warrior

Confronting Change

July 21, 2016 by Belghast

Hotbar Construction

Yesterday was at least in part a continuation of the previous day. When I got home we ate some dinner and I plopped down in my comfy chair and began continuing to sort through my gear, getting almost all of the way through my characters last night. Early in the evening Grace and I had talked about running some older content for transmoggy bits, so I had a clear target timeframe in mind. In the meantime I had to somehow make sense of my hotbars and decide what the hell I was going to play that evening. Since I really only care deeply about plate graphics usually I knew it was more than likely going to be Warrior, Deathknight or Paladin. As a result I devoted a bit of time to each of them, and tried to make something functional for the purpose of running content. Of the three the most immediately recognizable was the warrior with the only thing really dropping off of my hotbar being Heroic Strike. There were various other tweaks as well but nothing that I could not adjust to rapidly, and within a few minutes I felt like my old self again. The biggest hitch being the significant change to the thunderstrike sound and animation. It is those moments when I realize how much I ultimately play by sound, and use audio queues to know if an ability actually fired or not. The animation is also extremely different being more of an earthquake than a shock of lightning… which I can only assume is part of their “aligning of class fantasies” business. More than likely we lost our lightning because they decided that only Shaman can have lightning effects or something along those lines.

The paladin was also a similar easy adjustment period, and I fell into that routine rather easy. I also love the fact that Paladins now have a movement speed buff similar to that of the Crusader in Diablo 3 which I have played the last few seasons. I may or may not have spent a good deal of time charging around my garrison. The big challenge however was that of the Deathknight, and I still have not quite figured out how I am supposed to be playing it. Compared to the other two tanks it just feels like a wet paper bag when it comes to survival. I straight up got wrecked by the dungeon tank dummy in the garrison and had similar problems in Legion beta. So far I have been able to breeze through the artifact weapon class every single time… but with the Deathknight. While doing that quest I wound up dying roughly five or six times before I was finally able to limp through it. The whole reason why I always gravitated towards the Deathknight was their ability to solo and their ability to quest rapidly. I am not discounting the fact that I probably am missing some key element that makes the class manageable, but whatever is wrong… it is a little maddening. I was truly hoping this would be the expansion where I could feel comfortable returning to being blood again. As it stands… for tanking main I am pretty much staying Warrior because it feels comfortable and like I have the ability to actually take some damage, and at the same time still have a lot of movement in the form of the new combo intercept/charge and heroic leap.

Collecting Appearances

I thought I would include this gem of an image as a clear understanding of why we need a good cosmetic system in this game. As I sifted through my various alts I encountered a whole bunch of reasons, but this one from Earthen Ring takes the cake. As far as the actual collection of appearances we ended up running a few panda raids… or at least tried to because one of the bosses on Heart of Fear kept resetting, and neither of us seemed to have Throne of Thunder unlocked. We did however successfully get through Mogu’shan Vaults and then finished off the night with a quick run through Black Temple where we honestly got more awesome greens than purples. I was making an attempt at getting the second warglaive for my warrior. Earlier in the evening I ran my warrior through MC at least up until the binding dropping mobs… only to get the same binding I had already to drop. I had a similar lack of luck in Black Temple, but there were a handful of plate appearance pieces that I had apparently never picked up along the way. Grace made out like a bandit in Pandaria, but seemed to get minimal drops once we finished the night up in the BC era content.

Right now my biggest frustration is with the whole collection of appearances being locked to armor type. As a result anything that was leather or mail pretty much went to waste, well other than selling it for gold. This is a similar problem to the one I have with the cata era cloth drop rate changes. There are certain characters I play just to have a complete stable of classes, and then there are other characters that I actually enjoy farming content on. My tailor is a Shadow/Disc Priest and that is the character I will probably never actually farm older content on because I don’t get along very well with finger wigglers. Similarly I gravitate towards plate wearers for the characters I actually repeatedly run content on, and it would be amazing if I could just pick up those items and commit them to my appearance library rather than being grumpy as I watch cool stuff going to waste. I can totally see making appearance follow class lines in parties to keep people from rolling on everything. However when you are out soloing it would be amazing if you actually got to collect those appearances. However the end result is likely going to be that I find a farmer of every armor class and wind up running a lot more old world content. Maybe that was their intention all along? Force you to dust off those alts and actually play them?

Low Sodium

This is one of those patches that I have seen a lot more salt over than previous ones. I am not sure if the World of Warcraft community is just more dramatic than it used to be, or if the changes really are that frustrating. I mean on some level I get it, because I quite literally had to rethink the way I play every character I have tried so far. All of the rules of how classes interacted changed, and for the players that tried to do a lot of things for utility purposes… I fear their gameplay is forever going to be changed. For me… I have a full stable of alts and if for some reason I don’t like the way one feels this time I can shift focus to another one and be equally happy. However for the player that spent over a decade playing this one class a certain way… the changes could be traumatic. I fully support complaining about World of Warcraft, because god knows I have done plenty of it over the years. I fully support the notion of feeling like your voice needs to be heard. However after doing both of those… you are ultimately left with a decision point of either adjusting to the changes or quitting the game and trying one of dozens of other good MMORPGs. Change has right or wrong been a constant in World of Warcraft, and if you are not willing to reinvent yourself every few years than chances are you are going to wind up bitter and frustrated.

This moment happened for me during Cataclysm, and several times since I have decided that I am simply no longer having fun with the game. Each time it happens I have tried to be more chill about it, to the point where when I quit these days it is not a huge ordeal. So if you are finding yourself having one of these moments over the Legion changes, take a bit of advice from someone who has been there so many times. Firstly it is completely okay to quit the game. The game will still be there, and you can absolutely return at a later date if you rethink your decision. I quit “permanently” at the beginning Cataclysm, around the end of Cataclysm, the beginning of Pandaria, the middle of Pandaria, the end of Pandaria, the beginning of Warlords, and then I’ve been more or quite often less active for the last six months. There are other amazing games you could be playing and would likely have a much better time doing so, at least until the present bitterness fades. If you need some suggestions hit me up sometime and I can probably rattle you off a dozen based on your previous Warcraft preferences. Essentially what I am saying is as someone who has been there… doing that is so much better than flailing impotently in the hopes that someone will notice your pain and rollback all of the offending changes. Sometimes it is better to walk away and return later… rather than napalming the community.

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.

Embracing the Fel

July 18, 2016 by Belghast

Confronting the Legon

This week on “the twitters” I said something to the effect of Legion might be the first World of Warcraft expansion that I never managed to get into either Alpha or Beta. Then almost like queue on July 15th I found an email in my inbox notifying that my account had been flagged for Beta access. As a result I installed it on both my Desktop upstairs and my Laptop downstairs, and spent a good deal of the weekend poking about around the fringes of the new expansion. The truth is I was not all that excited about Legion prior to this weekend, namely because I am stuck in another down cycle with this game. There are plenty of things I could be doing, but just nothing I felt terribly compelled to do other than log in a few times a week to collect “free gold” from the garrison chore masters. Even more maddening in a way is the fact that I desperately need the transmog system changes yesterday. I think a huge part of why I stopped playing so frequently is because one of the activities that I absolutely love is farming old content for interesting bits. The challenge there is that I have my entire bank, void storage and all but a half dozen slots in my inventory taken up with appearance gear. So I just really have no more place to store anything and with transmog changes so damned close… there is no way I am going to get rid of anything that might be cool looking. So as a result I think I just largely stopped playing, thinking that eventually Legion would arrive and I would be able to have a massive spring cleaning… or in this case late summer. Well that time has arrived almost and tomorrow the patch lands that is going to see me spending my entire evening sifting through shit trying to figure out what I can pitch and what I should actually keep.

Blood Deathknight

A huge part of the reason why I wanted into Beta was to fiddle with the class changes. Yes I realize that at any point in the last several weeks I could have installed the PTR client, but without having access to more than just those changes it didn’t really feel worthy of the 28 gig install. Throughout late Wrath of the Lich King up until Warlords of Draenor I was a huge fan of the Blood tanking spec. Then in Warlords alpha a whole bunch of that changed, because the feel of the class changed. Sure the rotation was similar, but the inclusion of Blood Boil as part of the standard rotation made the class start feeling too casterly for my tastes. It is funny how class fantasy can really effect the way you feel about a set of changes, and at least in this case it was a bridge to far. On the other hand the Warrior changes for Warlords were amazing, and I loved being able to indulge in a different player fantasy… which was dpsing with a sword and shield thanks to the Gladiator spec. While I mourn the loss of that option, I completely get why they had to make the change for balance reasons, because quite frankly Gladiator was just too much of a one off special snowflake. It was my hope that Blood on the other hand would be appealing again, and for the most part I think I like the changes. That said something is still off with the class and I am struggling to put my finger on it. Deathknights in general have undergone some pretty shattering changes, and while the feel of the class is right… there are a bunch of empty spots in the rotation where you are waiting on either runic power or rune regeneration. That is not to say that there is absolutely the chance that I might be playing it wrong. However in my experience so far there seem to be some pretty significant lulls in the action, and at the same time the class feels like it has lost a whole lot of survival. On my fresh 100 test character I struggled to get through the quest that ultimately earns you the artifact weapon, because I kept dying with no real way of keeping myself alive.

Demon Hunters

After a bit of a false step by accidentally choosing a talent that turned my resource builder into an auto attack key… I’ve decided that I really love Havoc Demon Hunters. Much like Deathknight was the Belle of the Ball in Wrath of the Lich King… it feels like Demon Hunters are the class that has the most new toys to show off. For starters… any class with a double jump is something that I am going to pay attention to. Better than that they have a built in wing glide, which is similar to using the goblin glider… but just as an intrinsic ability. Then there is the movement… this class has the ability to dart around the battle field like crazy… and those same abilities have allowed me to explore maps in ways that you really could not in previous expansions without copious amounts of wall hacking. The only negative so far is that I hear by creating a level 100, I somehow am missing a huge batch of abilities that you pick up from quest chains in the starting mission. The only negative of the class… is that you have to be an elf. I kinda hate elves, and will likely always hate elves… however ironically I have always loved Illidan and the concept of the Demon Hunter. I am seriously contemplating making Demon Hunter my new main for the expansion, even though I realize that will make me yet another member of the Legion of players doing that… pun only partially intended. The gameplay however feels fun and fresh and like this strange amalgam of Combat Rogue and Fury Warrior. Ultimately I need to spend some time with the tanky variety of the class to see if I like that as well, because if so you might be looking at a newly minted Demon Hunter.

The class that I spent the least amount of time playing this weekend was Warrior, but everything I saw made me feel like tanking as a warrior was going to be just as stable and reliable as it always was. Unlike Blood Deathknight, I had zero issue completing the quest chain to get my artifact weapon, the only problem being… that the protection warrior artifact is boring as hell. I have a vault full of amazing one hander and shield combinations… and for the most part all of them are cooler than the artifact weapon. It seriously looks like leveling trash, and I am hoping that some of the mutations later will at least give me something I am not embarrassed to be using. With the absence of Gladiator though, it is going to be hard for me to really consider being a Warrior main this time around. I have to say however that some of the changes in animation for Fury looked amazing, so at some point over the next few days I want to give that a proper whirl… once again pun only partially intended.

Tanking

Generally speaking I tend to gravitate towards tanking, and if you plunk me down in a brand new game that is almost certainly what I will roll. That said I think Final Fantasy XIV has spoiled me when it comes to tanking. Their version is just head and shoulders more enjoyable than pretty much any other form I have played since then. As a result I think I might be hanging up my tanking hat when it comes to World of Warcraft at least. I tried to tank for some of my friends late in Warlords, and I just didn’t like the way it felt in the least. Now I am sure I will still play things that have a tank spec… and be able to swap in for specific encounters or for copious dungeon runs, but more than anything I just don’t think I want to be a raid tank anymore in this game. So knowing that, I am trying to find the class I enjoy dpsing the most or hell I might even try out some healing. Mostly I have a feeling that I will never again be completely stable and reliable as a player when it comes to World of Warcraft, so I am trying to make sure I pick classes that are useful when I feel like attending something, and not a burden when I don’t. For all I know I might really love Demon Hunter tanking, and that ends up changing my mind… but I am prepping myself to no longer be a go to tank at least when it comes to this game.

Getting Unstuck

June 23, 2016 by Belghast

Not-Castlevania

It has been an up and down week for kickstarter games. Namely I am talking about just how bad Mighty No. 9 has been received. I own this on the PS4, and while the gameplay itself is not too horrible… the biggest problem that I have is that it feels like an odd throwback to the GameCube. Which I guess makes sense given that the game has released on a silly number of systems including the 3DS, which makes me think that quite simply all console versions… are the 3DS version. The saddest part about this is at various points during its development cycle the game looked really good, but the end result is this lifeless mess of flat color. Now earlier in the day I had commented that this whole debacle over the “Not-Megaman” game made me extremely concerned about “Not-Castlevania” which is my not so subtle jab at the fact that so many of these kick-started games are simply recreations of whatever game made the developer famous in the first place. Almost as summoned from the abyss… I got an email with a key to the E3 version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which I didn’t even remember being part of the funding level I backed the game at.

It was a little late and I only played the demo long enough to get up to the first boss… I failed miserably at even coming close to defeating it namely because I entered the fight after a lot of backtracking. There are certain things that work extremely well, then there are others that I was largely confused about. The primary point of confusion is that for whatever reason I could not seem to get the game to do jump attacks… which are of course a staple of the Castlevania gameplay. I was playing on my PS4 controller which I happened to have hooked up at the time to my PC, and notoriously it tends to map things oddly, so I might give it a shot with the defacto Xbox 360 controller. As far as every other aspect of gameplay… this is very much the spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night, but done with cell shaded 3D models instead of 2D pixel art. It works, and it works well.. and gives you the feeling of the Castlevania art style. The game has some really strange creatures that you end up fighting, which is cool and something vastly different from the standard zombies and werewolves and vampires oh my genre. I am assuming that the demo leaves off after the boss fight that is pictured above, but nonetheless I am really happy to see this game at least appears to be still on the rails.

Catching Up

Last night I got drug into Final Fantasy XIV by Ash and Grace… and admittedly they didn’t have to pull too terribly hard. Largely they wanted to run some Void Ark, which is the thing that I needed to do to get caught up in gear levels. I am not sure why this was such an impassible obstacle mentally for me, because I had some serious anxiety about solo queuing for it. Memu had made an offer to help me out, but we failed miserably at coordinating a time to run it together… mostly because I fell into a Rift shaped hope and wasn’t around all that often over the last week. In any case all of my concerns were essentially for naught, because Void Ark is extremely easy…. but unfortunately not the gear bonanza I had hoped it would be. Over the course of the night I ran the Ark three times, two times with Ash and Grace and one time by myself later after getting back from a walk. In all of those boss kills I managed to get two pieces of gear… only one of which actually replacing a slot I had something lower in. I did however get plenty of Esoterics which allowed me to keep upgrading jewelry until a combination of the that and the Mhachi Farthings pushed me over the item level 200 barrier.

Ultimately I am probably going to keep running this place until I run out of slots to upgrade, and even then…. it is still a decent source of gear to help pull my Dragoon up in item level. I guess I am officially off high center, and soon I can pick back up the quest chain and at least be expert viable once more. My hope is that tonight, I can get together with Grace and run the new dungeons who now also needs them since she too broke the 200 barrier last night. I feel better about the game in so many ways considering how frustrating it was to hit this gear wall in the questing. I guess in truth this is something that never happened to me during 2.0, or at least once we got back and started really moving forward. We were always just good enough to keep pushing into the next set of dungeons, but at the same time I was also spending a ton more time grinding out tomestones to make sure I was the best possible tank I could be at all times. That is the piece that has been missing, because I really have not been able to push myself to do that the way I once was. As our little rag tag Tuesday night group is contemplating doing more “Real” content I guess that will start to matter significantly more in the coming weeks and months. Time to get over the hump and gear up a bit, and for the moment Void Ark seems like an easy place to do just that.