addons

Where Are The Boots?

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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.

Midnight Was Pretty Great

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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.

World Boss and Meta Add-On

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Good Morning Friends. Zone Meta Events are the secret sauce of what makes Guild Wars 2 amazing. For the uninitiated, a “Meta” in Guild Wars 2 language is a zone-wide event that takes place on a reoccurring timer. Some of these are straightforward single-shot world bosses, and others are complicated if/then/else chains that start with minor escort events and end up in giant 80+ player raid fights. The popularity of specific zones is often determined by how popular the metas associated with them are. That said… pretty much EVERY zone has at least some player population wanting to complete the meta at any given moment. For example, this is Queensdale this morning at 6:30 am… with folks waiting on the spawn of Shadow Behemoth. We wrecked the World Boss in what felt like record time… all during non-primetime hours.
I’ve personally always struggled with keeping track of what was going on at any given time. For example, you can type “/wiki et” in the game and it will pop open the event tracker page… which does a reasonable attempt at laying this data out but also… causes my eyeballs to fuzz out and my mind to go blank. It seemed a bit mad to try and figure out what I was going to do in a given evening, with the amount of playtime that I had in front of me. This meant that most of the time… I participated in the meta events that I happened to accidentally stumble into rather than approaching any of them with a sense of purpose. I had tried a few plugins for BlishHUD in the hopes of helping me keep track of this nonsense, but honestly, it always felt a bit too cumbersome, and as a result… I defaulted to just roaming aimlessly or following the World Boss train when I could hop on board knowing for example that Tequatl always spawns at server reset.
Over the weekend, I stumbled onto a better solution. I was setting up ArcDPS again, and I went through the process of setting up the Addon Loader Nexus as it supposedly handles some of the problems with ArcDPS on the release of major patches. Nexus works very similarly to BlishHUD and offers the ability to hot load addons into the game while it is running and similarly comes with a library of addons you can install quickly from within the UI. One of these is called World Bosses by Sognus and for me at least it has been a game changer. Essentially it puts little clocks for lack of a better term over the top of the world map zones that contain popular metas, and at any given time you can see what phase that meta is in and what phase is coming next. For example, I blew up a chunk of my screen in the above image showing that Dragon Stand was just about to start a fresh meta train, which would of course be the ideal time to join that map.
What is even better about this is that after playing with this for a bit, it becomes trivial to see the natural synergy between different meta events and how you can easily hop from one to the next one without much forethought. For example, in the above image, the Aetherblade Assault is just about to start in Seitung Province, and then when it is wrapping up… The New Kaineng City Blackout should be starting… and then as it is wrapping up you can pop over and pick up the Echovald Forest Gang War event. Similarly this weekend I rode from Dragon Stand to Chalk Gerent to Octovine without missing a beat, just rolling from one event to the next and racking up the sweet sweet loot. I used to think that either people joined specific Commanders exclusively, or just had some vague sense of precognition about these things… but with this addon, it becomes super easy to follow the meta train.
If you are curious I would check out this general video about Nexus, as it can install a lot more add-ons other than the World Boss one that I am specifically talking about. I am also a huge fan of BlishHUD for marker packs that help with world completion, jumping puzzles, and getting various achievement collections completed like all of the nonsense associated with the SkyScales. Thankfully the two addon loaders play nicely together, and each of them seems to do something slightly different than the other one. There are a few add-ons that can be found on both of them… for example, Regions of Tyria a dumb addon that I enjoy greatly that announces the name of every area when you enter it, exists on both platforms. Add-ons and Guild Wars 2 are a massive rabbit hole, but the World Bosses tool seems well worth diving into because it gives me a level of confidence at being able to join in various Metas that I have not had before now.
Zone Metas are legitimately the best part of Guild Wars 2, and being able to participate in them more predictably is pretty freaking amazing. Sure I might not be in the mood every night to gather together with eighty strangers and mash buttons to take down a big bad, but when I am… this just works so much better. It makes me realize how important add-ons have been to my enjoyment of various MMORPG tropes throughout the years. Generally speaking, they just take information that already exists and present it in a more digestible format that my ADHD-addled brain can consume. While I have completely eschewed them in Final Fantasy XIV, I do get why players use them because I have always found having an interface that I can more directly control key to my enjoyment in games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2. Anyways! I hope this is helpful to someone out there. If you ever want to do Meta nonsense, hit me up in game. The post World Boss and Meta Add-On appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Favorite Addons

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This morning I decided to sit down and write up a post I had been meaning to for awhile.  Lately I have been having a significant number of friends returning to World of Warcraft, and among the first questions is always…  what Addons do I need?  This is as always a personal preference question, but I thought I would take a moment to talk about some of the addons I use and why.  I will be snagging screenshots from curse for the purpose of representing the addon given that it is always a pain in the butt to find circumstances that show them off properly.

One real quick note… I use the Curse client to update my addons and generally I find it  the best possible option.  I highly suggest you check it out.

ArkInventory

Favorite Addons

This is probably the number one addon that I simply cannot function without.  At face value it takes all of your bags and presents them in a single window pane, and does the same for pretty much any bag like structure like your bank.  What sets this one apart from everything else that essentially does the same thing, is that you can configure virtual bags.  This allows you to sort all of your trade goods, or filter your gear in a way so that the highest item level items appear at the bottom of the bag.  I also use this as a way of finding what I have gotten that has dropped that is BoE because it appears in a different virtual bag.  Configuration has gotten a bit more cumbersome since it first was released but it is well worth the time.

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Can I Mog It?

Favorite Addons

We all know the real end game is looking cool on your characters, and with the release of the Legion pre-expansion patch we got a brand new overhauled Transmog system.  I rejoiced at the thought of being able to finally reclaim all of that bank and void storage space that I simply used to keep cosmetic gear around for the purpose of transmogging.  However I was a little gunshy about simply just selling it… and the default Blizzard interface made it a little cumbersome to see if you did in fact have an item appearance.  This is when “Can I Mog It?” comes to the rescue showing you at a glance on the item tooltip if you have already collected the appearance or if you should send the item to an alt of a specific class or armor type.  For me this little peace of mind was super important before I actually started liquidating all of those hard fought appearance items.

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TransmogTokens

Favorite Addons

If you are anything like me…  you are farming old world content to try and get new transmog options.  Look I may or may not care more about this system than pretty much anything else in World of Warcraft.  As a result you end up with a ton of the various tier tokens that you may or may not remember if you actually have the appearance for.  This addon does two important things… firstly it shows you how many appearances you have yet to collect that are unlocked with the token.  Secondly it shows you who you actually turn the token in to… which is often times even more important because I don’t always remember which tier turned in at which location because…  there have been a lot of raids I have done in World of Warcraft.

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NomiCakes

Favorite Addons

Nomi is horrible.  NomiCakes makes dealing with him significantly less horrible.  What this addon does is simply tell you how many more recipes you can learn with a given consumable.  That way you don’t waste resources on something you don’t actually care about.  Granted at this point I have not learned everything that is available from any given food item… but at some point I hope to and NomiCakes is going to be there to remind me when that glorious day finally arrives.

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GTFO

This addon doesn’t really need a screenshot because…  it isn’t really a screenshot sort of thing.  If you raid… get GTFO simple as that.  The addon does one thing and does it amazingly well.. and that is play a god awful klaxon noise that you want to stop at all costs…  any time you are standing in something bad that deals environmental damage.  It is super simple, requires zero configuration and will immediately improve your awareness of bad… because you really don’t want to ever hear that noise again.  I especially love this as a tank because sometimes the boss is partially obscuring things that I shouldn’t be standing in… and this addon tells me that I need to move or make my healers hate me.

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Loot Toasts

Favorite Addons

I love this addon and I am not entirely certain if I can explain why.  Largely I go on murderous rampages rather often, and I have definitely been the sort of person that ends up with a world BOE epic in their bag…. and didn’t even realize it.  I also sometimes go on farming trips, where I need a specific amount of this or that material…  and don’t want to keep having to check my bags to see if I can stop yet.  In both cases Loot Toasts helps me to keep an eye on what I just looted.  Essentially it allows you to have an area of the screen where things pop up briefly for items you have looted.  If it is something that stacks, it shows you both how many you just looted and how many you happen to have in your bags with you.  The tooltip is colored based on the rarity of the item so it is pretty easy to see out of the corner of your eye that you might have just gotten something interesting.

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World Quest Tracker

Favorite Addons

World Quests are amazing, and pretty much in my experience the best possible way to gear your alts without tons of effort.  On the mobile app you are treated with this great view that summarizes what World Quests are available and what the rewards are… so if you are like me and mostly interested in the ones that drop gear, you can find them quickly.  The only negative is that logging into the mobile client, logs you out of the game.  What World Quest Tracker does is give you an in game interface to see the same sort of information, as well as adding in hooks for things like TomTom to give you waypoints to find where the quests start.  You have all sorts of filtering options that allow you to show say only Order Resources quests, or only quests that will help you complete a certain Emissary quest.  To make things even better… when you are on the flight map you can see all of the available World Quests so it makes picking the nearest flight path an ease.  I could not seriously imagine existing in Legion without this addon… much in the same way as Master Plan seemed to be a requirement for functioning in Warlords.

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Saved Instances

Favorite Addons

One of the big challenges this expansion is the fact that Mythic Dungeons are essentially the new Heroic Dungeons, and that they come with a bizarre weekly lockout timer.  I always struggle with remembering who is locked to which zones, and while I can simply hit /raidinfo to see this information…  I found that I didn’t quite have the all in one interface that I really wanted.  Saved Instances is a widget that is added to your map border that gives you a quick chart of who has a lockout to which content.  I find this especially handy for farming old world content and raids, when I am trying for mounts or pets.  It will also keep track of the reroll tokens and who has used them…  and who has yet to redeem them for the week.

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Enemy Grid

Favorite Addons

One of my favorite things about tanking in Final Fantasy XIV was the way that they chose to display threat.  It not only gave me an awareness of all of the targets in play, but gave me a quick at a glance view of which ones I had aggro on.  In the past I used a custom them for Tidy Plates to do this same sort of thing, but in coming back to World of Warcraft I happened across Enemy Grid.  It gives you a quick list of all of the available targets and if grays out the ones that you do not currently have aggro on.  Simple and easy and something I have gotten used to having in my arsenal of information.

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The Boring Stuff

Favorite Addons

This is by now means a complete list of my addons, but more a list of the ones that I find particularly interesting.  My base UI is cobbled together from a bunch of addons that I have used for as long as I can remember, and it creates an interface that I am comfortable and familiar with.  I don’t generally go for the whole minimalist thing… and my UI is way more busy than most people would like…  however it works for me and is what I am comfortable with.  Here is a run down of some of the things that I didn’t talk about that I am simply too used to now to give up.