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.

Soul Remnant is for the legendary ring quest!

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:

Xhul'horac - kill the two guys on the outside first!

Mannoroth rises ...

... the beginning of the fight ...

... he dead!

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?!

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:

Here they come!

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?

The gold "You won!" is from my bonus roll - gold is a loss, in this case.

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:

Thanks Postmaster!

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.

Awww yissss.

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!

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!

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

Last month, I made sure to take note of my gold totals after buying July's token to see what sort of income I really have on a monthly basis. I was basically starting from 407k gold.

Backpacks from this month:

Cres

Piffle

Lak

Grand total around 546,000! Honestly, I am surprised. I was not expecting to have made that much; in fact, I had been planning to tell you why I had hardly made any money!

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.

Are you killing Kazzak every week on every character? Because you should be.

And not just for the #selfie opportunities.

No, I'm not dead, just playing with filters!

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:

So much chat spam from loot pinatas!

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:

He dead.

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.

Long live the champ!

Overall, it seems like an improvement to be guaranteed a piece every week.

Are they jeggings? I hope they're jeggings!

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:

Down goes Tremblade!

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!

#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!

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.