leveling – Page 5

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August 22, 2016 by Belghast

The past week was hyper focused on a single goal… getting Belgaoh my monk from 53 to 100. The weird thing about this process is that once completed… I am finding myself drifting a bit without purpose. The above screenshot is unrelated to anything, but I thought it looked cool so you are getting it with this mornings post. Starting yesterday I begin finally running my stable of characters through the Broken Shore content. I managed to snag all of the toys, and troll shoes transmog from my single leel 100 horde character, and on my second time through on an alliance character successfully got the bonnet cosmetic item. I am assuming that tomorrow there will be a new step on the quest chain being patched in, and this time around we will actually do the moving of Dalaran to the Broken Isles bit. Tonight is our Final Fantasy XIV raid, so that means I will go into this weeks patch not having run Broken Shores on the bulk of my characters. At least in theory the content isn’t going anywhere so I shouldn’t feel that much of a rush to push through it. I think this content will essentially be the “welcome to Legion” content for everyone from this point on wards. I will say it was really strange buzzing right past the quest starter for Cataclysm, Pandaria and Draenor on the monk. I think I have all of the quests sitting in my log, because they are given automatically when you zone into Stormwind, but I am not sure when if ever I am going to do them. At this moment I am contemplating using the Timeless Isle port to get to Draenor, but then again that would mean I need to open up Pandaria to get to it.

Even though I have completed one journey to 100… I am finding that I cannot seem to quit the Invasion Event. A good chunk of yesterday was also spent running characters through the event trying to get the last few 700 items for each. I managed to finish off Lodin and Tallow last night, which leaves Gloam, Exeter and Belglaive all needing a single item slot. Belglaive is a little more complicated because I used that character to purchase the pet, and as a result he is still missing several of the purchased pieces of gear. I just need to run ANY instances on him to get that finished off. I do have his Glaives upgraded to 725, and I have started a second set mooching off of everyone else’s spare tokens to upgrade them for my eventual Horde demon hunter. I wish the other weapons worked like this, in that they were bind on account and you could pass them around as needed. Some characters I have gotten more than my fair share of weapons… and then others like Exeter have yet to see a single one. I have this feeling that ultimately it is going to be Ex my Paladin that I will continue to run events on, as I try and get three weapons for him. The other big thing that I need to accomplish before this event is over is to try and find the Demon that spawns in Orgrimmar and Stormwind and get a Fel Spreader toy. I failed to get one the two times I tried it yesterday, with the one in Orgrimmar bugging out and running back to the Doomsayer and fading.

The big thing I have learned over the years is that I have a lot of fun playing World of Warcraft, so long as I have a goal in mind. For example this last week has been a blast as I leveled my way through to 100 doing events. In theory I could pick a Horde character and start doing the same, but I don’t really have any that are nearly as close to finish as my Monk was. Doing the event without flight was a pain in the butt, and I am not sure if I want to go back to that frustration right now. If I was going to pick a character on that side of the fence I would probably pick my Warlock since I have really enjoyed playing my Alliance lock… and I have full cloth heirlooms. Similarly I have full leather heirlooms, but of the leather classes the one I am most likely to play… is the Demon Hunter, which is easy as hell to get to 100. I do however have the cash to just go ahead and outfit my plate heirlooms up to 100 and then push something else that I would likely play. My Orc Deathknight is sitting at 60, so flight is possible, even if it is a slow version. I might be fun to be able to use this event to play with one of the other specs like Frost or Unholy. If the next goal is NOT the event however… I need to pick something be it Mount Farming or Dungeon Achievements because so long as I can keep a list of things I want to do… I will be able to stay engaged in this game. I really am having a lot of fun being around all of these people again. It is a bit like a reunion, because everywhere I turn on Argent Dawn I keep running into familiar faces from the past. I know we have roughly a week until the official launch of Legion, and with that comes a whole new set of goals so I just need to keep busy in the meantime.

The Top Floor

August 21, 2016 by Belghast

Off and on throughout this event I have used the “elevator” metaphor to explain how the experience bonus of the invasions has felt. It started off as a steady elevator, and then took a bunch of detours for maintenance. However at the end the final version felt like it was picking up speed as I finished the climb towards the top. The other day Devolore made a comment about this invasion that I think is worth sharing.

While I realize the goal of the event was not to level everything to 100… that is precisely what I set out to do. Before the initial change I managed to get my Priest from 92 to 100, and then turned around and got my Mage from 90 to 100. That left only my little monk that starting last Wednesday was sitting at only level 53. In the last four days I have finished the climb to 100, finally dinging off of an invasion last night after we wrapped up recording the podcast. It was a wild ride filled with pure madness, but overall it was an enjoyable one. This is the feeling I have been chasing for awhile, going into an expansion knowing that every single character on at least my primary server was ready to go and awaiting the next content release. There are a bunch of things I learned on the trip, and I took care last night to log some of my findings. The rest of this post is likely going to be a bunch of bullet points explaining what all I found out.

It took a total of 49 Invasions to go from level 53 to 100
I was wearing full heirlooms the entire way, so adjust accordingly
That makes it .95 levels per invasion completed
I saved 97 loot boxes while doing the even, 49 Blue, 48 Green.

The Loot

This is what 97 loot boxes from the event looks like sitting in my bank. I saved every single one from the moment I started climbing from 53 to 100, in a large part because I wanted a bunch of information to be able to draw conclusions from. On a whim I ended up opening all of my Green chests first, and they my Blue chests… which caused me to notice a pattern.

Phase 2 – Small Legion Chest – Can Contain

Bracers
Gloves
Belt
Boots
Weapons

Phase 4 – Large Legion Chest – Can Contain

Helm
Shoulders
Chest
Pants
Weapons
Coalesced Fel

In the course of the events I ran I got 118 items to drop from the chests, and around 2000 nethershards… but I was not keeping as good of track on that number as I did the others. As I opened the boxes I recorded the what dropped and divided up level 700, 710 and 720 drops in the hopes of being able to pull some percentages together on the chance of each.

Level 700 Item Drops

Helm – 9
Shoulders – 13
Chest – 10
Bracers – 11
Gloves – 11
Belt – 8
Pants – 9
Boot – 6
Weapon – 14
Coalesced Fel – 9

Level 710 Item Drops

Helm – 2
Shoulders – 1
Bracers – 2
Gloves – 1
Belt – 3
Pants – 1
Boots – 5

Level 720 Item Drops

Shoulders – 1
Belt – 1
Pants – 1

So in total I got 100 level 700 drops, 15 level 710 drops, and 3 level 720 drops. Using some quick and dirty math that means that I got a Warforged 710 item 12% of the time, and a 720 item 2.5% of the time. In any case… my Monk is likely going to be my best geared character once I complete the Broken Shores content and get my ring and trinket. Leveling through Invasions was often times frustration… but overall it was an extremely enjoyable experience. I would love to say I would do this same rough on my hordies… but with only nine days until the launch of Legion I just am not sure if I have that sort of grind in me. More than likely I will be focusing on filling the gear holes in my various characters, and pushing them all through the broken shores and follow-up content.

Elevator Broken

August 17, 2016 by Belghast

Fun While it Lasted

On Monday I wrote about riding this new Legion Event to 100 on several of my characters, and how holding chests allowed me to instantly have viable level capped characters upon dinging. At least the second part of that statement is true now, but sadly the first part… not so much. It seems yesterday they patched the servers to increase the spawn rate of events, but greatly decrease the experience gained from each. While this is technically a net gain… it is also a whole lot of busy work to gain it. Previously on my Monk in his 50s/60s I was gaining at least one full levels worth of experience from each event I participated in. So that mean’t every four hours, I could run two events with him and then still have time to swap in some other alts for gearing purposes. As of yesterday I was getting a little less than half of a level of experience per event participated in. That means during the same four hour window, there are now a total of six events, instead of two… and as a result if experience stays roughly half a level that means I gain 3 levels instead of 2 before. The gotcha however is that you spend almost every second of that four hours either participating in an event or travelling to the next one, and in my experience I had no real time to swap in that many alts to also attempt to get gear. Given how fast experience is gained through questing, it also feels like during that same four hour block I could probably do significantly better than three levels.

What made the “elevator” nice is that I could more casually swap in my lower level alts, and still have time to do the ones I was trying to get gear for. Now instead I have to make a choice between getting the gear from the event, or leveling. I mean I get why they did this, because they really want folks to focus on the gear and not the easy ticket leveling. I am just glad that I managed to pull my Priest from 92 to 100, and my Mage from 90 to 100 before the elevator broke. As a result I am tabling my Monk for the moment, at least until I finish getting all of the rest of my stable of 11 characters fully geared in 700 or better items from the event. Technically Belghast my Draenor main has the least stuff from the event, but he also has 700 or better in most of his slots already. Other than that my rogue really is the one missing the most gear, so I will be working on him next. Exeter my Paladin is missing a weapon, Lodin my hunter Shoulders, and Tallow my Shaman a handful of items. Instead of focusing entirely on the Monk I am going to work on getting these characters the last of the missing pieces so that they are in a better state to be prepared for leveling them in Legion. I have this feeling that 700 is essentially the place they are expecting us to be at for the new content, and even though we will be swapping all of it out for better gear almost instantly it should at least ease that transition.

Unknown Main

I am hoping over the next few days to be able to reach a point where I am completely okay hopping off the event train. While it has been a fun ride chasing the skulls around the zones, I have to say I have neglected other important things during the process. For example I have yet to complete the Broken Shore quest chain in live on any of my characters. While I did it a bunch of times in Beta and have since seen the cinematics I missed… with the patching in of more quest content I feel like I need to get on the ball and start in with this. More than anything this expansion feels really different, and in a good way. I like the way that they seem to be easing us into the content with the invasion, and the head start into Broken Shore or the Demon Hunter experience. It feels like we are having this rolling soft launch more than waiting for the 30th to flip the switch and have everyone rush into doing exactly the same stuff. My hope is this is going to allow us to have a more staggered experience with different groups of people progressing through the content at different speeds. I know personally I will likely be starting the new content in Stormheim, but that is largely because it feels like this great big love letter to Northrend.

The biggest challenge however still yet to be solved is… I have zero clue what my main is going to be. There are a bunch of different classes that I really enjoy right now. I love Vengeance Demon Hunter, I think in part because of its mobility and the ability to get places due to double jump and glide which comes in super handy in the new content. I also am completely in love with Lodin my Hunter… because I am finally getting to play out that fantasy of being a melee hunter. Belghast and Belgrave are both strong contenders because well… I tend to level tanks first, but in both cases they don’t necessarily feel that new or fresh but more the same. I am also loving Tallow my Enhancement Shaman and Gloam my Outlaw Rogue… but they will more than likely be relegated to the back burner. The character that I love that I am shocked to admit it though is my Demonology Warlock. It is actually a really strong contender for getting leveled quickly, because I have enjoyed playing it so much. Now however you can see the problem… I am loving this game at the moment because I am loving a lot of my characters at the same time. There however has to be a first… and I am still completely up in the air as to who that is going to be.

Scrap Collector

June 21, 2016 by Belghast

The Wastelands

The Rift resurgence continues and this time around I find myself working on tradeskills. Every so often I find myself stuck in a loop, that winds up with me leveling one thing like mad. The focus currently is pushing as many trade-skills up as I can manage… and honestly afford. I went into this little mission with roughly 1600 platinum, and as of last night I had dropped under 500. Please not this is just on reagent costs and pattern training costs, as I have been going out into the wild to gather materials on a pretty regular basis. The above image was taken on one of these many trips, this time to find Rhenium nodes in the Steppes of Infinity. I am not sure if this is even the best place to look for these, but I figured the highest level zone in Storm Legion would probably have the highest chance of these nodes. Currently I am working on Artificer which as of last night is I believe sitting at 360 of 450, but thankfully it was one of my lowest trades. When the game went free to play, one of the things that I spent a bunch of my “free” currency on was adding tradeskill unlocks to my main. The goal is to eventually turn Belghast into an omnicrafter, which is a term that is common in FFXIV but not possible in most games. Currently my trade-skill load-out looks a little something like this…

Armorsmith – 450
Butchering – 450
Foraging – 450
Mining – 450
Outfitter – 450
Runecrafter – 450
Weaponsmith – 450
Dream Weaver – 390
Fishing – 375
Survival – 375
Artificer – 370

So like I said Artificer is the lowest of my skills or at least the last of my “make gear” skills so I have been focusing on it. Fishing and Survival hopefully I will be able to level in tandem as I have done in the past. Dream Weaver I probably have more than enough material to start pushing it up there in level given that I salvage every single artifact that I get that I already have…. which at this point is a considerable number. The worst part of the artificer grind right now is trying to acquire gemstones which is namely why I am out in the Steppes farming Rhenium for those every so lucrative Heavy gem nodes. The only problem I foresee however is that a some point soon I am simply going to run out of money, probably long before I actually hit the goal of leveling all of these things. I am also lacking one tradeskill on this character, and that is Apothecary the one I have never actually successfully leveled on any character. At some point I will end up picking up one more tradeskill unlock and start working on that, but I think that will ultimately happen at a later date. The only real disappointment so far is that apparently this awesome 38 Slot Cosmic Bag pattern that I picked up can only be crafted with a drop from Tier 3 raid bosses, with no other way to acquire it. That is a bit of a kick in the pants…. but hopefully they will add it to the cash shop or something at a later date.

Low Key Activity

I think that after coming back from our whirlwind birthday weekend… I have just needed something super chill to do and crafting became that activity. The biggest problem is that if I keep on this course I am going to ultimately bankrupt myself. Tonight is going to be a night of fiddling with my desktop upstairs, because in theory I should have a shiny new graphics card to install. If I can manage to get that done in time I will probably end up participating in the FFXIV pony farm and miscellaneous activity night. If I do not get finished with machine upgrades until after the start time, I will likely just piddle around in Rift. I need to get back to doing some Intrepid Adventures because it turns out that they are still a pretty damned good source of upgrades. I also need to get some more Expert dungeons in, as in a perfect world I would do at least seven a week so that I get all of my currency bonuses. As far as raiding goes I am still up in the air as to what I want to do there. There are supposedly a good number of pick up raids, and I would love to see some of the content at least once… namely the new Comet of Ahnkhet raid. I would also love to get some of those bag reagents to craft up a few 38 slotters… but I would imagine that even now those items are in high demand. I wish they dropped form the Mind of Madness bosses in Intrepid Adventure, but as I have not seen one yet… I would assume that is not something that happens. For sheer gear acquisition Hammerknell seems way faster for getting cache drops, but then again that could simply be that people are just more used to those encounters.

At some point I also want to begin leveling my rogue, but in the past my key reason for doing this… was to have a bag maker. Since going all omnicraftery that reason went out the door so ultimately I need to find a spec that I can really enjoy. I somehow down the “grandpa build ” is still as effective as it once was for soloing content. For doing Instant Adventures I am currently running around as Marksman, because standing back and plinking tends to require less focus than getting up close and personal with the mob encounters. Similarly at some point I do want to level a character on the European servers, and I have gotten my Zaviel character up to 22. Right now I am largely just opening patron caches on him every day in the hopes of getting extra loyalty, but at some point I want to start pushing him in levels again. At some point I left the tracks and entered the Instant Adventure zone and it is unlikely that I will ever return to proper leveling with quests on that guy. The IA is a bit of a trap… in that the experience you gain seems so much faster than anything you can get while questing… but as a result it ends up with you being severely under-geared for your level. It also make sure that your tradeskills are woefully behind, and at some point I will have to go on a gathering binge to even begin to catch up. In any case… its been a little over a week now since my return to Rift and I am still finding so many of the things compelling. Even more so I have dove back into the community and am hanging my hat on discord, so if you have any interest in Rift I highly suggest you check it out as well.