of silence most expansions turn into apart from the occasional person asking for something that just dropped.

I realized while running the heroic last night that I was way too out of it to run a mythic.  I was weirdly tired and additionally we were down a person from our normal group mix, which could have of course been remedied…  but was even more stacked against me running something.  Instead I focued on cleaning up some of the quests that I had not completed… and finally getting the Zandalar Forever achievement required to unlock King’s Rest.  When I dinged 120 on the Warrior I largely stopped questing in the zones entirely and started focusing almost entirely on dungeons and World Quests.  You have to realize… I am not really a quest motivated player and while I really enjoy a good story… it isn’t something that has to be there to make me enjoy myself.  I can spend countless hours in a game like Minecraft with no story and be perfectly happy.

As such I always seem to be behind on quests because if there is an option that is not running quests I will almost always choose it.  Each time a new expansion comes out in World of Warcraft, you see me deleting a long sequence of abandoned quests from the previous expansion.  I’ve already found myself with a stack of quests gathering here as well, and I really should get in the habit of taking an evening here or there to burn through them.  For example… I only ever completed the Nightbourne quests on one character, because why would I even bother with that mess a second time?  For other players that is the highlight of their experience… for me quests are an easy way to level so that I can start gearing up to do the more interesting things like dungeons and raids.

While I seem to be having decent luck on getting things to upgrade…  I am still seeking a couple good weapons and am annoyed that the best fist weapon I can craft is 300.  I am stockpiling my Hydrocores from Mythic runs in an attempt to maybe craft some upgrades, but I will need 15 per item crafted and that means a significant number more mythic runs that I have currently done.  We all have some keys for Mythic +2 and I am wondering if we are at a gear level where we can give that a shot soon.

So in the past I have talked about how our middle cat, Kenzie…  loves to play fetch.  This originally started with her stealing the rubber bands that occasionally bind together bundles of hangers when we get dry cleaning.  This escalated to her swiping the elastic string that holds together shoes sometimes when you buy a pair at the store.  One day while roaming Dollar Tree we noticed these hair bands and thought…  this is a thing that Kenzie would love and would also be easier to tell when she has dropped one on our head.  So we picked up a package of them and at the same time my wife swiped one for herself to use as a binding strap for one of her notebooks.  Over the weekend Kenzie found this hairband…  and pulled the notebook off of my wife’s desk in her office…  somehow figured out how to get the band off the notebook… and by the time we got up that day was playing with it downstairs.

She has a special proclivity for this one that is sorta light pink/mauve-ish, and if you happen to be holding it…  she stops whatever she is doing and goes into seek and retrieve mode.  This is actually rather handy in the mornings when we want to shoo her out of the bedroom… all you have to do is toss it down the hall.  The other side effect of these bands is she does a much better job of carrying them back to us…  whereas with rubber bands they almost never made it back for tossing/flinging again.  She is a crazy cat, but also mostly awesome for her weird little quirks like this one.  The photo is a stash of them we have hidden on top of the entertainment center, because occasionally she misplaces them.  I think she can smell the rubber honestly, and for whatever reason likes it…  because that is the only common thread behind all of the things that she seems to want to fetch.  Our eldest cat though…  her thing is bread twist ties so maybe all cats have a “thing” that they are super passionate about.

Today is maintenance day for World of Warcraft and I feel like the game definitely needs some tweaking.  A curious thing started happening over the weekend…  where a lot of the spawn rates for world quests went completely out of whack.  This for example is an Azerite Mining area in Vol’dun that went from near instant spawn Sethrak to single spawns every few minutes.  As a result it was a free for all match of trying to get a tag in on a mob when it spawned so that your faction could get the credit for killing it.  I apparently was fairly good at tagging things with my thrown glaives and then would sit back and ignore the mob hoping to let as many players get a tag in as well as possible before it inevitable evaporated.

Similarly there were other world quests that had near instant respawn rates…  or faster.  There was a quest in Stormsong Valley where I would often end up with five copies of the same mob as it would keep spawning over top of itself before I could kill the first one.  There was an Azerite Mining area in Nazmir where I just straight up got overwhelmed because I ended up with five of those golems on top of me from the same spawning node and simply could not keep up with the self healing.  My hope is today’s patch will sort all of this out and tweak the respawn rates back to normal ranges.  In truth the servers have mostly been doing excellent until yesterday… when all of this nonsense started showing up so I am wondering what tweak behind the scenes brought it all about.

Lastly we ran our first Mythic last night, and chose to go after Freehold…  the super awesome pirate dungeon.  In truth it was far easier than we had expected it to be… especially given that a couple of our players were just barely heroic level… let alone mythic level.  At this point I am 324 on the Demon Hunter which is not that far off from the 330 I managed to get my warrior to before shifting focus.  I have for all purposes “caught up” and over the weekend chain ran several heroic with Grace healing at the helm.  Demon Hunter is an excellent tank with the one slight problem…  they lack the wide variety of “oh shit” buttons that many of the tanks have.  Essentially I have Demon Spikes as a frequent use little burst of survival…  which helps take the edge off things but isn’t going to really keep me alive for long.  Then I have Metamorphosis that acts as my major survival cool-down and turns me into a big damned demon.

That is pretty much it…  I can roam around some and pick up souls that I have not managed to suck back into myself yet…  but the class lacks the wide variety of survival tools that say a warrior has.  This means that if everything is going well I am super easy to heal because the sustain that the class has all by its lonesome is phenomenal.  However if the Demon Hunter tanks starts to really take a damage spike… there is going to be nothing they can do themselves to pull back out of it and save the day.  Basically after playing tanks that have a deep bench of abilities they can pull in to save themselves from things going south…  it feels sorta helpless to have nothing much in reserve.

As far as the Mythic itself… we took it slow and over cleared just to keep from things going south…  but things did in fact go south at a few points when we had chain aggro… or someone back into a pack of mobs… or a runner go grab something.  That said we managed to whittle our way down through the bosses and the only one we actually wiped on was Shark Puncher…  which gets WAY nastier on Mythic.  I am super amped to get in and try some more Mythics tonight if we can assemble the same strike team as we had last night.  I’ve been contemplating pulling together a horde community of folks who want to do Mythics to sorta make the process of building them a bit easier.  I am not sure however if I have it in me to do much group organization these days…  if it happens however you will likely hear about it here first.