Gracie Status Update – Page 25

A month of Legion

October 4, 2016 by Grace

Are you sick of me talking about Legion all the time? I’ll be honest I’m a little tired of writing about it, but I’m nowhere near sick of playing it. Now that we’re a full month in I wanted to do a little analysis of what’s working and what’s not in this expansion.

Great:
Scaling tech: I was super nervous about how this would work but the reality of it is that it’s seamless. It worked great for leveling and it meant I could run dungeons with friends and not care about everyone’s level at all.

World Quests: I love pretty much everything about this system. They’re varied and usually quick, you can do as few as 4 a day and still get your emissary quest done for rep and loot, and the rewards for individual quests feel more meaningful than the tiny gold and rep you’d normally get from dailies. The fact that you can have up to 3 stored emissary quests also helps you get things accomplished on your own schedule without feeling like you’re missing anything important.

Titanforged Gear: Related to world quests, the fact that any piece of gear can potentially upgrade makes lots of tasks feel more worthwhile. Sure, that quest reward gear might not be that great, but I’ll do almost any quest that rewards gear because there’s that chance it could titanforge and be amazing. I got a sweet pair of i865 boots this way the other day and I’m still excited about it.

Suramar: Suramar as a zone is huge, full of nooks and crannies that I still feel like I haven’t completely explored. Doing all the quests there, I kept finding subzones with long quest lines and tons more content than I expected. On top of that you have Suramar City and the nightfallen. Multiple times questing in the city I got the feeling that I was not even playing WoW anymore, and I mean that in the best possible way. It felt like a completely different, story driven RPG and I loved it.

Mixed feelings:
Legendaries: Random legendaries that change the way you play your class like in Diablo 3 seem pretty neat. The fact that they are a random drop is less neat. For something this powerful, I prefer a way to work towards it. At least they put in a bit of RNG protection behind the scenes. Only a couple of my friends have gotten one yet. I’m sure I’ll get one eventually, but I’m mentally preparing myself for inevitably getting one that is the least helpful for my spec and being sad about it.

Artifact Weapons: Getting artifact traits has been pretty neat, and does a decent job of replacing the fun of getting talents as you level up. The way the gains speed up with artifact knowledge seems to scale pretty well. It still feels a bit bad when you either make a new character and have a long road to catch up, or if you’re trying to split points between multiple specs.

Dungeon Difficulty: I’m mixed on this because while I enjoy the more difficult settings, the system feels a bit cumbersome. Normal, heroic, mythic, and mythic+ feels like a lot of options, but then you realize that the game really wants you to play on mythic or m+. Mythic difficulty has been the most fun by far, and some of the dungeons (I’m looking at you, Darkheart Thicket) feel incomplete or boring at lower settings. Many quests and dungeon meta achievements require mythic difficulty, yet there’s no random group finder for that setting. I really wish they had either allowed quest completion in heroic, or added mythic to LFD. That said, mythic and M+ have been really fun, and I’m hoping I can keep a coherent 5-person group together long enough to progress.

Not so Great:
Professions: Blizz did their usual swing here. Profs went from almost completely meaningless in WoD to complicated quest-locked monstrosities in Legion. For example I need to run around to 6 different old world zones and run a bunch of different dungeons to unlock some things on my jewelcrafter, and the gear I’ll be able to craft after this will still be ilvl 815 and fairly useless.

Meaningless Faction Bullshit: There’s really two items in this category. First is the stupidity of the faction story in Stormheim. It is bad and it should feel bad. I love my chosen faction and will wear my Horde t-shirt with pride like any other nerd but the faction conflict in the story feels incredibly weak and forced. I am so over it. The other item is tagging. Making normal mobs be multi-tag is amazing, but faction locking them is annoying. This doesn’t enhance my faction pride or desire to pvp, it just makes me angry at the designer who thought this was a good idea.

Odd Content Gating: This includes mythic-only dungeons, locking story behind mythics and out of the reach of LFR, and the fact that there’s no LFD for mythics. I am lucky I have a group of friends playing right now but lots of people don’t. Why is so much of the story gated behind more difficult content with no easy grouping option? Related- this contributes to my feeling that LFR is almost entirely useless. You can get better gear from world quests, and it doesn’t work to progress story. Why on earth would anyone go in more than once just to see the fights?

Overall I’m still in love with this expansion a month in. I would currently rank it as my 2nd favorite, after WotLK, and if it keeps going well it might even move up to first place. How do you feel about Legion after the first month?

Yet another week of Legion

September 28, 2016 by Grace

Another week has gone by and I’m still in my infatuation mode with Legion but it is starting to wear a bit at the edges. In the big picture sense I haven’t made a lot of huge progress since last week, but everything has still been moving forward in a satisfying way. Mage and Monk are still my only 2 characters at 110, but I now have 2 druids, a priest, pally, and another monk in various stages from unlocking the class hall through level ~105. Other than the minor faction BS that happens in Stormheim, there’s not much difference between Horde and Alliance side. This is making me feel less bad about focusing on my alliance servers where my friends are. It also helps that professions are so tied to quests that having my army of alts horde-side isn’t as huge a benefit, and is more a liability at this point.

I got to raid a tiny bit on Friday! We only cleared the first boss and put in a few attempts on the spider-bird boss, but it was a fun time. I also got to try a couple mythics and my first mythic+. Mythics are fun, they feel about what I’m used to for heroic dungeons. My only complaint about them is that they aren’t available through the group finder. I am hoping as the expansion goes on and the gear cap rises that they might lift that restriction, because there’s nothing about normal mythics that makes me think a restriction on grouping is necessary. Mythic+ on the other hand, that kicked our butts. I mean it probably didn’t help that we had never been in that particular place on regular mythic. We had a good time and we did complete it, but nowhere near beating the timer. With a couple weeks worth of experience and gear I’m sure we’ll be in good shape.

A few other things happened inside my brain over the last week. First, I finally realized that yes, I really am a healer at heart. Goodbye short-lived mage main, we hardly knew ye. Monk healing is fun and satisfying, and since I have a good group of friends to do mythics and raids with I think it needs to be my main. It will take a couple weeks to get fully up to speed on her compared to where my mage was, but it will be worth it to be settled in and not feel pulled in multiple directions. I even kinda enjoy windwalker, even though I usually hate melee. I’ve been playing it enough during world questing to get used to it though, and ran a dungeon as dps and it wasn’t awful. That was my one outstanding worry about monk and it is pretty resolved so I think I’ll be really happy going forward.

The other brain thing that happened is that Blizz’s insistence on forcing people to manually group for things and putting story content out of reach of the group finder has made me stop giving any fucks about it. I’ve got groups and friends so I can totally do these things! But sometimes I just want to queue for LFR and knock out a quest or run a random dungeon when my friends aren’t around. Now LFR gives absolutely nothing I need, not gear or quests or anything, so I have zero reason to do it. And heroics are only really worth it if there’s a world quest or a healer goodie bag. I am wondering if this expansion is going to really divide the population, between casual solo-ish folks who only do world quests, because they can’t move the story forward in accessible content, and raiders who group with their guild for the hard stuff and have no reason to do LFR or heroics. There doesn’t seem to be much incentive this time around for those two groups to overlap. At least in the last 2 expansions you could work on the legendary questline in LFR. Anyway I’m curious to see how this plays out, but I’ve decided I need to stop caring about the story and rewards that Blizz put in front of me and just wander around doing whatever I feel like instead.

Three Weeks In

September 19, 2016 by Grace

Like the title says, we’re 3 weeks into Legion, and about to have access to raiding and mythic+ dungeons. Are you prepared? I am not prepared. Or rather, I’m actually in a pretty good place personally but I have no solid group to do these activities with. My gear level is pushing ever closer to the pre-raid cap of 850 on my mage, and my monk is now heroic-capable or possibly even mythic-capable too. What I need is a squad, a team, some pals to do all the new stuff that comes out tomorrow with. My self-imposed casualness has deteriorated in the face of a really fun expansion that I can’t get enough of. Unfortunately most of my friends are still exactly as casual as we all said we’d be. So I’ve done only one mythic dungeon so far.

This may come off as me complaining about my friends, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact I’m frustrated at myself, for not being able to go slowly like I said I would. Or alternately, for not recognizing that I get into “do all the things” mode every time I am enjoying a new game/expansion and planning accordingly. I shrugged off some invitations to join more hardcore groups because I wanted to go slow and not have pressure. Now I’ve gotten raid-ready anyway in spite of myself.

So in the interest of keeping momentum without running off to do things without my friends (which has already gotten me in trouble a few times, stupid lockouts!) I’ve been working on alts. Mage is still my main but is holding on to that title by a thin thread. DPS queues are a thing, and everybody needs a healer. Monk is leveled, class campaign finished, and heroic geared, ready to run mythics and drag me back into healing forever. My horde priest, my main for many many years is 102 and has all her weapons, even the disgusting evil holy one. She’ll be leveling as shadow and gearing up enough to do LFR as disc. I don’t love disc for dungeons this expansion and I hate holy so I don’t plan on doing much other than healing LFR with her. Horde pally, and both alliance and horde druids have unlocked their class halls and first weapons, so I have tons of options in front of me. I just have to figure out what I want to accomplish first.

Are you raiding tomorrow? Getting ready for mythic+? Or are you still slow and steady, enjoying all the new content of Legion?

A little bit of everything

September 13, 2016 by Grace

Holy cow I can’t believe we’re only 2 weeks into Legion. The first week was a week of leveling and exploring. This past week has been about trying to clear out my quest log more than anything else. The first time leveling in an expansion I like to get the Loremaster achievement, which means by the time I reach the level cap I’m usually pretty close to done with all the quests available. Not so with Legion. I keep half-joking with my friends that there’s some folks at Blizzard laughing their butts off at us because we complained there wasn’t enough to do and now there’s SO MUCH TO DO I don’t even know where to start. I head to an area with the intention of clearing out a quest from my log and suddenly there’s a world quest there too. Or I’m flying somewhere for a world quest and I see a quest hub I missed while I’m flying over. Suramar in particular has two subzones that are gigantic, with pretty extensive quest lines. And I’ve barely scratched the surface of crafting and all its associated quests.

One thing I have done is dungeons. I’ve done all of the normal mode dungeons now, and a few heroics. There’s surprisingly little difference in tuning between the two modes. I wonder if part of that is the way level scaling works on the normal ones, since you never get the benefit of a couple slightly higher characters in there making the whole thing go easier? All I know is I’m more than happy to queue for heroics now, because the dps queue times are much shorter than for normals. I was all proud of myself for doing all the dungeons, and then I found out there’s 2 more that are reputation gated by Nightfallen rep, plus I haven’t set foot in mythics yet. So there’s plenty more on my list.

I have still found the time to do a little bit of work on my army of alts, usually once I’ve finished the emissary quest for the day on the mage and don’t feel up to running dungeons. I’ve unlocked one weapon for my pally and my priest, and have unlocked all 3 weapons and gotten to 108 on my monk. The monk is very fun and flexible, and leveling goes ridiculously fast when you have rested xp. I’ve gotten to heal a few dungeons, and while monk healing is nothing like it used to be back when I picked it up in Pandaria, it is a solid healer with a pretty nice toolkit. I’m still happy that I chose mage as my main, but it is nice to be able to heal again if my friends need a healer to fill in a group.

My goals for the week are to get revered with the Nightfallen, get my 2nd gold artifact trait, and level the monk to 110. I wish I could will myself to slow down a little bit more and savor this time, but this is part of the cycle I enjoy most and part of that enjoyment is the speed with which new upgrades and unlocks are coming in. I’ll just keep doing a little bit of everything and trying my best not to burn myself out.