The WoW servers have officially gone down in preparation for the Legion pre-patch, and I’ve milked every possible gold out of my garrison. For the record, opening crates, shuffling items, and liquidating resources on 16 characters is pretty dang time consuming, I do not recommend it. I also made a last minute stop by Dalaran on one of each class so I could pick up all their Wrath-era PvP sets before they get locked behind a PvP currency grind again. Yeah, I dropped a few tens of thousands of gold on a bunch of recolors that I will probably never use. The river of coins flowing out of my garrison has skewed my perspective on costs. Now I’ll have to get used to hoarding my gold again until the opportunities of the new expansion present themselves. My plan is to be far too busy with other activities to try any of the get-rich-quick schemes that take advantage of the changes being put into place today. I still desperately need to figure out which character (and faction!) will be my main for the start of Legion. With one of every class except warrior at 100, I have choice paralysis.
The other thing that will definitely be keeping me busy this week is the new FFXIV patch, also happening today. As usual there looks to be a ton of great stuff in this one, most notably the new “endless dungeon” type content that my friends and I are dying to give a try. Our raid time last night got cut slightly short so we only did a couple new-to-us Alex fights, but it was still a blast and I think everyone is feeling pretty good about the game right now.
I’m a little sad that I’ll probably put off the new FFXIV stuff until at least tomorrow. There’s so much transmog to unlock and bag space to free up in WoW that I am guessing that will take most of my free time tonight. I mean, sure, the transmog system isn’t going anywhere and I could totally hang out and do fun dungeons with my friends instead, but I won’t because my compulsive brain has been waiting for this day in WoW for way too long. Hooray for freedom from garrison tyranny, hooray for pristine empty bags. If you’ve been looking forward to either of these patches, I hope you enjoy too!
Last night was the second running of our reconstituted Monday night group, but unfortunately this time around we were missing a Thalen. So instead of working through the content we planned on doing with was Ravana Extreme, we opted to start work on the second part of Alexander. We had seven folks gathered up so we figured grabbing a single pug wouldn’t hurt at all. We also decided to be up front with the pug, in that they were hanging out with a group of learners. The most awesome of possible circumstances happened in that the game ended up giving us someone on our own server. As a result we met a new friend Lux Tenebrae who happened to join up as a semi-permanent 8th last night. We like to go into fights fairly blind, and then adjust and shift until we have a grasp on the movie parts. So both of the Alexanders that we completed last night took more than one attempt, but at the same time it feels like we have a firm enough grasp on the fights to be able to come in next week and completely wreck them. The fights themselves were extremely fun, and pretty much anything with the Alex background music is going to rate high on my radar. We had to cut things short however because last night began the maintenance period that will eventually get us patch 3.35 which for all intents and purposes is the “Deep Dungeon” patch. I think every single one of us is looking forward to this as a way of leveling our army of alts.
However once we got out of the raid we had roughly thirty minutes left before the servers reset. At the not so subtle nudging of Neph we pulled together an expert group and decided to go for it. By the time we got zoned in we had less than thirty minutes to go and Hullbreaker Hard set out before us. We had an early wipe due to hubris and standing in stuff, but we recovered quickly and made it through the zone in a good clip. When we pulled the final boss we had two minutes left on the official clock from the set time of the maintenance period. The thing is we continued on fighting after time was at least in theory up. Then something strange happened… firstly Kodra got disconnected, but we were able to finish the boss without him. We got our loot and zoned out… and then both Tam and I got disconnected at exactly the same moment. Then moments later Neph did as well. So it seems like quite literally they were flushing connections one at a time as they cycled through the server preparing to shut it down. The positive is that three of us managed to get credit for the expert… the negative is that Kodra did not but I am sure we will all be willing to make it up to him later. This was one of the funnest dungeons I have fun in a long while because we were really pushing ourselves trying to beat the timer… which while we didn’t quite make it we came really damned close.
Farewell to Gold Farms
The other part of the evening was spent going from character to character and purchasing Smuggled Sack of Gold over and over until I completely depleted my garrison resources. Yesterday was essentially liquidation night of everything from my garrison that might sell for a decent bit of gold. I also went to Wrath era Dalaran and checked the various PVP vendors to see if any of that gear was something I might want for transmog purposes given that with today’s patch all of that is getting shifted away from gold to honor based purchases. On a handful of my characters this also meant scrapping lumber yards to build trading posts… just to liquidate their resources for cash. The whole process was an extremely fun atmosphere because quite literally everyone else in the guild was pretty much doing the same. In a shared chat earlier in the day macros had been posted to speed up the process and there we sat spamming away purchasing gold bags and opening them at the same time. In many ways it felt like we were all saying goodbye to what ended up being a frustrating expansion, and more than that… saying goodbye to our daily garrison chores. Today the first of the Legion pre-patches go live and with it a removal of pretty much all of the ways to make gold from the garrison. This is a bit of a double edged sword because even someone like me, was able to compile a decent amount of gold just by logging in periodically and opening bags of gold from my garrison missions.
That said not a single moment of doing this really felt fun. It was a chore for me because I felt like if I was not cycling through all eleven characters on Argent Dawn I was essentially “leaving money on the table”. So doing my Garrison chores mean spending thirty minutes to an hour doing nothing but interacting with NPCs and queuing missions all before doing anything fun or interesting. So removing the gold from Garrisons will always be removing any leverage it had over me to actually do the crap contained within those instanced walls. What gets replaced instead is the every so much more exciting mission of farming all of the transmog bits from all of the old world dungeons and raids. Most of my characters have a fat stack of salvage crates waiting to be opened in the hopes of gathering up new appearances to unlock for the system. I still think overall the transmog changes are a bit of a half assed system compared to what other games have, but it is a far better system than World of Warcraft currently has. Tonight will more than likely be spent going character by character and checking things into the transmog system and getting rid of everything that is literally clogging my bank, void storage and inventory. I started a bit of this last night in selling off any non cosmetic gear that was for alternate specs other than whatever I considered my “main” role on a character. Getting things in the Transmog system however will pretty much clear up the rest of the space and allow me to actually start saving more interesting items.
This week Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam, Thalen discuss a bunch of stuff, some of it not Pokemon Go
This marks the second week of the majority of our cast being completely enthralled by the apparent phenomenon that is Pokemon Go. So as you would expect this weeks episode is a hefty bit of our hosts recounting their recent experiences. Pokemon Go is a story engine, and we have many stories to tell as a result. Additionally we talk a bit about Augmented Reality gaming in general, and whether or not Pokemon Go is the “Everquest” or the “World of Warcraft” of this genre. This week also saw us “getting the band back together” as it were and raiding for the first time in months in Final Fantasy XIV. We discuss our feeling about raiding again and the hopes of what we might accomplish in the coming months.
Grace and Bel made their way into the Legion Beta finally for World of Warcraft so we discuss a bit in the way of the set up for that expansion. Bel talks at length about his experiences playing a Demon Hunter and why he thinks this might be a class Tam would actually like. Tam deftly deflects and turns the discussion back around to the story of Final Fantasy XIV and our feelings about what seems to be the wrapping of this expansion. In other news we discuss two similar gaming experiences in Necropolis and the brand new chapter of the Monster Hunter saga. Finally we get into a length discussion about the ramifications of Pokemon Go and what it might mean for Nintendo and accepting that the mobile platform is actually viable.
Topics: Pokemon Go, Augmented Reality Gaming, Everquest or World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV Raiding, Legion Beta, Demon Hunter, Final Fantasy Story, Necropolis, Monster Hunter, Nintendo Mobile Gaming, Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow.
The last several day have been interesting to say the least, but in ways I have not really talked about in my blog. We moved into our house in 1999 and at that time the air conditioning unit was original to the house circa 1980. So the fact that our unit would fail has been this weight hanging over us for well over a decade. For at least a decade it has had a slow leak which meant that roughly once a season it would freeze up solid, and the service folks would come out and top off the Freon and get us up and going again. Each and every service guy has said essentially the same thing… keep the unit going as long as we can because “they don’t build them like this anymore”. A few weeks ago we finally reached the endgame with our unit as something rattled loose and started trying to vibrate it to death. The actual fix was going to cost over $1000 and that was simply something I could not in good conscious do given that the unit as a whole would still eventually fail sooner rather than later regardless of said fix. I did however come up with a hedge fix that held us until them… which was essentially placing a huge sandstone rock on top of the unit which dampened the rattling enough to keep things going for a bit while we sorted out options for a replacement unit.
Old Unit vs New Unit
Now in some parts of the country air conditioning might be an optional thing… but in Oklahoma with our regular over one hundred degree fahrenheit days it is an absolute necessity. So Monday and Tuesday we had workers in the house installing the new unit, and the last several days we have been trying to get used to the way it works. Traditionally AC units are either on or off, meaning you either get 100% power or nothing at all. This new one has a stepper motor that goes from 35% to 100% in 1% increments, which is really odd to get used to because it rarely ever shuts off completely. It just sort of cycles down to next to nothing at times, but essentially tries to maintain a stable temperature at all times. The other thing this unit has is a built in dehumidifier, which means we have been going through this adjustment period when we are trying to figure out what the new norm is. Previously we kept the house around 73 degrees, but that is honestly way too cold now… so for the last bit we’ve landed somewhere around 75 degrees and that seems to be working out okay. Finally the unit has a built in hospital filtration system, which means all of the air in the house is almost completely allergen free…. which was almost immediately noticeable the first time I stepped foot outside of the house after sleeping a night under the new system. I was like walking out and hitting a wall of pollen and humidity.
Goobbue Rider
Chompy Teeth Monster FTW!
Needless to say the last several days this has taken most of my energy, and as a result my gaming has been extremely scattered consisting of some Pokemon Go and a bunch of logging into various things and doing maintenance type tasks and then logging out again. One of those tasks that I have been trying to do religiously however is the Sylph quests in Final Fantasy XIV… or as we usually call them the “Lettuce Fairies”. Since the moment I saw that there was a Goobbue mount I have wanted one, but the Slyphlands in general and the daily quests they offer are probably the most annoying set to grind. So during the 2.0 content I nibbled away at them but never really made a concerted effort to work on them. However at level 60 they are insanely easy and actually when everything is not aggroing out… the Sylphlands are rather charming. So over the last bit I have been focused on pushing through the reputation grind so that I could be a tiny Lalafell on a giant monster. Last night I managed to complete the last of the quests and now I am riding tall on my big buddy. Next up I am working on the Sahagin quests for no particular reason other than the fact that they were the next highest. I really did not know how much faster the quests go when you hit the rank three quests and can start doing nine a day. If nothing else this gives me a solid purpose to be in game and see folks every night even if I am not necessarily running complicated content.
Descending Further
Last night I also played quite a bit more Necropolis, and I think I finally get the comparison to Dark Souls. Both are games that when you encounter a completely new type of monster, you are likely going to die a lot. A number of my deaths have been caused by me learning how to properly battle a specific type of critter, and since my attacks are rather slow and deliberate it is not like I can simply spam my attack key and pray for the best. I’ve also found myself needing to bait monsters to keep them from swarming me at the same time. So those Everquest/DAoC body pulling skills are coming in handy. All of this said I am still not terribly far into the game. Last night I made it through the first floor and managed to transition to the second floor… where the mocked me for this achievement. Then moments later I encountered a brand new type of monster and died horribly within moments. I think the worst thing about restarting each time is going back to the original crappy starter weapon. I wish I could somehow carry my loadout into the next life, but I guess scavenging usable equipment is a large part of the game play. I think this is very much going to be one of those “play a bit each night” type of games for me, because I cannot really see grinding my face against it.
