World of Warcraft

I didn’t blog this morning in part I think because I didn’t want to write the post that was sitting inside my brain.  First off I wanted to share this amazing image of my Elder Scrolls Online Imperial Dragon Knight that I commissioned Ammo to create for me.  Secondly I ended up creating a big damned thread over on Mastodon and I just realized… it was the blog post I should have made this morning.  So I ultimately lied to you and am going to largely post that thread over here since it is actually a post.

I am in a really weird place with WoW at the moment.  The last several nights I have logged in mostly to do the Emissary quest and then largely logged back out.  I rapidly reached a point where the World Quest gear isn’t really an upgrade unless its one of my dwindling number of 300ish items

The other main problem is…  the Protection Warrior just doesn’t feel as good as it has in past expansions, especially for open world content.  Sure after swapping around my build I can survive essentially indefinitely, but the time to kill just feels awful.  Not to mention the flow of combat just feels off for some reason that I can’t quite quantify.

I am starting to feel like maybe I chose the wrong main this time around…  but I am also not finding the oomph to level something else in its place because that is even more time being out of sync with my friends playing.  The stingy nature of weapons while leveling, means that I don’t really have a viable off spec weapon set up to go Fury (my choice of dps spec as warrior), and even Arms would be super anemic since my single two-hander is pretty crummy.

I think if I force myself into chain running some dungeons I might be able to kick start that joy again… but right now I am in a doldrum the earliest I have ever been in any previous expansion.  The last few nights have been a little odd and lead to me just not playing at all with friends so I think tonight I am going to see what a round of dungeoning feels like to see if it kicks me back into enjoyment phase.  Otherwise I have to tackle the thought of leveling something else…  or just moving on for now knowing that eventually I will come back.

Sometimes you just gotta be willing to let the post out that is inside of you even thought you maybe don’t want to be negative.  It will get out one way or the other…  either in a long thread on social media or in a series of private messages to friends.

Last night was a pretty chill night for me, in fact I honestly didn’t play that much Warcraft other than getting in and doing the Emissary quest for the day.  The sand fishing quest in Vol’dun can officially die in a fire… the only thing that managed to make it reasonable is that I happened to have a couple of other hordies doing it at the same time and we tagged each others spawns.  Effectively when you fish with the extra action button… you can either get a work or one of the angry trilobyte things… and it seemed like I pulled way more of those out of the ground rather than the worms I actually needed.  Not a fan at all… but it was a 310 azerite chest so figured I NEEDED to do it to see if I got anything interesting from it.  I am also trying to adjust to drastically changing up my play style with the warrior.

Ultimately I was operating with old data in the back of my head and also trying to play like I had played for most of legion…  when rage rained down from the sky like magic.  The entire time playing Battle for Azeroth I have felt rage starved, like I simply did not have enough of it to do all of the things I felt like I needed to do.  In Legion it seemed like I could spam revenge with impunity and still have plenty of rage left over to keep Ignore Pain and Shield Block active 100% of the time.  Additionally I seem to have missed the memo that Ignore Pain is now sorta garbage as compared to its original state that I was used to.  If I had to make a choice before I would almost always favor Ignore Pain over Shield Block because it seemed to buy me more leverage to work with.

That however is not the case anymore and additionally the Devastator talent that can be used to simplify the rotation…  seems to also be not that great.  So all through the leveling process I ran a build that looked a little something like this…

• Impending Victory – having the heal was nice for regenerating my health
• Crackling Thunder – because thunderclap radius meant I could hit more things
• Unstoppable Force – because more thunderclap with Avatar
• Indomitable – largely picked because I always used this before
• Rumbling Earth – because I like shockwave a lot
• Devastator – because it was one less button I needed to mash
• Heavy Repercussions – because lazy and it is a simple pick

The build that I have shifted to looks a little bit like this.

• Into the Fray – because apparently now haste is king?
• Bounding Stride – more movement options is more better
• Unstoppable Force – still because more thunderclap with Avatar
• Bolster – because halves the cooldown of Last Stand and makes me block all melee attacks while up
• Rumbling Earth – again because I like shockwave a lot
• Booming Voice – because apparently Demoralizing Shout became my fastest way to get some rage
• Anger Management – because thanks to bolster Last Stand is my best cooldown and it comes up more often

The problem with all of this is to make it work…  I had to shift around a ton of my keybinds and last night was largely me running around and killing things and trying to get used to the new places that things are in… and also learning to lean on Demoralizing Shout whenever I am rage starved to get back in the game.  I am old… and as a result I am starting to get a little set in my ways.  The keybinds I have been using for my warrior have been used in that configuration for probably three expansions now more or less apart from some minor tweaks.  It is going to take awhile to get to where I don’t feel like I am walking on marbles with these new keybinds.  Essentially I try and play my classes in a way so that I am not thinking about what I am hitting at any given moment… and I am largely just playing through muscle memory.  So I have to spend some time retraining said muscle memory so I can get back to just reacting to the situation on the ground as it is happening rather than hovering in my head trying to sort out what I should be hitting.

Tonight I will probably do more of the same, doing world quests to get used to the feel of things… and also because I am going to be at RiffTrax with work friends leading me to get home super late as compared to my usual schedule.  It is going to be Krull which has always been a bit of a guilty pleasure movie for me.  I grew up loving the weapon and tolerating the movie because the weapon looked badass.  It should be a good time and I am mostly hoping that I can keep my coughing down to a minimum in the theater as not to distract everyone else around me.

Last night was a good night.  First off I am finally starting to feel a little more like human, as it seems that whatever crud I have been fighting for the last week is starting to subside.  Second I think I found the source of my annoyance in Discord mysteriously turning itself from push to talk to voice activated all the time.  Finally I got to run some dungeons with Mor, Grace and a friend of theirs from the Star Wars the Old Republic days.  At this point I think there are a couple of dungeons I still have yet to see on normal, and it is my goal to remedy that before sitting foot into heroics.  There are still several items that I need…  namely a good shield, good main hand weapon, and another reasonable trinket.  Those are the slots that are dragging down my magic number down from what it could potentially be.

Speaking of magic numbers however…  I have now hit 305 which makes me physical capable of queuing for heroics.  However this is not quite something I want to do yet.  I want to finish getting those missing slots and see if I can sort out why I feel so damned squishy.  It could be that Protection Warriors are just in a shitty place right now and one that will improve later as gear scales.  This has been the case in past expansions, but what I am going through at the moment is that I feel completely rage starved.  It is like I don’t have enough active rage to be using revenge and keeping up Ignore Pain/Shield Block.  This is completely new for me because always in the past I had all the rage in the world to play with.  So last night I shifted around my talents after the few dungeons we ran and I am hoping tonight…  I maybe see an improvement.

The image may state that this is Lord Stormsong…  but in truth it is Squid Pope.  Originally we thought he was Fish Pope but he transformed over the course of the instance.  Squid Pope and his friends were very annoying, but we managed to make it through the effort and get some loot in the process.  So far I am thinking that the dungeons that the Alliance gets natively are maybe a little cooler than the dungeons the Horde gets.  The blood troll instance for example… is annoying as shit and I still have not figured out how the ticks work given that sometimes I die horribly to them exploding and other times I am just fine.  The end result is me running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to avoid standing near them as they die.

My hope is that tonight in our adventures I manage to find a weapon and a trinket… and preferably a new shield so I can go forth into heroic land with great confidence.  It is taking me a little longer than normal to ease into my comfort zone with Battle for Azeroth content, but I am thankful I have a trusted healer to ferry me along in this journey.  She is showing great restraint in not just completely blowing past me and leaving me in the dust.  I am already feeling super behind the curve given how often people in guild chat are asking for Mythics…  and I have not even set foot in a Heroic.  They are on a vastly different trajectory to me so far, and that is okay.  I will get there eventually, and hopefully at some point I get enough gear to have offspec options.

I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning, apart from just how badass my Orc Warrior Lady looks in the Blackhand set combined with the revamped version of the crazy Black Temple shield and Mechanar sword.  As much as I generally did not like the story arc of Warlords of Draenor…  it produced a bunch of gear that I absolutely love.  The Iron Wrath set still is among my all-time favorite Warrior sets and I really need to put some time into farming the transmog bits that I am missing.  One of the things I realized last night is that my attachment to the Sun Eater’s appearance is at least in small part because I farmed Heroic Mechanar for ages to try and get it.  It also made me realize how different the economy of gear is now as to when it was back then.

There were items worth farming because when you got them… they would actually serve as a pretty good weapon for a good while into raiding rather than something you toss in the bin immediately.  I remember in Burning Crusade when they introduced the long and contorted weapon specializations for Blacksmithing…  those items were actually worth working towards because they would serve the player for more than a day or two.  Anything I could craft for myself right now gets tossed in the shredder the moment I step foot into a heroic or at the very least a mythic dungeon.  Those long tailed goals are largely gone from the game, the things that are worth striving towards.

I think the problem for me is that my core gameplay loop has shifted from seeking specific objectives, to gaining the next disposable item that will increase the magical number that gates all of the tiers of content in the game.  I remember there used to be a time when I would create “Hit Lists” of the items that I wanted from specific dungeons, and then set forth to run those dungeons until I completed that set.  Back then however the items in each dungeon felt unique to the location… not just super similar draws from the same item pool.  The transitory nature of the items however makes each new acquisition feel completely unimportant…  the equivalent to the commons in a pack of Magic the Gathering cards that you just skip over hoping that maybe just maybe you got something really cool in the Rare/Mythic slot.

I miss caring about the drops.  I am not sure how you go back to that era especially when the modern era is actually way more open to varied styles of play.  Right now I am largely gearing through a mix of World Questing and running the occasional dungeon.  If I were super serious about things I would be abusing the fact that I have instant dungeon queues as a tank and pug my way to glory.  At this point I am sitting at 300 item level and I need 305 to start doing heroics.  That said in truth I probably need to have a full compliment of 310 items to make heroics really viable as the person who is soaking all of the damage.

The thing is… I used to feel confident running dungeons with strangers.  Somewhere along the way that changed and I no longer feel as bulletproof and steadfast as I once was.  I used to feel like I really had a handle on all there was to know about warrior tanking.  Now I just sorta feel like a pretender in plate armor, and I think that lack of confidence hinders me so much when it comes to random groups.  Last night Grace and I ran a dungeon, and I felt like I was screwing up all of the time…  and doing all the wrong things.  I am not entirely certain how to get over that, apart from just bashing my face against the random group finder until I become desensitized again.

The funny thing is though… I don’t have reason to feel this way.  So far all of the random people we have grouped with on Horde side have been awesome.  I generally start the group with a “Hey Folks!” and unlike Alliance side I almost always get a response back which starts an open dialog that often continues during the dungeon.  I do however miss the days when I used to have a ton of active social channels on the server, and had to build groups by hand…  because then I actually got to know more people.  It is all too easy for me to stay in my comfortable bubble of people I am already familiar with rather than branching out and making new connections.  I think in part that is why I am enjoying Mastodon so much… is because it is forcing me to meet and entirely new world of people.