paladin – Page 6 – AggroChat

Kodra the Prodigy

September 23, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I had what is going to go down for awhile as one of my strangest dreams. The root of it was a roadtrip, that apparently myself and the rest of the AggroChat crew were taking across country. I have no clue at all where we were going, or what we were actually doing. However we were in a road trip in a car that was probably too small to fit all of us… but those are the sort of details that dreams just handwave away. What I do know for certain is that at some point we stopped at a roadside diner, and while milling around and waiting for everyone to finish going to the restroom I noticed this little girl had a cool vintage metroid championship t-shirt. I commented that I liked her shirt and she showed it to me proudly… and that is when I noticed that emblazoned across it in a fuchsia with purple shadow version of the Metroid logo was the name “Kodra”. Round about this time in the dream Kodra comes out of the bathroom and I point out the t-shirt and he is super nonchalant about it. This is the point where we learn that apparently he was a child prodigy at video games… and “he doesn’t like to talk about that time”. We also find out that apparently there is this entire internet sub culture that has been trying to find out what happened to Kodra after the championship… which in itself is funny given that he goes by that game on our podcast. It is around this point that the dream starts to break down like every dream does, especially given that I am not sure the timing works. Kodra is quite a bit younger than I am, so not sure what age he would have been when Metroid was even a thing. In any case… it was one of those strange dreams that I had to commit to paper as it were.

As far as “me”, I am doing mostly better… or at least on the road to better. I feel bad about the weird state of yesterdays post, but I just didn’t have any proper fuel to cobble together a post. I have been stressed beyond belief for reasons I can’t get into. Just know that for the most part those events have passed and I think I am on the other side of them. Cryptic as hell I know but that is about all I can really say. I have not been feeling great, but I think it is just a side effect of the stress. Last night I wound up going to bed before 10 pm, and then woke up about midnight feeling like I had slept an entire night. My body does strange things when it comes to sleep, but thankfully I was able to mostly get right back to sleep. As far as gaming goes last night, I managed to exist in the “organized gameplay” world just long enough to drag some friends into Heroic Darkheart Thicket for the World Quest that rewarded an 850 wrist. This was unfortunately good enough that it was worth breaking up my four piece world quest set to partake of the level difference. After that and finishing up my emissary quest for the day I flipped over to my paladin and continued questing out in Highmountain for a bit. So far leveling as a tankadin is pretty chill and relaxing, and while I would rather run around Justicar Julia Celeste, I have to say Vindicator Boros is growing on me. It is kinda fun to run around and be Super Draenei Tankbros. I contemplated actually transmogging to some of the gear he is wearing to make it even seem more legit, since I think I have a lot of that stuff from the Draenor expansion. However my purple judgement set matches the purple tone artifact so well… that I am leaving it be for the time being. Over the night Tam managed to ding 110 so my hope for tonight is to grab him and smuggle him into a heroic to hopefully get some gear.

Kodra the Prodigy

September 23, 2016 by Belghast

Panda Hero

September 20, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I talked about my journey from bad engineer to not so bad engineer, but that was not at all the only thing I accomplished this weekend. For some time I had been sitting at three achievements from completing my Glory of the Pandaria Hero meta achievement and obtaining the purty mount you see in the screenshot above. I guess leading with a screenshot pretty much kills any suspense, but I am going to talk about this regardless. I actually accomplished most of this during my periods of playing Pandaria back in the day, but for whatever reason I simply was not with the group when they completed Rattle No More, Seeds of Doubt, and I never messed with the super annoying Polyformic Acid Science. What ultimately jogged my memory is that I wound up getting an enchanting quest requiring me to go gather up various components… two of which were located in Scholomance and Stonecore which meant me going to the respective areas and soloing a dungeon. It was during this process that I got one of the empty vials, and remembered how the whole Polyformic Acid thing worked. As a result I managed to do five of the six kills needed for that achievement during a single 60 minute charge… before using the empty vial and removing it. What I did not remember is that apparently when you remove and reapply a charge… it gives you a fresh 60 minute buff and not a partial buff based on what the previous timer was when you last stowed it. From there the actual chore of doing the last two achievements was minimal because with level 110 gear things just sort of fall over. However regardless I now have one more mount to add to my collection. The thing is I am in similar places on most of the other “Dungeon Hero” achievements because for whatever reason I never really prioritized them. I have never been the achievement hunter that Thalen or Rylacus was… but maybe it is time to start changing that.

As far as last night went, I spent most of it working on questing Exeter my Draenei Tankadin. I did not realize what a difference harvesting makes to the total amount of experience you can squeeze out of a zone. Belghast had no harvesting skill, but instead a double crafting combo of engineer and enchanting. As a result it took me all five zones to be able to reach 110, or at least a fraction of the last zone for me which was Highmountain. On Exeter however I have done nothing but complete Azuna my first zone… and I am sitting at 104 and roughly half of the way to 105. I’ve run zero dungeons, and the only real difference is that I am harvesting every ore node I happen across. However at 900 xp or so a pop those nodes I guess add up, as does the fact that I have plenty of rested experience since I am only playing him a few times a week right now. The push however is to get to 109 quickly so that I can have another character to start running the upcoming Coren Direbrew fight that comes with Brewfest… that should start showing up after the downtime today. Now however is the point at which I am going to ascend my soapbox. One of the things that the Legion pre-event showed off is just how damned well the content scaling works, and how much more enjoyable an event can be when you allow players of all levels to complete it. Direbrew has never really been a difficult fight and honestly most of the time you could complete it without a tank in previous years. It just feels odd that in an expansion driven by scaling of content, that they would not also update this event to use it.

As much as I am loving this expansion, there are a lot of things that still make me wonder. For example Stormheim is this amazing zone… so long as you completely ignore any factional crap that happens in it. This is really the expansion of two stories happening at once… a faction tale of red versus blue that feels grossly outdated, and deep and rich zone specific tales that feel fresh and new. I realize they probably did not have time to do everything in this expansion and update Brewfest… so they instead simply bumped up the item levels a bit and moved on. However I feel like at some point they really need to do an update pass on all of these seasonal fights to bring them in line with the newest tech. Imagine how much cooler it would be if anyone in the game could participate on all of their characters. Right now this event feels like it is setting an artificial deadline on when we should have been leveled by in order to keep from missing out. Then there is the issue of the fact that I am pulling 840/850 items from World Quests and the face value of the Direbrew trinkets is only 810… something that I am hoping can easily War and Titan forge up in level. In any case I will be doing this event every day on Belghast, and attempting to get my nearest character up to the appropriate level range of 109 so that I can get multiple characters trying to farm goodies. If nothing else I need to have more characters at the level cap since this does not appear to be something they are going to scale… because I still am chasing that ever damned elusive Headless Horseman mount.

Breaking Silence

September 12, 2016 by Belghast

After the challenges of last week, this past weekend was largely a time to chill out and relax. On the “paw” front I am pleased to announce that the round of IV antibiotics seemed to work pretty well given that the swelling is largely down as is the redness. There is one spot that is a bit troubling, but we are watching it. I am guessing that the location went a little deeper than the rest and as such might take a little longer to recover. There is always the fear that the bite penetrated a tendon or something else, but we will continue to watch it as it hopefully heals. On the gaming front… I had all of these grand ideas about running nonstop dungeons, but what happened in reality is that I wound up chilling with the wife downstairs and watching various stuff on the television. It felt like it would be an invasion of the peace and quiet to get on voice chat and start talking “strategery” and such. What happened instead is that I queued up a few times as a pug dps, and spent time working on older stuff in the meantime while waiting on that lengthy queue to pop. Of note on the Ruin server group, the queue time for a DPS is about 45 minutes, which means I had plenty of time to work on other objectives while waiting on the queue to pop. I spent some time in Warlords farming spawns attempting to get my Shatari Defense reputation up… because I am admittedly a bit jealous of Grace and her amazing fire mammoth mount that she keeps running around on. The only problem there is it seems with the opening of Tanaan Jungle at least one of the farm spots has been nerfed into the ground… and Shattrath city has spawns really far apart making it hard to gather things up and AOE them down with whirlwind spam.

Another queue I wound up spending on the Isle of Giants in Pandaria where I learned a few key things. Firstly once again it is hard to gather everything up and AOE it down… because my aggro radius is minuscule now with the dinosaurs. Second I can apparently now easily solo Oondasta as Fury, so that is going to go on the mount farming list. The white raptor mount has been something I have worked on for awhile, and yesterday I ground out the last 2000 bones roughly. The queue popped before I could actually turn in, so I had to finish things up after the dungeon. The real takeaway from the weekend however is… my theory of treating World of Warcraft like Final Fantasy XIV seems to largely be working. Upon entering a dungeon, be it as tank or as dps… I do my customary “Hey Folks” which seems to unjam the conversation mechanism. Then throughout the dungeon folks tend to be willing to talk, but if I don’t say anything… it seems like folks are willing to just ride along in silence because there has always been the wowism that silence is preferable to dealing with assholes. The thing is… I think we can do better and a lot of the negative opinion folks have of this community is due to the fact that folks are willing to either put up with bullshit in dungeons because they want it to be over and don’t want to have to deal with another 45 minute queue. I am not sure if it is going to help, but I am absolutely making an effort to talk to people be it in my Class Hall fielding questions like I did yesterday… or running a dungeon, or even out in the world while doing an objective. I think most of us just simply assumed that no one was willing to have conversation, and I am trying to flip that assumption on its head.

The other big thing from the weekend is that I started work on my second character. Some time ago I started Exeter my Paladin off by getting Lightbringer. However after swapping Belghast to tanking, I am finding it way easier to quest like a madman in that mode. So as soon as I hit 102 I did the quest chain to pick up the second artifact, and had been holding artifact power items in reserve for awhile. Unlike Belghast I have a clear path that I am planning on working towards first, which I guess makes the experience feel more purposeful. On the Warrior protection tree there were so many cool things that I wanted, but none of them seemed to be clearly better than any of the others. Paladin it feels like there is one right choice for survival, and I am going in that direction first. Largely I devoted the time spent during the podcast to working on this guy, and by the end of the night I had hit 102 and was off into tanky land. I apparently also unlocked one of the appearances so I quickly swapped to the purple look and used it as an excuse to rock my purple judgement set. The one set that I wish existed in game is the yellow judgement set that you see one of the NPCs wearing. As it stands I have normal, Blue from the opening of Wrath event, and purple from the BC era heroics. This really is the best looking tier set in the game, and I wish more recolored sets would show up in dungeons, which reminds me… at some point I really need to work on farming up the turquoise wrath set. In any cases it was a good weekend and fairly relaxing, but it is my hope that with the week I will be back doing dungeons with friends again. I am now up to 823 item level on Belghast, which means I need to be hitting up those heroics.