Moonshine Mansion – Page 52

Barely There

August 17, 2016 by Grace

I worked on greater rifts in D3 yesterday. For the uninitiated, Diablo 3’s adventure mode gives you access to two types of rifts. The normal “Nephalem” rifts have difficulty that is set when you set the game difficulty for yourself overall. They are procedurally generated dungeons that take on the appearance of various places from the story, and are populated with random monster sets. As you kill monsters you fill up a progress bar, and once it is full the rift guardian boss is spawned. Rifts are great because they have a higher chance of dropping legendaries, and the rift guardian drops greater rift keystones.

Greater rifts have the same random tileset and monsters, but none of the normal monsters drop any loot or gold. Instead, you are trying to beat a timer, filling up the progress bar to summon and defeat the guardian before 15 minutes are up. Doing this nets you loot from the guardian plus legendary gems with special powers. Each completed greater rift gives you the chance to level up those legendary gems and make yourself ever more powerful. Greater rifts also have a more granular difficulty setting that you can choose when you open a new rift, and they’re not capped at Torment XIII like normal rifts.

Yes, I really finished that rift with less than 8.5 seconds to spare.

All this is a really long introduction for the fact that yesterday I attempted GR65 (functionally a few tics higher difficulty than TXIII) and won. Barely. As you can see in my screenshot I had less than 9 seconds left on the clock. On that run I died a few times to dumb things early on (stupid effing bees in long narrow hallways), fell behind, and almost just gave up and reset. In greater rifts when you’re fighting against the clock you also get increasing penalties when you die, forcing you to wait up to 30 seconds until you can rez again. I wish that there was a way to instantly rez and just deduct that time from your timer instead of having to sit still for 30 seconds and think about what you did, but at least watching those bees hovering around my corpse filled me with enough determination to continue. So let this be a reminder that even when things look terrible and you’re surrounded by evil bees, there’s still a chance that you can make it through okay!

How to get to invasions in a hurry

August 16, 2016 by Grace

I know I said I wasn’t going to do any guides this Blaugust, but I guess I lied. There’s enough folks wondering how to quickly get to the demon invasions that I figured I’d put together a quick guide. This accounts for both Horde and Alliance paths and portals, and has optional extra speedy options for specific classes. For the purposes of this guide I’m assuming you have set your hearth to your faction’s shrine in Pandaria for easy access to most portals. If you don’t yet have your hearth set there, make friends with a mage and get yourself a portal because some of these locations are a bit out of the way otherwise. Or better yet, just go roll a mage because they’re pretty great.

Westfall:

Alliance: Port to Stormwind just fly southwest. It’s not even worth grabbing the flight path to Sentinel Hill.

Horde: Port to Orgrimmar, take the zeppelin to Stranglethorn Vale, fly north to Westfall. If you really don’t want to wait for the zep you can take the portal to the Blasted Lands and fly northwest from there, but it is slightly longer.

Horde Mages: If you don’t feel like waiting for the zep, you can port to Stonard and fly west from there.

Dun Morogh:

Alliance: Port to Ironforge, walk out the front door.

Horde, with increasingly silly options: The fastest path requires you to have unlocked the portal to Twilight Highlands. You can fly due west from there. Otherwise you’re looking at a long flight from either Stranglethorn (via zeppelin), Blasted Lands (portal in Org), or Stonard (mage portal) to Searing Gorge, then north to Dun Morogh. If you’ve unlocked it you can also take the incredibly awkward pathway via Vashj’ir portal, seahorse to the flight path, to Searing Gorge, but if you’ve got that you probably have the Twilight Highlands portal anyway. If you’re extremely bored and have one laying around you can also try using a Direbrew Remote to go to blackrock mountain and fly north from there. All of these paths leave something to be desired but they will get you there, eventually.

Hillsbrad:

Alliance: Portal to Ironforge from the shrine, then hop a flight to Arathi Highlands and head west. Death Knights can also death gate and hop a flight from Acherus instead to save a little time. Aerie Peak is a nice close flight point.

Horde: Portal to Undercity and hop a flight to Tarren Mill directly.

Mages of either faction: Use your Ancient Dalaran portal to go directly to Hillsbrad. Just have your feather fall button ready! For the unaware, this teleport spell is found in the last room of Scarlet Halls (normal or heroic), after killing the last boss without letting him burn any books. It is on a shelf to the left of the door. The portal version is sold by the mage vendor in Dalaran once you have learned the self-teleport version.

Azshara:

Alliance: Portal to Stormwind. Take the Hyjal portal from there and fly southeast from Hyjal to Azshara. If you haven’t unlocked the Hyjal portal yet, portal to Darnassus, hop a flight path to Ashenvale and then fly east, or if you are a druid teleport to Moonglade and fly from there.

Horde: Portal to Orgrimmar and head out the back door to Azshara.

Northern Barrens:

Alliance: Once again the Hyjal portal is your friend, otherwise you’ll be flying for a long while from Darnassus.

Alliance Mages: Teleport to Theramore and laugh at the poor suckers flying all the way from Hyjal.

Horde: Portal to Org or Thunder Bluff and catch a flight straight to the Crossroads.

Tanaris:

Everybody: Portal to Dalaran. In the Kirin Tor tower there’s a portal to the Caverns of Time. Take it and you’ll be in Tanaris.

Do you have any other suggestions for getting around Azeroth in a hurry? Share in the comments and I’ll be happy to update this list!

All the Fel

August 15, 2016 by Grace

My garrison was feeling left behind so I brought the demon invasion to it.

When the 7.0 patch hit I was surprised how much I still stayed in my garrison. There was cloth to make and missions to run to stock up on resources so I could buy fur so I could make more cloth…it was still almost as tedious and exhausting as it was before the gold missions got nerfed. I was starting to worry that I’d end up spending Legion still hearthing back to my garrison just so I could keep working on professions and making bags to sell. Fortunately last week’s demon invasions have thoroughly cured me of my garrison addiction. When I bother to check in on them, my garrisons are full of resources and waiting for me to restock everything. In between, I’m not thinking about them at all and that’s 100% fine by me. My baby mage is 92, she’s going to hit 100 this week, and the stretch from 60-100 will have been fueled largely by invasion events instead of questing. I’m going to squeeze all of the leveling goodness out of this that I can because I know it is going away at the end of the month. The only other question is, can I level another alt to 100 before it goes?

What I’m Playing: August 14, 2016

August 14, 2016 by Grace

We’re almost halfway through Blaugust and I’ve managed to keep up with things so far, woo! This week my play time has still been pretty focused.

FFXIV: Once again the only time I played FFXIV this week was during raid. Once again, the time I did play was phenomenal. This game’s raiding is so fun and satisfying, and even old content still requires some thought and attention. I’m just too distracted by other things right now to give it the attention it deserves.

Steven Universe Soundtrack Attack: I almost forgot to mention this one, but I was talking with the Aggrochat folks about it last night before we recorded the podcast and figured other people might want to know about it too. I’m playing this fun little rhythm game on iOS. I like it because you can create and customize your own new gem (mine’s a Ruby!), and it has music from the show. Unfortunately it moves pretty quickly from “hey this is fun” to “furiously mashing at the screen not being able to keep up.” Maybe that’s a thing this type of game does? I admit I’ve not played any other rhythm games on my phone. Some of the songs are even sped up a bit from the show. I suspect it is because they want you to watch more adds and buy powerups that let you slow down the songs. Also not all of the levels are songs directly from the show, a lot of them are instrumental tracks, so don’t expect to hear all of the songs from the show right away when you start playing. In any case it is a fun enough little game and worth checking out for yourself if you are interested, just don’t expect a lot of depth.

Diablo 3: I’m still working away at my seasonal character. I’ve completed GR60 and the view ahead is all grinding for tiny upgrades and praying for ancient legendaries with good rolls. I have no idea if I will stick around long enough to finish another chapter of the season, but I’m still having fun for now.

WoW: Once again this is where I’m spending the bulk of my time. The demon invasions have gone from fun distraction to pretty great way to level, so I’ve been trying to hit them on my baby mage whenever new ones are up. between invasions and dungeons I’ve gone from 60 to 77 while barely setting foot on outlands or northrend. I actually like both of those expansions just fine, but it is pretty neat to have an alternate leveling pathway open up like this, even if it is only temporary. I suspect I’ll have at least one more character to 100 by Legion at this rate!