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What I’m Playing: August 7, 2016

August 7, 2016 by Grace

Hooray, I made it through the first week of Blaugust! WoW has definitely been my main focus, but some other games have still been on my radar too.

World of Warcraft: This is where I spent most of my time this week. I got my legendary mace on my forsaken priest, but otherwise have mostly been playing alliance side. It makes me frustrated and sad, because I just plain like the horde races and story better, but at this point absolutely all of my friends are playing alliance so there’s no escaping it. Once again I find myself really wishing WoW would just add cross faction play already, even if it were tied to battlenet friends or something. I already have prepared myself for the inevitable point in Legion where I get sick of being alliance and go back to level my horde mains all alone. I guess it is a good thing I like alting.

LFR gets a (mostly deserved) bad rap, but sometimes you luck out and it’s nothing but Gamon and rainbows as far as the eye can see.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a little LFR on my druid and wandering around on my baby spacegoat mage and enjoying it. I’ve been using the baby mage as a chance to really see the low-level alliance quests, and to knock out some of the individual zone loremaster achieves that I never did. I got the overall loremaster achievement and title back before Cataclysm, so there’s a lot of quests I’ve never seen before. See yesterday’s post from Felwood for just one example.

FFXIV: I want to be playing this more, but WoW is really taking up too much of my time and attention for me to bother. Over the past week I’ve logged in for raid and pretty much nothing else at all. Don’t get me wrong, raid time was amazing and probably more fun than all of the time I played WoW put together, but we only raid 2 hours a week. I had been hoping that raiding on a schedule again would reignite my drive to log in more and upgrade my gear and such but it didn’t work out that way.

WildStar: I’m going to come clean and admit I hadn’t logged in to WildStar in a couple months. That just felt wrong, so when WoW got hit by a DDoS attack a few evenings this week I logged back in to WildStar. I didn’t do anything new and exciting, just a couple of expeditions. It still felt amazing and comfortable, like nothing had changed. I will be trying to spend at least one night a week poking around in this game again, because it remains my favorite MMO of all time.

Diablo 3: Season 7 started on Friday! The response to this season seems to be very low compared to all of the previous ones, but I’ve still been playing and having a great time. On Friday I got to play with some friends that I haven’t hung out with in way too long, and had a blast leveling together. This season was the first time in a while that I didn’t get to 70 on the first night, but that was all on me because I decided to get some sleep instead. I hit 70 and completed the first 5 chapters of the season journey yesterday, which included the cosmetic rewards and the full free class set of gear (after chapter 4). Since that was my entire goal for this season, I don’t know if I will stay invested or not, especially with the pre-Legion WoW event coming on Tuesday. A lot of the goals for the stash tab this time around feel easier, but also grindier, and I’m guessing I’m not going to bother when there are new shiny things to distract me in other games.

Screenie Saturday: Illidan

August 6, 2016 by Grace

I’ve been leveling my baby mage through Felwood, because I haven’t done the quests there since Cataclysm. It turns out that it was incredibly timely. There’s a short series of quests where you find a demon hunter, and get to re-live Illidan’s past, from his fight with Arthas, to using the skull of Gul’dan, to all of the frowny faces Malfurion made at him. The images are a bit blurred, unfortunately, since the whole thing took place in a sort of emerald dream or fel bubble, but it was incredibly cool. I wish I had done this back in the day, because I didn’t know Illidan’s story very well until recently.

Long Time Coming

August 5, 2016 by Grace

Once upon a time I used to do “hardcore” raiding in WoW. The best parts of that time were during the Lich King expansion, and the very very best was Ulduar. While we were raiding Ulduar, the shards for the healer legendary were funneled to our holy paladin. I got a couple from the rare times he wasn’t there. I was so excited and so jealous when he finally finished the quest and got his hammer, after weeks and weeks of us working together as a team to clear Ulduar. Then, as is usually the way of these things, that pally took a break from the game not long after getting this prize. He came back at least, but Ulduar was around for such a relatively short time that we never finished a second legendary. I spent the rest of the expansion being jealous of the shiny bubbles that came from this mace.

I had ventured back into Ulduar a bit after that expansion ended, chasing fragments and the mount. But I never fully put my mind to finishing this thing until recently. At long last, I completed it this week. This legendary didn’t have nearly as cool a quest line as Shadowmourne, but it will always hold a special place in my heart. I’m glad I can finally call it mine.

WoW 7.0 Highs and Lows: Class Changes

August 4, 2016August 4, 2016 by Grace

Oh right, there’s actual gameplay changes, not just transmog and new healthbars. I’ve only gotten a few characters into “fighting shape” since the patch, and overall I’ve been surprisingly okay with the changes. Priest: I heard worrying things from beta about disc healing in dungeons, and they seemed true in practice. I tried healing some timewalking and it felt very difficult and not very fun. On the other hand, I did some LFR and raid healing as disc was incredibly fun and pretty darned effective. Shadow felt mostly like shadow should feel, with a few different buttons and the sad loss of devouring plague. I enjoyed it, but would still like to lobby for the return of the shadowform toggle, because I miss actually being able to see my character. Priest was my main for many years, and I’m strongly leaning towards making it my main again for this expansion. If I end up maining a priest in Legion I might have to learn how to play the dreaded holy spec if I want to do dungeons though.

Sometimes I miss when my druid was a cow, but I admit this transmog looks super nice on this troll

Druid: I healed and (feral) DPS’d a few rounds of LFR, and druid felt relatively unchanged. It didn’t feel fun and new and exciting, but it didn’t feel nerfed or warped beyond recognition either. Even in my crappy Tanaan gear I kept up with healing numbers and in a reasonable place on the DPS meters. I suspect I might notice the changes more when I try boomkin, but for now druid still feels like it is comfortable and in a good place for me.

Sure, this mage would look at home on a box of lucky charms, but that won’t stop him from setting you on fire.

Mage: Frost also feels pretty unharmed by the patch, and I continue to enjoy it. I also tried out fire and arcane on a baby mage alt. Fire felt much more exciting. The new graphics really pop and feel satisfying. Arcane continues to be silly good in low level dungeons, and more fun than I remember it being for me in a while. I even like the fake pet arcane can talent into. I named mine chip. Mage is also a strong contender for main in Legion, if I can make peace with a class that has no healing spec. Hunter: This class had the most major overhaul. First up, survival is now off the table for me because I’m not interested in hunter melee dps. If I want to melee I’ll go be a kitty or something, hunters are for shooting things in the face and collecting cute pets. I have not tried marksman spec yet, so I can’t comment on it. Beast mastery feels different enough that I’m still struggling with it. I can’t say I like it any more or less than I did before, it just feels different. I’m not a fan of the changes to pet survivability though. Having to remember to swap pet spec for normal soloing doesn’t feel great. Finally, WTF happened to aspect of the cheetah? A huge cooldown on our movement ability? This change feels awful. It looks like I’ve managed to narrow my options for Legion main down to Priest or Mage, unless one of my lesser-played classes manages to knock me off my feet in the next couple of weeks.