World of Warcraft

Last night did not exactly work as intended.  I had originally planned on getting home and running some Mythics with my friend Grace but that didn’t actually happen.  Then by the time a guild group asked for me to do Mythics with them… I was mostly in the wrong mindset to be successful.  I did however hook them up with a healer friend of mine that was able to make the group work.  Tonight however I need to get started on running my four Mythics required for a chest of raid loot.  In theory we can probably make a group happen even thought Tam is travelling and not available this week.  I am sure I can probably dip into the guild to pick up a dps if we wind up short, since that seems to be what we are always short on.

Instead of Mythical Nonsense…  I ground the Warfront.  Essentially as of yesterday I was short three pieces of gear from having everything 340 or better.  I needed a pair of gloves, a second weapon and a second trinket…  the last I am not entirely certain is an option for coming from Warfronts.  I have not found a great source of everything that can possibly drop from a warfront cache, but what I did find seemed to only indicate pieces of armor and weapons.  At first I was starting to think this was going to be a repeat of my past outings…  as I got two more belts and two more cloaks…  but before the evening was up I managed to also pick up a pair of gloves and a one-handed axe giving me that second weapon.  Now I am effectively down to just the trinket, which means I could run LFR and hope that I get lucky or pick up one of the inscription trinkets.

This also means that I am largely without purpose when it comes to secondary activities on the Demon Hunter apart from farming faction to eventually push everything to Revered.  I am not contemplating starting to run Warfronts on the Warrior in hopes of maybe getting a reasonable sword and shield option.  I keep thinking at some point in the near future they will make Warrior tanking not feel horrible, and the couple of Warfronts I have run as DPS have been way less enjoyable than running them as a tank.  Its an option… but I am not entirely certain I am ready to dive right back into a gear grind.  I’ve abandoned any illusion of trying to maintain some sort of split mains scenario, and am largely just going to focus on the Demon Hunter for gearing purposes.

That means if I can make one of the Sunday raids… and I am not already locked for the week…  I will just be dpsing as Havoc Demon Hunter instead of trying to do Fury Warrior.  That doesn’t stop the fact that Sunday is a really bad time for me to be raiding so the likelihood that I am going to make many of them… is pretty limited.  It is our hope to get a RoboSquid Armada based raid going on Wednesday nights, which is a far better time for me to be committed to raiding.  Also if I am going to raid… I really want to be tanking since I am lacking whatever stuff makes people care about how they are doing on the meters.

If you are a NA Server Horde Player and are curious what the hell RoboSquid Armada is… check out this post for more details.  It is sort of a dream of mine to kick start non-guild based raiding as a “thing” that actually happens again.  If nothing else we have an in game Battle.NET social channel and a discord that are places we draw upon for building Mythic groups.

Last night was a really good night.  My original intent was to grind Warfronts until my face fell off…  and that did not exactly happen.  I did however run two of them…  which sadly dropped exactly the same item… a pair of bracers that were five item levels lower than the ones I already wore.  Instead I allowed myself to get talked into mythical nonsense, at which point we ran an Atal’Dazar +2 because none of us had actually run it on mythic.  At first I thought we were not doing super well but in the end we managed to pick up time thanks to the fact that we now know a few shortcuts around the zone…  and finished the timer with time to spare upgrading our very first key and getting Tam and I the Keystone Initiate achievement.  My Demon Hunter was a third string character in Legion, and as such never set foot in a mythic, let alone a mythic+.

I managed to get a belt that was a minor upgrade…  which marks the first piece of loot that I have pulled from mythic+ so far.  Tam caused me to curse the fact that he has apparently stolen my luck and pulled a 340 weapon…  something I also so desperately need but in truth I would rather have that contribute to his dps as opposed to my aggro generation.  I did however manage to pick up a 330 weapon from a world quest before the end of the night so I at least saw movement.  The keystone from Atal’Dazar upgraded into a Waycrest Manor +3 at which point we decided to go ahead and give it an attempt.

The thinking being that if we could just struggle through the zone and get to the end… we would at least get slightly better gear from the weekly chest today.  Side note… I need to figure out where in the hell the weekly chest spawns.  I am guessing in the great seal area, but knowing the weird forced “I’m On A Boat” narrative, it is probably somewhere under deck near Gallywix.  So we set forth into Waycrest, which thankfully Grace had run on heroic earlier in the day so she more or less knew the appropriate path to take that day.  We had a few false starts but managed to nail the boss fights like we knew what we were doing, and came up a tragically five seconds short of getting the timer and upgrading the key further.  I think more than anything it proved to us that the keys were completely something reasonable that we should be shooting for.

Tonight at this very moment…  the plan is to run whatever Emissary there happens to be for the day and dip my toes into LFR.  I think Grace and I have more or less made a pact to go in together as to minimize the frustration.  After that I figure we will evaluate what keys we all got and start the mythical madness over again from there.  I am shocked and surprised at how engaged Tam still seems to be with Mythics, because a part of me was certain he would bounce the moment he finished leveling his character.  He was asking us how high the mythics go… and in theory I believe they effectively keep scaling indefinitely.  Maybe this will be the expansion I finally see a Mythic +15.  Regardless in the mean time I am having a lot of fun and learning the zones better so I can pull more efficiently.  We are also slowly starting to re-learn when we should start using CC…  and given that I am a tank with a really damned solid CC… this is an interesting experience.

This weekend was a lot of fun, and was a blend of Warfronts, Mythics, Heroics and at the very end dipping my toes into the raid with Facepull.  By the end of the weekend the Demon Hunter is 337 item level, and the Warrior still 332 since I have yet to do the Warfronts and get the 370 item.  Tonight is going to be me grinding away slavishly on Warfronts because thing I did not realize…  you get a 340 or better every single time you do them.  I thought I was just lucky in getting a 340 and a 370 for turning in the quest, but apparently that 340 is a reoccuring thing.  Based on what I am hearing there can be weapons and armor both that drop…  which given my track record with weapon drops in this expansion probably just means armor slots I already have better items in.

Since Facepull is a very well established raid, it meant that I would be filling the very uncomfortable spot of DPS which is not really a thing I do well as evidenced by how bad my parses will ultimately be.  I’m a tank… I think like a tank and act like a tank and when you tell me to burn something I get a very confused look on my face.  However I was apparently not a bad enough impediment to keep us from downing Taloc after a handful of tries.  Of course I got nothing but crafting materials, because that is the way of the world.  It supposedly drops a really sweet two handed mace that would have been a nice dps upgrade for my warrior…  but that wasn’t going to happen because weapon drops don’t exist for me in this expansion.

This is a lovely shot of me dead on the floor in the room of MOTHER which apparently is actually supposedly to be in all caps.  You know what Titan servitors like the most… burning and purging corruption.  MOTHER appears to really enjoy it, and the fight is all about trying to stop her from doing this thing while also not being purged yourself.  On this particular attempt Ary and I zigged when we should have zagged and got a wildly unexpected mace to the face.  Ary got a battle rez because he is a useful member of the team, I stayed on the floor because I was just barely keeping up above the tanks.  We made progress but also sorta went too long and lost progress as well, with our last handful of attempts being significantly worse than some of the ones in the middle.

I feel like MOTHER is either a gear check issue, or we are just doing something not quite right during the process.  Since most of us were hovering around the 325 range I figure we probably hit a gear wall, which became a subject of much lamentation over discord.  All in all it was a quirky and enjoyable night, and I managed to die most spectacularly when I accidentally clicked on a Warlock portal and went zooming into a firey death pulling MOTHER in the process.  I had no clue what was going on and apparently I instinctively screamed “OH SHIT!” to which my wife freaked out trying to figure out what was wrong.

The only negative of the experience is the fact that the Sunday time slot is really horrible for me.  Pretty much ANY weekend time slot is horrible, but especially Sunday night because that is generally when we finish up anything that needs to happen for the week.  I felt like an ass sitting there and raiding while my wife had to struggle with things I would have normally helped out with.  So there in lies the problem… I enjoyed myself as I generally have any time I have raided with Facepull…  but the timing is horrible and I am not likely going to make it every week… which means I stay in an under geared pupa state and am likely more trouble than it is worth?  I would like to get a raid going on a week night that is much easier for me to manage attending on a regular basis.  We will have to see how things shake out, but ultimately my hope is something workable can happen via RoboSquid Armada.  Being on the computer from 6:30 pm to 10 pm on a Sunday when I should be swapping loads of laundry and what not isn’t going to work for me as a regular thing sadly.

This morning I had a startling revelation.  I am not only maining Horde this expansion…  but I am also maining an Elf.  What in the living hell has happened to me as a human being to find myself in this state.  The Horde thing is a logical progression since I played mostly Alliance for well over a decade that it was high time to see how the other half lives.  The Elf thing…  I am completely clueless other than the fact that with Demon Hunters you literally have no other choices.  Blood Elf demon hunters look so much cooler than the Night Elf ones with their damned floppy hairy eared nonsense, so it was really a no-brainer than last expansion I gravitated more towards the Horde version of Belblight.

For anyone who has read this blog of any length of time will realize that in general I am pretty Anti-Elf as a whole.  There are however some exceptions…  I have always enjoyed a good Dark Elf in most of the games that have them.  Similarly I really dig the Bosmer because they are awesome and cannibals.  Orcs in the Elder Scrolls setting are technically fallen elves…  so I like them as well.  However High Elves in pretty much any form can fuck the hell off.  In Skyrim I used to take glee at going completely out of my way to kill Thalmor and the parts of the Aldmeri Dominion quest lines that really focused on High Elf matters made me get a little bloodlusty.

So for me to play a Blood Elf which is effectively a fallen High Elf…  is really sorta shocking.  I am going to basically lean on the fact that I have horns… and that it somehow makes it palatable.  After all I would probably be more than happy to play a Satyr, which has a similar relationship to a Night Elf.

The other thing that I did last night was take on an Island Adventure thing…  which shockingly I had not actually done until last night.  They are kinda fun but also fairly grindy given it is just killing a lot of mobs for no real reward.  Grace claims that she got a mount out of there, and I got a brief flash of excitement when I saw something purple colored pop up in the auto loot window…  however they were unfortunately just doubloons the currency used to buy things associated with the island aventures.  In theory I need to try and get all three of the islands available this week since I need to do five different islands in order to move forward in the war effort thing that is effectively the same as what we were doing with our order halls.

Lastly the spawn rates of certain things are still completely borked.  I did what I have been doing the last several weeks and logged in this morning to see if there was any loot on world quests that would be an upgrade.  Sure enough there was a quest out in Vol’dun for the Bloodwing Bonepicker offering a 330+ cloak which would be an upgrade over my 325 cloak.  While writing this blog post I have been watching my WoW window in the background and a larger and larger crowd has been gathering during this time… all the while the mob in question has not spawned in.  Unfortunately this seems to be one of many quests that are in slightly bugged states right now.  I wrote about the Azerite Mining quest a few days ago where the mobs simply don’t spawn in during reliable rates.  This seems to be maybe one of those cases, but I am largely going to give up now and head in to work.  My hope is maybe this will be “unbugged” by the time I get home tonight.