MMORPG

Fixed Mostly

by

The Wild Ride

The last two weeks have been a bit of a roller-coaster of nerfs and buffs to the Legion Event.  When I first wrote Monday about the “elevator” it was really simple and fast to get a character through the levels, and it didn’t even require much attention to detail.  Simply being in the zone allowed you to reap the entire lions share of experience.  This unfortunately lead to a bit of a plague of afk leveling, because players would park in a relative safe spot and just wait for the phases to complete.  The irony here is that I didn’t actually do this myself until the first round of nerfs, taking the experience down so much that the event didn’t really feel worthwhile.  The positive takeaway of this experience is that Blizzard kept trying different combinations to see if they could find the sweet spot.  I know of at least four different hotfixes that were applied to tweak this variable or that until we wound up with the one that happened last night, and seems to FINALLY restore the event to a level that isn’t AFK leveling, but still feels like you aren’t wasting your time.  Also the new version of the event seems to reward group player, and dissuade players from some of the antisocial behavior that had sprung up.

For a period of time your best bet was to find a quiet corner of the zone to camp for demons and solo everything you could.  This however lead players to getting rather vocal when someone was encroaching upon their turf.  I mean I get the frustration because it could literally half your experience gained if another player touched whatever you had been soloing.  A drive by dot could wreck your experience, and as a result folks were somewhat understandably grumpy about the experience.  You can read my own twitter feed full of random comments about this over the week, so on several levels I have been grumpy as well.  Since I have been writing about it I thought this morning I would talk about the various methods I have personally experiences, and which have good results if you are going into these events hunting experience for leveling, rather than loot boxes.  You admittedly end up with more lootboxes than you could ever want as well, but that is just a fringe benefit.

Your Own Private Army

Fixed Mostly

Scattered throughout the Invasion zones are a number of NPCs that can be saved.  Several of them will fight along side you when you save them, and are really handy.  I am sure I don’t have a full list, but here are some of the ones I know about and have used.

I am certain there are more, but wowhead is freaking out this morning.  I know at some point I also had a dwarven hunter lady while out in Tanaris.  Essentially they are scattered throughout the battlefield, and in Westfall they are often times inside the farm houses.  Rescuing them essentially allows you to take things down more quickly because you have a battle minion following you around and attacking whatever you happen to be attacking.  For example if I have the Crusader I tend to go after the huge mini-boss type baddies because the stun effects them and allows me to shred them.  If I have one of the AOE minions… then I tend to focus on large packs because they will chew them up with AOE damage.  I am not sure how many of these you can have at once, but I have for certain had two up at once and been just fine.  Essentially when you have a couple of these battle minions up, you can run throughout the zone looking for packs of Legion mobs and shredding them for experience.

Vehicular Demonslaughter

The option one of my friends tends to favor is to grab one of the many vehicles scattered around the battlefield and start laying waste to baddies with it.  There is a shockingly wide variety of these available.  For the alliance I know we have Dwarven Steam Tanks, Gnomish Spiders, and Darnassian Glaive Throwers.  Similarly there are horde options as well including some weird undead thing that throws bombs.  Once again the idea is to grab a tank, and just go to town wrecking as many demons as you can before you run out of fuel.  Fuel being a buff that you get that shows how long you can be active in the vehicle.  Personally I have had the best luck with the Steam Tanks because they allow you to just brute force large packs of mobs at once.  Demolishers I think play a similar role for the horde, and allow you to just storm into a Legion camp and destroy everything in your path.

Chase the Skulls

Now personally after the patch I think this is the best option for maximum experience gain… and it seems like everyone else has caught on as well.  Boss fights reward a silly amount of experience now.  In my 70s last night I was getting 45k-60k experience per boss kill, and the various mobs scattered throughout the map and marked with Skulls in phase three… count as bosses.  So new best way to gain experience seems to be to chase these around the zone, and I say chase because there will be a massive amount of flying mounts heading in one direction or another.  The key here however is to stay alive.  This is my only real complaint about the changes… is that with placing so much emphasis on boss kills, you are completely screwed if you are dead while the boss is taken down.  If you are dead you get exactly zero experience for the boss kill, and makes the entire process a complete waste of your time.  As a result you have to play super cautiously, especially as you near the end of the bosses health bar.  I tend to disengage from melee range and use my extremely crappy channeled range attack just to make sure I am on the threat list of the boss but also giving myself maximum room to duck away in case of one of the many one shot boss abilities.  Overall the changes are much better than they have been…  and in truth you can end up with a lot more experience per invasion than you could even before the first round of nerfs.  The big difference is that you have to be extremely active and constantly moving around zone and fighting to make that happen.  Ultimately I think that was what they were going for, and I wanted to reward activity that helps the invasion out… and not activity that happens to get in through a loophole.

 

Slow News Day

by

For lack of a better term, yesterday was a slow news day… at least in terms of me and gaming.  A handful of times a year I go out with some co-workers to RiffTrax and last night was the live show for Mothra.  I say live show… because in Nashville the Rifftrax crew genuinely is doing this live… and simulcast to the various theaters around the country.  We’ve talked about how great it would be to sit there in the theater and experience it in person…  but that would be like a nine hour drive.  Also the RiffTrax show is always on “a school night” which would make work the next day super awkward and staying over in Nashville even more bizarre.  The interesting aside from last night is that I apparently had either not seen Mothra… or did not remember it at all.  In truth when I think Mothra… I think Mothra vs Godzilla.  Growing up there was a local UHF channel that used to have “themed” weeks during the summer.  There would be one week where they played all of the Spiderman movies, or another week where they played nothing but Bruce Lee.  One of the weeks was always every single Godzilla movie, and I remember watching those as a kid and enjoying them greatly.  Mothra on the other hand…  was just way more bizarre than I ever realized.  Also as the RiffTrax folks kept pointing out… for a movie about Mothra she didn’t spend much time on screen.  The “Riffs” were of course plentiful and one of the more awesome things about going to several of these live shows… is that they keep making call backs to previous ones.  Both Merlin and the Ice Cream Bunny made appearances at least in joke form.

As far as gaming goes I did manage to get about an hour in before I finally collapsed, and during that time I mostly just worked on trying to get drops from the invasions.  Right now it seems like everyone is for the most part either finished gearing… or one slot away from it.  I’ve made a lot of progress in knocking stuff off in my spreadsheet, and at least feel like I am in a better place than I was earlier.  It does get frustrating when you need a single item… but keep getting nothing but bracers for example.  What I seem to be missing follows…

  • Exeter – Paladin – Gloves
  • Lodin – Hunter – Shoulders
  • Tallow – Shaman – Legs
  • Gloam – Rogue – Gloves
  • Belglaive – Demon Hunter – Grinding out Purchased Items
  • Belghast – Warrior – It’s Complicated

Right now I am mostly focused on that last one.  Belghast was my best geared character going into this event, so some of the items are simply not upgrades… unless I happen to warforge them.  Even then some of the slots are not worth it unless I get the 720 warforged versions.  The main thing for him however is gloves and a set of weapons because at least in my Fury set I only have a pair of 690 axes.  I am not sure at what point I call it “good” however, because really I feel like my 11 level 100 characters are all in a reasonable place for leveling in the Legion expansion, which ultimately was my entire point in doing any of the events.  At some point soon I am going to shift my focus over to the Monk and see how close I can get to pushing him over the level 100 line before the expansion actually hits.  I am not sure why but it just feels like it would be awesome to say I went into this expansion will a full stable of level 100 characters… at least on Argent Dawn my primary server.

The “Main” Problem

by

Shakes Fist

Over the last few days my friend Grace and often times partner in crime in online games…  has been talking about how she should finish up her legendary ring.  I stalled out on both caring about this item and caring about grinding for it at some point.  I didn’t remember how many Chaos Tomes I had collected, but I knew it “wasn’t enough”.  I guess at some point they greatly jacked up the drop rate of these things, and I simply had not run any Hellfire Citadel content after this happened.  The problem is that this little back and forth planted the seeds in my head, that I too should go ahead and finish mine up.  This was only furthered when I noticed that I was sitting at 24 of 33 tomes in my inventory.  With each boss now having a nearly 100% drop rate that means that in a single night I could get enough tomes to finish up this step.  I thought surely I had to be close to the end by now, and could potentially push across the finish line for no reason other than to say I did it.  So for the bulk of last night I threw myself at the LFR system, sometimes it went well… other times not so much.  Namely when I zoned into Archimonde I had an instant 6 stack of determination, and for whatever reason on Bastion of Shadows the tank kept pulling before even half the raid was at a given boss.  However all of these things aside… I managed to get my tomes rather quickly and turned in the quest… finally now understanding what the hell happened to Cordana.  Side note I always read this as Cortana…  but I guess it really isn’t spelled that way at all.

I turned everything in waiting for my ring… only to realize that I was just about to get kneecapped by this quest chain.  You have to understand something… I hate the shipyard.  I have begrudgingly done a handful of quests to get my chest every few weeks, but otherwise have not really done shit in there.  I somehow knew in the back of my mind that this was probably going to bite me in the ass at some point.  Apparently to complete the legendary ring you need to have completed a series of 2 day long shipyard “legendary” missions, and while I am fairly sure I have run some of these….  I cannot for the life of me remember how many.  The only thing to do as a result is to just start running them now and hoping I can get through them in all before the 30th.   Ultimately this is going to be the bit that kills my bid for the ring, because I have done little to no effort to properly gear any of my ships.  So basically I am going to need a lot of luck going into these missions and just hope that I don’t have to repeat them.  So now I am shaking my fist at Grace for planting this damned fool quest in my brain…  because I suddenly apparently care about completing the Legendary ring.  If I am reading the quest line correctly… I am guessing I MIGHT be on the fourth part of the quest… the one that has to be completed before you do the mission to actually collect your Draenic Sea Charts.  So maybe this won’t be as bad as I am fearing in the end.

Abandoning “Main”

The “Main” Problem

Yesterday I talked a little bit about my dilemma of trying to pick a main.  I think that maybe the core problem is that I feel like I need to have one.  Mains have traditionally been a construct designed for raiding, so that you can focus your efforts on gearing one character to be the best you possibly can be in a raiding context.  While I might do some raiding, that is going to be far from my focus in Legion.  I want to do some of the mythic five player content, but even then I am not sure how serious I am going to be about it.  Maybe the construct of having a main is working against my enjoyment of this game.  I think back to the times that I enjoyed the most, and I absolutely had a raiding main character, but I also had an army of alts that I cared equally about.  Some of the most enjoyable times for me personally were farming these alts to friends raids, and getting to see content as something other than Belghast/Lodin/Belgrave depending on whcih my main was.  Hell Belghast was an answer to me not really liking raiding as a hunter, and I leveled it with the purpose of having cool stuff to do when not strapped to huntering.  So as someone for whom the alts have always been of the utmost importance…  how did I think I would ever be happy trying to focus mostly on just one of them.

That said there needs to be a sort of pecking order when it comes to leveling them.  I did not want to run LFR as a tank last night, that is a package of stress and frustration that I was simply not willing to take upon myself.  So as a result I figured out the new fury spec and spent the evening testing it out.  The end result is… that I think I like it quite a bit.  I have come back and forth on fury over the years… and the previous incarnation with Draenor was not really my thing.  This Legion version however is awesome, and I was having a blast playing it.  So much so that I think I might choose the Fury artifact weapon first, and then later pick up the tanking set.  I think for a lot of reasons Belghast is going to be the first character I level in Legion.  I mean he is the actual and for real “Belghast” not my army of “Belg” named characters.  Additionally Fury is a really fun DPS spec once again, and then Protection is a very familiar feeling tanking spec that I am more than comfortable doing content with.  So for the first we will honor tradition and for lack of a better term the warrior will be my “main”.  That said I plan on following it up quickly with several of the other classes that I have enjoyed like Demon Hunter, Warlock, Rogue and Shaman.

 

Elevator Broken

by

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

Elevator Broken

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.