Moonshine Mansion – Page 53

Screenie Saturday: Fashion and Feels

August 13, 2016 by Grace

BROKEN SHORE SPOILERS AHEAD

This week was dominated by WoW and D3, and I never remember to take screenies in D3.

My baby mage looking stylish in Feralas.

Tirion dying horribly without much fanfare had way less emotional impact than the fact that there were horde and alliance raids working together here

I loved the chaos of the invasion events on the first day. What is even happening here?

Are you watching Steven Universe?

August 12, 2016August 12, 2016 by Grace

I didn’t get as much time as I would have liked to play games last night, but I did get to watch a few episodes of Steven Universe that were sitting on my DVR. I started watching the show a bit late, and I admit I was pretty baffled by the outspoken love for this show on my social media radar. The show is about a young boy named Steven and his alien gem friends/caretakers who protect the planet earth. It is a fairly normal-sounding premise for a generic kids cartoon, but luckily the delivery is anything but generic. Steven Universe does so many amazing things I wish I had seen on TV when I was a kid. Almost all of the main characters are women and girls. It has perfect beautiful normal flawed queer relationships. I realize it is 2016 and I should be taking things like this for granted by now, but it is still amazing to me for a cartoon to step forward and say “these people love each other” without being either so subtle about it that it could be overlooked or so awkward that it is meant to be a lesson not a relationship. Likewise, the show covers some pretty grown-up sounding themes like consent in a straightforward honest way without ever having to mention sex, and without sounding like an after-school special. To top it off it packages it in a cheerful fun art style and some of the most amazing catchy music I’ve ever heard on television. If you haven’t seen it yet, I really recommend you give it a try. Start from the beginning if you can, because the series is definitely telling a story. The most recent episodes pack a real emotional punch for fans, but might just be 15 minutes of confusion for someone new to the show. I was hooked within the first 5 or 6 episodes, and if you make it to episode 12 (Giant Woman) and aren’t completely sold then I think you can probably walk away safely. At this point the show has become enough of a cultural touchstone among my social circles that I couldn’t imagine being without it.

An Expensive Mistake

August 12, 2016August 11, 2016 by Grace

I took a break from the land of demon hunters last night to…play a demon hunter. Yeah, I forsook WoW and the promise of easy ilvl 700 gear for all my alts to play some Diablo 3. I’ve officially reached the point in the season where I have all the pieces of gear I need, and now I’m on the very long tedious path towards finding ancient, optimal versions of everything. It is a slow climb from here on out, and squeezing every ounce out of gems and enchanting will matter.

That’s a lot of work. The despair part is accurate.

One of the ways D3 lets you upgrade is by “augmenting” your gear. This requires that the piece of gear in question be an ancient legendary, the kind with a shiny gold border around its item description and higher stats than normal. You augment it by placing it in Kanai’s Cube, along with some gems of your choosing. One leveled legendary gem and 3 flawless royal gems to be precise. The legendary gem must be level 30+ to augment a weapon, 40+ for jewelry, or 50+ for armor, and the higher the level the more powerful the augment. Last night I did a bunch of rifts with fellow Aggrochat friends Bel and Thalen, and poured all my gem upgrades into an unused legendary gem so I could get it to 50 and upgrade my pants. I was gonna have the fanciest pants of them all! I did one more rift than I reasonably should have, putting me a bit past my usual bedtime, but damn it I wanted my fancy pants. I finally got that legendary gem up to 50, grabbed the mats I needed out of my stash, and ran over to the cube to make my fancy pants.

Whyyyyyy?

Then this happened. In my haste to upgrade my pants and run to bed, I grabbed yellow gems from the bank. I’m used to playing a mage, and more than once I’ve accidentally put a yellow gem into my gear before realizing that no, demon hunters don’t care about intelligence. It doesn’t help that the in-game recipe tells you that you need 3 flawless royal gems, but doesn’t remind you that specific colors of gems grant specific stat bonuses and maybe you should use the green ones, idiot demon hunter. And so this is how after hours and hours of work, I ended up with demon hunter pants with 250 bonus intelligence. The moral of this story is probably something about not finishing expensive projects when you’re overtired and not paying attention, measure twice cut once and all that jazz. Otherwise you might end up with shitty pants.

Demons Galore

August 12, 2016August 10, 2016 by Grace

SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T DONE BROKEN SHORE YET The Legion invasions have officially started in WoW, and have been surprisingly fun! I fully expected to barely be able to log in last night, but somehow there were no server crashes and no DDoS issues, only smooth demon hunting as far as the eye could see.

As one person on my server said, “even the demons hate Barrens chat.”

First thing I did was hop on my forsaken priest, my character with the most history and achievements, and set off to do the broken shore quest. I knew what was coming, story-wise, but was excited to see how it played out. I was expecting a solo scenario, and was a little surprised and worried to see I ended up in a group of 20 people. Luckily everyone was just excited and nobody was a jerk, and the way things were constructed I felt completely free to watch the cutscenes when they arrived. I liked that there were both a horde and an alliance group doing the scenario at the same time, and the way the combat with the end boss went with friendly banter between the factions. At the end, I was a bit disappointed that Vol’jin got mortally wounded in such a mundane way, while Varian got to have his epic heroic moment before exploding. After watching the later cutscene it was clear that it happened that way so that Vol’jin could make it back to Org and choose the new warchief himself instead of letting the Horde fall into chaos without a clear succession. Then I got to fangirl out for a while, seeing Sylvanas take up the mantle of warchief. For all her faults as a character I still can’t help but love her. I hope she gets the chance to do a good job, and that this isn’t the setup for making her a raid boss down the road. I liked her rallying cry to avenge Vol’jin, and just seeing all the horde races mingling together and cheering in a unified way instead of each being off in their own racial divisions.

I love seeing so many people out in the world again! “Do these zeps have a weight limit?”

Once the juicy story goodness was finished, I set myself on a mission to do the legion invasions. The new tech here is incredibly sweet. Zoning into an area with an active invasion smoothly put me into an instance with plenty of other people, and usually at or near the very beginning of the event. Only once or twice did I arrive at the start of phase 2, and usually that was because I had zoned in while on a flight path and it took a minute for me to arrive and land in town. I even tried out the scaling tech on my baby mage, and at level 60 the demons were all level 60-61 for me and I had no problem helping to take them down. Honestly this was the highlight of the night for me, because I think it is huge for the game going forward. I can’t wait to quest through the broken isles with this tech in place, and I hope that they go back and apply it to all the old zones too. It would make leveling an alt a completely new experience, and revitalize so much old content. Between a few characters I managed to get most of what I wanted from the event already, and I’m kind of relieved. I got the pet, a warglaive for my future demon hunter, and 2 of the 4 sets of cosmetic gear. I even managed to get the last zone I needed for the achievement this morning before I ran to work. That means I can focus on the invasions just for the characters that could use gear upgrades, and maybe try to get some of the weapons for transmog. It isn’t much of a grind and that means hopefully I won’t burn myself out before Legion even gets here at the end of the month. If this is what Legion is going to be like, then I can’t wait!