MMORPG

Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker

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Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker

In yesterday mornings post I showed off briefly my transmog to go with the hidden protection warrior artifact appearance, but I have yet to really talk about it.  I have to say when I saw the protection warrior artifact during the lead up to the legion launch, I was more than a little underwhelmed by it.  However over time I came to love it, largely because of the lore behind it.  This is of course a spoiler so if you have not unlocked the protection artifact, and want to be surprised… then I guess skip this post for now.  Essentially the shield that you pick up as part of the artifact quest chain was crafted from one of Neltharion’s scales.  Yes I mean Neltharion… not Deathwing… as in before the transformation happened.  So that alone made me a bit more excited to wield the weapon, however when I found out that the hidden appearance was a Deathwingy version…  I knew sooner or later I had to get it.  Now apparently in beta this appearance was just sitting out in the open in the Vault of Neltharion area in High Mountain, so for awhile I started making the occasional trip through that region to see if it happened to be up.  I had largely forgotten about the appearance however in the hustle and bustle of gearing and tanky bits.  A few weeks ago however I found out that apparently the appearance was alive and kicking in game, and that supposedly there was an easy way to get it.  That easy method involved standing at the torch in the Vault of Neltharion and running a  script to see if the quest trigger that makes the shield appear had fired.  Now unfortunately I learned about this… two days after they had applied a hotfix to make the logging thing stop working… and instead give players a single chance each day to get the quest.

/run print("44311:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44311))
/run print("44312:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44312))

So for the last few weeks it has been a nightly occurrence to log in, make a beeline over to the Vault of Neltharion either by running through the path of Huln from Thundertotem or flying directly to the vault via Obsidian Overlook.  To explain what the above script does, is that when placed in a macro the first check is to see if the shield has spawned for you and is lootable.  The second check is to determine if you have already spent your once a day attempt to get the shield.  You are going to see an awful lot of “false, true” on those two before you finally see one that shows as “true, false”.  Basically running the script saves you wandering through the cave checking every single kobold gold pile, because apparently it can show up on literally any of them.  The biggest problem is that I am not exactly sure what triggers eligibility for this quest.  The only certain requirement is that you be at least Artifact Knowledge 5 to unlock it.  However others are claiming that you need to have read the artifact book in your class hall, and still others are claiming that it has something to do with the Xe`ra quest chain that lets you see events through the eyes of Illidan.  Supposedly when the quest triggers you see an emote in game and hear a gigantic roar…  this never actually happened for me during the time when the script actually returned true, so don’t count on that part.

Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker

Here is a shot of me standing beside the shield on the pile of gold.  Note this is not the same pile of gold that I saw in earlier screenshots of how the process works, so I think that quite honestly it can be any of various gold piles that are guarded by kobolds.  Another thing of note… I have also heard that if you die it can reset the flag so I highly suggest you do not take the level or risks I did in trying to get the shield.  I did the traditional warrior tank thing and pulled literally everything up to the pile where the shield was and tanked it down.  On second thought this was probably not the most prudent way to do this… but dammit I was excited.  There is a certain level of paranoia and superstition now associated with this quest for me.  As a result I thought I would basically run through all of the various things that might be triggering it.  I cannot state that any one thing did it, but I had just wrapped up a bunch of stuff the day I finally got my shield.  So here was the status of several variables on that day.

  • Had obtained Artifact Knowledge 7
  • Sitting at Revered with All Legion Factions
  • Had just finished Xe`ra quest chain before attempting
  • Read the Artifact Book in Class Hall before attempting
  • leap down from Skyhold to Highmountain
  • flew to Obsidian Overlook
  • entered Vault from that direction firing script as soon as I saw the “vault” name text show up

Like I said… none of these or all of these could be significant… or this could just be the ramblings of a madman.  Either way I am happy to have my new shield and mace combo and now I am working on the other hidden color schemes.  It seems like these are the same requirements regardless of hidden artifact appearance or class.

  • Complete 100 Dungeons using a hidden artifact appearance.
  • Complete 200 World Quests using a hidden artifact appearance.
  • Kill 1000 Players using a hidden artifact appearance.

or you can just do what I do and periodically run this script from a macro to see what your present status is.  I basically just recycled what was my Vault macro, and turned it into this one.

/run local q,x,_,a,b = GetAchievementCriteriaInfo,0 for i=1,11 do _,_,_,a,b = q(11152,i) x=x+a end local _,_,_,c,d = q(11153,1) local _,_,_,e,f = q(11154,1) print(“Dungeons: “..x..”/”..b) print(“WQs: “..c..”/”..d) print(“Kills: “..e..”/”..f)

Which simply causes some numbers to print to screen indicating how many of each item you have completed.  In any case good hunting and hopefully you too will find your silly shield so we can stop caring about the Vault of Neltharion!

 

Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker

by

Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker

In yesterday mornings post I showed off briefly my transmog to go with the hidden protection warrior artifact appearance, but I have yet to really talk about it.  I have to say when I saw the protection warrior artifact during the lead up to the legion launch, I was more than a little underwhelmed by it.  However over time I came to love it, largely because of the lore behind it.  This is of course a spoiler so if you have not unlocked the protection artifact, and want to be surprised… then I guess skip this post for now.  Essentially the shield that you pick up as part of the artifact quest chain was crafted from one of Neltharion’s scales.  Yes I mean Neltharion… not Deathwing… as in before the transformation happened.  So that alone made me a bit more excited to wield the weapon, however when I found out that the hidden appearance was a Deathwingy version…  I knew sooner or later I had to get it.  Now apparently in beta this appearance was just sitting out in the open in the Vault of Neltharion area in High Mountain, so for awhile I started making the occasional trip through that region to see if it happened to be up.  I had largely forgotten about the appearance however in the hustle and bustle of gearing and tanky bits.  A few weeks ago however I found out that apparently the appearance was alive and kicking in game, and that supposedly there was an easy way to get it.  That easy method involved standing at the torch in the Vault of Neltharion and running a  script to see if the quest trigger that makes the shield appear had fired.  Now unfortunately I learned about this… two days after they had applied a hotfix to make the logging thing stop working… and instead give players a single chance each day to get the quest.

/run print("44311:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44311))
/run print("44312:", IsQuestFlaggedCompleted(44312))

So for the last few weeks it has been a nightly occurrence to log in, make a beeline over to the Vault of Neltharion either by running through the path of Huln from Thundertotem or flying directly to the vault via Obsidian Overlook.  To explain what the above script does, is that when placed in a macro the first check is to see if the shield has spawned for you and is lootable.  The second check is to determine if you have already spent your once a day attempt to get the shield.  You are going to see an awful lot of “false, true” on those two before you finally see one that shows as “true, false”.  Basically running the script saves you wandering through the cave checking every single kobold gold pile, because apparently it can show up on literally any of them.  The biggest problem is that I am not exactly sure what triggers eligibility for this quest.  The only certain requirement is that you be at least Artifact Knowledge 5 to unlock it.  However others are claiming that you need to have read the artifact book in your class hall, and still others are claiming that it has something to do with the Xe`ra quest chain that lets you see events through the eyes of Illidan.  Supposedly when the quest triggers you see an emote in game and hear a gigantic roar…  this never actually happened for me during the time when the script actually returned true, so don’t count on that part.

Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker

Here is a shot of me standing beside the shield on the pile of gold.  Note this is not the same pile of gold that I saw in earlier screenshots of how the process works, so I think that quite honestly it can be any of various gold piles that are guarded by kobolds.  Another thing of note… I have also heard that if you die it can reset the flag so I highly suggest you do not take the level or risks I did in trying to get the shield.  I did the traditional warrior tank thing and pulled literally everything up to the pile where the shield was and tanked it down.  On second thought this was probably not the most prudent way to do this… but dammit I was excited.  There is a certain level of paranoia and superstition now associated with this quest for me.  As a result I thought I would basically run through all of the various things that might be triggering it.  I cannot state that any one thing did it, but I had just wrapped up a bunch of stuff the day I finally got my shield.  So here was the status of several variables on that day.

  • Had obtained Artifact Knowledge 7
  • Sitting at Revered with All Legion Factions
  • Had just finished Xe`ra quest chain before attempting
  • Read the Artifact Book in Class Hall before attempting
  • leap down from Skyhold to Highmountain
  • flew to Obsidian Overlook
  • entered Vault from that direction firing script as soon as I saw the “vault” name text show up

Like I said… none of these or all of these could be significant… or this could just be the ramblings of a madman.  Either way I am happy to have my new shield and mace combo and now I am working on the other hidden color schemes.  It seems like these are the same requirements regardless of hidden artifact appearance or class.

  • Complete 100 Dungeons using a hidden artifact appearance.
  • Complete 200 World Quests using a hidden artifact appearance.
  • Kill 1000 Players using a hidden artifact appearance.

or you can just do what I do and periodically run this script from a macro to see what your present status is.  I basically just recycled what was my Vault macro, and turned it into this one.

/run local q,x,_,a,b = GetAchievementCriteriaInfo,0 for i=1,11 do _,_,_,a,b = q(11152,i) x=x+a end local _,_,_,c,d = q(11153,1) local _,_,_,e,f = q(11154,1) print(“Dungeons: “..x..”/”..b) print(“WQs: “..c..”/”..d) print(“Kills: “..e..”/”..f)

Which simply causes some numbers to print to screen indicating how many of each item you have completed.  In any case good hunting and hopefully you too will find your silly shield so we can stop caring about the Vault of Neltharion!

 

Finally Grasp It

by

Finally Grasp It

For several weeks now Tam has been wanting to get those of us together that have Guild Wars 2 and try some of the group content.  However the launch of World of Warcraft Legion put a pretty serious brake on that concept.  We agreed that last night was a decent night for myself, Tam, Thalen, Kodra and Ashgar so we set forth with the plan of getting together and running something as a group.  While we didn’t exactly get that entire team together we did venture forth into Fractals, which are dungeons of a sort, but the closest thing I can really relate them to is the Pandaria Heroic Scenarios.  You are dropped on a map and that map has certain objectives that it is leading you towards.  However as we found out last night there are several things that exist just off the beaten path, like a champion dragon of sorts that we managed to take down.  In total we ran three of them, and we spent a good deal of that time wiping as we adjusted our strategy to be able to take certain encounters down.  Throughout the night I flirted with several weapon combos… but wound up right back at Greatsword and Hammer as a warrior.  However after the fractals I spent some time playing sword and shield again and found it greatly improved over what I remember from alpha/beta.

Finally Grasp It

Ultimately what it really reminds me of the most are the encounters in Dungeons and Dragons Online.  Those were a fairly unique blend of exploration, reasoning, problem solving… and finally a heavy dose of surviving combat.  The problem there however is this was rendered in relatively low fidelity, and it felt cumbersome to have to comply with the various rules of the actual pen and paper game system.  Admittedly Guild Wars 2 is also fairly fiddly, with a bunch of sliders that you can tweak on your character to build for very specific purposes…  however it feels like it does a much better job at the sort of experience that DDO was trying to go for.  Fractals feel like bite sized adventures… more than just on rails dungeon crawls.  If we can actually get the proper group size on at some point, we need to give dungeons a proper attempt as well because it feels like there are actual tanky characters now.  We did some messing about with a training bot system inside the fractal hub, and quickly found out that apparently I have way more survival than either of my companions.  This is even more noticeable when we actually started to do harder content, because I could stay in and take those hits longer allowing them to hang out on the boundary and deal damage or reflect effects.  In group play it suddenly felt like we each had a clear role to play, and not quite the zergy mess that I remember from the launch of the game.

Finally Grasp It

This is really the first time in a very long time I can legitimately say I enjoyed playing Guild Wars 2.  It was extremely fun for group play, and that suddenly makes all of the more casual exploratory bits of the game more enjoyable because I know that it is all leading to something.  One of my key problems with Guild Wars 2 has been a feeling that I had capped out and was not really going to improve my gear in any reasonable fashion.  That changed the moment I set foot into the fractals hub and saw all of the “better than exotic” items that were available on the vendors there.  Additionally I used some of those laurels that I had been getting, and not really knowing what to do with them… to purchase a nice neck piece.  Ultimately I feel like I finally “get” why people enjoy this game, and while I doubt it will ever supplant a more traditional MMO for me…  it doesn’t really have to.  The set up of Guild Wars 2 makes it extremely to drop into game with my friends and have a night of play, much along the lines of how non-mmorpgs work.  After seeing that I could in fact be a tank in this game… it makes me feel significantly better about playing warrior, and makes me want to try out some of the other weapon combinations that I long abandoned.  I still have problems with the game in a few spots, but I  think I have largely reached a point of peace finally after all this time.  I can stop trying to solve this puzzle, because I finally grasp what folks see in it.

Finally Grasp It

by

Finally Grasp It

For several weeks now Tam has been wanting to get those of us together that have Guild Wars 2 and try some of the group content.  However the launch of World of Warcraft Legion put a pretty serious brake on that concept.  We agreed that last night was a decent night for myself, Tam, Thalen, Kodra and Ashgar so we set forth with the plan of getting together and running something as a group.  While we didn’t exactly get that entire team together we did venture forth into Fractals, which are dungeons of a sort, but the closest thing I can really relate them to is the Pandaria Heroic Scenarios.  You are dropped on a map and that map has certain objectives that it is leading you towards.  However as we found out last night there are several things that exist just off the beaten path, like a champion dragon of sorts that we managed to take down.  In total we ran three of them, and we spent a good deal of that time wiping as we adjusted our strategy to be able to take certain encounters down.  Throughout the night I flirted with several weapon combos… but wound up right back at Greatsword and Hammer as a warrior.  However after the fractals I spent some time playing sword and shield again and found it greatly improved over what I remember from alpha/beta.

Finally Grasp It

Ultimately what it really reminds me of the most are the encounters in Dungeons and Dragons Online.  Those were a fairly unique blend of exploration, reasoning, problem solving… and finally a heavy dose of surviving combat.  The problem there however is this was rendered in relatively low fidelity, and it felt cumbersome to have to comply with the various rules of the actual pen and paper game system.  Admittedly Guild Wars 2 is also fairly fiddly, with a bunch of sliders that you can tweak on your character to build for very specific purposes…  however it feels like it does a much better job at the sort of experience that DDO was trying to go for.  Fractals feel like bite sized adventures… more than just on rails dungeon crawls.  If we can actually get the proper group size on at some point, we need to give dungeons a proper attempt as well because it feels like there are actual tanky characters now.  We did some messing about with a training bot system inside the fractal hub, and quickly found out that apparently I have way more survival than either of my companions.  This is even more noticeable when we actually started to do harder content, because I could stay in and take those hits longer allowing them to hang out on the boundary and deal damage or reflect effects.  In group play it suddenly felt like we each had a clear role to play, and not quite the zergy mess that I remember from the launch of the game.

Finally Grasp It

This is really the first time in a very long time I can legitimately say I enjoyed playing Guild Wars 2.  It was extremely fun for group play, and that suddenly makes all of the more casual exploratory bits of the game more enjoyable because I know that it is all leading to something.  One of my key problems with Guild Wars 2 has been a feeling that I had capped out and was not really going to improve my gear in any reasonable fashion.  That changed the moment I set foot into the fractals hub and saw all of the “better than exotic” items that were available on the vendors there.  Additionally I used some of those laurels that I had been getting, and not really knowing what to do with them… to purchase a nice neck piece.  Ultimately I feel like I finally “get” why people enjoy this game, and while I doubt it will ever supplant a more traditional MMO for me…  it doesn’t really have to.  The set up of Guild Wars 2 makes it extremely to drop into game with my friends and have a night of play, much along the lines of how non-mmorpgs work.  After seeing that I could in fact be a tank in this game… it makes me feel significantly better about playing warrior, and makes me want to try out some of the other weapon combinations that I long abandoned.  I still have problems with the game in a few spots, but I  think I have largely reached a point of peace finally after all this time.  I can stop trying to solve this puzzle, because I finally grasp what folks see in it.