September 2016 – Page 11

Chill Excitement

September 6, 2016 by Grace

Legion excitement is still going strong. Last week was busy for me with classes starting and work being stressful, so I was a bit behind my friends on the leveling curve. Then I got to spend all day Saturday playing, and I managed to get myself to 110. The only thing that seems to have changed for me so far is that I’m trying to run dungeons a bit more. Otherwise I’m still doing a ton of quests. In fact, when I hit 110 I had not even started questing in Highmountain yet, so I had that whole zone to do to unlock world quests and get the loremaster and exploration achieves.

This expansion comes with a pretty solid crop of new dungeons. The five that are available while leveling are fairly nice, but the 3 that unlock at 110 really shine. Maw of Souls, Vault of the Wardens, and Black Rook Hold are all incredibly atmospheric places and do some slightly different things with their boss fights.

Helya is the best.

My favorite by far is Maw of Souls. Most of the dungeon takes place on what is essentially a ghost ship full of the damned, and when you get out on the deck you can even see the sea rolling around you. The last boss is essentially a sea witch goddess and I love her more than words can say, although I suspect I’ll love her less when I have to fight her on heroic!

Because my friends have all been leveling at different paces I’ll still have to run through those 110 dungeons a few more times as people hit the cap. Instead of dreading it I’m actually looking forward to it. Part of it is that the dungeons are really fun, and part of it is because I’m a DPS and it is way less stressful than healing. The difference in levels hasn’t mattered much at all along the way. We’ve been able to run dungeons with groups ranging from 100 to 110 with no noticeable difficulty, so that’s a huge quality of life change to the game.

The very best thing is that I’m in no hurry. I’m not planning to raid more than completely casually, so there’s no rush for me to get geared or anything. I’ve had some requests to do heroic dungeons, but I’ve been putting them off for a bit because I want to see and enjoy things on normal mode for a bit longer and give the rest of my friends time to get to 110. Overall am feeling a bit weird about this expansion because I am really enjoying myself, but I’m also super relaxed about everything. I’m used to being very manic at launches, trying to do all the things as fast as possible. It feels very strange to be happy and excited about all the new things to do and yet not rushing through everything. Now I just hope that I keep enjoying the game this much as the expansion continues!

Back to Tanking

September 6, 2016 by Belghast

It always feels strange sitting back down at the keyboard to blog after an absence. This weekend was of course the Labor Day holiday weekend here in the United States, and our plans caused me to miss Saturday. Since I was taking a single day off, I decided to go ahead and take the entire weekend off to just chill out and enjoy the goodness that is Legion. When we last spoke I was sitting at level 105 and knee deep in Azsuna. Since then I have dinged 110, which for some reason took me starting the final leveling zone High Mountain to accomplish. Most of my friends hit the new level cap without touching that fourth leveling zone, but I am thinking some of it might be coming from harvest experience. Additionally I seemed to get all log jammed up in my Class Hall quests, because it seems the order in which they would love you to level for Warriors is Stormheim and then High Mountain. However I did Stormheim, Azsuna, Val’sharah, and finally High Mountain… and even then the Warrior quest was buried deep inside of the content so much so that I finally said screw it and went out trying to find the location only to wind up terrain hacking my way onto the appropriate path with Heroic Leap. Have I mentioned how bad I am at following the path? This is my downfall in many games… that I see that a path exists, but the first thing I want to do is go running off into the wilderness on either side of said path. As a result I miss so many quests because quest givers tend to be… on paths. Also as a result my first time through a zone takes me easily twice as long as literally any other player because I keep ending up backtracking trying to find that quest I missed. On the positive however this expansion seems to FINALLY reward folks getting way the hell off the path.

This screenshot… is the result of getting way the hell off of the path. This is quite possibly the most enjoyable quest I have done in a really long time… and I didn’t understand a damn word of it. That is right, you end up doing a quest for a Murloc… who only speaks Nerglish which I had to google to find out what the hell their language is called. The result is a bunch of quest objectives that are “0/1 ?????” that you have to sort of figure out on your own what the little guy is wanting you to do. This quest is something that none of my friends seemed to know about, and I only managed to find because I was completely off the path and wandering aimlessly along the coastline of Suramar. This expansion more than any to date seems to be the expansion that Blizzard finally learned a lot of lessons, or at least reflected those lessons in their design process. In the past there was always a problem of folks ONLY doing the boss that was required for a quest in a dungeon run, and then pugs often times dropped immediately after that kill. So there was a high likelihood that you would get randomed into an instance with the boss you needed already dead. Now anytime there is a collect X item or kill X boss from an instance quest, it also requires you to kill the final boss in order to get credit. Similarly they seem to have learned the lessons of what made Garrisons feel horrible, because the Class Order Hall while deeply related in design… feels nothing like the Garrison did in the daily requirement of logging in and doing wizard chores. To make this even better it was announced over the weekend at Pax West that there was a mobile companion app on the way that lets you handle the Class Hall bits without ever needing to play the character swap game.

Another thing that I spent a significant amount of time doing this week is exploring the various dungeons. Yup you guessed it that also means that I have once again shifted focus to tanking, and have for the most part put my two-handers away for the moment. Both protection and fury artifact weapons are at rank 13… which means any further progress is going to be completely silly as far as the artifact power cost goes. I am however largely focusing now on the sword and shield, and am even considering doing some pvp to unlock that specific appearance. The above screenshot is extremely special because Belghast and Finni were started at exactly the same time back in Vanilla. Both my friend and I really wanted to level a Warrior and a Priest, but had minimal luck getting traction in leveling them solo. So we made a leveling pact and we quested our way through the old world content as a Holy Priest and a Protection Warrior… and it was a blast. All of my bad tanking habits probably started here, because she enabled my horrible instincts. I would roll up into a Gnoll camp and pull the entire thing… knowing that she would keep me alive while I whittled them down slowly. Once I hit the level cap I started tanking the alt raid nights for the Late Night Raiders, and with the release of Burning Crusade I shifted focus to tanking as my primary gig. However due to motherly responsibilities, Finni just doesn’t get the amount of playtime that she used to so it is always awesome when we can run relevant content together. The way this expansion levels content so that it is perfectly viable for a 100, 105, and a 110 to be in the same instance is really nice. While other games have done this well for quite some time, I am happy to see Warcraft catching up here.

AggroChat #122 – Glimmers of Hope

May 21, 2019September 4, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Thalen talk about a bunch of stuff… with a significant emphasis on the launch of World of Warcraf Legion

Tonight we are down a Tam thanks to Pax West Shenanigans, and in theory at least we will be talking soon about those experiences. However for the time being… we talk a bunch of stuff but mostly World of Warcraft Legion. Right now Ashgar, Belghast and Grace are playing… and talk about their experiences with the launch, and the revisions to the game. The long story short is that we all seem to be enjoying ourselves. The main story is still frustrating, but the sub stories are amazing. We also talk a little bit about the game of the month Tales of Maj’Eyal, largely related to a few tips for getting started and things that players should really avoid getting bogged down in. Finally Kodra talks about his experiences with Deus Ex and Necropolis in recent play sessions for both.

Things Discussed – World of Warcraft – Legion – Class Halls – Spec Fantasy – Leveling Content – Tales of Maj’Eyal – Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – Necropolis

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New Expansion Buzz

September 2, 2016 by Belghast

I have been having more fun in World of Warcraft than I have had in years. That at least feels like a true statement, but also one that makes me question it. Sure it seems like I am having a blast, but it got me thinking… don’t I always have a lot of fun at the launch of a new expansion? One of the interesting things about having a blog that has been active since 2009 is that in theory I should have evidence of how I felt at the launch of Cataclysm, Pandaria and Warlords. Around the launch of Cataclysm I seemed to be mostly focused on grouping and gearing… and grinding dungeons to get to the magical number needed for raiding. I think I was still very much in my “games are serious business” mode, so there really isn’t any talk about the expansion being fun or not. In truth remembering that time period I was very much not having fun, and I think in the grand scheme of things that is ultimately why Cataclysm was the expansion that caused me to “quit” World of Warcraft. The quit is of course a lie, considering that I am still playing the game… and never really went longer than six months without reactivating my account. The launch of Pandaria unfortunately happened during a serious lapse in my posting, and by the time I start back up… I was on the daily posting kick and talking about casually playing the game. With the launch of Warlords… I talk a lot about how nostalgic the game makes me feel, but in reality not much actually talking about how I am enjoying it. This was after all the expansion I had originally said I was going to take a pass on… so this quote makes sense.

I still stand by my original statement that if you have no interest in World of Warcraft, this expansion will do little to change that.

So if I set out to prove that I am always pumped about the launch of a new game expansion… I guess I disproved that theory? I guess at least on some level, any infusion of new content is something that I ultimately enjoy. There are new zones to explore, new quests to figure out… and lots and lots of tasty loot. However this time around something feels different, and I am having trouble quantifying exactly what that is. For the first time since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King… I have hope that the best days of the Warcraft franchise are not behind us. With all of the previous expansions… I felt like they did a decent job of stirring up nostalgia, but not really doing a great job of making me feel like the game has a new purpose. This time around so much feels fresh, from the class designs and reworks to the fact that they all seem to be focused on a clear vision of what that class does. I attempted to talk about this yesterday, but the fact that my airflow was pretty low ended up with the post being a jumbled mess. To be truthful I am still sick right now, so for all I know this post is also going to be a jumbled mess. However I love the feel of my Warrior for the first time since I really came into my own as a tanking main during Burning Crusade. The irony here is the fact that I am not really tanking at all, but instead dpsing my way through the content as Fury.

The only problem here is that we have just barely scratched the surface, and myself even more so than that. The game launched Monday night, and we already have four level 110 characters in House Stalwart. I am very much not one of them… but instead hanging back in the middle of the pack at level 105, having completely finished Stormheim and just started Azsuna. I have no idea what the “feel” of the expansion is going to be once we all kick off the training wheels and move into that sometimes glorious time known as the end game. Even Warlords had some really fun moments while leveling, and including some really amazing cinematic experiences. However once we arrived at the end there was a very hollow game waiting for us. I guess the difference this time is that with the launch of Warlords I absolutely expected to have bounced off of the game by about the three month mark. In truth it was a little closer to the six month mark, but the bounce did in fact happen at least mentally even though I don’t think I ever actually cancelled my account this time around. This time however… I have a blazing pyre of hope that maybe just maybe that won’t happen. Ultimately I really like what is going on… with the class design, with the storyline, with the zone creation, and heaven forbid with the lore itself. The bigger story of Khadgar being Khadgar and Jaina being Angry… well it can screw off. However the intricate intra-zone stories are awesome, and I totally want to have reasons to hang out with Havi during later content. World of Warcraft and Blizzard… please don’t break my heart this time.