This morning I had a startling revelation.  I am not only maining Horde this expansion…  but I am also maining an Elf.  What in the living hell has happened to me as a human being to find myself in this state.  The Horde thing is a logical progression since I played mostly Alliance for well over a decade that it was high time to see how the other half lives.  The Elf thing…  I am completely clueless other than the fact that with Demon Hunters you literally have no other choices.  Blood Elf demon hunters look so much cooler than the Night Elf ones with their damned floppy hairy eared nonsense, so it was really a no-brainer than last expansion I gravitated more towards the Horde version of Belblight.

For anyone who has read this blog of any length of time will realize that in general I am pretty Anti-Elf as a whole.  There are however some exceptions…  I have always enjoyed a good Dark Elf in most of the games that have them.  Similarly I really dig the Bosmer because they are awesome and cannibals.  Orcs in the Elder Scrolls setting are technically fallen elves…  so I like them as well.  However High Elves in pretty much any form can fuck the hell off.  In Skyrim I used to take glee at going completely out of my way to kill Thalmor and the parts of the Aldmeri Dominion quest lines that really focused on High Elf matters made me get a little bloodlusty.

So for me to play a Blood Elf which is effectively a fallen High Elf…  is really sorta shocking.  I am going to basically lean on the fact that I have horns… and that it somehow makes it palatable.  After all I would probably be more than happy to play a Satyr, which has a similar relationship to a Night Elf.

The other thing that I did last night was take on an Island Adventure thing…  which shockingly I had not actually done until last night.  They are kinda fun but also fairly grindy given it is just killing a lot of mobs for no real reward.  Grace claims that she got a mount out of there, and I got a brief flash of excitement when I saw something purple colored pop up in the auto loot window…  however they were unfortunately just doubloons the currency used to buy things associated with the island aventures.  In theory I need to try and get all three of the islands available this week since I need to do five different islands in order to move forward in the war effort thing that is effectively the same as what we were doing with our order halls.

Lastly the spawn rates of certain things are still completely borked.  I did what I have been doing the last several weeks and logged in this morning to see if there was any loot on world quests that would be an upgrade.  Sure enough there was a quest out in Vol’dun for the Bloodwing Bonepicker offering a 330+ cloak which would be an upgrade over my 325 cloak.  While writing this blog post I have been watching my WoW window in the background and a larger and larger crowd has been gathering during this time… all the while the mob in question has not spawned in.  Unfortunately this seems to be one of many quests that are in slightly bugged states right now.  I wrote about the Azerite Mining quest a few days ago where the mobs simply don’t spawn in during reliable rates.  This seems to be maybe one of those cases, but I am largely going to give up now and head in to work.  My hope is maybe this will be “unbugged” by the time I get home tonight.

I want to start off this mornings post with a business note.  Yesterday I wrote about the RoboSquid Armada initiative that we have started, and there was a problem with the Battle.net social link.  For whatever reason the first one I generated didn’t seem to work for anyone, so I have since replaced it with one that is actually working.  We didn’t do a lot last night other than run the Sethrak Temple dungeon on heroic real quick to complete the world quest that awarded a weapon for us Demon Hunters.  That has been a weird point of contention this expansion, is that the look feels really off for whatever reason.  Weapons are far harder to get to drop than they probably should be which means that I have been running around using some jank for most of my mythic dungeon running.

In truth the whole loot drop experience feels weirdly limiting, and it is starting to cause some pretty negative behavior in the dungeon finder.  There are a number of times where we have been doing a heroic and see a player drop immediately after getting a piece of loot, since it is highly unlikely that you will walk away from any dungeon with more than one item.  This ends up feeling horrible, but in a way I absolutely get why they are doing it.  Especially as a dps your queue is insanely long, and the sooner you drop out and get in another queue… the sooner you get another piece of gear.  However for the players running the instance it feels like you are constantly adjusting to the revolving door of players.

At the beginning of the expansion we were able to bolster a little bit of in dungeon chatter with a simple “Hey folks!” as soon as I zone into the instance.  However lately that banter has turned to complete silence as we all sort of go through the motions required to get to the end of the dungeon.  Now for me personally most of the time when I am running a heroic I am running it with at least a handful of people I know, and as such we are often talking back and forth on some sort of voice.  However I keep trying to prod text chat and make comments when something odd happens, trying to draw players into actually having a conversation.  The loot grind however is in full force and everyone seems to be falling back into the gulf of silence most expansions turn into apart from the occasional person asking for something that just dropped.

I realized while running the heroic last night that I was way too out of it to run a mythic.  I was weirdly tired and additionally we were down a person from our normal group mix, which could have of course been remedied…  but was even more stacked against me running something.  Instead I focued on cleaning up some of the quests that I had not completed… and finally getting the Zandalar Forever achievement required to unlock King’s Rest.  When I dinged 120 on the Warrior I largely stopped questing in the zones entirely and started focusing almost entirely on dungeons and World Quests.  You have to realize… I am not really a quest motivated player and while I really enjoy a good story… it isn’t something that has to be there to make me enjoy myself.  I can spend countless hours in a game like Minecraft with no story and be perfectly happy.

As such I always seem to be behind on quests because if there is an option that is not running quests I will almost always choose it.  Each time a new expansion comes out in World of Warcraft, you see me deleting a long sequence of abandoned quests from the previous expansion.  I’ve already found myself with a stack of quests gathering here as well, and I really should get in the habit of taking an evening here or there to burn through them.  For example… I only ever completed the Nightbourne quests on one character, because why would I even bother with that mess a second time?  For other players that is the highlight of their experience… for me quests are an easy way to level so that I can start gearing up to do the more interesting things like dungeons and raids.

While I seem to be having decent luck on getting things to upgrade…  I am still seeking a couple good weapons and am annoyed that the best fist weapon I can craft is 300.  I am stockpiling my Hydrocores from Mythic runs in an attempt to maybe craft some upgrades, but I will need 15 per item crafted and that means a significant number more mythic runs that I have currently done.  We all have some keys for Mythic +2 and I am wondering if we are at a gear level where we can give that a shot soon.