transmog – Page 2

Playing Dress-Up

July 20, 2016 by Belghast

Quest for Bank Space

Be warned, I am really not sure how much this mornings post is actually going to be a proper topic… and how much it is just going to be show and tell. Essentially last night was spent sifting through so many characters on so many different servers to unlock all of the appearances I seem to have available to me. From there I started cleaning out the banks one at a time starting with Belghast my Warrior and for the time being my main. This was shockingly hard work, and I ended up installing an addon to help give me some confidence to actually go through with getting rid of an item. What I really wanted was a clear thumbs up or thumbs down on every single item much like Rift has stating that “you have this appearance”. Caerdon Wardrobe works at least in a way that is most critical, but still I really wanted to see that message for every soul bound item “just to make sure”. What the addon does do that is useful is for non-soulbound items it tells you that either you don’t have the appearance, or you have collected the appearance from another item. As far as the soulbounds… I just took the plunge and accepted that over a decades worth of accumulated stuff really was in fact added to my account appearance collection. This admittedly was a hard step, and one made no simpler by the fact that apparently Ark Inventory changed greatly… and with every character I logged in I had to do a bit of remapping of some of the styles to get things to load correctly. So I spent the night with Grace as moral support trudging through my bank… while the rest of the AggroChat crew listened in while playing Final Fantasy XIV thinking we were absolutely insane.

Honestly Tam thought this was some sort of limited time event… but I somehow doubt that the rest of the crew takes appearance items nearly as serious as Grace and I do. I mean Tam always has a spiffy glamour in FFXIV but he only has the one glamour and is not constantly rat-holing appearance items just in case someday he MIGHT want to use one for an outfit. I have joked and said that wardrobes are the true end game… but I am being serious. I have been more motivated in games when there is a cool piece of armor or a weapon on the line, than literally anything else you can dangle in front of me like a carrot. As a result one of my favorite activities has been doing old raid content and collecting nifty appearance items to line my vaults for another day. The problem being that quite literally on my Warrior I had seven inventory slots, zero bank slots, and zero void storage slots. Every last corner of that storage was filled with weapons and armor that I under no circumstances would be willing to part with. So a whole lot of my simply not playing the game… is because I had no room to keep accumulating items. Last night had been a long time coming, and was a bit of a purge of my digital hording of stuff. So in many ways selling all of those items was a liberating experience… but also one that terrified me at the thought that maybe just maybe the system would fuck up and I would end up losing everything. Of note… I got every single fashionista achievement other than the shirt one from logging in my first character. As the night went on the shirt achievement happened slowly while logging in a long list of alts that have otherwise been abandoned to the sands of time.

Show and Tell

Essentially the order of operations went a little something like this. I first logged in every single character on my account… which includes numerous characters on other servers that I have only ever played once or twice. From there I focused in on chewing through my mains… where I decided to sell off any gear that was not the current “best in bag” for my current spec. I figure with the expansion only a few weeks away, I was going to be just fine being confined to a single spec per character for that moment. I burned through my salvage crates and learned the appearances I did not already have… and mailed the extras off to Grace for her to sift through as well. Of note she is doing the same thing, but I just realized that it might not work as well as I thought it would… given that I think you can only learn an appearance on a character of that armor type. We will sort out the details of that later though. Then I started tearing into the bank, offloading anything that did not have a nifty and unique use effect and selling it. The only real speedbump here is the fact that a lot of the Naxxramas and Ulduar era class gear can’t be sold… so I will have to manually delete that at a later date. The final thing I did before logging out of any character… was to set my talents and give my character an outfit for the occasion. The rest of this post is ultimately going to be me posting pictures and talking about the outfits.

Belghast – Warrior

This is my “Ready for the Legion” outfit, rocking the Illidari tabard and shield, and using the red/fel green version of the Icecrown Deathknight look-a-like armor. As to whether or not this will remain my main for the coming expansion has yet to be seen, but for the time being I think I look awesome.

Belgrave – Death Knight

Character number two on the list was my Deathknight, and also the point at which I learned that I can apparently now transmog legendary weapons? I wanted to go with something fiery looking to match the Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros legendary weapon. So I ended up landing on the black hand armor set from the garrison appearance vendor. To go with it is one of the trading card game tabards, the Flame one to be specific.

Lodin – Hunter

When this game launched I tried to make Melee Hunter a thing, and wound up tanking a bunch of the instances with a combination of myself and my gorilla pet. Now that Survival is the honest and true melee spec… of course I am going to freaking use it. As a result I wanted to come up with an outfit that worked with the new PVP gear I picked up. This is one of those situations where it “sorta matches” or at least well enough to make me happy in combat, however as I look at it now I am starting to pick it apart a bit. I am going to be “happy enough” for the time being.

Exeter – Paladin

I tried a bunch of different things before finally settling on this outfit. I wanted something purple for my paladin, but didn’t want to use the purple judgement set that I have often used in the past. So I started with the purple tone deathknight icecrown set, and started shifting around bits until I was happy. Once again I am using one of the card game tabards, this time the purple Tabard of the Arcane. The end result is almost my favorite of the night… which is ultimately the next one.

Tallow – Shaman

When Cataclysm introduced the ability for Dwarves to be shaman… I immediately race changed my then Draenei Shaman to be a proper Wildhammer Dwarf. Ironically I also then turned my Dwarf Paladin into a Draenei one… but that is a different story. I have always been enthralled with the whole idea of the Wildhammer Clan, and for this transmog I wanted something that felt almost wildhammery but still looked nice and armored. So I ended up shifting to using one of the Warlords leveling sets… that I just happened to have the perfect set of hammers to go with. I then decided to go with the Fel Goggles to bring out the Fel coloring of the hammers. This was the last one I did last night before crashing but is hands down my favorite so far. So that was ultimately my night, and tonight I will hopefully do the rest of this server.

Everything Must Go!

July 19, 2016 by Belghast

Rushed Raiding

Last night was the second running of our reconstituted Monday night group, but unfortunately this time around we were missing a Thalen. So instead of working through the content we planned on doing with was Ravana Extreme, we opted to start work on the second part of Alexander. We had seven folks gathered up so we figured grabbing a single pug wouldn’t hurt at all. We also decided to be up front with the pug, in that they were hanging out with a group of learners. The most awesome of possible circumstances happened in that the game ended up giving us someone on our own server. As a result we met a new friend Lux Tenebrae who happened to join up as a semi-permanent 8th last night. We like to go into fights fairly blind, and then adjust and shift until we have a grasp on the movie parts. So both of the Alexanders that we completed last night took more than one attempt, but at the same time it feels like we have a firm enough grasp on the fights to be able to come in next week and completely wreck them. The fights themselves were extremely fun, and pretty much anything with the Alex background music is going to rate high on my radar. We had to cut things short however because last night began the maintenance period that will eventually get us patch 3.35 which for all intents and purposes is the “Deep Dungeon” patch. I think every single one of us is looking forward to this as a way of leveling our army of alts.

However once we got out of the raid we had roughly thirty minutes left before the servers reset. At the not so subtle nudging of Neph we pulled together an expert group and decided to go for it. By the time we got zoned in we had less than thirty minutes to go and Hullbreaker Hard set out before us. We had an early wipe due to hubris and standing in stuff, but we recovered quickly and made it through the zone in a good clip. When we pulled the final boss we had two minutes left on the official clock from the set time of the maintenance period. The thing is we continued on fighting after time was at least in theory up. Then something strange happened… firstly Kodra got disconnected, but we were able to finish the boss without him. We got our loot and zoned out… and then both Tam and I got disconnected at exactly the same moment. Then moments later Neph did as well. So it seems like quite literally they were flushing connections one at a time as they cycled through the server preparing to shut it down. The positive is that three of us managed to get credit for the expert… the negative is that Kodra did not but I am sure we will all be willing to make it up to him later. This was one of the funnest dungeons I have fun in a long while because we were really pushing ourselves trying to beat the timer… which while we didn’t quite make it we came really damned close.

Farewell to Gold Farms

The other part of the evening was spent going from character to character and purchasing Smuggled Sack of Gold over and over until I completely depleted my garrison resources. Yesterday was essentially liquidation night of everything from my garrison that might sell for a decent bit of gold. I also went to Wrath era Dalaran and checked the various PVP vendors to see if any of that gear was something I might want for transmog purposes given that with today’s patch all of that is getting shifted away from gold to honor based purchases. On a handful of my characters this also meant scrapping lumber yards to build trading posts… just to liquidate their resources for cash. The whole process was an extremely fun atmosphere because quite literally everyone else in the guild was pretty much doing the same. In a shared chat earlier in the day macros had been posted to speed up the process and there we sat spamming away purchasing gold bags and opening them at the same time. In many ways it felt like we were all saying goodbye to what ended up being a frustrating expansion, and more than that… saying goodbye to our daily garrison chores. Today the first of the Legion pre-patches go live and with it a removal of pretty much all of the ways to make gold from the garrison. This is a bit of a double edged sword because even someone like me, was able to compile a decent amount of gold just by logging in periodically and opening bags of gold from my garrison missions.

That said not a single moment of doing this really felt fun. It was a chore for me because I felt like if I was not cycling through all eleven characters on Argent Dawn I was essentially “leaving money on the table”. So doing my Garrison chores mean spending thirty minutes to an hour doing nothing but interacting with NPCs and queuing missions all before doing anything fun or interesting. So removing the gold from Garrisons will always be removing any leverage it had over me to actually do the crap contained within those instanced walls. What gets replaced instead is the every so much more exciting mission of farming all of the transmog bits from all of the old world dungeons and raids. Most of my characters have a fat stack of salvage crates waiting to be opened in the hopes of gathering up new appearances to unlock for the system. I still think overall the transmog changes are a bit of a half assed system compared to what other games have, but it is a far better system than World of Warcraft currently has. Tonight will more than likely be spent going character by character and checking things into the transmog system and getting rid of everything that is literally clogging my bank, void storage and inventory. I started a bit of this last night in selling off any non cosmetic gear that was for alternate specs other than whatever I considered my “main” role on a character. Getting things in the Transmog system however will pretty much clear up the rest of the space and allow me to actually start saving more interesting items.

The True Endgame

June 17, 2016 by Belghast

Wardrobe System

Last night I had a marvelously relaxing evening working on “endgame content” in Rift. By that I mean the true end game of any MMO… and that is wearing interesting outfits. There are so many different cosmetic systems out there, but I have to say that in my personal experience Rift has hands down the best one. How the system works is you have a tab on your character screen labelled Wardrobe, and at the bottom are a number of alternate outfits that you can save. By default you get one free wardrobe slot, and then up to four can be purchased using platinum, with the second tab costing 10, third costing 50 and fourth costing 100. If I remember correctly the loyalty system has a number of unlocks that come with various ranks in that, gained through either subscribing as a patron or spending money on the in game shop. Up to sixty total wardrobe slots can be unlocked however through the cash shop currency, and each of them costs 144 credits which if you base that on the conversion rate for the $19.99 and if my math is anywhere near correct that is roughly 90 cents a slot. What makes the system so special is that the game saves appearance and dye information at an account level, and simply looting an item into your inventory saves the appearance. You don’t even need to equip an item to save its appearance, which means if you get a sweet bind in equip item that you are not going to use… you can sell it and still have saved its appearance data. Dyes work a little strange in that they are mostly unlocked through cash shop currency… however I believe you have some of the basic colors unlocked for free. The individual unlocks are at tiers of pricing and are either 90, 270 or 450. As I am writing this I am realizing that all of my information may be slightly off given that I have the patron discount applied to pretty much everything. Essentially if you really want a color it isn’t terribly cost prohibitive to get it, however I wish their dyes worked like Wildstar in that they were drops out in the world and not something you simply purchased.

What makes the Wardrobe system so special to me is that for every single wardrobe tab you can save an appearance that you choose from all of the appearances you have collected, a primary and secondary dye color… and even toggle whether or not you want to display that particular slot. What I love the most however is that you can save an appearance for two one handed weapons, a two handed weapon, a ranged weapon and a shield with every single slot. That means when you are running around in this outfit and you switch specs to something that uses a sword and board, or something that dual wields… you don’t have jarring change in appearance, nor do you have the odd feeling of running around and fighting with a shield but it still shows your two handed weapon. When you pick up any item, or look at an item in the crafting or auction pane you see a little note that tells you if you have collected the appearance for it yet. What makes collecting gear so damned fun for me at least is that they have created this tab called “Appearance Sets” that tells which pieces you are missing from each set. For the completionists there are a number of achievements tied to the collection of various sets as well. I have lots of singlets and partial sets but you can see that as of last night I have completed 30 of 323 available item sets. The only thing that I wish it showed… was where you could actually get that specific appearance item be it crafting or drops. That said the Rift team gets amazing marks for me in the way this system works and feels to use. What makes everything better… is that you can use ANY gear type on ANY character…. so I can have my plate wearing warrior in robes, or my mage sitting in full plate.

Bolstering the Sets

So when I say last night that I spent the entire evening working on the true Endgame… what I mean is that I have been on this crafting kick. Another feature that I love about Rift is that I can pretty much make one character do every single crafting profession in the game. Granted this is cost prohibitive when it comes to credits, but when the free to play system launched they gave long time subscribers a pretty massive cash shop payout. This allowed me to add everything but Apothecary and Outfitter to my primary Bahmi Warrior main. At some point I would love to add those professions as well just so I can have a true omni-crafter in this game and to streamline the creation of items. I have a max level outfitter on my Rogue, so last night I had to spend a good deal of time swapping items back and forth for the creation of fabric bolts. Over the last week as I have been out in the world picking up max level crafting materials, I have been spending some time at the end of the evening pushing up my tradeskills and at this point I have several of them at the 450 max or pretty close to it. This is the point where my brain goes a little off the track here, and shifts goals on me. When they put in the Item Appearance system, I was a little disappointed because so many of the items left to collect were things that I had in my grubby little hands at one point. Now I saved the items that really mattered to me, but wound up scrapping the vast majority of the items I handled over the years. I always had it in the back of my mind that at some point I would start running old world dungeons and crafting old world items to help bolster my appearance collection.

So last night while watching The Expanse through the Syfy Roku app… I started in Freemarch and worked my way through the various zones of the Old World collecting ore, wood, leather and cloth and then taking it back to either Meridian or Tempest Keep and crafting item sets. By the point I had shut down for the evening I had made my way through to Titanium and had crafted the Plate and Chain armor sets for each… as well as the armor bundles that were available at various points. At some point I will follow up and do the same with weapons, but there are far more items to craft there… or at least it certainly feels that way. I suppose at some point I will go do the same with my Rogue and collect the various cloth and leather sets, but since I am a pretty plate and chain focused person those weren’t nearly as important to me. The truth is since this system went in during Storm Legion if I remember correctly, I have most of the post Old World craft-able sets already saved, so that leaves me with Carmintium left to craft of the easy sets. At some point I would like to purchase the rest of the alloy metal sets like Steel and the rest of the Orichalcum set… but those involve farming up a bunch of crafting marks to purchase the patterns. In the end I had a blast and knocked out a bunch of those things that I have always said I wanted to do. I love the crafting system in this game because it is just intricate enough to keep my focus… and not a maddening mini-game that requires me tending it as I craft things. I like systems that make the acquisition of raw materials the challenge, not the assembly of those things.

Shamen and Pax South

January 10, 2016 by Belghast

Prepping for Pax South

Tis the beginning of the year, and we are now roughly three weeks away from Pax South, and I have to say…. I am a bit concerned. It is going to be an awesome time no matter what because right now I know of like a dozen friends that are going to be there… so going to have plenty of people to hang out with. What concerns me though is it seems like Pax South as a whole is a much less hopping place. By this time last year, all three days of the show were down to “low” rating, and Saturday and the Three Day Passes had been sold out for a very long time. Additionally they had already posted a picture of the convention floor and who was going to be inhabiting what booth space. As far as the passes, Saturday was still available on Friday… and just looking at the schedule there don’t seem to be as many “big name” presentations as there were last year. Last year after all we had the world announcement of Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns happening, as well as I believe the first real information about Sid Meier’s Starships. Now… what I see instead is very light on the game content and very heavy on the youtube and stream celebrities.

All of this said I am going to have the best time this year…. because what made last year so much fun was running around with Ashgar and Rae. This time around I will be running around with Ashgar, Rae, Thalen, Dallian, Damai, Lonrem, Helkim, Paragon, Tick, Rylacus, and hell probably several others that I am failing to rattle off on the top of my head. It is the people that make the place awesome, and it is my hope to meet up with as many people as I can over the two days I am going to be there. So if you are planning on going to Pax South please let me know. I did a poor job of actually connecting with people last year and I hope to fix that. The other thing that is going to make this year awesome is that I am no longer going to have to worry about somehow abandoning my wife. Last year she went running around during the day, utilizing the hotels shuttle service, and by all accounts had a lot of fun, or at least enough fun to want to come back again this year.

The problem being that I always felt guilty for leaving her at the hotel and felt the strong pull to rush home at night so we could go out to dinner and such. This time around we are also bringing one of her friends so she now also has someone to run around with and wander San Antonio. What is hilarious is… she feels like I am being awesome, and I think its awesome because I will feel less guilty all the time. This also means I will probably experience a lot of the nighttime content of Pax and go to the concerts and such, and maybe some of the after parties. Granted on Saturday night I don’t want to be out too late… given that I will be driving the eight or nine hours home on Sunday. In any case…. if you read the blog or you listen to AggroChat, drop me a line and it is my hope to catch up with as many people during that weekend as I can. I will be getting into the hotel room late Thursday night, and I am staying about six miles away from the convention center out by the airport… in part because we had a great experience there last year…. and the whole free shuttle service to various destinations thing was awesome for my wife. So yesterday we did a bit of juggling to change our arrangements, and now have a double suite so it should be awesome. There was talk last night about maybe trying to get in together and see Force Awakens as a group while down there… since supposedly there is a theater a few blocks away.

Shamanism

One of the things I am really enjoying about World of Warcraft right now is the ability to fly. I realize that I was heavily in the “no flight in draenor” camp, and for the most part I still am. That said… having it makes everything so damned much easier, and questing through the zones is greatly improved. I feel like WoW content however desperately needs the grounding of players at the beginning of an expansion to keep folks from just blowing through everything instantly. In the past once you had a single character at the new level cap you could purchase flight for your other characters, and that was a great option…. but an extremely expensive one. I think personally I like the Draenor Pathfinder option because even though it was a pain in the butt to complete… now that I have done it the benefit can be used by every single character on my account. As a whole I am a huge fan of account wide unlocks and they actually make it far more likely for me to play other characters. In Final Fantasy XIV everything that I have exists on a single character, and as a result I am completely disincentive from trying any more characters. Same goes for games like Rift that while I have alts… I always tend to play the same main character because he has the best toys.

I feel like playing an Enhancement Shaman is a little broken…. in a good way. After having leveled several other characters, this one seems to be the easiest. I can just straight up shred most mobs without my totems, or heroism…. but then I always have those things waiting in reserve for big mobs and elites. The speed of killing things is just so damned fast, and since I have crafters that can feed me gear…. walking around with a pair of level 630 blue weapons really makes a huge difference. I still don’t fully understand why the crafted blacksmith weapons start at 630 unlike the 640 that all of the other gear seems to start at, but in any case I am fine with it…. it is a huge dps boost over the weapons I am getting in the zones. The thing that I cannot wait for in WoW however is the new transmogging system. WoWhead, being the awesome folks they always are has put up a preview system to show you all of the transmog gear your characters are going to get granted from quest completion. I am really really hoping that the new system is account wide like Diablo 3, because there are certain characters like this shaman that simply don’t have a lot of cool gear to work with yet. I guess I should farm more old world content to get him a decent set to run around in.