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Launches and Lurching

July 18, 2018 by Belghast

Initially I had planned last night on poking my head in on various characters within Azeroth but like many I was greeted with a lot of this screen when I first got home. It seemed like a combination of a couple of things… first being that there were apparently some rather nasty DDoS attacks going on with the hosting providers… and secondly this was a major patch in WoW. I mean I’ve been going through this cycle since 2004 and this is far from the first time a major patch rendered the game unplayable for one reason or another. Just the simple onslaught of a bunch of players coming back to do like I was planning is enough to take down servers. I have no idea when it was fixed and when the servers came back up… because I did what I have learned I need to do to keep from getting ragey… I moved on to playing something else.

Though that said I heard that the community was particularly toxic to the BlizzardCS account last night. There were apparently people calling for the firing of employees and all of that nonsense… while those of us who have been through far worse launches sit back and eat our popcorn. I think the reality is that Blizzard has spoiled us of late with a string of relatively smooth major patch cycles. So as a result when folks see what I would consider a normal MMO patch rollout… they lose their shit. There have been times when I too was losing my shit… particularly during the relaunch of A Realm Reborn when you had to effectively stay logged in if you hoped to play the game at all. In this scenario however I happily wandered off to play Elder Scrolls Online after a few rounds of attempts.

So I have been working my way through the ESO content as it was originally released and after finishing Orsinium… that lead me down the path of the Thieve’s Guild. Now I had accidentally already done the intro quest to this content because I quite legitimately thought it was just another quest in Windhelm. That is one of the challenges you have coming back this far behind the curve is there are quests everywhere… and a good deal of them are trying to lead you off to start expansions and DLC without ever fully announcing that is their intent. Sure I probably could have looked it up in the quest journal, but for the most part I find myself not using that at all while playing Elder Scrolls Online.

One of the challenges with Thieves Guild is the fact that it is more or less a stealthy expansion, and I Belghast… am not a stealthy person. I am one of those charge into the fight and taunt all the things type person… and the thought of sneaking around in full plate seems hilarious to me. That said I have tried my best to embrace this game play style because the content essentially forces you to do so. Getting detected in a good deal of the missions means that you are going to get swarmed by city guards that you have no way of actually soloing. Now thankfully it employs the Assassins Creed “instant hiding container” sort of thing, which allows you to evade attention at just the right moment. Now unfortunately if you already have guard aggro you are going to have to wait a bit until the “heat meter” dies down before popping out and continuing the mission.

Now it is not like I have never done a thieves guild in the past Elder Scrolls Online games… in fact to my knowledge I have done them all since Oblivion. The problem is in those older games there was always a path of “kill all the things” that got you through the quest as opposed to constantly sneaking your butt around. For the most part however I have managed to do the quests as intended part from a few times when I killed someone instead of just not doing that. While the gameplay is not my favorite thing in the world, I have to give the game credit for completely hooking me with the storyline. This is in fact an Elder Scrolls Thieves Guild story… which quite honestly tend to be some of the better written and more interesting guilds out there.

I am completely hooked on the characters and the story as it is deciphering due to my interactions. It is part pirates, part heist, part Indiana Jones and a whole of fighting back against an oppressive evil empire… all of which make for a really interesting sequence. The way it plays out is interesting as well as there is no one constant thread that you follow but instead a sequence of what seems to be disconnected actions that ultimately weave their way into a main story quest. I get the impression that I am reaching about the halfway point in the story as there was a major revelation last night, that seems like it will begin the end phase where I start narrowing down and working to righting the great wrong done to the guild. I am completely hooked… in spite of needing to creep about unbenefiting a warrior of my stature.

The WoW races, ranked

July 17, 2018 by Grace

I got a bit of blog inspiration today by reading Syp’s opinions on the World of Warcraft races over on Bio Break. There’s a bit of advice for the new bloggers this Blaugust: when in doubt, respond to something else you find in the blogosphere. Just keep it good-natured if you can. Unless somebody says something as objectively wrong as “Gnomes are the best WoW race”. Then the gloves can come off.

Best World of Warcraft (core) Race: Undead

Syp put them near the top of his list, which was a nice try but just not enough. While some people are baffled at why anyone would play the “ugly” Horde races, I embrace the ugly. I’m tired of games that give me the options of “too cute”, “too pretty”, or “too pretty and has giant boobs”, for player characters. The undead are like a giant middle finger to all the catgirls and sexy elfs, and my contrarian self enjoys it. Sure my undead priest has sizable boobs, but they’re probably full of maggots or something so it cancels out. As a bonus, I’m a sucker for their lore. I am a bona fide Sylvanas fangirl, even if I’m skeptical about the direction her story is heading right now. I love the idea of this race that got completely screwed over during a war, and when they tried to come home they got shunned and called monsters. Now they’re building their own place in the world as best they can. Plus they literally start the game by rising out of a grave, and they get to ride skeletal horses. What’s not to love?

Belfs

Okay, okay, I know I just had a rant about “too pretty” races in MMOs, but sometimes you do want to be pretty. This is also the only race in the game that I enjoy playing both the male and female versions. While undead is my race of choice for mains that I spend a lot of time on, blood elves are one of my top choices for alts. Mainly so I can see my armor transmog without the holes that come from being undead. I also love their starting zone and city, because they remind me of when I was new to WoW at the start of TBC. They’re like a little time capsule that missed the worst of Deathwing’s remodeling of Azeroth.

Draenei

These are my favorite of all the Alliance races. Although they are still pretty, they were the most “bestial humanoid” available to the Alliance until Worgen came around. They have a cool aesthetic, and their giant spaceship always fascinated me, even when I was baffled by the lore of it. The draenei also gave us Yrel, who was one of the best things that came out of the wreckage of WoD. I reserve the right to hold Yrel against them if BfA ruins her, though.

Trolls

I might actually be a “masochist that enjoy[s] looking bad”, it’s hard to say. I do love the ugly Horde races, including trolls. I think the distinction here is that I love the female trolls. The male trolls are a bit too big and weird looking. But then again I feel that way about almost every race in WoW. I think the ladies look sassy. I love their tusks. They have one of my favorite hairstyles in the game (that long weird braid). I wish they wore shoes but if I’m willing to forgive the undead elbows I can forgive this too. As an added bonus their druid flight form is an awesome bat.

Dwarves

These are my other favorite Alliance race. They’re short without being silly cartoon characters. I like the female facial options. To me they look the most like real people faces of almost any race in this game. They have lots of beer, and their racial mounts are awesome. I always enjoyed their starting zone and Ironforge, although I’m still not sure why such a short race needs such high ceilings. I also like their leadership, and the more I read about Moira the more I like her as a character.

Tauren

I feel fairly neutral toward Tauren but they are just too big. They’re fine lore-wise. I liked Cairn and like Baine and enjoyed the tension with the Grimtotem. I don’t have the attachment to Thunder Bluff that some of my friends do. It’s okay but I fell off of those bridges a few too many times as a newbie cow and now I’m scarred for life. I also always felt like their starting zone was incredibly boring. I’m just not a fan of those wide-open spaces I guess. It’s pretty from a distance but not exciting to quest through. I had a tauren druid for a long time because I had no choice, but as soon as it was an option I race changed her to troll because I like bat form and fitting through doorways.

Orcs

These guys are the boring option for the Horde. I guess both factions need one. They’re not terrible but they don’t really have a lot to recommend them, especially after the Savage Draenor Orc Fatigue set in. Side note: I’m pretty sure nobody ever plays female orcs. I get this impression because I got in a huge argument with someone while leveling my female orc DK a few years ago. The dude swore I was some sort of hacker because “armor doesn’t look like that on orcs”. He literally had never seen anybody playing a female orc before and followed me around and got mad at me about it.

Pandaren

I don’t think I could say it any better than Syp did:

“I think the best thing that can be said about Pandaren is that the models are well-detailed and you do get the option to choose your faction. But they still, three expansions later, don’t feel like they fit in World of Warcraft. “

Although I do have a pandaren mage I got to max level back in MoP so my guild could get the achievement for it. I’d be perfectly happy if I never looked at her again.

Humans

Normally humans end up much closer to the bottom of the list for me. I guess that tells you something about how I feel about the races below this. Humans in fantasy games just seem like a waste of a perfectly good character space to me. In WoW, I think the human males look a bit ridiculous, and I dislike what happened to the female faces during the character model upgrades. That said, I still have several human alts, mostly because I’m willing to forgive a lot of things for their super useful reputation boost racial.

Gnomes

Here’s another big difference of opinion. I used to sort-of like gnomes, back when I was new to the game and desperately trying to make a character I didn’t hate on the Alliance-side where all my friends were. My ranking of gnomes and humans has swapped a few times over the years. At least gnomes are different. Their engineering prowess is a plus. But they’re tiny. Transmog looks weird on them. They get lost on the screen in group content. As a culture in the game I like them fine, but as a player character they just fall a little short. Haha.

Worgen

Worgen are one of those things that seem cool in theory but when you actually have to live with it they’re not so great. Their starting experience is one of the coolest in the game, and it’s all downhill from there. Female worgen look exceedingly weird to me. You can hide this sometimes by swapping to human form but…then you’re just a boring human. Also screw Genn Graymane and his grudge. Dark Lady watch over us!

Goblins

Goblins are a weird race. I appreciate they gave the Horde some short people, but they’re just not for me. They’re ugly, selfish and rude. Their leader is horrible, and weirdly enough if you start as a goblin you probably hate him even more than everybody else in the Horde does. It also feels strange to still have some neutral goblin factions when some of them are Horde-aligned. I like them better as a neutral, only-in-it-for-the-money race.

Worst: Nelfs

This is something Syp and I can definitely agree on. They have weird eyebrows and bounce too much and their eyes don’t look right. Plain elves are almost as boring as humans at this point in fantasy settings. Also I’m just going to go ahead and hold Malfurion against them because I can. I hate that guy. Even though my very first, long-since-deleted WoW character was a night elf, I don’t have any residual fondness or nostalgia for them. Their starting zone is pretty, but I couldn’t even be bothered to go look at their tree one last time before grabbing my marshmallows and waiting excitedly for the bonfire.

Not Prepared

July 17, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I logged in a bunch of characters in a failed attempt to prepare for the impending apocalypse that is sure to come with today’s patch. What I mean by that is the 7.0 patch nerfed the prices of a bunch of the garrison missions as well as the sales prices of a ton of the associated nonsense that comes with that sort of thing. So last night I logged in and collected any gold missions I had waiting to be collected since I had not logged into WoW in a few weeks… and sold all of the items used to upgrade followers that I had in my inventory. While the servers are still up and running at this very moment the patching process has already started to our clients, and by the time I come home there will be a whole new era of World of Warcraft started. I am still not entirely sure how I feel about this.

I don’t mean this post to sound as hyperbolic as I am sure it will come off as, but Legion was sort of a tipping point for me in many ways. Blizzard showed me how good a design could feel that didn’t focus on the red versus blue nonsense but instead dug down hard into the class story-line and creating situations where all of us… Horde and Alliance worked together to solve issues. While I didn’t stick with it for the long haul, Legion is probably my new favorite expansion for World of Warcraft replacing the previous… Wrath of the Lich King. I had hope that we would see a new shining era of working together to fight the bigger baddies in the world, but instead what we got was a doubling down on the infighting and bullshit, and a path that looks to be setting up both Jaina and Sylvanas on a possible path towards becoming raid bosses.

My dream for World of Warcraft is a time when I can sit down and play with both my Horde and Alliance friends together, and this expansion seems to be putting a final nail in that concept. As a result my interest in this game has never been at a lower point, and were it not for twitter and people talking about the 8.0 patch constantly I probably would not have known it was a thing. While a lot of my friends were in a flurry of activity trying to finish out their mage tower challenges, attempting to beat all of them before they went away… I find myself in a situation where I never did a single one. The last expansion saw me going into it with one of every class Alliance side at maximum level… this expansion sees me going into it with 2 warriors, 2 deathknights, a demon hunter and a paladin.

This expansion also sees me planning on switching my allegiance and “maining” horde this time around. It is going to be a weird ride when in less than a month now the expansion launches. I have deeply mixed feelings about my future with this game. I’ve heard the “its world of warcraft, not world of peacecraft” nonsense so many times it makes me want to punch people through the internet. I used to keep going because I had this nexus of hope deep down inside of me that someday somehow things would change and the faction wall would fall and I could finally unite both groups of friends living on either side of that chasm. That hope has died, and with it a lot of the reasons why I kept playing the game. That said I know I will give Battle for Azeroth a shot and probably even find myself enjoying certain aspects of it. However the hope has mostly been replaced with Dread as I watch this Warbringers series seeming to make good on that concern that we might be losing one more more powerful characters to a Raid someday.

After patching my addons and logging into a bunch of characters… and then the requisite amount of “oh look its bel” and answering a series of messages… I eventually retreated back into my comfy space that is Elder Scrolls Online. I sorta knew that I could only log in so many characters before someone noticed my presence and started trying to interact. I mean this is more of a thing on the Alliance side where I have been gone far longer. On Horde side I am mostly greeted with a “hi bel” since I tend to darken those doors fairly often. House Stalwart was the guild that I built on the day the servers opened in World of Warcraft and for a long time it was my home. However the game has changed and with it the guild has changed as a necessity to keep folks active and happy. I don’t begrudge anything that Elnore, Rylacus or now Kylana did to keep things up and running and the tweaks they made to stay viable.

That said House Stalwart feels like returning to the small town you grew up in, years after leaving it… and while the folks are friendly all you can notice is the things that have changed and the names that are no longer there. That guild and the Alliance side of the house are fundamentally different now, and quite honestly are different from when the Legion expansion rolled out and I went through my last period of heavy activity and raiding. To say active and relevant you have to be a guild in constant motion, whereas the older I get the more I seem to want things to stay the same. As it stands, though I created it… I identify more with Greysky Armada our FFXIV guild than I do with House Stalwart these days. While the Elder Scrolls Online guild bears that name it bears way more connection to Greysky and the AggroChat community than it ever did the original World of Warcraft one.

I think ultimately so much has changed in my life and inside of me since 2004 when the doors opened to Azeroth. What used to feel like family now feels like a foreign country. I can’t really blame the game or the players… it is me that changed because I kept leaving with increasing frequency to go elsewhere. I remember my first “WoW Tourist” jaunt happened about six months after release, before I had even made it to level 60 on a single character. A bunch of my friends went off to play Everquest 2 with the group of folks who didn’t follow us into World of Warcraft but instead chose that path. I remember doing this again for Warhammer Online and quite frankly every major MMO release seemed to pull me away from Warcraft for a period of time… until those periods of time got longer than my actual time playing the game.

While this image is greatly outdated at this point… you can see this constant string of orange squares at the top to represent time spent playing World of Warcraft. The only problem with that is it is a lie, and a lot of those interactions are time spent subscribed and poking my head back in for a night here or there and not large blocks of dedicated time. I left the game during the early days of the Cataclysm expansion prior to the first patch, and in truth I never fully returned to feeling the same way about it as I did back then. Sure I have come back with each expansion and usually become active again just prior to a new patch… but that orange bar is evidence of a lot of time spent moonlighting in World of Warcraft but not actually playing it as my primary game. I have some deeply complicated feelings about my inability to let go of the past and just move on, and a lot of those feelings have come to a head recently as I stare down the barrel of this expansion.

Sorry for what probably ended up being a bummer of a post, but occasionally I cannot predict the post that will come forth from my fingertips on a given morning.

Bucket list fail

July 16, 2018 by Grace

A few months ago, around the time we learned Battle for Azeroth’s release date, I made a bucket list. I figured since it’s patch day I should revisit it. I’ve been running fairly cool toward WoW for the past year or more, still playing but not really engaged. So my bucket list felt very humble when I wrote it. And yet I did a very poor job checking things off. Here’s the list:

Get the mount from new Karazhan
Do a mythic +15
Get at least one artifact maxed out in the netherlight crucible
Cap my professions
Get all the First Aid achievements before it disappears
Save up some gold
Level at least one of my allied race alts to 110

How did I do? About 3 1/2 out of 7. Not great but not a total failure.

I didn’t get the Karazhan mount. I didn’t even try in the months since I wrote the list. I did become part of a group that intended to work toward M+15, but it lost momentum after a month or two and we never met that goal. I was really keen on both of these things but wrangling other people to do them with when I was on the edge of burnout just didn’t work.

I did get one artifact capped in the crucible, even before the freebies we got by siphoning off Sargeras’ sword. I will be honest though, it was not fun. It was not difficult, it just felt like an entirely pointless chore. Go pick up rocks to make this number tick up higher. If BfA has more of that in store I’ll be starting the expansion halfway checked out already.

On the profession front, I had envisioned capping everything on all my primary profession characters. I did finish all the ones I use regularly, or that are traditionally good for turning a profit. I came up a little short on my lesser-used profs. I think I’m still missing blacksmithing and leatherworking. I also never got close to the Field Medic First Aid achievement. I hate to leave something like that undone since it is going away forever, but reading people’s accounts of farming for it inspired me to spend my time on more productive things.

I made enough progress on the gold front that I’m willing to call that a win, since I didn’t set a concrete goal. I would have liked to have saved up enough to pay for the ridiculous dinosaur auction house mount, but I didn’t quite make it. If BfA continues the trend of the past few expansions I should have no problem taking my current balance and building it up enough to blow 5 million gold before BfA is over.

I was hoping to level more of my alliance race alts, but I did at least get one of them finished in time. I loved my baby mage, and she might end up being one of the first characters I level in BfA. I was very disappointed to see that we are not getting a leveling catch-up mechanic in the pre-patch like we did with Legion’s invasions. It would have been nice to rocket a few more alts up to 110 (or at least past the 60 – 80 slog) before BfA’s official launch.