Legion Flying is not hard, it is time consuming

I’m still playing WoW Legion after returning 3 months ago – specifically I’m trying to see the story (meaning world quests, dungeons, and raid content on scrub level), and get the Flying Achievement. For the first few 5-6 weeks I didn’t think I cared about flying as it seemed a task for later, but now it frustrates me watching other players swoop in, complete something, and swoop out. I’m now 5 weeks into playing scrub/casually and creeping up on the farmable reps, and the (huge) zone quests in Suramar.

Legion Flying takes dedicated attention to get because it requires completing all the zone quests, considerable effort in reputation farming, and making sure you have travelled everywhere. Those tasks unto themselves are worth it because they help/force the player to see the content. I dislike how unfriendly to roadways and cumbersome some of the zones are (High Mountain is a disgrace). So Legion Flying is essentially very easy when compared to very difficult content like the Mage-Tower fights, however it takes a concentrated effort of many months when you play very casually.

If I get Flying, see the raids, and a second Legendary drop by the time the expansion ends then I will be happy. … In the pic blow is Mortigen wearing a terrible clown-suit leveling drops surrounded by a few ghouls (unholy spec), a bodyguard, and a quest follower.

Chuckle

Its been a while since I considered WoW and thats not going to change soon – however I came across a wow’er’s blog which discussed the early levels and couldn’t resist this old bad joke. Happy travels folks.

What might be coming in WoW v6.1?

What might be coming in WoW v6.1? (blizzard official source, and wowhead’s views)

• A Legendary follower for the garrison, as part of the legendary quest chain. Cool.
• Ability to send tweets and screenshots out directly from the UI. Um, wow.
• Better flight paths. Good.
• Game-Time tokens tradable for gold. Maybe at this stage. #Plex
• An heirloom tab, which might be wonderful, or might be pox.
• Maybe the new Blood Elf models. Meh, not fussed.
• Another raid. Good.

Bring it on, looking forward to it.

Molten Core at 100 done

Molten Core is done! I feel like I can de-stress a little as I’ve gained the mount and the helm, and don’t plan to return to there at 100 anytime soon. It was great to do though. I plan to open up an Alt now so they can also have a Garrison, to both feed my main and have a different leveling experience through Warlords.

For MC I joined an in progress fight so only had to fight the last 4 bosses, and our group had a far harder time on the trash than the bosses. Strategy wise I think there were enough folk who knew what to kill in what order, that everyone else just followed along – so it was like very old school MC. I missed Sam yelling for decurse, and thought that Ragnaros in particular had been toned back in terms of difficulty to make the experience more LFR friendly. Nobody made the joke about looting the damn dogs, sadly.

More Progress, some frustration. WoW

Well after a terrible login lag issue for almost all last night I was able to get online and get most of the way to level 98, then this morning level up to 98. Root cause was not communicated, and there was a 4 hour lag between any updates on the issue from any Customer Service team. Not playing a game between 8pm – 10pm is extremely frustrating, and Blizzard needs to up the service and improve their communications to players. I was not trying to raid, but most Oceanic raids would have been totally wiped out last night. Eventually the @BlizzardANZ twitter account had the update and after a reboot the server returned to almost normal. I still found some parts of the UI slow, especially when in a Garrison.

I’m in the Spire now and enjoying that zone. The quests are more haphazard and I think there is more flexibility in what order quests are unlocked. I prefer this. My Death Knight was 93 on 25 Nov, and I’m 98 10 days later, so allowing for Christmas feasts and parties I’ll be 100 in about another week to 10 days.

Hopefully that is enough to then get to average ilevel 615 for the Molten Core revamped raid and get the special mount and helm. I have an heirloom weapon which will be 620-ish when I’m 100, and then it means grinding through Dungeons and hoping I get lucky with Follower quests.

I’m enjoying the game, Warlords so far is great. It will be interesting to see what the long tail game-play is like for a non-raider (aka LFR Raider).

Happy logins to all, TyphoonAndrew

Slowly leveling, very impressed

I’m about 5% away from level 93 now, and still loving Shadowmoon Valley. As a zone it is well put together. The rares spawn often, they drop interesting and sometimes useful things, the monsters are squishy enough (especially if you overgear the zone), and the travel time between hubs and quest locations is enough to get you “into” the zone and exploring without being tedious. There are the odd special things found along the way, like the quest to kill animals for steaks, or the special events for the garrison.

It is also a little morbid to look at this zone and think about what we know of the alternative from our character’s own timeline. I can see parallels in the geography and that helps make the story’s impact stronger. I wish I was able to level faster, but not at the cost of missing the experience.

More WoW Round-up

• Subscriber news – Polygon is reporting that WoW is back over 10 million paying players at the moment. That means Warlords of Draenor has returned WoW back to The Burning Crusade subscriber numbers. Fantastic. More players means more diversity and options. 3.3 million sales at launch.
• Observation – Local Australian severs have made a huge difference in the game to me in terms of latency. No longer to monsters infrequently “stagger-jump” or rever to a place slightly when they are fighting. I love it.
• Observation – It appears that the massive login queues are (mostly) gone too.
• WoW’s 10th Anniversary event starts soon in Molten Core – see rant below… It contains foul language, so you’ve been warned in advance.

Wow ain’t dying.

WoW Nagrand oceanic. Position 3642 in queue, 126 mins. Dead? Right.
I’m kind of happy it’s like this: we have players everywhere.
Perhaps the Ddns attack affected times, perhaps it’s all the returning players. A bit of realm maint and the odd tweak we might see more capacity. I’ll wait. The content isn’t going anywhere.

Updates:

• Position and time flings around a bit; from 45 mins to 450 minutes. Yikes!
• 2 hours later, still a 2+ hour wait estimated.
• 3 hours later, 45 min to 1.5 hours to wait. And I think the queue is going down because we all need to go to bed to sleep.

WoW subscriptions and resubscription

After a day of chatting about WoW to the nefarious gamer who first recruited me to World of Warcraft; I’ve resubscribed. It took a day to break my will, which means one of my favourite sayings by Oscar Wilde applies totally, “I can resist everything except temptation”.

Last night I ran Karazhan’s first boss five times to try to get the mount, UP once, and solved the archaeology Horn which makes your character bigger. It was great.

Related old news says WoW subs have increased again too as players return for Warlords (MMO Champ 14 Oct). We’ve seen this increase occur once before with the pre-Mists subscribers. It isn’t news in itself, but I think we will see a slightly different result from the Mists pre-sub drop off. My hunch (based upon only my gut feel) is that this time the subs will take significantly longer to drop away. They will drop away, but I’d not be surprised to see them climb upward again before doing so, and certainly expect the initial downward drop to take longer than it did in MoP.

Why? Part of my hunch is that the simplification from the item changed and the squish will remove a gearing attitude, and thus make it easier to maintain multiple sets, and therefore grant flexibility. There is also the appeal of WoD as something new, which is also a return to something that was popular back in the day. The Burning Crusade really built the WoW player-base, and many of us look fondly on Draenor.

Lastly I think they know how to make reasonable content, and many players and companies know that this formula works well. Yes, it is grindy, and a themepark, and often unbalanced, and also affected by a vocal minority … but everything is, especially in computer games. If Blizzard deliver quality the players will play. So far it looks promising.

Thoughts on the pre-WoD events

An hour in the Blasted Lands of questing to kill a few generals, gather some (un)important items, and harassing the new (old) baddies didn’t feel especially profound. I kept wanting to understand why what we were doing would actually help in the long term. Sure, a strike at a few generals and supply lines will hurt the Iron Horde in the short term, but not stem the flow of the attack; or will it? Did it?

Were the quests enough to push them back through the portal, and then take the fight to them on the other (new?) Draenor? I know that is what we are doing, but the landscape didn’t change after the quests were done. A switch might happen when the expansion is released, but it would have been great to see a phased approach to the area akin to the Death Knight starting area which used phases to change over time as the quests were completed.

If we can shove them back through the portal, or control at least this side of the portal, then why not just destroy the damn portal? Or bury it, or nuke it with a manna bomb. I’m sure more will come from the release to help answer these questions.

So effort wise the quests were a little short. Great for people with multiple alts though.

The rewards were good – a boost for new level 90s, but nothing to make the current end gear redundant, which is good. In a few days there will be “green” gear to replace most of the high level items anyway so its really zero impact in the long term. I’m doubly thankful to have an heirloom weapon to carry through the expansion leveling. I just need to decide when to buy Warlords. At the moment I’m looking forward to it, but not in a mad rush kind of way. I know its (soon to be) there to be experienced, and I get to pick when I eat the cake.

Garrosh Defeated

I hate Garrosh’s storyline, but I had the chance to join the Ex-Tenebra guildies in a casual run to kill the last few bosses in Siege of Ogrimmar. I must say it was a thrill to see the content I thought I’d miss out on.

The plan was to return after the expansion launched, but a few free days gets you motivated; and with that small effort (large effort by the guildies to do it each week which made it look easy) I’ve now got a Heroic Heirloom two handed axe for 90-100 and a few other items of nice loot – probably far too late to be of large benefit.

I’ll add a few screenies of the axes – it had me set for tanking and dps now.

And of course I died early in the Garrosh fight and watched the rest play out – not much more to be expected for a player who’d never seen the Garrosh Hellscream fight before, and only been in Siege LFR once before, and left that run in disgust.

Happy killing folks. See you after the expansion hits.

Aussie WoW servers at last

As of Tuesday maintenance the Oceanic realms will be moved to Australia. I ranted about wanting this half a decade ago! As reported by GamePlanet:

Blizzard announced the news tonight at a World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor pre-launch community event in Sydney.

 

For almost a decade, ANZ World of Warcraft players have played on US servers hosted in California. Select US servers were only categorised as Oceanic, and displayed Australian Eastern Time. The move to local hosting should significantly reduce lag for players in Australia and New Zealand.

The change-over will occur as a part of next week’s scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, October 28, local time. The Oceanic servers will be down for an extended window. When the servers come back online, they will be hosted in Australia.

 

Australian and New Zealand players with characters on other non-Oceanic US servers will be offered free character transfers to the Oceanic servers for a limited time.

Incredible that it is happening, but I have to say about time too. I’m excited by what that will mean for interactions where latency is an issue. The pvp improvements and impacts (assuredly) will be great. I’m thinking of the pve encounters where movement is needed quickly and accurately.

Heigan’s exploding slime floor in Naxx used to give people issue on poor connections, and there have been many fights since. I won’t blame Ultraxion as such, but it didn’t help.

Special thanks to UntamedHellCat for the Facebook PM with the news. So darn stoked.

Now where did I put my credit card and my two handed axe?

WoD’s great cinematic

The WoD cinematic is really good. As a semi-retired lore nerd I love seeing this stuff, just as much as I love seeing the Mage cast a Sheep spell in the first trailer, or Arthas summon an undead dragon. The MoP trailer did what it had to do (show us the Pandaren) and did it in a way which was fun. It certainly makes me think this is Orcs vs Humans … of Warcraft.

Non-serious aside – It does feel like a story set to make us like killing Orcs, and as an Alliance player I don’t really care if that is the wrong view. Orcs have proven themselves weak willed, power hungry, and generally the bad guys in the lore. Guldan gets his historic plans thrown asunder, but we’re still facing Orcs as the foes. These Warlords just reenforce the point. Thrall was the exception, and only that because some silly human made an effort to civilize him instead of kill him.

Now wonder he liked Jana. I’m happy to kill orcs, wargs, goblins, any sort of green or brown skinned filth.

(edit: truthfully that trailer makes the idea of playing an orc seem very appealing)

Is it as good as the others in terms of placing the players “in the world” and throwing down a challenge? Probably not, but then the excitement from an expansion is only partly attributed to the pretty non-gameplay video. There is not much that would top “you are not prepared“. As a video to continue the hype and announce a release date it was fine; great in fact.

Bring on more cinematic media for players, add more online comics, give us preview pages, lore updates, stat blocks to drool over. Complete the character models (I know, I know) and a few decent armor sets and it’s finished isn’t it? All of it. Build the hype with many strings of your bow Blizzard.

WoW sub stats published – Unsurprisingly Downward

I know reading about World of Warcraft subscriptions is more click bait and flame war material, but I can’t help be interested. The stats show a clear downward trend in subscriptions, and I find that obvious.

Without new content the player base leaves, and it has been a long time since new content has been put into the game. Further the community has been told that it will be a while to go before the Warlords updates, which acts as a negative incentive to keep subscribed during the quiet time. Wrath was the game’s peak, but The Burning Crusade added a huge amount of players to the game.

Graph of subscriber numbers, via MMO Champion

At 6.8 million accounts the game is back to subscriber numbers from the Original release. Warlords will be the 5th expansion for WoW, and any gamer or marketer will know that holding interest over ten years and 4 previous expansions is difficult.

New Toy for WoD – Haunting Memento

Discussing WoW and other MMOs a few friends were pondering what our favorite items were and how much the might be worth. I love my Legendary items and also love the Haunted Memento.

The Memento dropped as part of the Scourge Invasion many expansions ago, and allows a strange shadow to follow your player as long as you have it in your inventory. An item of years go which is special within the world.

WoD (listed as patch 6.0.1) will add a new Haunting Momento to the game as a toy, obtainable through the Darkmoon Fair. I like the fact they are adding the toy for those who were not around for the previous expansion, but also hope they make it different somehow, both in the cosmetic effect and also the application. It appears that it can be used on another target, which is already nice – and perhaps the haunting will have a different animation?

The Sha default model would be very suitable as an alternative to the typical specter model used in the original. An odd thought, and odd too that a similar item is being added to the game in WoD.

Gone fishing, err Hunting, but watching WoW regardless

I’m still watching the blogs and news for WoW despite not being subscribed. Interesting to see what others are still doing in game, and to reflect that it does not entice me back into a subscription yet. Later probably, but now – not at all.

One interesting set of information has been launched around the “cosmetic class items” as a way of rewarding players for participation and also allowing for character customisation. A good and interesting mini-feature. I see bags and quivers for Hunter types, and spell books for caster types (or is that a libram for Paladins?). These could be bracer on the hip, or shoulder of character models, hand from belts, attach to forearms, or even float about the character(?).

What would be great is to see them merge with the colour palette of the character gear as well. Why? Well the spell book looks fantastic as concept art, but will be way too hapy-happy-joy-joy for a soulful purple-black themed Warlock. Keeping the emo kids happy is somewhat important, and most of us MMO players are emo about something or other.

Anyway, I’m glad they’re adding these and hope vials, off-hand frills, sub-weapons, hunting kit, crosses and prayer beads, ioun stones, boot knives, random pockets, ghost-haunted crowns, and all sorts of other widget-like oddities might come. Collect them all…buy them… Happy Killing, TyphoonAndrew.

The Trial of Garrosh, idiots.

A trial for Garrosh was bloody stupid. Likewise was any attempt to make the process fair and legitimate. I’m finding it hard to want to read the new Warcraft novel because I think the end of the Mists story and setting was utter balderdash. I like the Warcraft novels and can forgive a lot when it provides more lore to consume – but in all seriousness the axe should have fallen on Garrosh as soon as it could. Too many times inaction has let to disaster in WoW lore.

Has Warcraft become so soft that the heroes can only dispatch a foe if they are corrupted by an old god? It takes pervasive corruption to allow an execution, but the “heroes” can murder hundreds of opponents in daily quests with impunity? C’mon.

I think some players like to rationalise the setting to their own morals and ethics, but I think the setting has lost it’s way when a figure like Garrosh wasn’t killed at the first opportunity. That would make the setting less PG13 than probably desired, but it is needed. This is (was) Warcraft folks, and the idea that one faction or race has more claim to judge Garrosh is missing the point.

Those factions should be arguing about the division of the trophy head, axe and body, not still trying to for a delegate sub-committee to investigate the correct division of voting rights, for the membership to the partisan review group, in order to make a recommendation to the yet to be confirmed leaders…

Garrosh didn’t ask for permission to destroy Theramore with a mana-bomb. I’ll see if somebody I know grabs the book and perhaps I can borrow it for a while in a few months. It makes me wonder if the end of the Iron Horde will see them all placed in work programs to rehabilitate them back into “normal” society.

Grumble.

Time for a break from WoW

Well it’s that time of year, where I’ve not got through the current content in any meaningful way as yet, and there is a huge gulp of time to get to the next expansion. So as of around a month or so from now I’ll no longer be playing. I’ve cancelled my account.

I could play casually onward, or lump through alts, or whatever – but those activities will still be waiting if I return, and if I don’t return then I’m not paying for an account which gets only a small amount of play time each month.

Will I be back? Probably when the expansion comes, yes, but unlikely before. Half a year is just too long to wait to see new areas. I can use $15 pcm on something else.

In the interim I hope to do some play-by-post and some pen and paper RPG games, and possibly get some time played in games I’ve got but not really played. StarCraft II, Diablo 3, and a host of smaller games.

Happy killing, TyphoonAndrew

Whats the go fella, where you been?

Well heck, another period of life where playing WoW (or any game) means logging in, checking mail, doing the odd transmute, and then getting back to whatever is urgent IRL.

I don’t mind life being busy as most of it is great stuff but I miss the folks a little. To the guys I banter with, you’re not forgotten.

My little warlock is level 89.5 and I’m really keen to get to 90 soon and look at ow blisteringly difficult the green fire quest is. I was a Warlock in the original game, and played Warlock heavily in TBC. The idea of green fire has always been an uber sexy wishlist and it is really the only reason my warlock is being played.

I’ve read that an item level of greater than 470 makes it more plausible, and after 500 it is muc easier. That makes sense, but it also means I’ll be burning dungeons and lfrs to gear up and I was hoping to avoid too much of that. Ah well, expect to see my noob Warlock in your LFR run. I’ll be in the back with the disturbing smile and the goal to win on threat.

Some refs for later

• Icy Vein’s guide to Warlock Green Fire

WoD release dates…yup. Told you.

Multiple sources tell me that WoD will be released for WoW on or before 20 December 2014, or “fall” in the USA. So anytime from late September (doubtful) through to Christmas (hopefully not that late). Sheesh, I was thinking about July. Ah well, many other games to distract me.

We can now also pre-purchase from Blizzard, and get a “free” level 90 boost. What the hell?

I can pre-purchase a digital version…why is that even a bloody option worth doing? It is digital. It gets “shipped” to you when you click the payment button. Oh, right, the level 90 character which can’t level past 90 till the new expansion launches at least 6 months later; probably more like 8-9 months later. I’d suggest that a 6-9 month window is plenty of time to level a character, and as we are going to get a gear squish most items will be of little benefit.

I guess you might farm the heirlooms in Siege, to help you level? But you can farm them on a 90 now – you don’t need the boost.

You could level to 60 and get some free professions later with the bump? Not really 6 months of game time there.

So some time in the next 6+ months I might pre-purchase, but for now I’d rather have that money in my wallet. This really has a funny kick-starter feel to it; cash now, game much later.

Oh, and I just have to say this because I’m a bit snarky about all the drama it caused – to those folks who were “building up” to raiding in WoD… go hard. Go soft, go whatever way you can because you’re in for a long wait. You’ve got 6-9 months more to get those kills. Months ago I said it was a bloody waste of energy to try and recruit players “for Warlords” as it would be too far away. With the news today I’m almost certain nobody has a roster of players that will be certain to be playing and at level 100 in 9 months.

Happy waiting, TyphoonAndrew