Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Last week we recorded our second half of the Shadowbringers spoiler show, but as a result it pushed a few topics off to this week. First we talk about Pax West and the experiences of Ash, Kodra and Tam as they roamed the show floor. After that we talk about the most recent Nintendo Direct and some of the titles that stood out. Lastly we go over our normal time talking about our most recent obsession World of Warcraft Classic. I am sure this will be a topic spread across many weeks but we at least start the discussion of our feelings about returning to a game that seemingly we still enjoy playing.
For those who are new to this blog, I run a semi-monthly column of sorts where I track what I have been playing over the previous month. This does a few things but largely it allows me to track over the course of the years what I have been into at a given time. My blog serves as a bit of a record to jog my memory and help me firmly plant when certain events are happening. Also it allows my readers a window into what I am up to and what my thoughts are about a thing in short form. I also generally try and use this moment in time as a point to “true up” my sidebar widget.
To Those Remaining
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC / Switch
This one is sorta hanging on by a thread at this point, not for want of desire but more for lack of time. I have however booted it up and made a bit more progress over the past month as well as starting the Switch version. Word of warning, I would say if you are ONLY going to buy a single version of this game, maybe don’t buy the Switch version. It has some slowdown issues and the graphical fidelity are not up to snuff from what I have been used to with the PC version. As it stands I own copies of this I believe for every platform… largely because I want to support the hell out of this title and see more games in this series released.
Destiny 2 – PC / Xbox One / PS4
I have been playing considerably more of Destiny 2 than I had in the months leading up to now. There is a bunch of exciting stuff happening not the least of which is the enabling of Cross Save. I can now play my guardian on every single console platform in addition to the PC and have gone through the process of moving my character from Battle.net to Steam. I am super pumped about the launch of Shadowkeep coming up in October. Of note if you have ever played the PC version then it would behoove you to go through the process of moving your character from BNet to Steam because after October 1st it will not longer be accessible through the BNet client.
Diablo 3 – PC
I legitimately thought this one would be leaving my list this month. A new season started at the tail end of August and with the impending launch of World of Warcraft Classic a few days later, I fully expected to just skip out on this season. However I found myself once again logging in on a Friday night for the ritual Grace and I have maintained for the last several seasons. It is enough of a thing that it felt weird NOT to be playing Diablo 3 on an opening night. I had a lot of fun and we ran Demon Hunters just to make the season a little easier to complete. I’ve made it as far as unlocking the seasonal rewards and I am not sure if I will push any further.
Dragalia Lost – Android
This one is going to likely maintain a permanent slot on my list. Unfortunately I don’t really have any new screenshots because I no longer play on my phone where it is super easy to take screenshots. On my Galaxy Tab S4 I have to do a complicated volume down and power button to take a shot so I never do it. On my ZTE Axon 7 phone it is a 3 finger gesture to take a shot, and I am wondering if there is a way to restore that functionality to the tablet with an application or something. This game keeps my attention because they keep rolling out new events, with either brand new or revisiting boss encounters for me to play with. I pretty much play enough each night to complete the daily objectives and then head to sleep.
Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers – PC
I went from hot and heavy to barely at all on this one. I got in, completed the Shadowbringers story and leveled the Warrior to 80 and my Samurai to 80 as well. Then I disappeared once again because other things released that pulled away my attention. I will continue to play this it fits and spurts for the remainder of this month I am certain, because my attention is being funneled super hard away from almost everything else that I have on my plate. I would really like to level a Magic DPS and a Healer so that I can see all of the Shadowbringers role quests. Still a great game I just am waiting on more story content to drag me back into it.
Magic the Gathering Arena – PC
My attention span for this game has been limited this month, but with the upcoming release content for Throne of Eldraine and the Brawl event happening right now I want to poke my head back in. I have to say though I would play this WAY more if I could play it from my Tablet. My winding down and bed routine would probably include a quick rush through Dragalia dailies and then a few matches of MTGA. I feel like they are missing out on a lot by not having a tablet client, though I guess in theory I could stream this from bed with Parsec. I should investigate how feasible that really is. I sorta wish that I could configure Parsec to work in a sort of console friendly mode where instead of my desktop I am presented with a board of icons of applications to launch.
To The New and Returning
Monster Hunter World Iceborne – PS4
I am a sucker. I did in fact buy this on the PS4 to be able to play it now… when I would way rather have just waited to play it on the PC. The PC version is so superior to the PS4 version for my purposes… however for some reason Capcom is maintaining a staggered schedule of releases. I still love the game and as a result they are getting two purchases from me. I am what is wrong with games and I know I should feel ashamed. I am honestly not sure how much time I will have to devote to this but I really want to poke around and try and get used to a PS4 Controller again.
World of Warcraft Classic – PC
This is the grand daddy of all things on this list and is consuming the most of my time. As of last night I hit 28 on my Undead Warrior and am about halfway to 29. I have plans already made to run Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deep tonight with guildies, and this game is dominating my headspace at the moment. I cannot fully explain why it feels so good but god does it feel good to be back in Vanilla WoW. I knew I would be playing it because Grace had never gotten to experiment, but on some level I fully expected it just to be the two of us running around and doing nonsense. Instead we have a legitimately large guild full of friends all seemingly digging this experience. Long live House Kraken!
To Those Departing
Final Fantasy V – Android
This one largely lost focus somewhere around the Earth Shrine. I probably will return to it because I really like the idea of legitimately playing this without the Four Job Fiesta rules. That said on some level I agree with Ash on this one that the rules actually improve the game. Right now I feel like I need to do all of the things to min-max my characters, whereas playing under the rules dictates my actions. It limits the scope of what is available and causes me to focus on specific strategies. That said now that I know this is a reasonable option I might sign on next year for the Fiesta from my tablet. I just wish this version synced with any other version of the game so I could pop between playing on the PC for example and the tablet. Everything should have cross save.
Summary
The last several months have been pretty stable to be honest with not a lot of changes happening. Mostly a few things shift into focus as a few other things fall out of focus. I expect this month will be about World of Warcraft Classic with a side dish of Monster Hunter World Iceborne and a little bit of Destiny 2 especially as we get closer to the launch of Shadowkeep. Destiny has made me wish that literally every game had cross save if not cross play. I am mostly fine with having to buy a client for each platform, but I would love to be able to carry my characters over to it. There is no reason why Diablo 3 on the switch couldn’t have connected to Battle.net for example, and I have zero excitement over Overwatch Switch as it stands because I fully expect that it will not be connected to Battle.net either. I want more ability to play with my friends on the characters I have already spent time building, because quite frankly I don’t generally have enough bandwidth to level something new.
Some years back I wrote a series of posts that I called GroupCraft and dug into my greater unified theory of group creation. The problem with the Classic era is that I see a lot of people doing a lot of things that just are not effective, and then being frustrated when groups don’t happen. Coming back to Classic I am seeing the same behavior so I thought it might be time to break these posts out again or at least create a streamlined version of them. The original posts however are still largely valid so if you are so inclined the three part series is as follows:
If You Don’t have a Healer and a Tank You Don’t Have a Group
I realize this is a blunt statement, but it is one you need to get used to. During the course of this post I will give you some advise to mitigate this, but if you don’t have a stock of pocket tanks and or pocket healers then you are going to struggle to make groups happen. That is the cold hard fact and there is no reason to sugar coat it. DPS you are a commodity in the Vanilla/Classic era because you are WAY easier to level than a Tank or a Healer. Hybrids to some extent have an easier lot in life but they are also in many ways less effective at the chosen role, at least until properly specced and geared.
I commented about the above snipped of general chat on twitter last night. That is not a group looking for more that is two very hopeful dps thinking that shouting into the void is going to fix their dilemma. Shortly after I took that screenshot and snipped it down, it was a group of three dps looking for a tank and healer, and continued to do so until I logged for the night and hour and a half later.
Public Channels Rarely Provide Results
When you look for a group in either General or Trade you are effectively shouting into the void hoping that someone else happens to be sitting there doing nothing looking for a group as well. Most players are engaged in the world and not actively watching chat channels. We are still knee deep in the leveling phase of the game and few people are just hanging out in Org or Stormwind trying to make a group happen. While I have General and Trade still turned on, I have also made a tab that complete filters them out so that I don’t miss Guild Chat. Basically when you are shouting into the void of a public channel you are talking to a very small group of players that are actively watching that channel.
Lock Down a Tank and a Healer
If you want to be successful in forming groups you have to take a very systematic approach to it or be very lucky. As a Warrior Tank I can shout into any channel and probably get a bunch of nibbles because I am a class that is in demand. Most players are not going to have this benefit so when it comes to building a group, you have to lock down the core. If you are DPS this means you need to find both a Tank and a Healer. If you are one of those roles you just have to find the other. In theory you should have been friending every Healer or Tank you come across in grouping up randomly to complete quests. If you didn’t do this however you have to utilize the dark art of the /who command.
When you type /who in game you get the first panel. Yours may not look exactly like mine because I have an ElvUI skin applied but the contents should generally be the same. The who command accepts a large number of arguments and by default it it queries the specific zone you are in with the z=”ZoneName” argument and +/- 3 levels from your current level. This might be useful if you are looking for a specific group within your zone. However I find filtering by class a way more powerful option because it will search all players actively logged into the game when you use the c-“ClassName” argument.
Getting to Know the Classes
So now that you have access to the full potential of the who command, you are going to need to know what you are looking for. The truth is for Classic the class options are pretty limited so I am going to go down each of the Tank and Healer options and talk a little bit about my own personal perspective.
The Tanks
Warrior – The OG Tank, the only one that is universally raid viable at end games. I’ve know a lot of people that worked really freaking hard on their hybrid of choice to be almost as effective as a warrior completely half-assing it. The bigger challenge is the fact that most people have no clue at all how to tank in the classic era, and it took me a couple of instances to reach a point where I was comfortable with it.
Druid – Bear has some excellent threat and a lot of health to mitigate damage. The biggest challenge to bear tanks is the fact that the gearing options for “tanking leather” suck badly for the entirety of Vanilla. If a Druid wants to do this role well, they are going to have to go to some extreme lengths of grinding to reach peak efficiency. That said since dungeons are mostly about holding threat then Druids make a perfectly cromulent choice.
Paladins – Just don’t. My original intended main was a Paladin Tank, and eventually after running up the Hunter I returned to it and attempted in vain to make it work. Paladins have the benefit being able to wear all of the same gear that Warriors can, which is a pretty good start on the mitigation front. The real problem with Paladins is they have really poor threat generation tools. You are going to have to work very hard to make a Paladin Tank viable.
Shaman – No. Yes technically at this point in life Shaman have a tanking tree. Enhancement has all sorts of threat generation abilities, and rockbiter weapon is damned mighty for holding threat. However you are going to kill your healer in the process. We had a guild run recently where the Shaman was running rockbiter and I forgot it was the threat stance… and the healer had a hell of a time each time something was ripped off my Warrior. Maybe viable if you are really desperate and you have a really great Shaman.
The Healers
Priest – The OG Main Healer, and the one that has the most tools in their toolkit without really having to do much spec wise to augment them. In vanilla this is going to be your bread and butter most reliable healing experience.
Druid – Healer really is the role that this class is born to play in Vanilla and as a result Classic. They have a lot of healer gearing options, with the ability to just wear “priest” gear and get by with it. It is a weird healing style to get used to but those who are good at it are godly.
Paladin – A phenomenal healer if specced properly. If you are running with someone who is hybrid specced then they are going to constantly run into mana issues. If the paladin throws on some “priest” gear however they can do a great job of healing in a pinch regardless of talents. For them it is all about making sure they have enough mana.
Shaman – Probably the weakest healing offering in Vanilla mostly because it requires a lot of talents to back it up. All of the Shaman I have run into that are trying to shift over and heal a bit are having serious mana issues. The Shaman that are geared and talented specifically for healing though are perfectly fine.
Be Direct and Be Specific
When you shout into a public channel you are talking to everyone and no one at all. It is very easy for me to completely ignore something that happens in public chat. Either I may not happen to be watching that channel at the moment, or I may read something and not think it really is addressed to me. As a result I find it way more viable to hunt for players directly. I am going to always at least respond to a tell, even if it is with a polite “no thank you”. If you ever get a response like that, move on and don’t pester the player.
So taking what you already know about the /Who command and the classes available to you… start reaching out directly to players and trying to fill your slots. Once you have locked down a Tank and a Healer you can then probably safely take things to public channels to fill the last couple of DPS slots. Right or wrong… right now in Classic as it was in Vanilla… DPS are a commodity. GOOD DPS however will eventually become something that is going to get you invited back to groups over and over, but we are too early into the life cycle of this game for it to have much of an effect.
It is also very important that you tell players exactly what you are wanting to do. If you need to run Blackfathom Deep, then say something like this “Excuse me, would you be interested in tanking a BFD run I am pulling together?”. It is polite, direct and friendly in tone. Sure you could get by with fewer words but just sending someone a message like “BFD?” comes off as totally random, somewhat rude and doesn’t exactly convey the full message of what you are expecting. Come up with a template in your head and mostly just swap out the pieces of what you are looking for and where you are planning on going.
Join Social Channels
One of the functionalities that players have more or less forgotten about is the inclusion of social channels. So /1 is always going to be General for players and /2 is always going to be Trade, however you have a bunch of channels that you can create yourself. I am sure if you do some searching you will find a full listing of the commands but here are some of the most basic options.
/Number – a slash and the number of the channel will allow you to address a message towards that channel. Doing the command with no message will lock your chat pane to talk to that channel by default, which is handy if you are in a lengthy communication.
/Join ChannelName – the /Join command followed by the name of a channel will join that channel. There really aren’t a lot of options here and all channels are effectively joinable by all players. There isn’t really an option for locking them down.
/Leave Number – Similar to the join command you can type /Leave and then the number of the channel and it will remove that channel from your list effectively removing you from it.
/ChatWho Number – ChatWho is a super useful command because it lists who is active in the channel at a given moment. Mostly useful if you are going to say something to the channel that is really meant for a couple of people that are in the channel, and want to make sure that they are actually in there.
Social channels used to be a great resource for grouping. Pretty much every raid group had one or more… or in the cases of Late Night Raiders we had one for each class team in addition to the main channel. Once you got invited to one they became a great way to pull together groups giving you several “slightly better than general” options to look for groups. I still stand by direct messages as the best way of finding groups however.
Friend Good Players
I cannot harp on this one enough. If you are out in the world friend players that you happen to group with that are both good-natured and competent. Direct messages work, but what works better is a direct message to someone on your friend list that you have already built up a rapport with. Also get to the point where you notice names of players you have been around before. I’ve friended up a few players that I have noticed consistently throw me a buff for example. That kind of open positive attitude towards the community means that the player is probably going to be team minded.
This Takes Work
It takes an awful lot of work to make any of this happen, but then again once you start building ties it leads to other things. Back in Vanilla I got invited to so many raids as a result of random encounters that I happened to have out in the wilds. There are a lot of people that I am still friends with today that came from a random occurrence. Hell we would not have 80 some characters in the guild right now were it not for the fact that I have been applying this sort of logic and “collecting awesome people” over the last two decades of gaming.
It isn’t that I am doing anything terribly special. I am just being mindful of my surroundings and taking opportunities to make connections with the good people I happen to find along the way. You too can do all of these things.
The first hurdle of a guild is getting the 10 silver required for the charter. We managed to get that within the first few hours of Classic. The bigger hurdle however is the 10 gold required to be able to choose your tabard design. I remember back in Vanilla we did some runs of Deadmines where we vendored everything that someone didn’t actually need and funneled that money into funding the 10 gold. This time around we took a more communal approach. As you reach 20 you start getting a little more wiggle room in your money situation, and as such I set up one of my alts as a banker and folks mailed donations to it.
Over the course of four days and lots of generosity we gathered the 10 gold needed to buy the tabard design, and last night when I first got on I labored over making sure to pick the right items. I really wish there was a number system or something so that I could make sure that what I was choosing was exactly what I wanted to choose. I had used some of the tabard designers to come up with the basics of what I wanted and last night was largely just trying to match that design in the tiny window that is the tabard designer and the generally poor lighting conditions of Undercity.
In the time it took to earn the money I also cobbled together a logo. The idea for the tabard was to make it sorta look like a pirate flag given that we are playing on the pirate themed Bloodsail Buccaneers server. The purple border is for the Forsaken given that a huge chunk of us were Forsaken to facilitate the signing of the charter. I also happen to really like purple as a color and thanks to Ultros I will always associate the color with octopoids. In my travels I found a really cool woodcut illustration of an octopus on a public domain site and I incorporated that into the logo.
Other than setting the tabard, last night was largely one of chill leveling. I originally went over the HIllsbrad to help Tam out with a quest, but then realized it was at the very end of a quest chain… where I opted to try and catch up so we could do it together. I did not realize this was one of those quest chains that went on forever and I made it to step three before I stalled out a bit and reached a phase where I am going to need to call in some help myself to push through it. I tried duoing it with a Shaman but we just didn’t have enough oomph to push through it.
In other bits of excitement, thanks to a pretty regular flow of materials from Dynar I am now officially an Expert Blacksmith. This is another point where I did not remember things working like they do. I kept trying to train in Undercity and my memory told me that I should be able to train the next rank at level 20 and 125 skill… both of which I had passed. After a quick jaunt over to the WoWhead Classic blacksmithing page I realized that I would need to take the Zeppelin. I vague remember this now but in order to train a skill you have to find a higher skilled smith than you are currently. So in order to get to Expert I had to find an Artisan, and the only ones of those that exist are in Orgrimmar and Ironforge.
Then when I want to move to Artisan I will have to go to Booty Bay and track down the only Master Blacksmith in the game. Now it makes sense as to why the quest for the purple smithing hammer was in Stranglethorn Vale. So at some point… I am going to need to make my way to Booty Bay, which thankfully is WAY easier for the Horde than it is for the Alliance. It also means that I am going to have to do the faction repair method in Dire Maul if I decide I want to become friendly with the Bloodsail Buccaneers. I mean I could trash my goblin rep once I have trained all of the available patterns… but that is a decision for a really long time from now.
