WOW

Forget your fears

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Over the last few days I’ve been basking in the joy of having a group of friends all actively playing WoW together. I started this expansion somewhat resigned to the idea that I’d be pugging if I was running group content at all. Now, I’m almost daring to hope to be able to put together a small casual raid group. It’s so exciting!

Part of what makes me so happy about this is that it lets me do some extra dumb things that simply would not fly in a pug. For example, the other night I ran my first mythic. Now, I’ve had a reasonable ilvl for a bit so I could have been pugging these, but I chose not to. For whatever reason, the random groupfinder is fine, but my brain gets extra stressed out by having to apply to groups in the LFG tool. Instead, I grabbed a group of friends and coerced them into running a mythic. I had to coerce, because two of them were not even geared enough to randomly queue for heroics yet. I figured we might get a boss down and then give up and swap to heroic. What actually happened is we used CC and careful pulls and finished the mythic, while only wiping a couple times. It reinforced my negative opinions about people requiring 340 ilvl to run a mythic-0, and also reinforced my love for my silly friends.

This ridiculous process was the most fun I’ve had in WoW in a very long time. What I really want to do is translate this into raiding too. We might not get a full clear anytime soon but we can use every trick we have to get as far as we can, and laugh a lot doing it. The communities feature lets us scrape together our friends from every server, so that’s what we’re going to do. Check out Bel’s post if you are on a NA server, Horde side, and want to get in on this stupid fun.

September 2018 Gaming Goals

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Welcome to Blogtember, when we’re all coming down off of the high of Blaugust. It’s time for my monthly look at how badly I failed my goals, and the cheerful setting of yet more goals anyway.

August Goals in Review:

WoW: Complete at least one more WoD transmog set. Done! It helps that the legacy loot updates mean that gear just pours out of the WoD raids now, and having another 10 levels means they’re way easier to solo.

Complete “Raiding with leashes IV”. Nope. But not for lack of trying. I mean I guess I could have been running ICC on 20 characters every week, and I didn’t do that. I did run it at least once a week though, and still no pet.

Level my druid through BfA. Nope! This was a surprise! I give myself half points – I did level something through BfA, just not my druid. At the last second I fell back in love with being a disc priest, so that is who I leveled first.

D3: Unlock adventure mode on a HC character. Nope. I got into act V but then BfA arrived and all thoughts of Diablo got set aside for a while.

September Goals:

WoW: Level an alliance-side character to 120. I always want to see the story on both sides, and doubly so this expansion when the two stories are so different.

Run each available dungeon on mythic difficulty at least once. I got a surprise bonus this expansion, a few friends I thought were done with WoW decided to give it a try. I want to take advantage of this bounty and try to run all the mythics before everyone wanders away again.

Run available LFR. I don’t actually know if all of the LFR wings will be available in September. I want to see as much of the raid as I can. Bonus points if I can sneak into an actual raid instead.

Complete “Raiding with leashes IV”. I’m going to keep trying this at least once a week until I get the stupid pet.

D3: Unlock adventure mode on a HC character. This is a leftover from August. I still really want to get this done, maybe once things have finally settled down in WoW I can make time.

No big crazy goals this month, just (hopefully) steady progress on things I’ve been working toward anyway.

FROGS!

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FROGS!Shoutout to my friend Mor, who suggested the topic of today’s post. FROGS!

Frogs are some of my favorite creatures. I’m not really sure why I like them so much. Maybe it is their cute little froggy faces, or their weird amphibian life cycle, or all the crazy colors they can be. All I know is I love frogs! That’s why I’m so happy that there are new froggy friends to enjoy in BfA.

I’ve already talked a bit about my love of Krag’wa, the enormous frog Loa in Nazmir. Krag’wa’s burrow is surrounded by naga and blood trolls, but he’s knows he can take them. He is worried about his children though. I’m not sure if they are literal or metaphorical children, but either way the the naga are stealing frogs and doing mean things to them. I happily murdered a bunch of naga to save the adorable froggies. Interestingly, there seems to be a connection between the crawgs and Krag’wa. Are crawgs what happens to Krag’wa’s spawn when they get corrupted? Or does Krag’wa just watch over all the weird swamp creatures? When you rescue a tiny crawg during a quest, Krag’wa tells you he can’t help it, and asks you to watch over it.

There are “spawn of Krag’wa” all around Nazmir. There’s even an achievement for finding all of them and sending them back home to the burrow. Although little compared to Krag’wa, these babies are the size of a large dog. I would love to have one as a pet, but I wonder what they would eat? Something that big would have to eat birds instead of bugs!

FROGS!If you really can’t get enough of the Krag’wa-model frogs, there’s good news. For only 75 polished pet charms you can get Tragg the Curious to come and join you on your adventures! This was one of the first pets I bought this expansion. Speaking of battle pets, there are even more frog pets to collect. There’s both wild and vendor pets with a new model that looks like a poison dart frog. They are extra cute, and they can have some pretty useful moves for pet battles too!

Lastly there’s the amazing frog mount. It has been datamined, but there seems to be no way to get it in-game at the moment. I really hope that they make it available soon. I need to be able to hop around the swamps of Nazmir and strike fear into the hearts of my enemies from atop my very own riding frog!

That’s enough of my love of frogs for a bit! Do you love frogs too? Or is there another new model in the game that you’ve fallen in love with?

Best Loa

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My post yesterday was a bit of a downer so I wanted to balance it out with something fun. I was having a discussion with friends about all the Loa we see in the Zandalari zones. There are a lot of new ones, and some of them are really great. I decided I would give you my top 5 Loa list. Spoilers for the horde story ahead!

5. Gonk – This large raptor/mini t-rex Loa is very helpful. I chose him over the pterodactyl one because he offers lots of speed boosts around Zuldazar. I love zipping around the city grabbing the Gonk totems!

4. Rezan – The Loa of kings. His appearance in the opening cutscenes (horde-side) was so cool, I may have yelled a little. Sadly his coolness is tempered by the fact that he is now a dungeon boss.

3. Bwonsamdi – The Loa of death. He has a huge personality and an equally huge role in the horde-side story this expansion. I am curious to see what happens with him in the future. Plus, he makes fun of me when I die (and makes me all nostalgic for WildStar!).

2. Krag’wa – The frog Loa. He seems pretty chill but will totally lick his enemies to death when necessary. Hangs out in an awesome pond with lots of frog buddies. I love him. Last night I spent my hard-earned pet charms to get the battle pet that looks like him.

1. Jani – The trash raptor Loa. Jani is the best Loa because it is fun to be a trickster. I really enjoyed seeing random trash piles in all the different zones and knowing that Jani would be waiting for me with maybe some trash prizes or a quest. So far my favorite has been messing with Nesingwary.

I never got that into the troll lore in WoW until this expansion. This time around I have really enjoyed learning more about their cultures and the Loa are a huge part of that.

“Which Loa do you bargain with?”