Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have the full group and end up talking mostly about World of Warcraft and the Battle For Azeroth expansion so far. If you listened last week… Tam became interested enough in the expansion that he renewed his account which lead to a whole sequence of events happening. One of which resulted in him finding out he had a hopelessly broken character. We talk about that event and the absolutely primo customer service he received as a result of it. We talk about the lack of players in War mode and how Blizzard apparently is planning on throwing more incentives towards playing in that fashion. We talk about our experiences in dungeons so far and how some seem way harder than others. We talk about the release of the Queen Azshara cinematic and what that maybe means for the future. We talk about how we are seeing some of the best storytelling in WoW’s history through this expansion. Tam presents an impassioned defense of playing “boring” humans in fantasy games, which leads to a discussion more about world building than anything else. Finally Kodra talks a bit about his new career in Glitchless Speedrunning primarily through VVVVVV, which turns into a discussion about speedrunning and the glitchless variant in particular.
Topics Discussed:
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This week Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen address a listener comment regarding our feelings about WoW.
It feels like every week I say “something weird happened” when describing our podcast. I might simply be that we have no real “normal” state to fall back on, and that everything is essentially new and strange. That said I feel like this week is on an island of its own. After last week’s podcast I had a listener pull me aside and comment that it sounded like it physically pained us to talk about Warcraft. I personally didn’t realize this until I went back and listened a bit, and I can absolutely see how someone could have that take away. More often than not we just have super confused feelings about the game, and tonight we delve into this… and it leads to a whole sequence of topics including the loss of “junk culture” and the businessification of things we love. For some of us you definitely can’t ever truly go back home.
Topics On The Show: Listener Comment – Conflicted Feelings About Warcraft – Why Tam Hates WoW – Loss of Junk Culture – Businessification of Comics and Games – Hobbyism and Creative Industries -Metal Gear Solid 5 – Overwatch – Last Bastion Cinematic
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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.
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.