World of Warcraft – Page 41

Grind to a Halt

December 4, 2017 by Belghast

When we last visited my Orc Warrior on this blog I was just about to start the Warlords content, and this week when I have not been poking my head into Destiny I have spent it pushing forward in World of Warcraft. It’s honestly been a shock just how fast leveling went until I hit Legion content. The old world was a confusion slog where I jumped zones each time I saw an exclamation point show up on the adventure guide. This meant I was constantly jumping zones every few levels and most of that journey was a complete blur. When I started Outland I did the majority of Hellfire Plateau then jumped over to Terrokar Forest for a little bit before finishing up the grind in Nagrand. From there I jumped to Northrend and did a good chunk of Borean Tundra before jumping to Grizzly Hills and doing most of it and finally leaping over to Scholazar Basin to finish the run out. From there we entered the Cataclysm zones and did all of the 80-85 grind in Vashj’ir without actually completely finishing that zone. Then came Pandaria and I managed to do the entirety of the 85-90 grind without leaving Jade Forest. From there I went to Draenor where I managed to hit 98 by doing the entirety of Frostfire Ridge and finishing up with just a tiny tiny bit in Spires of Arak.

This is the point where the express elevator has come to a grinding halt and I’ve been confronted with normal speed leveling because all of my heirlooms petered out at 100. I chose to do Stormheim first largely because it is both my favorite and least favorite zone at the same time. All of the Norse themed Vrykul bits are awesome, but all of that faction nonsense is not. It did give me access to another Order Hall champion quickly however so I am down with that. At this point I have finished both the main story arc of the zone and the faction bullshit arc and am likely to move on to the next area. There are a lot of things I have noticed… not the least of which is how ridiculously huge this shield is on my female orc warrior. It is as thought they scaled the shield for the insanely bulky male models and then just called it good enough for the female ones. The second of which is how much more intricate and slower paced the Legion content is compared to Pandaria or Warlords. When I leveled through the content it seemed really quick, but what makes things slog a bit in comparison to what came before is how fragmented the quest hubs quickly become. This might also be an aspect of the map itself feeling so busy with so many world bosses and objectives hidden out there to slow your journey down. I cannot resist wasting a few minutes to find a chest that is nearby or going after a mini boss, and as a result my leveling pace has gone to hell.

At this point I am contemplating investing in a set of Heirlooms which will set me back quite a bit of gold. It isn’t as much about leveling quickly, it is more about not outpacing the gear I am wearing…. and also not looking like I am picking up scraps from the battlefield while I level. I’ve liked making outfits for my character up until this point and then progressing my way through the content without having to care too much about swapping out items. In a perfect world Warcraft would have heirlooms for every slot and I could simply level my alts without ever having to worry about swapping gear out. With the new races coming in I fully expect to be leveling a lot more alts, and in truth investing in plate 110 heirlooms now will probably helm in the long run given that I tend to play plate wearing classes more than any others. I am still really bummed about the direction they are taking with artifact weapons. I would have loved to see them turn them into leveling heirlooms much the way that the items that dropped off Garrosh in Pandaria served this purpose. It would have been a fitting end to a really awesome chapter of the game to be able to then use those weapons to level your alts. Still having a lot of fun but I am also ready for the ride to be over and for my character to get geared up.

Shovels and Shoveltusks

November 27, 2017 by Belghast

I declared Thursday and Friday to be part of the weekend last week and decided to take myself four days off from the blog and one week off from the podcast. I feel super chill going into what is likely going to be an exceedingly stressful week so I think it was probably a good call. Apart of having to help my folks move some furniture yesterday, I mostly had a pretty chill thanksgiving. Both Friday and Saturday my wife and I attempted to avoid the world, and the only shopping we really did was online apart from a mad dash out to Target around 9 pm on Friday. At that point the store was largely sane and wasn’t that much different than a normal trip on any other night. Throughout all of this I have found myself forsaking my normal checking of Pokemon Go in favor of the relatively newly released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. First off I have to admit I have never played an animal crossing game before so I didn’t have much of a cultural frame of reference going into this. The experience instead reminds me a lot of a mix between the former web based casual MMO Glitch and some flavors of Stardew Valley. Whatever you end up calling it the game is extremely charming and at this point I am level 16 and have a bunch of the animals at my campsite… enough that the last three or four gave me a messaging saying there was no room. Unfortunately I have no clue how you actually determine which ones are at your camp and which ones are not… but for the moment I am rolling with it.

I’ve also seemingly hit whatever the friend cap is because when I try and add anyone it says that combined between my friends list and the few outstanding requests I have run out of room. I have no clue what this cap actually is… I estimated 200 the other day but I am guessing in truth it is closer to 100. The game is maybe bad at messaging some things but I am largely limping along without doing much in the way of research. There is a quarry mini-game that requires you to get help from five of your friends, and I wish they messaged when my friends were needing help a little better. For example if you look at the middle section of the above screenshot you will see a shovel icon out to the side of Kelsey’s name. I wish there was a way to sort these to the top of the list because they are really the ones I am most interested in given I like helping other players, because you appear to get some sort of cut of their profits. After that you attempt to guess which rocks have the most profitable stones… gold nuggets seem to be the best. I still very much feel like I don’t fully grasp a lot of things… like how the hell to make large quantities of Bells that Animal Crossing currency. Right now I have a 30,000 bells loan with the auto place and have never really gotten close to paying it off. Thankfully they don’t seem to be sending anyone to break my kneecaps because of it though, and they still allowed me to customize my RV regardless of having the loan out. I feel like maybe they don’t have the best business model. Regardless if you have not been playing this you should probably check it out because it definitely seems to be addictive as hell given the wide variety of friends that seem to be playing it on a regular basis.

I made a bunch of progress in Destiny 2 but I am likely going to wait until tomorrow to talk about that. Instead I wanted to talk a bit about the other game I played over the break… World of Warcraft. I am still working on my tiny Orc Warrior that is getting less and less tiny as each week goes by. At this point I have completed the Cataclysm content and am on the airship just about to start the invasion of Pandaria. This is something I have never actually done on the horde side given my last several characters I leveled were abusing the shit out of the pre-legion launch invasions. I’ve also not spent much time playing through Warlords of Draenor as a Horde character, so that should be interesting as well. Similarly I have never seen Legion as the Horde… all things I am interested in experiencing first hand. The biggest shock for me is just how fast Cataclysm managed to go given that I started in on Vashj’ir Saturday night and dinged level 85 well before finishing the final section of it Sunday evening. I realize that zone is in theory about the same size as two other zones combined… but I did not expect to be getting quite that much experience from it. Granted I am fully geared out in level 100 heirlooms (minus the rings because I don’t have the patience for that nonsense), but did not partake of any of the experience boosting options. The mission of the day however is to try and figure out how to get a Pandaria flying book… because I do not want to return to land based leveling if I can help it.

Punitive Shades and Iron Banner

November 21, 2017 by Belghast

The 13th anniversary event is going on right now in World of Warcraft and I have been largely disconnected from me. For whatever reason I am focused on leveling my Orc Warrior above pretty much all else. This is often the case when I return to WoW after being gone for a bit, I have to ease my way back into playing my bigger characters. This year each character gets a package that contains 200 timewalking tokens and the quest vendor also sells a bunch of items. One is the Corgi from past events and another are these crazy sunglasses that my Orc Warrior is modelling above. These seemed like a fun item until last night I happened to catch wind of something through twitter.

Correct, the Bronze-Tinted Sunglasses are only transmoggable during each year's WoW Anniversary event. https://t.co/wNQhhXuIEa

— WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) November 20, 2017

Why would you create an item that is only transmoggable during the yearly anniversary event? I mean I guess in theory they did give every character 200 tokens so they can fall back on the reasoning that we aren’t out any of our time to get the apparently disposable item. The transmog system in general has never quite set right with me because it seems overly complicated rather than simply just letting you swap any graphic with any other graphic. However the fact that there are timed transmogs only makes me more grumpy with it. I just hate the whole concept of time limited items in general because I realize these are supposed to make me want to collect them all before the time runs out. Instead what they do is make me just not want to even try and save myself the general disappointment by not participating. In the case of the shades, I put them on the Warrior for fun but I am not deeply connected with them. However it does seem oddly punitive to the players who have designed entire transmog outfits around them. This is just part of the Blizzard school of design where we can’t have anything that is universally good. Every nice thing seems to be required to have a negative that comes with it, and that ethos will always be an axe I have to grind with this game.

My means of taking screenshots in Destiny 2 seems to have crapped out this morning. It’s probably nothing a reboot won’t fix but I don’t exactly have time to do that when I am trying to churn out a blog post on the off chance that there might be queued updates to run. Instead you are going to get the Iron Banner screenshot from the PS4 that I took when the event was last available. Tonight I will begin the process of trying to get a set of gear on my Titan once more, because I really love the Iron Banner gear this time around. I have the full set on my PS4 Titan and I love it so much for many reasons… not the least of which is it has a decent stat package. Additionally I am all about trying to get back a few of the weapons that I really enjoyed using… namely the Pulse Rifle and Auto Rifle. There are daily milestones and my goal is to attempt to complete them on each of my characters. I am still frustrated that the Iron Banner is not a means of gaining power level the way it used to be in Destiny 1, but it is still a good source of cool gear and I am just going to focus on that aspect.

Memory is Fleeting

November 20, 2017 by Belghast

With all of the recent talk about the World of Warcraft classic server, I have found myself contemplating a lot of things about the game. We recorded a podcast episode where we basically spent the entire time trying to determine just how vanilla classic would end up being. The other side effect of all of this is that I seem to be playing my horde warrior over on scryers quite a bit more than usual. Now if you were to ask me to rank the current expansions to the game that ranking would look a little something like this…

Wrath of the Lich King
The Burning Crusade
Legion
Vanilla
Mists of Pandaria
Warlords of Draenor
Cataclysm

Notice that number one and number two are the second and third expansion, and that weirdly enough I rank Legion above Vanilla. What you are seeing is that my memory of these expansions and the nostalgia that colors them does not adequately represent the experience of actually playing through them. I’ve recently leveled through the Burning Crusade content in a fashion given that you end up dinging your way out of it long before you actually finish much of it. I did do Hellfire Peninsula in its entirety, the majority of Terrokar and a good chunk of Nagrand. I left the Cataclysm tainted Vanilla lands at 58 and similarly left the Outland at 68 and as a result have spent the last four levels completing pieces of Borean Tundra. The reality I am straddled with is that the zone design of the first two expansions is simply not good. I mean at the time it was released it was world better than anything Vanilla had given us and as a result felt like a breath of fresh air, however when you stack it up against modern zone design from say Legion… it is objectively not as well designed.

What I mean by this is that the quests don’t flow cleanly from hub to hub and instead it forces you to do a lot of travel time back and forth between a hub and its related spokes. All the while I was leveling through Outland and so far in Northrend it feels like I am spending a lot of time needlessly travelling between two destinations and this might have been the initial intent. However after seeing modern quest design it feels like I somehow failed and allowed my quests to get out of sync. If you fight your way through a micro dungeon with quest A you often find that upon turning in you now have another quest requiring you to go back there. It is maddening to have to wade through an army of minions to kill a boss that you were already next to and sometimes even killed while completing the first quest. The other that adds to this feeling of tedium is the mob density and having no real way to get in and out of these destinations without a heavy body count. Thankfully on my warrior racking up a heavy body count is fun, but on other more fiddly classes this causes the leveling experience to grind to a halt. The truth is it will probably have taken me twice as long to level through Outland and Northrend as it will have to push through the next three expansions.

As games mature their design ethic shifts significantly and we forget what it was actually like to play these games at the time. When it comes to Classic World of Warcraft for Project 99 in Everquest… what we are chasing is a feeling not an actual honest moment in history. I think when players say that they want to play Vanilla again… they want to return to a time when not everything was mapped out quite so clearly and they had a sense of accomplishment and discovery each time they looted a kobold (and the game subsequently froze). This is why World of Warcraft Classic is going to be the challenge it will be. That experience means different thing to different players, and none of the calculations that a game company can make actually take the social component into play. When I think of Vanilla or Burning Crusade or even Wrath, those memories involve very specific sets of individuals that no longer play the game and I might not even have contact with. For Vanilla it was the Late Night Raiders, and Burning Crusade it was No Such Raid and when Wrath launched we were excited to be the Duranub Raiding Company. Three non-guild based raids dominate those feelings and memories and the simple fact that I went through three separate raid groups tells you that there is no way to actually ever join those broken pieces back together again. All of this said I will have characters on the Classic server, and I will see how this experience actually shakes out in the end. I just feel like it is going to be exceedingly difficult to please even a fraction of the player base because we all want something different.