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| Laktose! |
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| Crescendo! |
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| Piffle! |
Monday, August 17, 2015
Monthly gold update
Last month I came in at about 546k gold. This month:
781,600! Whoa. 235,000 gold this month! That's a big difference compared to the previous month, which was about 140k profit - almost 67% more!
Monday, August 10, 2015
Playing dressup - it's not just for dolls!
The other day I posted a picture of my mage looking somewhat similar to Shredder. He just ended up with that gear by chance, it was all from garrison quests. I thought he looked pretty cool with just two exceptions: his cloak was too short and his weapon was totally derpy.
So the other night I decided I had had enough of not looking 100% dapper and decided I would visit one of the tranmog NPCs and fix the situation. There was only one problem ... apparently I have been vendoring/disenchanting every single piece of gear I replace. I had nothing to transmog. Nothing! Not a cloak, not a weapon, not a robe, not a hat ... nothing.
Fortunately there was an easy solution to this problem - there are a number of vendors that sell old PvP gear for honor. Oh, except I have no honor on my mage. Hm. Fortunately, I remembered stumbling upon some NPCs in Dalaran that sell old PvE gear. I ported to Dalaran, bought the cool looking stuff and then went to wowhead to see if there were some anywhere else. Sure enough, there are also a few in Orgrimmar!
The only problem was that they don't sell any good looking 2h weapons. The solution to that? I noticed a level 300 BoE staff in the Guild Bank that looked pretty sweet. For some reason I have the ability to withdraw 10 stacks a day, so ... uhh, yea. Anyway, here's the new and improved Piffle:
It wasn't until after I bought everything I wanted from the vendors that I realized I had spent seven thousand gold! Haha, woops. I went through the same process (with the Orgimmar vendors, at least. Dalaran is harder to get to if you can't just port yourself there) with my Priest and Druid as well, being a little more thrifty this time. I probably spent around 10k total on all of them:
Not sure how crazy I am about the yellow / green scheme on my druid. But it's a fun change for now!
So the other night I decided I had had enough of not looking 100% dapper and decided I would visit one of the tranmog NPCs and fix the situation. There was only one problem ... apparently I have been vendoring/disenchanting every single piece of gear I replace. I had nothing to transmog. Nothing! Not a cloak, not a weapon, not a robe, not a hat ... nothing.
Fortunately there was an easy solution to this problem - there are a number of vendors that sell old PvP gear for honor. Oh, except I have no honor on my mage. Hm. Fortunately, I remembered stumbling upon some NPCs in Dalaran that sell old PvE gear. I ported to Dalaran, bought the cool looking stuff and then went to wowhead to see if there were some anywhere else. Sure enough, there are also a few in Orgrimmar!
The only problem was that they don't sell any good looking 2h weapons. The solution to that? I noticed a level 300 BoE staff in the Guild Bank that looked pretty sweet. For some reason I have the ability to withdraw 10 stacks a day, so ... uhh, yea. Anyway, here's the new and improved Piffle:
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| New cloak, weapon, and robe. Cloaks MUST be long! |
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| The robe is very similar to before, just has a little more orange / yellow in it |
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| I felt like that complimented both the new cloak and weapon |
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| The staff is actually what you get from salvage boxes! |
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| Cape is probably the best looking one I have on any character! |
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| The Chest and gloves are last season's PvP |
Thursday, August 6, 2015
The next expansion has been previewed
I didn't see it myself, but someone put together this album which has some of the information that they showed: http://imgur.com/a/kiFqg
Some quick highlights:
Some quick highlights:
- New class - Demon Hunter!
- Separate system for PvP talents / abilities
- Artifact weapon you level up
- Instead of single person garrisons, you'll be chilling in a specialized domain for your entire class
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
This ... this was creepy
So there I am in my garrison, collecting mission rewards and sending new ones off, when I notice something out of the corner of my eye come into my main hall. After exiting out of the mission interface I was able to get a better look at what it was that had floated in ...
... a kite!?
So strange.
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| You never take me out anymore! |
So strange.
Monday, August 3, 2015
When nobody wins ... everybody loses
What you're looking at here is the scoreboard at the end of an Arathi Basin rated battleground match. The game started off very poorly for us - the leader of the group decided on a strategy (all but two to Blacksmith!) and then when we saw where they sent all their troops (to Lumber Mill) he changed it ... which led to us getting neither of them, somehow. So we spent some time with just 1 and 2 bases at the beginning.
Somehow we made a great comeback, swiping 4 bases of our own for a time ... and losing one of them right at the end. This led to ... a tie!
And, as you can see in the rating change, everyone lost rating because of it. Kind of weird how that works, I would have thought no rating change.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
A very late weekend update
Saturday was very productive, both from a WoW and real life perspective. The morning was all chores - mowing the grass, doing laundry, emptying the dishwasher, etc.
The afternoon led to some 2s play that was simultaneously pretty good and very frustrating (seriously, hunter comps are auto-lose). After a couple games though, we decided to try out ... LFR?
So, each raid has 4 difficulty levels - Looking For Raid, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic. Of those 4, LFR is the only one where you cannot pick and choose who you go with. It just puts you in a queue, similar to doing 5 man dungeons. LFR is gated, so only the first 6 or so bosses are available at this point (they release a new wing of Hellfire into LFR each week). We went through that and most of it was pretty easy, though there was a fight or two that was messy; my brother got an upgrade or two and said he had fun! Nice.
Emboldened by my success in LFR, I joined a Normal raid for Hellfire later that night. Previously I had cleared the first three bosses but had been unable to get past Kilrogg in two different groups. The leader of this group made it clear from the beginning that this was not a "learning" raid. He was here to clear the instance and if you couldn't keep up (DPS or mechanics-wise) you were getting the boot. "It's not personal, it's just business." Of course, people say this all the time ... very few are able to actually follow through on it.
We got to Kilrogg and he went down easily; in fact, I'm not even sure we had a single person die. It was great! At that point I knew I had a good group. We continued on with a wipe here and there and before I knew it, had done all the bosses that were available in LFR.
Admittedly, I have not watched videos on most of the fights in Hellfire. I had no idea what the next bosses were going to do, outside of reading a quick explanation in Blizzard's built-in Raid Guide. Nevertheless, I managed to not get kicked out of the group! Some other people did though, including the off-tank. We got through all the bosses except for the last one; at that point it was rather late and the leader called the raid (we had wiped ~3 times on Mannoroth, the second to last fight). Some of the other bosses:
Despite using every single bonus roll I had accumulated, I was unsuccessful in getting any set pieces. #sadface I did get a couple of other upgrades, though nothing monumental. Actually, funnily enough, I got a weapon upgrade ... except the only problem was that it was a 1her. And I don't have an off-hand. So at one point after a wipe while we were waiting to find another person, I hearthed to my garrison, took the portal to Warspear, and bought the PvP conquest offhand (iLvl 700). Of course, since I didn't want to keep that, I had to go back every 2 hours and re-sell it (only had to do this one other time during the raid).
I did try to get into a couple groups for the last boss on Sunday, but I didn't have a ton of time and those groups were being picky. Of the handful that were doing Archimonde, 2 required you to have the achievement for already beating him! Still, it's a complicated fight, so I guess I understand that (people did the same thing for the last boss in Highmaul on Heroic). I did get into one group, and then after one attempt they broke up - bleah. Here's the guide video for the fight, crazy, huh?!
The afternoon led to some 2s play that was simultaneously pretty good and very frustrating (seriously, hunter comps are auto-lose). After a couple games though, we decided to try out ... LFR?
So, each raid has 4 difficulty levels - Looking For Raid, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic. Of those 4, LFR is the only one where you cannot pick and choose who you go with. It just puts you in a queue, similar to doing 5 man dungeons. LFR is gated, so only the first 6 or so bosses are available at this point (they release a new wing of Hellfire into LFR each week). We went through that and most of it was pretty easy, though there was a fight or two that was messy; my brother got an upgrade or two and said he had fun! Nice.
Emboldened by my success in LFR, I joined a Normal raid for Hellfire later that night. Previously I had cleared the first three bosses but had been unable to get past Kilrogg in two different groups. The leader of this group made it clear from the beginning that this was not a "learning" raid. He was here to clear the instance and if you couldn't keep up (DPS or mechanics-wise) you were getting the boot. "It's not personal, it's just business." Of course, people say this all the time ... very few are able to actually follow through on it.
We got to Kilrogg and he went down easily; in fact, I'm not even sure we had a single person die. It was great! At that point I knew I had a good group. We continued on with a wipe here and there and before I knew it, had done all the bosses that were available in LFR.
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| Soul Remnant is for the legendary ring quest! |
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| Xhul'horac - kill the two guys on the outside first! |
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| Mannoroth rises ... |
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| ... the beginning of the fight ... |
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| ... he dead! |
I did try to get into a couple groups for the last boss on Sunday, but I didn't have a ton of time and those groups were being picky. Of the handful that were doing Archimonde, 2 required you to have the achievement for already beating him! Still, it's a complicated fight, so I guess I understand that (people did the same thing for the last boss in Highmaul on Heroic). I did get into one group, and then after one attempt they broke up - bleah. Here's the guide video for the fight, crazy, huh?!
Monday, July 20, 2015
Diversify your portfolio
Friday was a pretty uneventful night, so I ventured into the most recent raid - Hellfire Citadel. This was my second foray in on Normal. The first time I was with a guild that was making its first attempts and we got the first two bosses down before I had to leave.
This time was another partial guild run, but with a different group. We got the first 4 bosses down before running into the buzzsaw that is Kilrogg Deadeye. Some of the bosses were pretty cool. There was one that summoned giant deathly purple blobs that you had to dodge:
In fact, that boss drops tier tokens! He didn't drop a Druid token, but still, pretty cool! That's the first tier gear boss I've killed in ... oh, I don't know, 6 years-ish?
I've been using a variety of PvP gear (660 and 700 ilvl), which is pretty solid. My iLvl is around 682, so I got a couple of nice upgrades on this run. And at the end, I hearthed back to my Garrison and found this in my mailbox:
Apparently it had been on a corpse that I never looted. I sold it, because I will have the PvP belt fairly shortly which is a higher iLvl anyway. I also managed to get an upgrade from a garrison mission - not only was this one of the few slots I needed to upgrade, but it even has a socket! Now that is winning.
Honestly I really enjoyed raiding. I definitely fell into a funk for several weeks where I was so focused on doing all the daily stuff (profession, pet, garrison, AH, other random dailies) that I never got around to actually playing the game. Raiding is definitely something I enjoy, and I am kind of disappointed I never checked out BRF. I'm hoping to get through Hellfire on at least Normal!
This time was another partial guild run, but with a different group. We got the first 4 bosses down before running into the buzzsaw that is Kilrogg Deadeye. Some of the bosses were pretty cool. There was one that summoned giant deathly purple blobs that you had to dodge:
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| Here they come! |
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| The gold "You won!" is from my bonus roll - gold is a loss, in this case. |
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| Thanks Postmaster! |
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| Awww yissss. |
Weekend PvP Update!
Thursday night we decided to try some 3v3 with the new comp we want to run. Last season we did Jungle, which is basically Hunter (random), Feral Druid (me), and Healer. Given that my brother plays a priest, that worked out pretty well. We had some success with it, getting to around 1900 rating at our peak. I think both of us had varying degrees of frustration with the comp for different reasons.
For me, it was a combination of feeling like I wasn't as effective as the Hunter (basically any DPS class can perform decently when paired with a Hunter and a Healer because of how powerful hunters are), and feeling incredibly squishy when focused - which happened fairly often. For my brother, I think it was just the frustration of healing on what was considered one of the lower tier classes.
So this season we decided to switch it up and try out God Comp - Shadow Priest, Mage, and Resto Druid. This comp relies heavily coordinated CCs - between the sheeps, cyclones, roots, stuns, fears, horrifies, and two silences, there is an awful lot of CC! It is a top tier comp and has been for a while.
As you may have noticed though, this represents a role reversal from the last season. I've switched from melee dps to healing and my brother has switched from healing to DPSing. Both of us have performed these roles in Rated Battlegrounds before; in fact, they are the preferred spec for each of our class! Shadow, in particular, is very popular in RBGs now (and was toward the end of season 1 as well) - I actually think most teams prefer having 2!
But still, having played that spec in a 10v10 environment compared to a 3v3 environment is completely different. As a healer this is especially apparent to me. It starts with the basics of knowing when I need to use my cooldowns (in RBGs there are two other healers keeping people up, so it's very different than being the only healer), but extends to positioning as well. Positioning (to escape CCs or even DPS) is far more important in Arenas than it is in RBGs. If I get a sheeped in an RBG there are two other healers who can dispel me. If I get sheeped in an Arena? Uh oh.
So Thursday night we gave it a shot. We started off around 1500 mmr which seemed reasonable. And uhhh, we went 0-5. It was brutal. After the 5th game we all agreed to give up and we did some 2s to feel better about ourselves.
Sunday we decided to give it another shot. This time the mage that joined our group hopped in voice chat with us which was immensely helpful. The amount of communication and coordination was much better and we ended up going 10-6. There were certainly a number of games that we lost simply from lack of experience. "Ok, priest is at 75% health, I can sit in this stun ... oh he's down to 40% I should tri- oh. he's dead. Crap." There were at least two games that I can think of where one or more of us didn't use a defensive ability or a trinket or something that would have allowed us to survive ... and we simply died. Still, overall it was a very encouraging experience.
After doing 3s, we decided to try and raise our 2v2 rating high enough so that our weekly cap for Conquest will allow us to hit 7250 for the season - the number required to buy the weapon! Despite some internet issues that cost us a game (and close to half an hour?!?), we managed to go 9-5 and push our rating high enough. Epic weapons, here we come!
For me, it was a combination of feeling like I wasn't as effective as the Hunter (basically any DPS class can perform decently when paired with a Hunter and a Healer because of how powerful hunters are), and feeling incredibly squishy when focused - which happened fairly often. For my brother, I think it was just the frustration of healing on what was considered one of the lower tier classes.
So this season we decided to switch it up and try out God Comp - Shadow Priest, Mage, and Resto Druid. This comp relies heavily coordinated CCs - between the sheeps, cyclones, roots, stuns, fears, horrifies, and two silences, there is an awful lot of CC! It is a top tier comp and has been for a while.
As you may have noticed though, this represents a role reversal from the last season. I've switched from melee dps to healing and my brother has switched from healing to DPSing. Both of us have performed these roles in Rated Battlegrounds before; in fact, they are the preferred spec for each of our class! Shadow, in particular, is very popular in RBGs now (and was toward the end of season 1 as well) - I actually think most teams prefer having 2!
But still, having played that spec in a 10v10 environment compared to a 3v3 environment is completely different. As a healer this is especially apparent to me. It starts with the basics of knowing when I need to use my cooldowns (in RBGs there are two other healers keeping people up, so it's very different than being the only healer), but extends to positioning as well. Positioning (to escape CCs or even DPS) is far more important in Arenas than it is in RBGs. If I get a sheeped in an RBG there are two other healers who can dispel me. If I get sheeped in an Arena? Uh oh.
So Thursday night we gave it a shot. We started off around 1500 mmr which seemed reasonable. And uhhh, we went 0-5. It was brutal. After the 5th game we all agreed to give up and we did some 2s to feel better about ourselves.
Sunday we decided to give it another shot. This time the mage that joined our group hopped in voice chat with us which was immensely helpful. The amount of communication and coordination was much better and we ended up going 10-6. There were certainly a number of games that we lost simply from lack of experience. "Ok, priest is at 75% health, I can sit in this stun ... oh he's down to 40% I should tri- oh. he's dead. Crap." There were at least two games that I can think of where one or more of us didn't use a defensive ability or a trinket or something that would have allowed us to survive ... and we simply died. Still, overall it was a very encouraging experience.
After doing 3s, we decided to try and raise our 2v2 rating high enough so that our weekly cap for Conquest will allow us to hit 7250 for the season - the number required to buy the weapon! Despite some internet issues that cost us a game (and close to half an hour?!?), we managed to go 9-5 and push our rating high enough. Epic weapons, here we come!
Tonight we dine on Turtle Soup
All he needs now are some claw-like fist weapons, and his Super Shredder Halloween costume will be complete!
Gold Update
Backpacks from this month:
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| Cres |
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| Piffle |
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| Lak |
Three reasons I was expecting to not have made much money:
1) The Salvage Yard was nerfed. Basically, it was too good, so they decreased the likelihood of getting a crate and reduced what those crates contain. The Blue explanation is pretty awesome.
2) "Reduced the frequency of high-value gold missions appearing across multiple characters." Yup. They nerfed the gold generating missions for your garrison followers, too!
3) New crafting upgrades. So this one is interesting. 6.2 added two new levels up upgrades for the crafted gear. These recipes call for Felblight, easily obtainable if you kill Kazzak each week; 30 for the lower upgrade (Mighty), 60 for the highest (Savage). They also call for a similar number of [Particular Type] Essence. At ~400 per Felblight and ~40 for each essence, you're looking at about 13k and 26k in mats, respectively. This does not factor in the number of profession mats you need though (175 for the lower, 350 for the higher). At ~15 gold per mat, you're now looking at ~16k and ~32k ...
Which is to say, fairly expensive. And this is all before realizing that only 2-3 of those upgrades are ever in the AH (on my server, at least) so people are free to make crazy markups if they like. This leads to a big problem: nobody ever buys them.
I had more than enough mats lying around, so I made some. In fact, I made one Mighty of every profession I have and two Savages for my Jewelcrafting/Inscription. I've got over 100,000 gold tied up in upgrades that I can't sell. Yet the price of simply creating the gear itself has plummeted so far that not having at least one upgrade in the AH doesn't make sense.
So yea, if those upgrades ever sell I will be sitting pretty.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Are you killing Kazzak every week on every character? Because you should be.
And not just for the #selfie opportunities.
Kazzak drops loot once a week for every character you have. He requires a raid to kill, but that's pretty easy to find with the LFG tool. There are usually 1-3 groups running every time I have checked. Submit your name for acceptance, get accepted, chill in your garrison spamming "1" for a summon (don't actually spam, ask nicely!), click the table some gracious stranger dropped for the food buff, and then DPS / heal until he's dead. It takes maybe 5 minutes total.
Why should you do this? Well, most of all it's kind of fun. But if you're the type of person who hates fun, here are two other reasons to do it:
1) He drops ilvl 705 gear. This matters a lot if you raid or do PvE content. If you PvP, maybe it only matters for completeness or transmog's sake. It is the easiest/cheapest way to get gear of that ilvl. That trinket in the screenshot is pretty sweet!
2) He drops 5-15 Felblight. Felblight is the new crafting material in 6.2, replacing Savage Blood in the new recipes. The price has already dropped significantly, but is now holding steady around 3-400 gold each. Even at just 300 gold each, 10 Felblight is almost 12k gold a month for one character. Do it on two characters and you just paid for a WoW token in just 10 minutes a week!
Alright, alright ... I admit, it's really just about the #selfies:
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| No, I'm not dead, just playing with filters! |
Why should you do this? Well, most of all it's kind of fun. But if you're the type of person who hates fun, here are two other reasons to do it:
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| So much chat spam from loot pinatas! |
2) He drops 5-15 Felblight. Felblight is the new crafting material in 6.2, replacing Savage Blood in the new recipes. The price has already dropped significantly, but is now holding steady around 3-400 gold each. Even at just 300 gold each, 10 Felblight is almost 12k gold a month for one character. Do it on two characters and you just paid for a WoW token in just 10 minutes a week!
Alright, alright ... I admit, it's really just about the #selfies:
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| He dead. |
Thursday, July 16, 2015
A couple minor PvP differences
Last season, your first 3 rated battleground wins of the week would either provide you with an extra 50 conquest points or a random piece of epic gear. It was possible to not get a piece of gear, which is what happened more often than not (it seemed like, at least).
This season, each week you get a quest to win 3 games. Once you've completed the quest, you get a box with a guaranteed piece of epic PvP gear.
Overall, it seems like an improvement to be guaranteed a piece every week.
In addition to that, there is a new weekly quest in Ashran as well. It requires you to win 4 events and then kill the opposite faction's leader:
Given how atrocious Ashran was in the week between the end of season 1 and the start of season 2 when it wasn't possible to earn conquest (Horde refused to do anything but farm NPCs for fragments; they didn't even bother to try and win events!), I thought this quest would be impossible to complete. Turns out it's actually pretty easy! It rewards you with 500 conquest and another box which also holds a guaranteed epic piece.
So not only are you earning 1700+ conquest points a week, but also 2 pieces of epic gear! Seems like it should be really easy to gear up this season, right? So what's the catch?
The catch is (and of course there's a catch!) that all the gear with Versatility on it (Versatility is a secondary stat, like Crit, Haste, etc, that increases the damage you do, decreases the damage you take, and increases the amount you heal for; in short, it's awesome!) has been removed from the vendor. You simply cannot buy them anymore. Where did they go? Apparently, they can only be gotten from those quests.
So on the one hand, it will be faster to gear up to a full set of epic gear this way. On the other hand, it will take longer to get the specific stats you want - heck, it's even possible you could go all season without getting what you want!
I've gotten 3 epics this way (didn't do RBGs the first week, because I figured I wouldn't win a piece from my first 3 wins anyway ... woops!) and none of them are set pieces. I am not sure if it's possible to get set pieces from these boxes; I don't think the set pieces come with Versatility, so it's possible that you can only get non-set pieces from them. Then again, none of the three pieces I have gotten have Versatility anyway, so who knows!
This season, each week you get a quest to win 3 games. Once you've completed the quest, you get a box with a guaranteed piece of epic PvP gear.
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| Long live the champ! |
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| Are they jeggings? I hope they're jeggings! |
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| Down goes Tremblade! |
So not only are you earning 1700+ conquest points a week, but also 2 pieces of epic gear! Seems like it should be really easy to gear up this season, right? So what's the catch?
The catch is (and of course there's a catch!) that all the gear with Versatility on it (Versatility is a secondary stat, like Crit, Haste, etc, that increases the damage you do, decreases the damage you take, and increases the amount you heal for; in short, it's awesome!) has been removed from the vendor. You simply cannot buy them anymore. Where did they go? Apparently, they can only be gotten from those quests.
So on the one hand, it will be faster to gear up to a full set of epic gear this way. On the other hand, it will take longer to get the specific stats you want - heck, it's even possible you could go all season without getting what you want!
I've gotten 3 epics this way (didn't do RBGs the first week, because I figured I wouldn't win a piece from my first 3 wins anyway ... woops!) and none of them are set pieces. I am not sure if it's possible to get set pieces from these boxes; I don't think the set pieces come with Versatility, so it's possible that you can only get non-set pieces from them. Then again, none of the three pieces I have gotten have Versatility anyway, so who knows!
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
#alts #selfiestyle
I haven't really played around with the Selfie toy too much, but we did some Arena skirmishes on our alts so I figured why not.
Why skirmishes instead of the real deal? One of the new features in 6.2 is that every weekend there is an event that varies between PvE and PvP. This weekends event was a quest that gave 500 conquest points that did not count toward the cap if you won 10 skirmishes. This quest went really quickly on our mains and really slowly on our alts. Mostly the difference between having gear and not having gear, I think.
The main thing I'm taking away from this picture is how ugly my priest's gear is!
Monday, July 13, 2015
Easing back into it ...
I am nothing if not a creature of habit. Once I get into a routine for working out / dieting, I am pretty good at following it. Once my routine gets disrupted, everything kind of falls apart.
Apparently blogging is no different. It's not that I don't have anything to write about; on the contrary, there are actually quite a few things I had planned to detail here! But once I get out of the habit, it seems to be a tremendous chore to start back up again. No idea why.
At any rate, here goes nothing!
These were the titles I earned. Challenger is for 3v3 Arena and represents the top 35%. I believe we were roughly ~50 points away from getting Rival (top 10%); this is about 4 wins and would have been pretty easy to get had we actually just put the time in on the last weekend of the season. Oh well.
Soldier and Defender of the Horde are both for Rated Battlegrounds. Soldier is the top 35% and Defender is the top 10%. I've been using Defender of the Horde as my title for the time being.
Apparently blogging is no different. It's not that I don't have anything to write about; on the contrary, there are actually quite a few things I had planned to detail here! But once I get out of the habit, it seems to be a tremendous chore to start back up again. No idea why.
At any rate, here goes nothing!
These were the titles I earned. Challenger is for 3v3 Arena and represents the top 35%. I believe we were roughly ~50 points away from getting Rival (top 10%); this is about 4 wins and would have been pretty easy to get had we actually just put the time in on the last weekend of the season. Oh well.
Soldier and Defender of the Horde are both for Rated Battlegrounds. Soldier is the top 35% and Defender is the top 10%. I've been using Defender of the Horde as my title for the time being.
Friday, June 26, 2015
What's in 6.2?
I will admit to having done very little research or reading on what was being released in 6.2. I've done a little exploring since the patch was released on Tuesday (and a little reading on wowhead!), and here's a brief outline of what I know so far:
- a new zone, Tanaan Jungle
- a new raid tier, Hellfire Citadel
- Shipyard for the garrison; you build ships, send them out for missions, and can equip them with different upgrades to handle the obstacles the missions have for you. Each upgrade must be purchased for 500 garrison resources and then is used up when you equip it on a ship. To even have access to those upgrades, you must first find the Blueprint. Most of the Blueprints drop from rare mobs in Tanaan, but one drops from the new raid zone and one drops from a world raid boss (an epic shark, in fact - bringing Sharknado to WoW!)
- Sending missions with ships costs Oil, a new resource that you can get from regular garrison missions as well as quests in the new zone
- Many new mounts and battle pets from various vendors, rare mobs, and factions
- FLYING is back! You need to finish an achievement that requires you to have explored a number of areas, found a number of treasures, and reached Revered (I think) with the new factions in Tanaan
- New upgrades for crafting items - 700 and 715, I believe. Both of these take a new material (RIP Savage Blood) that can only be obtained with gathering professions in the new zone (Blizzard's attempt to revive the dead gathering professions); they can also be caught while fishing??!
- Several new factions in Tanaan; I'm not sure exactly what you get from these outside of some mounts, pets, and toys, but one of them requires Honored to buy the blueprint to the third type of ship for your Shipyard
- Rare mobs in Tanaan have a chance to drop Baleful gear tokens. Using them creates a 650 ilvl blue item for whatever spec you want and then you can upgrade them to iLvl 695 epics by purchasing upgrades for 20k Apexis Crystals (might be a gold component as well?). You can also buy any Baleful token for 5k Apexis Crystals
- Speaking of Apexis Crystals, the cap has been raised (removed?) and there is a pretty sweet mount available for 150,000 crystals. You can take a look at it here and read about how a very clever fellow got it the moment 6.2 was released!
- Obviously a new PvP season and new raid tier means new gear. Some of the new gear looks pretty sweet, some looks pretty dopey. I like the new Druid look! I think wowhead has a link to all of them on their front page if you are curious about a particular class.
- The new blue PvP gear bumps you to 710 iLvl ... I've already purchased the weapons on all of my characters!
- Supposedly the Nemesis quests were supposed to change from 500 to 100 ... but the quest I was currently on is still at 500. I'm not sure if I need to drop it and retake it or if it just never happened.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Feeling lazy ...
First, one of the wins we had from our Sunday night arena! This was against a double dps team - note their matchmaking rating!
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| too lazy to crop, too! |
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| omg he looks SO COOL! |
Speaking of gold, I bought my second token a week or so ago. I thought it would be interesting to see how much gold I actually make in a month, so I took screenshots of everyone's gold before I bought one. This is mostly for informational purposes. It's probably worth noting that one of the new additions in 6.2 is a vendor in your garrison that sells a variety of pets/toys/mounts. I bought most of them, and the two pets were 30k gold! So uhhh, we'll be sure to add that into the equation for next time:
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| Crescendo - so poor! Most of that was from Laktose |
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| Piffle |
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| Laktose |
So roughly 461,000 gold. The token was 24k and the mounts were 30 ... so the starting point is about 407,000.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Season 2 begins today
And it is kind of bittersweet.
I ended the season with a 2v2 rating of 2060, a 3v3 rating of 1847, and a RBG rating of ~1820. Neither the 3v3 nor RBG were my season highs, nor were they high enough to get the titles I wanted. This is the sad part. I think I definitely could have pushed them high enough to get those ratings, I just didn't put the time in.
Part of that is because I've just been really busy, and I think part of it is because we didn't have quite the same success with 3s as we did in 2s ... and that was disappointing and frustrating. I also didn't realize the season was ending this week until after we spent Sunday night playing 2v2.
2s actually went really well. We went just 7-5 but it felt like we were far more successful than that; we pushed our rating almost 40 points higher than when we started and that was by far the highest we'd been all season. The difference was using Mind Control instead of Fear!
Mind Control has no cooldown, does not share diminishing returns with Cyclone, and is similar to Cyclone in the regard that the player that is MCed cannot be healed by their teammate! It is also hilarious. We had several games where we got some really good CC chains off - a full cyclone, followed by a Mind Control (running out of line of sight or auto attacking the teammate!), followed by switching the cyclone/MC to the other opponent.
It was a lot of fun and brought with it an element of control that we hadn't really felt too often. We still failed against the couple hunter teams we fought (le sigh), but it worked really well in the other games we had.
I ended the season with a 2v2 rating of 2060, a 3v3 rating of 1847, and a RBG rating of ~1820. Neither the 3v3 nor RBG were my season highs, nor were they high enough to get the titles I wanted. This is the sad part. I think I definitely could have pushed them high enough to get those ratings, I just didn't put the time in.
Part of that is because I've just been really busy, and I think part of it is because we didn't have quite the same success with 3s as we did in 2s ... and that was disappointing and frustrating. I also didn't realize the season was ending this week until after we spent Sunday night playing 2v2.
2s actually went really well. We went just 7-5 but it felt like we were far more successful than that; we pushed our rating almost 40 points higher than when we started and that was by far the highest we'd been all season. The difference was using Mind Control instead of Fear!
Mind Control has no cooldown, does not share diminishing returns with Cyclone, and is similar to Cyclone in the regard that the player that is MCed cannot be healed by their teammate! It is also hilarious. We had several games where we got some really good CC chains off - a full cyclone, followed by a Mind Control (running out of line of sight or auto attacking the teammate!), followed by switching the cyclone/MC to the other opponent.
It was a lot of fun and brought with it an element of control that we hadn't really felt too often. We still failed against the couple hunter teams we fought (le sigh), but it worked really well in the other games we had.
Thursday, June 18, 2015
It's been a while!
Not only has this week been busy, hence the lack of posts, but this past weekend was also busy! In fact, it was so busy that I didn't really play at all. Nevertheless, I do have a PvP update!
About a week ago, I was waiting for my arena partner to hop on and decided to join an RBG group in the meantime. It took foreeeeever to get the last few members; so long, in fact, that my arena partner finally signed on by the time we got our third healer. He joined our group (shadow priests are OP in RBGs) and off we went!
I was really hoping to be able to crack 1800 and get to the next tier of groups in the LFG tool (generally they are restricted by your CR, so at 1800 I would have an easier time joining a group than at 1700). Our first match went really well! Not only did we win, and quite handily, but I led in healing and my SP partner led in damage!
This brought me to the familiar place of being one win away from breaking 1800. I've gotten to the 1790s 5-6 times this season, just to end up losing. This time actually turned out differently Not only did we win, but we also ended up leading in healing / damage again. We would go on to win five games in a row! It was pretty crazy. I've never been on a team that won that many games total, let alone in a row.
We ended up losing the last two we played, and people had started getting kind of antsy so everyone agreed it was a good idea to just stop there.
About a week ago, I was waiting for my arena partner to hop on and decided to join an RBG group in the meantime. It took foreeeeever to get the last few members; so long, in fact, that my arena partner finally signed on by the time we got our third healer. He joined our group (shadow priests are OP in RBGs) and off we went!
I was really hoping to be able to crack 1800 and get to the next tier of groups in the LFG tool (generally they are restricted by your CR, so at 1800 I would have an easier time joining a group than at 1700). Our first match went really well! Not only did we win, and quite handily, but I led in healing and my SP partner led in damage!
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| Top 4 in damage are all DoT classes! |
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| Druids usually also lead in over-healing |
We ended up losing the last two we played, and people had started getting kind of antsy so everyone agreed it was a good idea to just stop there.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Alternative Arena
Last weekend we had some time to do Arenas and decided to start off with our alts first, and then go to our mains. I played my priest and my partner played his rogue; at first I started off shadow, with the idea that quicker games would be ideal.
Let me tell you, shadow priests with only a few pieces of PvP gear (and not even the 2 piece trinket bonus!) die really quickly. Heck, I didn't even have the CC breaking trinket at the beginning! I would get hit by a stun right away and be practically dead before it wore off.
After 4-5 games where I fell over dead just because the other team looked at me, I switched to Discipline. We did pretty well with that comp, even getting our MMR up into the 14-1500 range! We ended up cranking out 40+ games on our alts and never even switched to our mains. We went 27-17 overall, so probably won about 67% of our games as Disc/Rogue.
Given our experience (one day!) and lack of gear, I was pretty impressed with the results. I did end up earning enough conquest by the end to purchase a trinket (2 piece bonus! - 15% reduced damage) and two pieces of armor to get the 4 piece bonus, but I still had a good 4-5 pieces that were just random blues from leveling up.
Let me tell you, shadow priests with only a few pieces of PvP gear (and not even the 2 piece trinket bonus!) die really quickly. Heck, I didn't even have the CC breaking trinket at the beginning! I would get hit by a stun right away and be practically dead before it wore off.
After 4-5 games where I fell over dead just because the other team looked at me, I switched to Discipline. We did pretty well with that comp, even getting our MMR up into the 14-1500 range! We ended up cranking out 40+ games on our alts and never even switched to our mains. We went 27-17 overall, so probably won about 67% of our games as Disc/Rogue.
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| Boy is he ugly right now |
I actually sold the 2 armor pieces back at the end of the day (you have 2 hours after you purchase them) so that when I earn enough conquest overall I can buy the weapon right away (you can't buy the weapons until you've earned 7200 for the season). It's a neat little trick - help yourself out in the short term and the long term!
It was definitely a different experience, being on the other side of the dps/healer combo we usually run. I really felt the lack of CC though - all I have is fear which is on a cooldown. On my druid (both feral and resto), I have a stun which is on a similar length cd and also roots and cyclone, neither of which have a CD.
Once I get more used to the priest play-style, it will be interesting to see which healer pairs better with a rogue!
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
10 miler - check!
Saturday I ran a 10 mile race, the first time I'd ever done a race of that distance. Heading into it, I didn't feel like I had trained very well for it, so I didn't really have a goal. I figured I would just go, run, and be happy with whatever time I ended up with.
The night before the race, I actually stopped and thought about the training I had done. After the half marathon, I essentially took an entire week off, partially due to a long 5 day vacation and partially due to really sore legs. This left me with just about 3 weeks to train, and the first weekend I just did a nice easy 6 miles to get back into the swing of things. I followed that up with 10 and 8 mile long runs, with my two weekly runs somewhere in the 3-6 range. This was actually pretty similar to how I had trained for the half, the only difference was that I never really felt like I pushed myself on any of the runs leading up to the 10 miler.
I assumed there would be a station at some point during the race that would have gels, bananas, donuts, or something for the runner's to eat, so I didn't bring along any of my own. I did eat two gels right before the start of the race though. There weren't really any timers along the way, so I had no idea what my pace was for the vast majority of the race. Apparently there was a single table halfway through that had gels, but I completely missed it, so I didn't eat anything during the run.
Until the last couple miles, I didn't even feel like I was running that fast. I thought I was doing a nice easy pace, probably a little under 9 minutes. The last two miles I really tried to kick it up a notch, and as I crossed the finish line I saw the race time was 1:28 ... just under 9 minute miles! Couldn't complain about that, though then I started to wonder how late I had started. 5 minutes? 8 minutes!?
It took a while for the website to post results, and waiting for that was mildly agonizing:
Huh. Not bad! Not bad at all! 2 minutes shy of breaking an 8 minute pace for the entire run! Almost top 10% overall, and almost top 20% for the men. I passed 269 people in the last 5 miles! If I hadn't gotten stuck behind the 2 hour pace group, could I have easily saved 2 minutes by not having to weave around people? Hmmm.
Perhaps the best part was that I felt pretty good after the race. Worlds better than after the half. I have no idea what the difference was, either.
The night before the race, I actually stopped and thought about the training I had done. After the half marathon, I essentially took an entire week off, partially due to a long 5 day vacation and partially due to really sore legs. This left me with just about 3 weeks to train, and the first weekend I just did a nice easy 6 miles to get back into the swing of things. I followed that up with 10 and 8 mile long runs, with my two weekly runs somewhere in the 3-6 range. This was actually pretty similar to how I had trained for the half, the only difference was that I never really felt like I pushed myself on any of the runs leading up to the 10 miler.
I assumed there would be a station at some point during the race that would have gels, bananas, donuts, or something for the runner's to eat, so I didn't bring along any of my own. I did eat two gels right before the start of the race though. There weren't really any timers along the way, so I had no idea what my pace was for the vast majority of the race. Apparently there was a single table halfway through that had gels, but I completely missed it, so I didn't eat anything during the run.
Until the last couple miles, I didn't even feel like I was running that fast. I thought I was doing a nice easy pace, probably a little under 9 minutes. The last two miles I really tried to kick it up a notch, and as I crossed the finish line I saw the race time was 1:28 ... just under 9 minute miles! Couldn't complain about that, though then I started to wonder how late I had started. 5 minutes? 8 minutes!?
It took a while for the website to post results, and waiting for that was mildly agonizing:
Perhaps the best part was that I felt pretty good after the race. Worlds better than after the half. I have no idea what the difference was, either.
Friday, June 5, 2015
2 outta 3 aint bad ... I guess
I had 3 goals headed into this past weekend that I touched on here. I succeeded in getting Cres to 100, I not only finished off Gnomebane but also became a Manslayer ... but I tooooootally failed at pushing my RBG rating.
It had been several weeks since I had done RBGs. Being fully geared, the opportunity for an extra piece of conquest gear was unnecessary and getting into them can take some time. During my available time I'd been focused on Arena games. But back when I was doing them before, I had been very successful, winning what seems like 90% of my matches since I switched to Resto and only looking for groups intent on pushing rating.
I figured that success would continue this past weekend. Friday night I didn't see many groups in the queue, so I just focused on getting Gnomebane done. Saturday afternoon after hitting 100, I looked around for groups, and ... there weren't very many. I puttered around doing other things and finally found a group that was around my rating. We won our first game (quite handily!), putting me one win away 1800. There were warning signs though - our group comp was alllll over the place. People didn't sound confident in voice chat on strategy. We didn't have a target caller. Still, we had won and groups had been hard to come by, sooo ... I stayed for another!
We lost. I left the group because it didn't really seem like a situation that was going to be successful. It took me a while to find another group, but I finally did. We won our first! One win away from 1800 again! ... and then we lost two in a row. And then we won another! Again, one win away from 1800.
And then the leader and two other people who were from the server disconnected. They were still in voice chat, but apparently their server had crashed. It was midnight at this point, so after waiting 5 minutes they called it. Disappointing first night of attempts, but I still had all day Sunday!
Sunday afternoon, I hopped on, expecting there to be a good amount of groups. There was only 1! I waited in this group for two hours before we finally got a full 10. We lost, then won, then lost, and then the group broke up. It took me several hours to find another group, and we lost our first, won our second ... and then the leader said he was calling it because he "wasn't feeling it." Sigh. I ended right around where I had started.
I have no idea what the difference was. Maybe weekends are bad times to try and RBG? I know that the meta has shifted somewhat - the ideal healer composition is now two Monks and a Paladin, and DPS has taken a strong shift toward dot classes (2 shadowpriest and a warlock is pretty popular right now). It was very surprising to me how much trouble I had finding a group. It had never seemed that hard previously!
It had been several weeks since I had done RBGs. Being fully geared, the opportunity for an extra piece of conquest gear was unnecessary and getting into them can take some time. During my available time I'd been focused on Arena games. But back when I was doing them before, I had been very successful, winning what seems like 90% of my matches since I switched to Resto and only looking for groups intent on pushing rating.
I figured that success would continue this past weekend. Friday night I didn't see many groups in the queue, so I just focused on getting Gnomebane done. Saturday afternoon after hitting 100, I looked around for groups, and ... there weren't very many. I puttered around doing other things and finally found a group that was around my rating. We won our first game (quite handily!), putting me one win away 1800. There were warning signs though - our group comp was alllll over the place. People didn't sound confident in voice chat on strategy. We didn't have a target caller. Still, we had won and groups had been hard to come by, sooo ... I stayed for another!
We lost. I left the group because it didn't really seem like a situation that was going to be successful. It took me a while to find another group, but I finally did. We won our first! One win away from 1800 again! ... and then we lost two in a row. And then we won another! Again, one win away from 1800.
And then the leader and two other people who were from the server disconnected. They were still in voice chat, but apparently their server had crashed. It was midnight at this point, so after waiting 5 minutes they called it. Disappointing first night of attempts, but I still had all day Sunday!
Sunday afternoon, I hopped on, expecting there to be a good amount of groups. There was only 1! I waited in this group for two hours before we finally got a full 10. We lost, then won, then lost, and then the group broke up. It took me several hours to find another group, and we lost our first, won our second ... and then the leader said he was calling it because he "wasn't feeling it." Sigh. I ended right around where I had started.
I have no idea what the difference was. Maybe weekends are bad times to try and RBG? I know that the meta has shifted somewhat - the ideal healer composition is now two Monks and a Paladin, and DPS has taken a strong shift toward dot classes (2 shadowpriest and a warlock is pretty popular right now). It was very surprising to me how much trouble I had finding a group. It had never seemed that hard previously!
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
A fitness update!
Today marks the end of my 12 week competition to lose weight. I started off at ~191, and ended at ~180. I was surprised to see that I lost pretty close to a pound a week because I definitely felt like I was less successful in terms of keeping to my diet this time. I do, however, think that my initial weight of 191 could have been a little inflated - I spent the last few days of my bulk eating ridiculous amounts of food, just because I knew it would be a long time before I could do that again. So I may have ended up a little bloated and artificially increased the before weight.
The reason I felt like I was less successful in keeping to my diet was that it seemed like there were a lot more special occasions (Memorial Day weekend, 5 day vacation, Brew at the Zoo, etc) that it just wasn't feasible to count calories for.
I had hoped to judge the effectiveness of my bulk by the end of my cut (since at that point the amount of muscle gain would be more apparent both visually and in the end-weight), but since I didn't quite get back to how lean I was before the bulk it's hard to tell. One thing that probably hurt me in terms of retaining as much muscle as possible is that I basically stopped doing Squats and Deadlifts for most of my cut, so I probably lost some muscle because of that.
Now we just have to wait until June 20th to see whether my beard can win me a prize!
ps. and yes, I plan on stuffing my face tonight!
The reason I felt like I was less successful in keeping to my diet was that it seemed like there were a lot more special occasions (Memorial Day weekend, 5 day vacation, Brew at the Zoo, etc) that it just wasn't feasible to count calories for.
I had hoped to judge the effectiveness of my bulk by the end of my cut (since at that point the amount of muscle gain would be more apparent both visually and in the end-weight), but since I didn't quite get back to how lean I was before the bulk it's hard to tell. One thing that probably hurt me in terms of retaining as much muscle as possible is that I basically stopped doing Squats and Deadlifts for most of my cut, so I probably lost some muscle because of that.
Now we just have to wait until June 20th to see whether my beard can win me a prize!
ps. and yes, I plan on stuffing my face tonight!
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Nemesis Groups - the other half of Ashran
Ashran was the new PvP "battleground" this expansion. It tried to tie in PvE objectives and mass PvP like some old PvP maps - old Alterac Valley, Wintergrasp. Their success with Ashran might be called murky at best. They've made multiple changes to Ashran along the way in an effort to fix the problems it has. At first the queues were just unbearable. They fixed that, kind of, but there are still plenty of "does this make sense?" issues.
Basically, most of the rewards (honor and conquest) are gotten from doing the PvE Objectives, meaning that most people aren't interested in fighting in the middle of the map. This lends itself to feeling very anti-PvP, which is rather a shame given the fact that this was the only new PvP map introduced in WoD. Open the LFG tool and look under Ashran, and you'll see plenty of "Events group!" and "Winning events!" groups. These groups first and foremost try to win the events. The events pop up randomly and have a fixed cooldown in between them, and in between events, groups will try to meet in the middle of the map and "push the road" ... which is basically just a way to kill time until the next event pops up. Of course, there is also a second type of group you'll find in the LFG tool: Nemesis groups.
The PvP building in your garrison, the Gladiator's Sanctum, offers a number of quests that revolve around killing the opposite faction in open world PvP. Battlegrounds (whether rated or not) do not count toward these quests, but Ashran does. Basically there is one quest for each race, requires you to kill 500 of them, and once completed you get a cool title. You can accept one quest at a time and, in an odd quirk, while in an actual group (not just overall raid, you have to be in that person's group in that raid) anyone who also has that quest will earn you credit every time they kill someone. So, as an example, the first quest I selected was for Gnomes. If someone else in my group was also on that quest, then every time we killed a single Gnome, we would both get credit for 2 kills toward our quest. This is the basis for Nemesis groups - every group in a raid has a specified race, hoping to get credit for 5 kills each time you kill a single player.
Some races are easier to kill than others - the vast majority of Alliance are Human or Night Elf, and so those are quite easy. There are very few Pandaren overall, and they are split between Horde and Alliance, so that is the toughest one.
Nemesis groups are focused on one thing - killing the opposing faction. They sometimes even hop from server to server trying to find an Ashran that has a large amount of alliance/horde. Once they've found a group, they try to control the road, but let the opposite faction win all the events and then slaughter them afterward. This way the other players don't just leave; call it a perverse win-win. Here you can see my group waiting for the alliance to complete the racing event:
If you look closely at the map, you can tell our raid is trying to block the two entrances to this event, and once the alliance gets 90% of the way to victory, we'd charge in and try to kill everyone. My goal on Friday night was to quickly knock out the rest of my Gnome quest ... and I was successful!
I am now known as Gnomebane Laktose. The titles are shared across all characters on your account, which is nice. Since humans would be pretty quick, I knocked that one out of the way this weekend, too:
I believe that title is Laktose the Manslayer. Completing all the Nemesis quests gives you the title of "Warlord of Draenor" which is pretty awesome.
Of course, Blizzard is changing Ashran again in the next patch. Some of the side objectives will no longer reward conquest, which doesn't seem like a huge deal ... but what will have a large impact is that they are no longer allowing raids to queue for Ashran. Event groups and Nemesis groups will cease to exist, you'll just be thrown into Ashran with a bunch of random people with different goals. To make things a little better though, they are dropping the amount of kills required from 500 to 100. This actually makes it easier, number-wise, to finish each quest, of course. In 6.1, in an ideal scenario (full group on the same quest), you'd need to kill 100 members of that race. In 6.2, worst case scenario you need to kill 100 ... but if you happen to find anyone else in your raid group on that quest, the number will go down. Of course, it might not be as easy to find a group willing to kill the opposing faction as opposed to just trying to win rewards, but we'll see.
Basically, most of the rewards (honor and conquest) are gotten from doing the PvE Objectives, meaning that most people aren't interested in fighting in the middle of the map. This lends itself to feeling very anti-PvP, which is rather a shame given the fact that this was the only new PvP map introduced in WoD. Open the LFG tool and look under Ashran, and you'll see plenty of "Events group!" and "Winning events!" groups. These groups first and foremost try to win the events. The events pop up randomly and have a fixed cooldown in between them, and in between events, groups will try to meet in the middle of the map and "push the road" ... which is basically just a way to kill time until the next event pops up. Of course, there is also a second type of group you'll find in the LFG tool: Nemesis groups.
The PvP building in your garrison, the Gladiator's Sanctum, offers a number of quests that revolve around killing the opposite faction in open world PvP. Battlegrounds (whether rated or not) do not count toward these quests, but Ashran does. Basically there is one quest for each race, requires you to kill 500 of them, and once completed you get a cool title. You can accept one quest at a time and, in an odd quirk, while in an actual group (not just overall raid, you have to be in that person's group in that raid) anyone who also has that quest will earn you credit every time they kill someone. So, as an example, the first quest I selected was for Gnomes. If someone else in my group was also on that quest, then every time we killed a single Gnome, we would both get credit for 2 kills toward our quest. This is the basis for Nemesis groups - every group in a raid has a specified race, hoping to get credit for 5 kills each time you kill a single player.
Some races are easier to kill than others - the vast majority of Alliance are Human or Night Elf, and so those are quite easy. There are very few Pandaren overall, and they are split between Horde and Alliance, so that is the toughest one.
Nemesis groups are focused on one thing - killing the opposing faction. They sometimes even hop from server to server trying to find an Ashran that has a large amount of alliance/horde. Once they've found a group, they try to control the road, but let the opposite faction win all the events and then slaughter them afterward. This way the other players don't just leave; call it a perverse win-win. Here you can see my group waiting for the alliance to complete the racing event:
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| Waiting ... |
I am now known as Gnomebane Laktose. The titles are shared across all characters on your account, which is nice. Since humans would be pretty quick, I knocked that one out of the way this weekend, too:
I believe that title is Laktose the Manslayer. Completing all the Nemesis quests gives you the title of "Warlord of Draenor" which is pretty awesome.
Of course, Blizzard is changing Ashran again in the next patch. Some of the side objectives will no longer reward conquest, which doesn't seem like a huge deal ... but what will have a large impact is that they are no longer allowing raids to queue for Ashran. Event groups and Nemesis groups will cease to exist, you'll just be thrown into Ashran with a bunch of random people with different goals. To make things a little better though, they are dropping the amount of kills required from 500 to 100. This actually makes it easier, number-wise, to finish each quest, of course. In 6.1, in an ideal scenario (full group on the same quest), you'd need to kill 100 members of that race. In 6.2, worst case scenario you need to kill 100 ... but if you happen to find anyone else in your raid group on that quest, the number will go down. Of course, it might not be as easy to find a group willing to kill the opposing faction as opposed to just trying to win rewards, but we'll see.
Monday, June 1, 2015
Ding!
Saturday morning (well, I guess it was actually early afternoon, since I went running in the morning) I devoted to getting my priest to level 100. He was half-way through 96 when I started, but all of it was rested. I recently discovered that you can buy potions that increase your experience earned by 20% in your garrison for just 100 resources, too! And for some reason I hadn't replaced my heirloom weapon yet either, so that was another 10% to experience. In all, a lot of extra experience.
I started off by running the two daily quests I had from my inn. Queues went pretty quickly since I was queuing as a healer. I had read that the zone Spires of Arak also has an additional 20% bonus to experience, so I headed there. I made sure to do any challenges I came across (~80-90k exp from one!) and open any of the 'treasure' items (~20-30k exp from one!). Still, I should have done a bit more reading on how you get the additional buff.
There are two quest lines in Spires, one with the Arakoa in the north and one with the Goblins in the south. I started off doing the Arakoa line, got about halfway through, and then for some reason switched to do the Goblin quests in the south.
After I had finished the Goblin quests, I went back up north and the very next quest I did was the one that provided the bonus experience for the zone. Woops! It still went pretty quickly though:
Getting to 100 means doing the Harrison Jones quest line alllll over again which I am not looking forward to. Bleah. Hopefully at this point I remember them well enough that they should go pretty quickly.
I spent a little bit of time in Ashran on Sunday with Crescendo and within maybe 30 minutes had gotten 4 pieces of PvP gear! Of course, then a Nemesis group joined and our group mostly fell apart. What's a Nemesis group? I'll tell you tomorrow!
I started off by running the two daily quests I had from my inn. Queues went pretty quickly since I was queuing as a healer. I had read that the zone Spires of Arak also has an additional 20% bonus to experience, so I headed there. I made sure to do any challenges I came across (~80-90k exp from one!) and open any of the 'treasure' items (~20-30k exp from one!). Still, I should have done a bit more reading on how you get the additional buff.
There are two quest lines in Spires, one with the Arakoa in the north and one with the Goblins in the south. I started off doing the Arakoa line, got about halfway through, and then for some reason switched to do the Goblin quests in the south.
After I had finished the Goblin quests, I went back up north and the very next quest I did was the one that provided the bonus experience for the zone. Woops! It still went pretty quickly though:
Getting to 100 means doing the Harrison Jones quest line alllll over again which I am not looking forward to. Bleah. Hopefully at this point I remember them well enough that they should go pretty quickly.
I spent a little bit of time in Ashran on Sunday with Crescendo and within maybe 30 minutes had gotten 4 pieces of PvP gear! Of course, then a Nemesis group joined and our group mostly fell apart. What's a Nemesis group? I'll tell you tomorrow!
Thursday, May 28, 2015
"There is nothing to do in WoW."
The title is a complaint I often see when reading various forums (or even the Trade chat!). I even recall feeling like this in the past. Right now though, this couldn't be any further from how I feel! I feel like there is never enough time to do everything I want to do in-game, in fact.
So I wonder how much of this is a function of play time and how long you've played the game. Though I have a good amount of time to play on the weekends (generally), I rarely am able to do much during the week at this point. Are the people who are complaining of being bored able to put in a lot more hours and therefore burning through content faster?
I also missed the last two expansions (well over 4 years of time), and I imagine that some of the things on my To Do List would have been accomplished over that time period had I been playing the entire time. Are the people who are complaining of being bored those that have been playing continuously for long stretches of time?
I feel like a big part of my feeling like there is always something to do also stems from the fact that I enjoy PvPing. If I were just raiding, I'd complete the weekly run and then be done with PvE content for the week - there wouldn't really be a reason to continue to run the same content without a chance for gear. Granted, I try to hit the Conquest Point Cap every week to get gear (well, at this point I'm capped), but even after that is done with I still have the desire to play more games simply to increase my rating. Because there's no "end point" with Arena / RBG ratings, I have a larger time-sink available than those who just participate in PvE.
Still, I recognize there are some valid complaints about the direction Blizzard went with WoD. This video was pretty highly rated and does a good job explaining some of them:
Honestly, the Garrisons don't really bother me. They are a bit more isolated than capital cities, but I am rarely actually in mine. There is almost always something I need to be doing in-game, I never just sit around and twiddle my thumbs while waiting for queues.
I do think the mounts / rep-grinds this expansion are pretty underwhelming though ... I have barely spent any time purposefully grinding for rep with any WoD reps since my return; conversely, I have ground for mounts / reps in pre-WoD areas.
So I wonder how much of this is a function of play time and how long you've played the game. Though I have a good amount of time to play on the weekends (generally), I rarely am able to do much during the week at this point. Are the people who are complaining of being bored able to put in a lot more hours and therefore burning through content faster?
I also missed the last two expansions (well over 4 years of time), and I imagine that some of the things on my To Do List would have been accomplished over that time period had I been playing the entire time. Are the people who are complaining of being bored those that have been playing continuously for long stretches of time?
I feel like a big part of my feeling like there is always something to do also stems from the fact that I enjoy PvPing. If I were just raiding, I'd complete the weekly run and then be done with PvE content for the week - there wouldn't really be a reason to continue to run the same content without a chance for gear. Granted, I try to hit the Conquest Point Cap every week to get gear (well, at this point I'm capped), but even after that is done with I still have the desire to play more games simply to increase my rating. Because there's no "end point" with Arena / RBG ratings, I have a larger time-sink available than those who just participate in PvE.
Still, I recognize there are some valid complaints about the direction Blizzard went with WoD. This video was pretty highly rated and does a good job explaining some of them:
Honestly, the Garrisons don't really bother me. They are a bit more isolated than capital cities, but I am rarely actually in mine. There is almost always something I need to be doing in-game, I never just sit around and twiddle my thumbs while waiting for queues.
I do think the mounts / rep-grinds this expansion are pretty underwhelming though ... I have barely spent any time purposefully grinding for rep with any WoD reps since my return; conversely, I have ground for mounts / reps in pre-WoD areas.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
The Weekend Update
Despite having a 4-day weekend, I actually didn't have that much time to play this weekend. For some strange reason people get really excited about doing social events on long weekends. Weird.
Anyway, some quick updates!
We tried some 3v3 arena last night and, despite making some early gains we ended up with a losing record overall. For whatever reason, 3s games rarely seem close / competitive. It seems like 75% of our games are over very quickly and are pretty one-sided, whether it's us doing the killing or getting killed. 2s, on the other hand, I'd say that about 90% of our games feel close and competitive, like either team could win; I'm not sure what the difference is.
One thing we definitely struggle with in 3s is when I get focused. As a feral druid, I'm somewhat of a glass cannon. Outside of bear form, I have a single defensive cooldown which reduces damage taken by 50% for 6 seconds. There are two charges and a charge regenerates every 2 minutes. Both of my CCs (cyclone, roots) have cast times. I have a stun on a 30 second cooldown.
As a comparison, hunters have 2 charges of Deterrence, which reduces damage by 30% and deflects all attacks, but renders the hunter unable to attack and, I believe, unable to be healed (which sounds bad, but if your healer is CCed you aren't getting heals anyway!). These regenerate every 3 minutes. In addition, they have an ability called Roar of Sacrifice which, when cast on a player, makes it so they cannot be critically hit for 12 seconds (they also cannot crit themselves). This is on a 1 minute cooldown. Add in the fact that hunters are ranged and so can try to kite when in danger (as opposed to feral druid, who has to stay in melee range to do any damage) and even use abilities like Disengage (which can cause players to be rooted, if you take a certain talent!) and they have even more damage reducing abilities. Freezing trap is an instant cast, though can be missed; do deal with this, some hunters take Binding Shot, which stuns the player if they move more than 5 yards from the tether. Otherwise, they generally take wyvern shot, another CC (1.5 cast time).
Rogues, as a second comparison, have evasion (1 minute cooldown, dodge increased by 100% for 10 seconds), cloak of shadows (1 minute cooldown, immune to spells for 5 seconds), vanish (disappear, breaking movement impairing effects, 2 minute cooldown), and preparation (resets the cooldown of the three previous skills, 5 minute cooldown). They also have a variety of CCs, including blind, kidney shot, sap, gouge, none of which have a cast-time.
None of this is to say that feral druids are helpless or bad. They are certainly in a good spot right now. I just feel like I have less tools to deal with being focused, and I end up getting flustered. It is definitely a weak spot in my game right now!
I actually had an invite to try healing in 3s from one of the hunters we had previously done 3s with, though he was going to play on his rogue. I accepted, because it's definitely something I'd like to try doing in the future. As we talked a little more about it, waiting for a second DPSer, we realized that my rating was about 300 higher than his. He then asked if I wanted to just try 2s, in which he was ~1850 ... feeling bad about saying no at this point, I said sure, but warned that I might not be very good since the majority of my experience is healing in RBGs. We played 3 games and lost all 3, though two of them were really close and could have gone either way. The second game was against a priest/lock combo and the priest spent half the time using Dominate Mind on me which was really annoying! Overall though, a positive experience, I think. We stopped after 3 because the rogue felt bad tanking my rating, ha.
We did pretty well in 2s overall, going 14-11. We ended on a nice little 3 game winning streak which was good, because we certainly had some frustrating games in the middle. In particular, we had one game against a Windwalker Monk (melee dps) and priest healer that ... I have no idea, still, how we lost. The priest was essentially oom for what seemed like forever, and even with all my cooldowns up I couldn't get him down ... and then we lost. Mind boggling. I think sometimes when we realize another healer is OOM, we get tunnel vision and stop playing the way that got us there in the first place. Too focused on trying to DPS down the healer, we stop CCing the DPS or switching when it's useful. We both ended with our rating over 2k and my partner got as high as 2030 (highest yet!).
I also spent some time leveling up my priest, who is now 96! I realized that there are potions you can buy in your garrison for just 100 resources, that increase the amount of experience you gain by 20%! That certainly helped.
This weekend, both my normal 2s partner and my wife will be out of town ... so this is what's on the agenda:
1) Level 100 on Crescendo. This should be pretty quick, I think. Couple hours, tops.
2) Rated Battlegrounds! Right now the cutoff for top 10% in RBGs is 1819, and my rating is currently 1788. I have had a really high success rate in RBGs recently it seems like, so I am hopeful this is pretty easy to get. Top 35% get the title Soldier of the Horde and top 10% get Defender of the Horde. Guardian of the Horde is top 3%, but requires 1950 ... not sure how reasonable that is, but we'll see!
3) Finishing up my quest to get 500 Gnome honorable kills in "world" pvp ... the title of Gnomebane awaits!
If I get all that done I might check out BRF or start working on Crescendo's pvp gear.
Anyway, some quick updates!
We tried some 3v3 arena last night and, despite making some early gains we ended up with a losing record overall. For whatever reason, 3s games rarely seem close / competitive. It seems like 75% of our games are over very quickly and are pretty one-sided, whether it's us doing the killing or getting killed. 2s, on the other hand, I'd say that about 90% of our games feel close and competitive, like either team could win; I'm not sure what the difference is.
One thing we definitely struggle with in 3s is when I get focused. As a feral druid, I'm somewhat of a glass cannon. Outside of bear form, I have a single defensive cooldown which reduces damage taken by 50% for 6 seconds. There are two charges and a charge regenerates every 2 minutes. Both of my CCs (cyclone, roots) have cast times. I have a stun on a 30 second cooldown.
As a comparison, hunters have 2 charges of Deterrence, which reduces damage by 30% and deflects all attacks, but renders the hunter unable to attack and, I believe, unable to be healed (which sounds bad, but if your healer is CCed you aren't getting heals anyway!). These regenerate every 3 minutes. In addition, they have an ability called Roar of Sacrifice which, when cast on a player, makes it so they cannot be critically hit for 12 seconds (they also cannot crit themselves). This is on a 1 minute cooldown. Add in the fact that hunters are ranged and so can try to kite when in danger (as opposed to feral druid, who has to stay in melee range to do any damage) and even use abilities like Disengage (which can cause players to be rooted, if you take a certain talent!) and they have even more damage reducing abilities. Freezing trap is an instant cast, though can be missed; do deal with this, some hunters take Binding Shot, which stuns the player if they move more than 5 yards from the tether. Otherwise, they generally take wyvern shot, another CC (1.5 cast time).
Rogues, as a second comparison, have evasion (1 minute cooldown, dodge increased by 100% for 10 seconds), cloak of shadows (1 minute cooldown, immune to spells for 5 seconds), vanish (disappear, breaking movement impairing effects, 2 minute cooldown), and preparation (resets the cooldown of the three previous skills, 5 minute cooldown). They also have a variety of CCs, including blind, kidney shot, sap, gouge, none of which have a cast-time.
None of this is to say that feral druids are helpless or bad. They are certainly in a good spot right now. I just feel like I have less tools to deal with being focused, and I end up getting flustered. It is definitely a weak spot in my game right now!
I actually had an invite to try healing in 3s from one of the hunters we had previously done 3s with, though he was going to play on his rogue. I accepted, because it's definitely something I'd like to try doing in the future. As we talked a little more about it, waiting for a second DPSer, we realized that my rating was about 300 higher than his. He then asked if I wanted to just try 2s, in which he was ~1850 ... feeling bad about saying no at this point, I said sure, but warned that I might not be very good since the majority of my experience is healing in RBGs. We played 3 games and lost all 3, though two of them were really close and could have gone either way. The second game was against a priest/lock combo and the priest spent half the time using Dominate Mind on me which was really annoying! Overall though, a positive experience, I think. We stopped after 3 because the rogue felt bad tanking my rating, ha.
We did pretty well in 2s overall, going 14-11. We ended on a nice little 3 game winning streak which was good, because we certainly had some frustrating games in the middle. In particular, we had one game against a Windwalker Monk (melee dps) and priest healer that ... I have no idea, still, how we lost. The priest was essentially oom for what seemed like forever, and even with all my cooldowns up I couldn't get him down ... and then we lost. Mind boggling. I think sometimes when we realize another healer is OOM, we get tunnel vision and stop playing the way that got us there in the first place. Too focused on trying to DPS down the healer, we stop CCing the DPS or switching when it's useful. We both ended with our rating over 2k and my partner got as high as 2030 (highest yet!).
I also spent some time leveling up my priest, who is now 96! I realized that there are potions you can buy in your garrison for just 100 resources, that increase the amount of experience you gain by 20%! That certainly helped.
This weekend, both my normal 2s partner and my wife will be out of town ... so this is what's on the agenda:
1) Level 100 on Crescendo. This should be pretty quick, I think. Couple hours, tops.
2) Rated Battlegrounds! Right now the cutoff for top 10% in RBGs is 1819, and my rating is currently 1788. I have had a really high success rate in RBGs recently it seems like, so I am hopeful this is pretty easy to get. Top 35% get the title Soldier of the Horde and top 10% get Defender of the Horde. Guardian of the Horde is top 3%, but requires 1950 ... not sure how reasonable that is, but we'll see!
3) Finishing up my quest to get 500 Gnome honorable kills in "world" pvp ... the title of Gnomebane awaits!
If I get all that done I might check out BRF or start working on Crescendo's pvp gear.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Monday, May 18, 2015
Soooo ... that happened.
Last Friday I got an email that Blizzard had tried to re-subscribe to WoW for me, but that the Credit Card info had changed and they were unable to (this makes sense, we had to get new cards recently). I made a mental note to take care of it when I got home, and then promptly forgot about it.
Sunday, I logged into this:
Woops! Guess my sub lapsed ... but you can use gold to purchase a game-time token from the character screen. I hadn't really planned on using gold to pay for my sub until I felt like my Mage's garrison was running smoothly, but ... clicking that button seemed so much simpler than having to get up and find my wallet and then logging into their website. So I just clicked it! World of Warcraft is now Free To Play!
I feel like I had a busy weekend, but we still managed to get a good chunk of arena games in. Late Saturday night, one of the hunters we had previously played with was online so we did some 3s games. We started off 2-2, spurring some comments along the lines of, "I feel like we're just stuck around the same rating" which, at the time, was ~1850. Then we went on a nice little run, going 6-2 and getting our rating all the way up to 1950! Our MMR was well over 2k, around 2100 at this point. At this point it was after midnight and I was quite tired, but I figured I'd stay around for a few more games to see if we could break 2k. Being really tired and doing arenas doesn't quite mix well, and we ended on a losing streak, back down to around ~1915. Still, it was an overall positive experience.
We were able to do some 2s the next day, and those did not quite go the same way. We faced one comp in particular that just destroyed us - Mage and Feral druid. We usually do really well against double DPS, but this one we went 0-3 against!! Outside of that we had some pretty close games that we couldn't quite end up winning, though we did beat a hunter / druid team which was enjoyable. We ended up losing more games than we won and ended in the high 1900s. Perhaps the funniest game of the weekend was this one:
Not sure what happened there, I think one of the players had accidentally joined without switching back to his damage spec. They left as soon as I opened on the first player.
It's possible that I was rusty - I hadn't played in about a week and a half, and it had been even longer since we had done 2s (probably 2-3 weeks?). Still, I thought the more frenetic pace of 3s would lead to 2s being even easier for us to handle ... and at least on Sunday, that wasn't really the case.
Sunday, I logged into this:
Woops! Guess my sub lapsed ... but you can use gold to purchase a game-time token from the character screen. I hadn't really planned on using gold to pay for my sub until I felt like my Mage's garrison was running smoothly, but ... clicking that button seemed so much simpler than having to get up and find my wallet and then logging into their website. So I just clicked it! World of Warcraft is now Free To Play!
I feel like I had a busy weekend, but we still managed to get a good chunk of arena games in. Late Saturday night, one of the hunters we had previously played with was online so we did some 3s games. We started off 2-2, spurring some comments along the lines of, "I feel like we're just stuck around the same rating" which, at the time, was ~1850. Then we went on a nice little run, going 6-2 and getting our rating all the way up to 1950! Our MMR was well over 2k, around 2100 at this point. At this point it was after midnight and I was quite tired, but I figured I'd stay around for a few more games to see if we could break 2k. Being really tired and doing arenas doesn't quite mix well, and we ended on a losing streak, back down to around ~1915. Still, it was an overall positive experience.
We were able to do some 2s the next day, and those did not quite go the same way. We faced one comp in particular that just destroyed us - Mage and Feral druid. We usually do really well against double DPS, but this one we went 0-3 against!! Outside of that we had some pretty close games that we couldn't quite end up winning, though we did beat a hunter / druid team which was enjoyable. We ended up losing more games than we won and ended in the high 1900s. Perhaps the funniest game of the weekend was this one:
 |
| Forget double DPS ... double healer is in! |
It's possible that I was rusty - I hadn't played in about a week and a half, and it had been even longer since we had done 2s (probably 2-3 weeks?). Still, I thought the more frenetic pace of 3s would lead to 2s being even easier for us to handle ... and at least on Sunday, that wasn't really the case.
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