Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the official launch of Midnight, and I am always shocked at how much of a difference this seems to make. My rotted “deluxe edition” brain feels that if there is a head start… I am probably going to pay the extra in order to enable it. However, there seems to be a large volume of people who do not do this thing, either because they cannot afford the difference or because they are diametrically opposed to the practice. So I will never be shocked at what a difference things make when the flood gates actually open and all of the players show up. All of the zones were way the heck more active last night, but shockingly, the most cogent change was the fact that general chat was way more hopping with activity. It’s been disturbingly quiet the entire time I have been playing, and even the few times I attempted to ping chat for a rare mob… I got crickets.
This morning I had popped in to check on World Quests and saw someone calling out that this dragon named Ravengerus was up and that they were going to take it down. I had attempted this the other day, and even attempted to summon folks to my aid… with zero luck but today… we got the critical mass of players needed to take it down. It dropped nothing useful, and also, seemingly, the rare kill quest is bugged because this thing did not count towards it… nor did any of other named mob spawns that I have taken down count. I like killing big monsters, and I will always be down for taking down a silver elite, no matter if I am likely to get loot from it or not. I took a screenshot in large part so those who have not been around WoW, can see how much better the ground markers and attack visualization are. While this is not the pixel-perfect nature of Final Fantasy XIV, it is so much better than the “every edge is fuzzy” problem that we had for years. Fights are way easier to do because it is so much easier to actually avoid attacks that are avoidable.
Between World Quests and Rare mobs, and a few hunts, I have gotten my item level up to 225, which includes a 220 blue or better in every slot except for my belt and my boots. I picked up a 201 belt for cheap off the Auction House, because I had so little luck with belt drops that I just could not seem to find anything better. I’ve gotten belts to drop from Rares, but it is always a cloth belt. Similarly, I have gotten multiple pairs of boots to drop but they are always Mail, so it makes me wonder if there is some sort of bug happening in the smart loot system. Apparently, you can only get two Veteran rewards from weekly hunts, because the first two “hard” hunts that I completed rewarded a trinket and an amulet, and then all of the others after that rewarded a generic green bag of loot. The 246 trinket hat I got came from the Singularity quartermaster for achieving a specific reknown rating and then completing one of the tower defense things in the Voidstorm. I need to probably grind out dungeons or delves to see if I can get a damned pair of boots, since no one seems to be crafting them and selling them for a reasonable price on the Auction House either.
I also went through the process of unlocking the Haranir, which is, by far, the easiest Allied race that I have seen. Essentially, it just involves completing the campaign in Harandar and then talking to the NPC near the portal in Silvermoon. I create a baby Navi/Troll thingy that is a Druid in large part because the most interesting thing going on for the race is their Druid forms. I played through the tiny bit of story that represents a starter zone, and then moved to the portion where I go through the motions and choose a campaign to go through. I opted to go for Battle for Azeroth because it has been a while since I have seen those zones, and I particularly enjoyed the main story quest for The Horde. At some point, I will need to get an invite to Facepull since I rolled this on The Scryers. I know guilds are both cross-server and cross-faction these days, but I prefer to keep my horde with my horde friends in Facepull and then all of them also on The Scryers, whereas Argent Dawn is for Alliance.
Other than that, I have been making daily trips into Dune Awakening to farm for batteries. I did quite a bit of this during the double resources event over the weekend, and now I am mostly just making a bit lap around the central rocky area that my base is located in. I am up to 17 days of power currently, but keep dipping in to do this to keep extending this time frame. The most recent Coriolis storm seemingly ruined some of the easy battery spawns in my area. However, there are still at least three spawns that I can farm relatively easily, and I dip in periodically to do so whenever I think about it. I am not done messing around with Dune, but I know that my focus is going to be really fraugh after this Friday when the Path of Exile league starts. My base to the south is going to run out of power, though, and I have warned the others on the server to raid the resources if they want anything.
There is a pretty constant trickle of information coming out ahead of the League start this Friday, and I am all on board with it. I’ve decided that I am, in fact, rolling a Righteous Fire Chieftain as my first character, in large part because I really want to get into the endgame as fast as I can so I can start exploring the reworked Atlas. I do want to build a Holy Hammers character and maybe a Guardian minions character, but those will come later once I have a stable financial base in this league. It seems like Kodra is going to be rolling some sort of Holy Strike character, and I will be interested in seeing how that works. Additionally, I have convinced my sibling Ace to give this a go, and they are going to probably be rolling an SRS Necromancer since it is pretty easy to get up and running. I would love to be there to support them as they need gear, but also know that they are deeply aligned with SSF ideology, so it will be a balancing act. I think Carth is going to be giving this league a shot as well and has a friend who will need to be invited to the clan. If we are mutuals and you play POE, you are always welcome in our nonsense.
The post Where Are The Boots? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Happy Midnight Official Release Day! I have been playing Midnight since Thursday, when the head start began, because I am a sucker and am willing to pay the premium to get access to things early. There are folks out there with way more self-control than I have… and as a result, I hope you all enjoy your journey into Midnight. This morning’s blog post is going to talk about some of the themes in Midnight, so if you want to go into the game completely unspoiled, this morning be something that you want to come back to later. I feel like it is also important to state that I have been out of the World of Warcraft game for a while now. I very briefly played through the Dragonflight campaign at release and then attempted to come back and play a bit for War Within, and crashed out on the second zone because I was overloaded by the sheer number of quests. So I have been gone from seriously attempting to play World of Warcraft since the Shadowlands expansion in 2020.
The last time I played the game seriously was during Pandaria Remix in 2024, and I am actually maining the character that I played during that event, which is a Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven. There has been a lot of adjusting to the sweeping changes in the game that have happened since I last played, and Remix doesn’t fully count since it was its own thing. First up, I think the User Interface changes are brilliant, and I have managed to play the game without reinstalling any sort of hotbar or nameplate addons. The only thing that I wish I had was some equivalent of the threat bar that FFXIV has where you can see how much threat you are holding on all of the targets that you currently have threat on. This would be amazing, but the base UI seems perfectly cromulent for the role of a tank. I have no clue how good it is for healing, but seemingly it works just fine for DPS, given that after the campaign, I have swapped over to Arms Warrior. I’ve also been using the one button assist quite a bit because I have wanted to completely shut off my brain while playing World of Warcraft. If I do anything serious, I will set my hotbars up properly and care about rotations again.
As far as the campaign goes, I think Midnight is pretty freaking great. It is a massive step up in World of Warcraft storytelling, even over The War Within… which was itself a massive step up over Dragonflight. While I am not feeling the feels that I did during Final Fantasy XIV, they are trying to tackle far more nuanced topics in this expansion than we usually get. The Amani zone and the redemption arc featured within it was phenomenal, and it might go down as one of my favorite World of Warcraft zones, period, from any expansion. Zul’Aman will always have a special place in my heart, and I completely forgot that it was associated with the Silvermoon area… so this was a massively pleasant surprise. Another zone that I did not expect to really love was the rambling mess that featured around Silvermoon, which takes you across all of the Plaguelands as you deal with the sins of the past. It tells a way more mature story about the horrors of war and what it brings people to do than I expected from Warcraft. Blizzard is known for big bombastic hero tales… and significantly less so for dealing with sensitive topics, but I applaud them for trying something new and interesting.
This game, however, continues my tradition of hating the “druid” zone. I am not the biggest fan of Harandar or the Navi… I mean Haranir. I get what they are going for with this zone and this race, and I might actually play one at some point because they have some really interesting druid transformation forms, but this is so not my jam. Harandar, in general, also suffers from the “Heart of Thorns” problem, where the zone uses aggressive verticality that makes waypoints mostly useless unless you have the layout memorized and know without a doubt what vertical tier of the zone the thing you are looking for is located on. I will always love the Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns expansion for the sweeping meta events that it introduced, but I fucking hate traversing these zones… and Harandar is that but for World of Warcraft. It also makes me feel like I need to sneeze the entire damned time because I can always feel the pollen in the air. There are going to be tree huggers out there that love this zone and good for them… but for someone whose favorite zone is Blackrock Depths… this is very much not my jam.
I dinged level 90 on Sunday morning and then wrapped up the campaign about an hour after that. This feels like a pretty good pace for leveling through the content, but I was left in the dust by Kylana and Erixi, who dinged, I believe, sometime on Friday. The biggest frustration that I have with the leveling experience is that you are still going to need about two zones worth of side quests to hit the max level. Go into the leveling process with that in mind and choose which zones you want to grind out completely in order to accomplish this. I personally chose Voidstorm and the Amani zone, and doing all of the quests in one and 90% of the quests in the other, combined with the Main Story quest, was enough to get me there. I did hit a wall at level 95, where I needed to be 96 in order to open up the last zone of the game, so you are better off just pushing through some side quests that are convenient as you are doing the MSQ. I wish the MSQ alone gave you enough experience, but then again, this is a problem that FFXIV has not solved either.
I’ve geared out Belgraven mostly through world quests, which are way less plentiful than when I was doing this in Shadowlands. That has opened up a lot more time to start leveling an alt, and I decided to push up Belgrace, my Horde side Paladin that was my main during Shadowlands. I have two guild families, House Stalwart on the Alliance side and Facepull on the Horde side, and I feel like it is only proper that I alternate back and forth between the two. I was apparently already in Dragonflight when I last played the character, and in theory, I should be able to hit level 80 while doing the campaign over there. I might actually do War Within as well because I would like to actually see the main story quest for that expansion without a multi-year lag between the first parts and then wrapping up rapidly right before Midnight. I’ve swapped up to Retribution because it feels like leveling as a tank is no longer as advantageous as it once was.
One thing that I had forgotten, though, is how much I enjoyed certain aspects of the Dragonflight storyline. While I do not give a shit about the Dragonflights in general… I really enjoyed a lot of the quests involving the races of the Dragon Isles that weave around the larger draconic narrative. I will never not love a Tuskarr storyline, and I really enjoy the tales of the Centaur tribes as well. Probably the worst zone is actually The Waking Shores, and that’s largely because you are so deeply involved in Dragon bullshit, with no real side narrative of the people you are impacting along the way. I feel like the Dragonflight storyline peaked in Northrend, and it has been downhill ever since. That is not to say that I did not enjoy this expansion, because clearly, there are some well-designed zones, and so much of it has an Outland and Northrend revisited vibe to it. The Ohn’ahran Plains is absolutely a rethinking of Nagrand, and large swaths of The Azure Span feel like Grizzly Hills, all of which are huge positives for the expansion in general.
As much credit as I give them for the updated UI, I am back to my old ways of installing a bunch of addons and using WoWUP to keep them patched, specifically the Curse Forge branch. Most of these are just quality of life improvements but the ones that I probably would not want to be without are Better Bags, which gives me similar functionality of having virtual bags sorted by item type, and Waypoint UI, which gives you a giant glowing beacon where the next step in your quest chain leads you to. The latter is especially handy when dealing with the bullshit verticality of Harandar. I am also a big fan of Dialog UI, which gives you a much more readable quest interface that also creates keybinds for all of the dialog options so you do not have to click the screen. Now that I am in the “endgame” and doing World Quests and such I started leaning on Handynotes and RareScanner again, which just are significant quality of life improvements when looking for rares and lootables in the zones. So I feel like all of the addons I am using now are window dressing on what is a completely functional base game, and I could play without them… but simply do not want to.
Are you just starting Midnight today? What are you most excited about for this expansion? Have you played through the expansion already? What did you enjoy the most? Drop me a line below.
The post Midnight Was Pretty Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. This Mixtape is a week late because, quite honestly, last Monday I forgot entirely that I had one sitting waiting in the pocket to be released. However, it seems like destiny might have shone upon me because this morning is going to be a bit of a mess as I have a very early medical appointment, and don’t really have time to bang out a proper blog post. I am hoping to return to weekly releases after this one again, because I enjoy making these and honestly… I end up listening to them as much as any of you might. Now, to preface my explainer as to why I make these… I have always loved the craft of placing songs in a specific order to create a unique mix that matches a specific mood or theme. Oftentimes, these end up with an anchor song and then attempt to make something that flows together with that single song. Others, like today, are more just that I have been in a specific mood and chose songs to go with that mood. I’ve explained this theory a bunch of times by now, but I don’t necessarily take for granted that someone has read every blog post, or honestly ANY of the previous Mixtape Mondays posts.
27 – Fear Loathing Flesh
If you have consumed any of my posts to date, you might have gleaned that I am dealing with a colorectal cancer diagnosis. It’s really hard waking up every morning and seemingly hearing about another person who has died from this disease, and it feels really prevalent. I am sure this is just selection bias… for example, I had never noticed a Nissan Quest on the road until my sister-in-law got one, and then I saw them constantly. Brains are great at pattern recognition when you are looking for something specific. I’ve been ina pretty dark place over the last few weeks because I am effectively in a holding pattern with no forward momentum yet… and what feels like a ticking time bomb inside of me. As a result, I have been listening to much darker music lately, and this is a mix that more or less fits that mood. This mix honestly caused me to find a song that was completely new to me, because none of the US streaming options seemed to have Melt by Front 242, so instead I substituted a really interesting cover by Helalyn Flowers. Probably my favorite thing is when one of these Mixtapes turns someone on to a new song or musician that they had never heard of before, and I feel like maybe this one has more chance of that given that it is crossing a few different musical worlds.
The funny thing about this Mix particularly, is that it has what I would consider to be a “phantom anchor”, because this did start off with Down In It by Nine Inch Nails being a sort of thread that I was pulling upon. However, the more songs that fell in place, the less and less that song really felt like it fit anymore. So I removed it and replaced it with Reptile that seemed to fit much more neatly into the emerging theme. I am pretty sure this is not the first time I have attempted to make a mix with that song, but I never actually ended up creating anything that flowed in the way that I wanted it to. Tomorrow is probably going to be an emotional post, because it has been a while since I have done one of my big dumb dumps of feels posts. So be forewarned. I did not sleep super well last night because Gracie has decided that she needs to scream instead of going to sleep, and I know that I did not get proper sleep until after midnight. After wrapping this up, I am going to start getting ready to leave the house and go off to my early morning appointment. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and one way or another, this is going to be a bit of a week of reckoning for me and my “cancer boy” journey.
As always, however, you can find the full list of Mixtapes over on my Archives, and I love it when people listen to them and comment about them. Hopefully, I will have yet another new mix next Monday.
Mixtape Mondays Archive
The post Mixtape Mondays: Fear Loathing Flesh appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We started out down an Ace and a Kodra, but picked up a Kodra as we went. Ash informs us that Nextfest is happening, and a few of us realized it. We talk a bit about the various games that have demos right now, or at least will for the first day after this show releases. From there, Tam shares his thoughts about Under the Island, a charming Zelda-like. Tam also talks about attempting to get into some of the later retro gaming consoles like the PS2, PS3, Saturn, and Dreamcast on the Ayn Thor. Bel is spun up because this week he has two big topics to talk about, first starting with the Path of Exile Mirage announcement and the sweeping endgame changes. From there, he talks about getting sucked back into World of Warcraft and mainlining the new expansion. Finally, we have a bit of a quick topic as we discuss the Dune Awakening Double Experience and Resources Event that is happening currently.
