December 2015 – Page 14

How to Gear Up at 50 (when you’re feeling asocial)

December 1, 2015 by Grace

MMOs are usually at their best when you have good friends to hang out with. Some of my fondest gaming memories are of learning new dungeon and raid encounters with close groups of friends and teammates. But what if you’re still new to the game, or just prefer to keep to yourself for a while?

In WildStar, like most other MMOs, the very best gear is to be had within end-game group content. If you don’t want to raid, there are still a ton of activities you can do solo or with small groups of friends, and higher ilevel gear can help those activities go a lot more smoothly. Getting gear when you’re solo is a slow and steady process. Here’s some things you can do to gear up without stressing out about other people:

How to Gear Up at 50 (when you’re feeling asocial)

Spellslinger starter PvP gear.

PvP: Ok, I know it seems weird to put this first considering if you don’t want to play with others then you probably REALLY don’t want to PvP, but hear me out. First and most importantly, the Season 2 PvP vendor in your faction’s spaceport carries entry level PvP gear that is ilevel 65 and can be purchased with gold. If you’re a fresh 50 this is an amazing way to get yourself started. The stats aren’t optimal for PvE but they darn sure will be better than the random leveling gear you may still be wearing, and way cheaper than buying from the auction house. If you’re brave enough to queue for PvP for a while you can also buy the ilevel 70 gear with prestige. Both the gold and the prestige sets look amazing, by the way, so that’s some more incentive to check them out!

The other really important thing you can buy with prestige is AMP and Ability Points. In fact, as a fresh 50 this is the fastest way to get those first few upgrades (other than the auction house) if you can stomach dying in PvP for a while. All of the other methods are gated behind reputations, questing, or weekly currency caps.

Quests in Northern Wastes

Questing: There are level 50 daily quests available in Star Comm Basin, Defile, Blighthaven, Northern Wastes, and Crimson Badlands. There’s also the R-12 event in Malgrave. This is not a glamorous way to get gear, but it can yield upgrades in several ways. Firstly, it gets you out in the world, killing things. Those things you kill often drop loot, and as a fresh 50 some of that loot might just be an upgrade. Secondly, all of the level 50 daily quest zones have associated reputations. Raising your rep with a given faction will unlock new items from their vendor, including gear and AMP and Ability Points. It can take a few weeks of questing to raise a reputation all the way to the maximum, so take a look at all the vendors and prioritize one or two to focus on at a time. Finally, all that questing will be earning you elder gems, and you can also pick up the elder gem weekly quest for even more. There’s no gear available from the elder gem vendor, but there are AMP and Ability Points. Once you’ve hit your weekly elder gem cap, you’ll also start earning extra cash from questing.

Another excuse to post one of my many Scorchwing pics.

World Bosses: Yes, this is another activity that technically requires other people, but it is usually fairly quick and painless. In fact with the way that world bosses currently work, you don’t even have to be in a group to get credit for the boss kill. It is preferable to group up though, since you’ll have a chance at more loot if your group is the one that tags the boss, and also you can get some healing if you need it during the fight. World bosses will reward you with a goody bag that can contain gear, decor, costumes, or even pets.

My favorite way to pass the time is sadly not the best way to gear up.

Expeditions: If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know that these are one of my favorite activities in the game! You can queue for vet expeditions solo and you should be able to complete them even as a fresh 50, especially with a little bit of gear from one of the above sources. Expeditions reward renown which may buy you some upgrades, and the daily quest will give you a little extra renown plus some cash. Sadly with the changes to the difficulty and the ease of getting gear in other ways this method is better for getting cosmetic rewards and decor than for gearing up as a fresh 50.

Contract Board, Contract Rewards.

Contracts: The contract board can make all of the above methods extra rewarding without any extra effort. Just make sure to load up on appropriate contracts for the day, whether you plan to do PvP or PvE activities. You can skip the dungeon and adventure ones, but the rest fall into the categories above. I try to base my daily questing on whatever contracts are available. Reaching each milestone will allow you to select a piece of either assault or support gear of ilevel 80. The casques that are available when you completely fill up your contract meter can reward ilevel 100 gear. That’s as high as raid gear!

Look for this symbol to trade in your promissory notes for reputation.

An added bonus of doing contracts is they frequently reward Protostar Promissory Notes. These can be traded in to reputation exchange NPCs for any of the daily zone factions to help speed up your reputation gains and unlock those rewards even faster. This is especially helpful for the Malgrave faction, since it is very slow to get reputation from the R-12 event alone.

A sample of the raid-quality (ilvl 85+) gear available on the auction house

Money: So hopefully doing all the activities here, plus whatever else keeps you happy in game, has left you with a little extra plat. The last place you can get some great gear is the auction house. If you save your pennies you should be able to buy some really fancy stuff for yourself. I’ve purchased a couple pieces myself, including the bind-on-equip Datascape weapons. If you can afford it, and can stand being patient until you see a good deal, you can get great raid-quality gear without ever even getting attuned.

Now you’ve got a ton of ways to gear yourself up at your own pace, on your own terms. WildStar’s group content is awesome but dungeons and raids aren’t for everyone. But fancy gear is important no matter what kind of player you are!

*This content was originally posted at WildStar-Core. I’ve reposted it here for safekeeping since that site is no longer operating.

Tournaments for Charity

December 1, 2015 by Tamrielo

Over the weekend I ran an Infinity tournament, the “AD Food Drop” event held locally. A lot of minis games do various charity tournaments and other events right around Thanksgiving, and this year Infinity is no exception. It’s a neat thing, I think, and there are a variety of formats that the events take.

One of the more popular event types is the canned food drive tournament, which is what we did this past weekend. The concept is fairly straightforward– it’s structured like a normal tournament except that you can donate cans for various bonuses or cheats. You can donate cans to bring units in your army lists that you otherwise couldn’t, or gain an advantage of some kind, or reroll your dice (and, in some cases, make your opponent reroll theirs).

It’s a format I like because it’s really obvious from the get-go that the person who donates the most cans is probably going to win, or at least have a good shot at it, but the whole point is that it’s a food drive, and donating more food gets you better results. It takes some of the seriousness out of the tournament in general, which I think is sometimes a good thing. There’s no implication of fairness, and everyone knows that up front.

It’s not just minis games, either– a lot of competitive tabletop games do this kind of event, and they tend to be pretty well-recieved. In a lot of cases, they upset the usual balance of tournaments (which I think is a good thing) and get people to play a bit more casually than they otherwise might (also a good thing). It’s hard to get mad at anyone for “cheating”, because they’re paying for the cheats in donations, and you can get a pretty good amount of charity from even a small tournament.

One of the other charity events at least among minis players is a fully painted army raffle. A wide variety of people (from professionals to hobbyists) will contribute painted miniatures to a single, unified army, which is then raffled off and the proceeds donated to charity. I’ve never personally contributed a miniature, but I’ve had a number of friends who have and the end result is always impressive. The armies are generally painted with an orange theme, as a world hunger awareness nod.

I always like these community events, and it was a great time being able to run the weekend’s tournament, both because I like the cause and also because it allowed the usual tournament organizer (who, truth be told, also set up and arranged this event) to actually play in an event rather than simply overseeing it.

The experienced reinforced to me how much I like Infinity and its community. There was another tournament running simultaneously with ours, and I had the opportunity to keep an eye on it while things were ticking over smoothly with Infinity. It didn’t escape my notice that the players at the other tournament were rather more aggressive and there were frequent calls for a judge to mediate some disagreement or another. Over the entire day of games during the Infinity tournament, I was called over to answer a question or mediate a disagreement maybe… three or four times, total?

It was a good time, and I liked having the opportunity to play a bit more active of a role in the community outside of simply being a player. I’m not sure it’s something I’d want to do ALL the time, but once in a while is nice.

Tauren Flight Form

December 1, 2015 by Belghast

Rose-colored Lenses

Last night was the night when I finally realized that playing Horde was not some magical and happy place free from assholes. Over the last several days it has been pretty great, and I have casually bumped into people that I have slantwise known on the server. I was beginning to think that the Horde were simply more mature players than the Alliance folks that I had been so used to dealing with. That apparently is not the case… I simply had a really lucky streak. I have to say the Facepull guild has been amazing, and it is actually drawing me out of my own little world that I seem to get stuck in so many times. Last night Laughingly that everyone calls “Gigs” convinced me to join her and Martoxis in a Supreme Lord Kazzak raid. Now me and Kazzak have a long history, namely from the days when people would pull him to Stormwind and he would ultimately need to be despawned by a GM because it got too powerful. So I guess in a way I knew what I was getting myself in for, but Gigs promised this version was no big deal. She even went so far as to give us a Mammoth ride to the location, and everything seemed pretty awesome for a bit.

Then we started summoning people… and I was simply doing my part and clicking the portals to get people here faster. At some point during this rush a mage perfectly summoned a portal to Hillsbrad Foothills… aka where Dalaran USED to be. A handful of us mistakenly clicked it… including myself and Gigs… and we quickly fell to our deaths. At which point someone pulls the boss, locking us out of the loot. So while I was raging inside… I attempted calmly rez and get my way back to Tanaan Jungle. I honestly didn’t even think of that being a thing that someone would do… but I guess now I know to be cautious. It feels like however fate rewarded me for my frustrations, because on the next attempt I managed to get a drop both from the boss and from the token… which gave me not one but two different 705 trinkets: Chipped Soul Prism and Mark of Supreme Doom. Well worth a fall to my death… that honestly I should have survived with a bubble, but I was simply too shocked to react in time.

Last Call LFR

On the Alliance side of the house, there has been a long standing rule… that you do not under any circumstances do Looking For Raid content any night other than Tuesday and MAYBE Wednesday at the latest. The closer you get to Monday the worse the groups get, and you only ever set foot in an LFR dungeon on a Monday night if you have a significant death wish. Once again I thought maybe the rules of the universe simply didn’t function the same on the Horde side, because I did several LFR runs on Saturday and Sunday and had a pretty good time of it. The groups were calm and reasoned, and we simply wrecked stuff and got loot as a result. So even thought I had the shitty experience with the asshole mage in Kazzak, I decided to brave the unwashed masses and venture forth into Monday LFR. My first sign that something was wrong, should have been that the DPS queue was roughly an hour. I however had stuff I wanted to do out in Tanaan Jungle so I queued up and before I knew it… it was popping. At first things seemed to go more or less pretty well. We downed the first boss with ease… then when we got to the second boss… it took two attempts. Finally the third boss took three attempts… so things seemed to be going downhill. However with the miracle of determination we were able to get through it.

Then I queued for Archimonde… aka the Black Gate. Firstly I have to say how awesome I think it is that you are essentially fighting the demons that besieged Mount Hyjal. I’ve been running quite a bit of Mount Hyjal attempting to get that really awesome two handed sword for my paladin. The end game of World of Warcraft or any game… is really collecting outfits for transmogging. Needless to say… Archimonde did not go well. I was assured by my guildies that this fight was a little overtuned even for LFR, and that most groups struggle with it. However after our fourth wipe, we lost literally half of the raid and I found myself exiting as well. So in my first week of really being “back” I managed to raid Normal Hellfire Citadel through Gorefiend, all of Blackrock Foundry LFR, and all but Archimonde in the Hellfire Citadel LFR. The only thing that I wish I had managed to squeeze in there was Highmaul LFR, simply because I am in desperate need of Abrogator Stones. Playing catch up on the legendary ring quest is going to be a massive pain in the butt, because I remember just how many weeks it took me actively raiding Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry to get all the necessary bits to complete that thing.

A Reason for Facebook

Another interesting side note is that it seems Facepull hangs out pretty much exclusively on Facebook. This is the one social media network I have actively shunned over the years, namely because of some bad first experiences with it. I technically have a Facebook account because it is connected to this blog, and I namely use it to syndicate my posts to the Tales of the Aggronaut page. What is going to be interesting is this may give me a reason to actually use it on a regular basis, seeing as they seem to use it in place of the traditional guild forum. The other funny side note is that apparently yesterday they found my blog posts thanks to Nubzy linking it to said facebook group. So hey folks if you are reading this! Apparently Obi was a bit grumpy that I didn’t mention him in my blog post, so I am going out of my way to remedy that today. I’ve known Nubzy and Obi since I believe Vanilla, or at the very least since early Burning Crusade. They have followed me into many games and I have always considered them both to be part of my extended family. I am just happy to finally make good on my threat of playing something on their side of the fence. I still say however that World of Warcraft would be a better game if they just tore the fence down, letting battle.net friends play together regardless of what faction they happened to enjoy the most. That said I really am starting to enjoy being a bull.