Bad Engineer

Bad Engineer

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

Imaginary Band

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.