WOW

Comfort Gaming Marathon

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I had a pretty busy weekend with various real life events and crises taking up a lot of my time and energy. That meant that when I got time for gaming I really needed it to be quiet and relaxing time. Often that means Diablo 3, but since everything I need for the season means pushing really high rifts or doing speed runs, I opted for a change of pace. My WoW subscription is still active, since I was trying to finish the achievement that unlocks flying for the Legion expansion zones.

I actually had forgotten that I unlocked flying at the end of last week, and then immediately logged off because I was pretty sick of WoW. Since that was the last major goal I had in-game, and because I wanted something low-key to do, I gave myself permission to not care even a little bit about gear or raids or anything difficult. Instead, I decided to work on my mostly-abandoned Horde characters. I’ve been in Alliance guilds since Pandaria, but Horde is where my heart is, and where my biggest stable of high level characters is too. Of the 9 characters on my Horde server that were 100 at the end of WoD, only my priest had been leveled in Legion, and this made me pretty sad. So I decided to fix it.

First I logged into that priest, who was 110 and had finished the class hall story but not done anything else, and got her up to date with artifact knowledge and the broken shore story. Since gearing up and raiding were unappealing to me, I stopped there and swapped to my paladin. She was in Dalaran and had picked up her first weapon, so I could start straight into questing. Flying makes a huge difference. I appreciate that having control over your movement lets the developers tell you stories and craft more specific experiences, but once I’ve gone through that on one character I really enjoy the freedom of flying. I thought Highmountain would be the most noticeable place where it would make a difference but honestly it felt amazing in every zone. Even more so when I wanted to dart off and grab a gathering node every once in a while. Flying let me pick and choose my questing experience, doing what I enjoyed and mostly skipping the bits I knew would frustrate me. It also let me grab a bunch of treasure chests for artifact power and class resources along the way.

Flying, and switching my focus to alts, transformed WoW from a painful slog into some seriously comfortable comfort gaming. By the end of the weekend my pally was 110. After yesterday I’ve unlocked the broken shore and her class hall quest line is just waiting on a few follower missions to progress. I was expecting to struggle with world quests when I hit 110 because my gear is terrible and I still haven’t unlocked my 3rd weapon relic slot, but surprisingly things went pretty smoothly. I leveled entirely as Retribution, something I have never done since that character was created 10 years ago. It still isn’t my favorite spec, but since I don’t plan on doing any group activities with her it seemed like the most reasonable thing to focus on.

Normally a big reason I like having so many alts is crafting, but since Legion’s take on professions is so painfully awful I don’t know how much I will focus on that. I did her mining quests as they came up, and the few engineering quests so far have not been prohibitive. My priest still has alchemy and tailoring quests sitting in her log for months because I didn’t feel like running dungeons to complete them, so I’m not optimistic about making much more progress on that front. Instead I’m already trying to figure out which alt to work on next. Normally that would be my druid, but since I already have an Alliance druid at 110 I may focus on warlock instead. I got my affliction weapon last night so I’m ready to start leveling.

I’m happy I’m getting more mileage than I expected out of my one month’s return to WoW.


Comfort Gaming Marathon

Weekly gaming grab bag

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I’ve been adrift a little bit in my gaming over the past week or so. The D3 season keeps progressing in smaller chunks, and I am getting close to finishing my second conquest. I just need one more set dungeon mastery, since I did Tal Rasha’s, Vyr’s, and Firebird’s after finishing my 4 demon hunter ones. The wizard dungeons have been harder overall than the DH ones, with Vyr’s in particular being quite awful due mostly to its size and spread of monsters to kill. I did the basic completion of Delsere’s before, but never mastered it. I guess as long as it isn’t worse than Vyr’s I should be fine. I am very much looking forward to being finished with these.

I’ve mostly wandered away from FFXIV, with most of my play time happening on Tuesday for our weekly raid night. There’s so much I could be doing but I’m in a really solid place to start the expansion so anything else is not very vital. It’s nice to stop obsessively grinding lore. I also made yet another attempt at FFXV and yet again bounced off it super hard. I guess I need to admit that the combat in that game is just not for me and let it go. At this point it is not that I can’t do it, it’s that I really just do not enjoy it at all. Instead I booted up a new game of Horizon: Zero Dawn and put in an afternoon reliving that joy. I think I’m going to try to motor through the story this time instead of doing all the side quests and exploration, just so I can have it fresh in my head to talk about with friends who are playing now.

I have also been logging into WoW every once in a while to work on my reputation grind to unlock flying. I’m hoping I can get it finished before my subscription runs out because I doubt I will pay for another month right now. The game is fun enough but the manic joy from the Legion launch is long gone and everything in front of me looks like a horrible long grind. While many of my WoW guildies have embraced the grind, it just makes me want to check out and do something else.

The same combination of overwhelming amounts of new stuff to do along with a long grind for character power rewards is keeping me away from WildStar as well. Every time I log in I have fun for a while but when I look into the long term progression I check out. These kinds of mechanics are great for people who are super invested in one game and need something to keep them engaged, but seem like this unassailable mountain that you will always be behind on when you’re a new or returning player. I guess this is one of the reasons why D3’s seasons are so appealing to me, because no matter how progressed or not my non-seasonal characters are, everybody gets to start over from scratch at the start of a new season, and you avoid that sense of “I can never catch up” that’s so demoralizing.

Well, that’s what I’ve been up to over the past week or so. I can feel the start of a super introverted spell coming on as I start poking at more single player games and avoiding group content. I’m mostly fine with this since I have a lot to keep me busy on my own, and my friends are somewhat dispersed across multiple games right now too. As long as I’m out of this mode by the time Stormblood launches I know I’ll be fine.


Weekly gaming grab bag

AggroChat #145 – I’m a Hufflepuff

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

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Tonight we have another big rambly show where we start out having zero clue what we are going to talk about… and then wind up recording for a couple hours.  Edited down the show ends up being roughly another hour and a half experience.  Tonight we talk at length about our addiction to Final Fantasy XIV and the Palace of the Dead.  Grace and I talk a bit about the blah feeling this latest patch cycle has given us in World of Warcraft.  Bel talk about getting into the Crowfall pre-alpha and how it is in fact a piece of software that he installed on his system and does in fact launch.  We talk a bit a bit about the weird City of Heroes nostalgia game wave and how there really is only room for one of those titles in the market.  We also talk about the drought of MMOs on the horizon and how instead it seems to be the Golden Age of expansions for existing games.  Bel gives an update on the gaming at work thing, and his first steps into God Eater.  Finally we have a weird offshoot into talking about building Gundams before wrapping things up.

Topics Discussed: Final Fantasy XIV – World of Warcraft Blahs – Crowfall Disappointment – City of Heroes nostalgia – Drought of New MMOs – Golden Age of Expansions – Elder Scrolls Online – Work Gaming Space – God Eater – Gundam Kits

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I’m a Bard

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I had a lovely long weekend and spent most of it doing increasingly silly things in FFXIV, and tying up loose ends in WoW. On the WoW front, I’ve been gradually losing interest since Nighthold released, and only partially sure why other than being distracted by FFXIV. I’ve resolved to let my subscription lapse for a little while, so I spent some time cleaning up my bags, making sure my mail was empty, and other housekeeping things. I realized that the Love is in the Air event was about to end and I had barely even tried to get a rocket this year, and I’m surprisingly ok with that. Even though they changed it so you don’t have to be max level to try, I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough to grind myself into the dirt trying for such a low drop chance mount. I did grind archaeology a little bit, since the bi-weekly quest is currently rewarding a ghost moose mount. Somehow grinding for a set endpoint is much easier to stomach than grinding for a tiny random drop chance. Anyway now I’ve got a sweet new mount and can walk away from the game for a break in style.

On the Final Fantasy front I am fully engaged in what feels like a series of weird side projects with no main overarching goal. My scholar is now geared enough that I feel comfortable that I’ll be able to get into whatever the next set of dungeons is without issue. That means that I’m still slowly working on her gear but it is no longer any sort of priority. I also managed to get my summoner’s gear over the threshold needed for expert roulette. This not only means that I get showered in upgrades, but also that I can actually run dungeons with my healer buddy again finally. Hooray! Mostly the end-game stuff feels like keeping time until the next new thing arrives, and I’m ok with that. I have a lot of other silly things vying for my attention.

One of the silliest things actually got completed this weekend. I finally finished my scholar’s zeta weapon. It took way too long, and probably wouldn’t have happened if most of the steps hadn’t been nerfed into the ground by the time I got to them, but I still feel weirdly proud and happy to have completed it. I will be starting the Heavensward weapon quest soon, but it will be nice to take a breather for a little bit before I start.
I’m a Bard
Another thing I’ve been doing a lot of is running Palace of the Dead. In my last update about my bard, she was trapped deep in the hell of the subligar levels. As of Monday she’s now level 50 and looking much better. I didn’t have any ironworks gear laying around for bard, but I did have some ilevel 100 gear that looks just lovely with her garuda bow thank you very much. Aside from the bard I’ve also gotten my lancer and marauder up to 30 this way, which means I have a freshly minted dragoon and warrior. I doubt I will be playing either of them very often but it has been fun to try them out and to see their class stories. Now I am only missing monk, paladin, and dark knight and I’ll have all the combat jobs unlocked.

The last week or so have seen a renewed flurry of activity in my free company, with lots of new faces and old friends returning to the game in preparation for Stormblood. It has been really fun introducing some people to the game, or helping folks gear up and run new-to-them content. Playing with friends definitely helps make a game more fun and more “sticky”, I’m constantly bouncing around doing all kinds of things I probably wouldn’t be doing on my own. My only real concern is that I’m going to get burned out before Stormblood gets here, so I’m planning in advance to take a mini break before that happens. Other than that I’m settling in and enjoying all the company and the silly things to do!


I’m a Bard