Category Archives: Games

When Things Click

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The gate has been breached.

The concept of “the zone” isn’t a new one. It’s been used in professional sports for some time.  For most people, the closest we get is when we roll 2 Yathzees in the same game.  Something in the air just lines up perfect and boom, things are going your way.  I’ve had sequences in D&D where the rolls were just non-stop crits (off-setting the times where I couldn’t hit a barn).

The seems to be more common in games with an element of chance.  For multiplayer games, this chance is the other people playing with/against you.  Maybe they all line up for a group headshot.  Maybe your team sequences their special attacks to put up a wall of invincibility & death.  A pre-made group has better odds of this, as you’re reducing the number of chances for negative outcomes and more of the positive.  I get the adrenaline rush of this, and counter, I understand why the toxic side comes out when random is random.

But single player games… woo.  The game number crunching is where you need to fit.  In some places it’s about learning the timing (Ninja Gaiden), in others it’s about the stars aligning with the pebbles on the beach (most open world games).  We’ve all seen some of the Zelda/Switch videos… where the open world allows for tremendous experimentation and super fast runs.  Awesome Games Done Quick is an event that celebrates speed runs, and is predicated on every second being in the zone.

But for mortal folk, we pray to the gaming gods for that one event, that one single run where everything goes perfect and you are more of a passenger than a participant.

T-Rex Attack

I upgraded a few bits and went back in with some bombs. I took it a bit slower once I found him, hoping to surprise him.  Which did work out.

There’s a particular move set that only occurs when you are above your prey.  You jump on their back/head and go saiyan. I managed to do that.  I was riding a T-Rex like a bucking horse.   It was glorious.

After he finally threw me off, he decided to run away.  I tried coaxing him back for the same type of attack but that wasn’t in the cards.  I did end up hitting him a few more times in the legs, enough for him to run off.

Right into a Rathalos.  A giant flying, fire breathing, poison striking beast of an enemy.  He picked up the T-Rex like he was a doll, then threw him on the ground (cue music).  Great.

He ran away, I jumped on his head once more and then he was limping off.  I had not realized where he kept his lair in the past.  Always too dead to make way there.  Anyhow, he ends up in the large tree area, where there are multiple floors, each acting like a trampoline.

For some reason he decides to take a nap.  Great time to lay out some bomb barrels.  A few explosions and he’s in the death throws.  Now, a few-ton T-Rex moving on a trampoline means that I am not moving.  It took another 5 minutes before I could find solid footing.  And once I did, a single hit to the back of the leg was what took him down.

Now, I’m not saying every dice roll was a natural 20.  But I am saying that I didn’t roll a single 0, and that once I did roll those 20s, it was glorious.

Now onto collecting some bugs.

T-Rex Gate

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The quest – loot – upgrade cycle is underway.  I cleared out the main quests until Anjanath, the giant T-Rex with wings.  I upgraded my weapons as far as they could go.  I took out the baddies.  I looted and crafted and stabbed my way through a fair chunk of events.  I was taking out the mud-fish Jyuratodus with good efficiency.  Even the lightning-flying squirrel (Tobi Kadachi) wasn’t too bad.  T-Rex time!

I died in 2 hits.  1 hit that bit me, the other was a charge that took out 70% of my hit points.

Back to the drawing board.  Anjanath is big, and fire based.  So fire resistant armor and water weapons seems logical… let’s see.

Capturing Monsters

Capt Mud-fish is water based and I needed some loot from him.  Figuring out the loot dropped from him the first place was more guessing than anything.  I checked the investigation board for a quest and all I could find was the capture line.

Captures require you to drop them to ~80%, drop a trap, then stand in front of their heads and throw smoke bombs at them.  Then pray it works and they don’t eat you.  Oh, and you need to craft the traps and smoke bombs from environmental loots.  Well, not exactly true – you need a trap tool that’s bought in town, and can only carry 2 of them on you (more in your stash).  Anyways, long story short and my first capture was a complete failure until I understood those points.  Second attempt worked just fine.

Back to Leg Attacks

I really like the speed of dual blades.  The damage potential is amazing, if you can get everything to hit.  The full demon-mode super swing is like 20 attacks in a row.

The downside is that everything is always moving and hitboxes on legs are quite small.  It’s that age-old DPS simulation issue.  If everyone was Patchwerk (nothing but a meat wall), then dual blades would dominate everything.  If I can knock down something, then it’s insane the amount of damage that can be pumped out.  But that doesn’t really happen.

I tried another 3 times (max per quest) and wasn’t able to get much farther.  I’m going to have to do some more studying of this bugger and likely further upgrade my armor with speheres to take more hits.  It really isn’t that he hard to read, it’s that you can’t really make a mistake.  And mistakes are bound to happen due to the trees/cliffs/junk strewn about.  Even a wandering monster is enough to muck it up.

So that plan — shore up defenses, find a better spot to fight, try a better in/out attack pattern, and maybe, just maybe, load up on fire barrels.

Kitchen Sink

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I still don’t really know what I’m doing in Monster Hunter World. It’s fun to play and experiment with the mechanics, but I am quite lost.

I can see that I can upgrade my weapon to something better, but I can’t tell what pieces I am missing to make that upgrade, or where they drop.  I just end up going with the flow of the game.

I can see that I can craft a whole bunch of items.. traps included.  Not why why I need them just yet though, or how to better manage my inventory of all the things I’ve collected.  Do I need spiderwebs?

There are quite a few quest types.  The main mission ones (assigned), optional ones (I think I can repeat them), investigations, deliveries, bounties and then open world exploration.  They are offered by different folk, with different criteria, for different rewards (that I don’t quite understand yet either).  Quite honestly, this game could be in a completely different language and I don’t think that would matter.

I will say that the act of Monster Hunting is a lot of fun.  I’ll see if I can get a video of it up.  I use Dual Blades, which are a very close ranged weapon, with set animations.  These animations cannot be cancelled, so you may end up pressing a combo that locks you for a second or two… and then the big monster hits you.  Timing becomes extremely important, as well as understanding hit boxes.  I’ve become partial to a slice and dash combo that does decent work.  And when I see the monster setting up something large, I go for the 6 second demon slash combo that just looks like ginsu knives.

I will say that this is the first time I have ever been in the middle of a fight with a giant monster and been distracted by collecting footprints.  That is very weird.  One second I’m slicing away, avoid jaws of death, and then “ooooh, a doodle” and off I go.

Anyhow, in terms of main quest the Pukei Pukei is down. A giant flying T-Rex appeared in the middle of that fight.  I did what anyone would do, and ran away.  Which was cool, because more footprints/mucous/doodles!

If all of this seems like the ramblings of a mad man, yes.  That is true.  I feel like a madman.  I barely understand how all the pieces fit together and that’s just fine be me.  It’s a level of fun I haven’t had in some time.  And that’s the main reason I play any game.

Squishing Monsters

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I am a Monster Hunter neophyte.  It was on my radar as a potential game, though the PC date of “fall 2018” doesn’t really inspire much confidence.  I never pre-order, and after some rather positive vibes and initial reviews, I figured what the heck and picked up a copy at my local game store.  (Side note, the reservations were low, but reviews were high, so their stock was near empty.  Brick and mortar stores in igloo-town have the same price point as online stores, just faster delivery.)

Syp would be happy with the character creation tool.  Everyone is human, mind you, but the options are pretty neat.  And you can customize your cat butler.  After spending a bit too long in this section (wonder if you can change it later…) I started up the main game.

It’s rare to start a game without training wheels these days.  Following the intro mission, which is just an interactive cut-scene, the game opens up pretty much every single system at once.  Every weapon type, crafting, eating, mission types, scanning… everything.  There’s a breadcrumb system to lead you through it, but it is a lot to absorb at once.

How are you supposed to select a weapon style from 14 options?  I barely caught that there was a training scenario were I could test them out, and even then, it’s about pacing swings more than understanding the nuances of each.  I opted for dual blades – short range, slash damage, has a super saiyan mode.

I finished the first quest, which boiled down to “kill 7 bears”.  There are items all over the place to pick up.  Either as slingshot ammo, gear crafting, potion crafting, food crafting… I don’t rightfully understand it.  The end of the mission gives you some time to collect the big bad guy.  I did learn that spamming the collect button makes it go a lot faster.  I also learned that the default action after ending a run is “sell all”.  Which is not what I would have expected, since all that loot is needed to make stuff.

Return to town and I opted to craft some stuff.  The weapon crafting is just… I thought that Path of Exile was obtuse in skill points… this thing is something else.  It’s a giant tree of options, none of which you know what they are until you craft them.  There are plenty of paths, and you can undo the choices (great!)  Impressive.  The armor crafting is a bit simpler, in that there are distinct items with benefits.  You can mix and match pieces, and each one has a linear power upgrade.  That seems simple enough.

I don’t quite get food/potion crafting yet.  I’m sure that will come.

I don’t quite understand monster research either.  I did some investigation on footprints and mucus and so one, but I don’t quite get the relation to the active mission, rather than eventually unlocking more info outside.  It appears I break a leg… but I did nothing but attack legs and nothing broke.  I’m sure it will make itself clear.

I’m up to the Pukei-Pukei mission.  Very early on, but still a couple hours in.  It’s going to take a while for me to figure out exactly how all the pieces fit together.  It seems somewhat obvious that each system works with the others, I just don’t see all the links yet.

I will say that I greatly enjoy the art, music, and setting this game presents.  The world feels lived in, which is quite an achievement.  Items and services seem to be placed with purpose, and the various wildlife interacts with each other.  The time I spent was simply lost to looking around.  It’s a great feeling when 2 hours go by and it feels like 15 minutes.

There’s more digging and swinging to do.  I’m not convinced for the need to go online yet, but maybe once I get a better hang of things.  Should be a fun ride.

Updates Aplenty

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Long form aside, here’s a quick list of weekend achievements, first in WoW

  • Monk (main) completed the steps to unlock flying in Legion.  He did so by completing a pet battle.
  • Monk completed the steps required for the class mount
  • Monk is halfway (?) done the Argus quest line – enough to unlock all the world quests, and armor upgrades to 925 for class hall heroes
  • Demon Hunter realized that to get the class mount, he needs to complete a the same chain of quests as the Monk.  He’s already sacrificed everything.
  • Rogue and Paladin, while 110, have not finished their class hall quest.  They are benched.
  • Death Knight is at the class hall step that requires a dungeon run.  Ehhhh.
  • Death Knight hit 110.

There are really 2 parts to this.  The Monk and the DK.

Most of the Monk’s time has been on the Broken Shores and the main quest line.  There’s a dozen or so steps required, and they cover pretty much everything the zone has to offer.  I think it’s a really solid way to make people try everything out once, and see what clicks.

Flying is unlocked through reputation – and the main source is the main quest line.  Some of those steps are a bit more painful (waiting on a class hall quest), a bit more grindy (Sentinax marks), or even a bit luck based (killing 3 rares when none are up).  The last step was finishing 6 world quests.  I only saw 5, then remembered I hid pet quests.  Did that and the screen lit up.  Flying ahoy!

The better news was that I was 2 small quests away from the class mount.  Monks get Ban-Lu.  Here’s a neat art piece on the cat.  Oddly this is pretty much how my tanky Monk looks.

veli-nystrom-wow-monk-mount-final-preview-veli

Every other class needs to do 2 things.  Finish their class hall quest (which is a week’s worth of effort due to the timed missions) and do the Broken Shores quest line (a couple days’ worth).  DH may do it since the mount is neat looking.  Rogue and Paladin… nope.  Devs – note for you.  Paladins and Warlocks have had enough horses that are golden/green.

Death Knight

Heirloom gear is supposed to give more experience.  As per above, I have already leveled 4 characters to 110.  I think only the Rogue did so on rested experience.  All of them hit 110 by the 4th zone, though at different points.

The DK hit 110 on the 4th zone – though only 10 or so quests in.  Just before completing the southern part of the map.  I did not see the experience gains from heirlooms here.  The stat boosts are nice though and makes the gear/stat cliff at 110 more bearable.  Now it’s about picking the right world quests to get him up to 850-875.

What did save time was flying.  I decided to focus on that with the Monk before doing any questing after hitting 100.  While each level too the same amount of quests/experience, each of those levels was extremely fast.  The longest was 30 minutes and that was mostly due to 2 bonus quests that gave pithily advancement but large exp boosts.  The main speed boost was flying.  It cuts leveling time by 75%.

Now I’m stuck on a dungeon quest for the DK, a run through Nethalrion’s Lair.  And since I hit 110, I collected 3 pieces of artifact knowledge that were around 3 billion each.  So all the traits are unlocked on all 3 specs.  I don’t have any decent relics, but it’s something.  Time for some world quests.

Alts

Similar vein of thought here… WoW had a long history of being alt-friendly.  Leveling was a joke after the first few runs – heirlooms did all the work.  Getting to level cap was easy enough, then a few days of dungeon runs put you in a decent spot.  At least up until MoP.  WoD, garrisons and the rep grind did it in for me for alts.  Legion pulls back a bit on that, with the dramatic exception of the artifact weapon – in particular the power and time gates.  That’s been reverted now (AK is shared on an account, time gates on 3rd relics are gone, empowerment is gone).

Given that the focus for BfA seems to be a reversion of the “bring the player” mentality, with a renewed focus on class distinction, that probably means people are going to have more alts.  The leveling portion is one thing, but it’s the cap-level activities that will need to be balanced.

I’ll go back to my old recommendation with MoP – make proving grounds mandatory for each class.  Continue to have unlocks/achievements, but base those on the account – not the character.  To figure out if that alt can take on extra content, just put them in the proving grounds.  It’s not time locked, takes about 20 minutes to reach gold rank, and is a great way to figure out how class mechanics work.

Vanilla Servers

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Nostalgia is a fun thing.  It’s based almost entirely on emotional memories, either positive or negative.  I’d hazard the majority of people have a large amount of positive, since we tend to scrub out the bad.

Video games are like that.  I clearly recall playing Mario/Duck Hunt in my basement as a kid.  The light gun stuck to the tiny TV.  Siblings taking turns.  I played it again 20 years later… not so memorable.

There’s a subculture in gaming that really likes the nostalgic aspects.  There are plenty of Ultima Online emulator shards that stick to a specific time period.  EQ has had progression servers for years now (though none are actually timelocked to my knowledge).  RIFT will go that route shortly with their PRIME servers.

WoW doesn’t have this.  It’s had a few public spats with emulation services, though I’ve only ever heard of those emulating the vanilla experience.  After many years of demands from a vocal minority, looks like people are going to get exactly that.

I’d expect the first few days to be just like when vanilla launched – broken servers.  Nostalgia is strong and I’m sure plenty of people will give it a kick.  And then after 2-3 days not having left the starting zone, they will move on.

And that’s the challenge from a provider perspective – people only remember bits of the past, not the whole one.

  • Talent trees with significantly poor choices
  • Quests ending at level 30, and filled with significant grind
  • No flying, LFG or summoning to dungeons
  • The Shaman / Paladin faction restriction
  • Priests that can do nothing but heal
  • Useless druids
  • Warriors that cannot heal
  • Healer rotations in raids (5s mana rule anyone?)
  • Hunters having no pets until the teens
  • Gnomeragan and Dire Maul (seriously, run these now at level and see what I mean)
  • Resistance farming
  • Farming for Tranq Shot
  • Actually managing 39 other internet people to complete a raid
  • Tuber farming
  • Faction farms (Argent Dawn)
  • No bag space, transmog, void storage
  • No cross-server groups

And vanilla was an improvement over other MMOs.

Don’t get me wrong, these challenges did accomplish something spectacular – they created a community of support.  You knew nearly every raider on your server, and most of the “consistent” players.  You needed them as much as they needed you.  The easing of the gameplay got rid of that sense… and it’s certainly debatable if that was a good or bad thing.

I won’t deny the appeal, and it’s clear some people want to re-live that experience.  I just prefer to look forward instead of back.

Update on the Death Knight

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Apparently Legion opens up at level 98.  WoD ended before I was even halfway done with Shadowmoon Valley.  Yay!

Tank Swap

I swapped to Blood for the last bit of WoD.  It went better in that I finally had the ability to restore my health during combat, but the overall damage went down.  There’s clearly something wrong with the scaling numbers, as every piece I had was within 5 item levels of my heirloom gear.

Let’s just say I won’t be running a cloth-wearing alt through this anytime soon (sorry ‘lock!).

Legion Boost

I guess I should have guess since all the expansions seem to open up 2 levels before the original entryway.  I figured I’d run the Broken Short campaign and test out both real tanking combat with proper numbers, and get a piece of gear from it (~100 item levels upgrade).

Like tearing through wet tissues.  Or rather, exactly like every other tank I’ve leveled.  Clearly, there’s a number issue pre-Legion, since the balance is as expected here.  Tweaks a plenty in the next few months I’m sure.

I had forgotten that DK’s already had a class hall, what with Acherus there since WotLK.  I was disappointed that it wasn’t upgraded a little bit.   Monk’s kept theirs, but it looks neat.  Acherus feels like a teenager’s basement.  Good news is death gate, making travel to/from quite easy.  (Side note – of the halls I can access, my preference from best to worst – Rogue, Monk, Druid, Shaman, Paladin, DH, DK). The tanking weapon – Maw of the Damned – was quite easy to acquire.  It’s neat to see the Lich King again (or the new old one… confusing).

My fingers are crossed that this story line actually plays out.  The DK storyline really closed a long time ago, but since it was the Burning Legion that actually created the entire line…it seems ripe for opportunity.  So far though, underwhelming.

Heirloom Scaling

First, my armory link.

You can see that a) the armory hasn’t been updated since 7.0, since it doesn’t list tier 3 Heirlooms, and b) that the actual items scale at a lower rate than gear drops.  At level 100, they are ilvl 605, compared to some ilvl 700 items I have equipped.  That apparently changes at 101, where the ilvl jumps to 695 and caps at 800 at level 110.  Not really an issue, since I’m doing just fine combat-wise.  Better than fine.

I did spend the 25,000g to upgrade all the items, giving me 45% more experience gains for Legion.  I have no issues with the actual content in Legion, but I’ve leveled enough through the core and have the achievements set that it isn’t needed.  The downside to the ugprade is that one I’m done the DK, the only other plate wearer is my Warrior – whom I will not be leveling any time soon.  Odd enough given that I could use that exp boost on the cloth wearing classes.  Ah well, making that money back won’t be too hard.  I get a gold mission every day that nets a bit more than 2k.

For now though, I can get through the levels without having to worry about rested xp.  And if the timing works out, I should have Legion flying up and ready within a week.

 

 

Adventures with a Death Knight

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They are not pleasant experiences, and it has nothing to do with role playing.

I started WoD at level 94.  I’ve made it to 97.  I have face-tanked more than at any other point in WoW’s history.

2372am

The starting scenario, where you break the portal and set up your garrison, the one that was a cakewalk on 5 characters.  The DK died a half dozen times… and I learned that there’s a timewarp effect that brings you back from the dead immediately.

Following that, I decided to take another look at my gear.  Aside from 2 crappy trinkets, everything else was within 10 item levels.  Ok… maybe it’s the spec?  I used to play frost, but heard good things about unholy as it had a pet.  Read up various guides on the interwebs.  It’s actually a remarkably simple build with 1 builder, 1 finisher, then others based on cooldown availability.  Cooldowns/triggers that take their darn time.

I do recall the first time through Draenor, where rares were quite hard to take down solo.  It was serious effort, but doable.  I am unable to get any of them to 50%.  I died quite a few times to the first mini-boss, blowing through every cooldown I had.  Even paying attention to spells in order to interrupt those worthwhile didn’t help.  I even resorted to consumables.

I won’t even go into the garrison invasion I botched.

Conspiracy Theory

Didjaknow that the refer a friend system was recently changed?  The experience boost was changed from 200% experience down to 50%.  And it no longer stacks with heirloom bonuses.

The way that RAF worked in the past, for the price of 1 month subscription you could level up like a rocket.  1 shotting everything and hitting max level in a few days.  This was great for two specific cases.

  • People wanting to quickly level alts
  • New players that wanted to go straight to the end game

This was bad for these use cases

  • Learning how to play the game
  • Experiencing any of the content in a logical manner
    • It was impossible to follow quest lines this way

The conspiracy here is that the RAF change, combined with the level scaling changes are a rather dramatic change to the leveling process that has been around since at least Cataclysm (7+ years ago).  The decision point of RAF vs. character boost is now gone.  If you want a max level character, then you need a character boost.

I will recognize that Blizzard has a talent for pricing things just at the top end of reasonable.  Enough to get people to complain, but not high enough to get them to not buy it.  I think most people can see the race swap requests that BfA will bring due to the new sub-races.  If that’s not a cash cow…

Death Knight Next Steps

I play a lot of multi-spec classes.  I have leveled nearly all of them as tanks.  That means that my DK is going to swap to blood and then try this run again. I only have a couple levels to go in WoD anyhow, which is good.

I had forgotten about the WoD enemy density issues.  Legion has groups of enemies close together, and most classes have decent AoE abilities. WoD was the final expansion of solo kills.  Once Legion closes up, I’ll write up a retrospect on the WoW expansions…it’s remarkable how this last one has addressed so many hurdles that WoD introduced.

WoW Tokens and Opportunity Cost

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I wrote about Opportunity Cost a while back (2012).  The premise is simple enough, how much are you losing by doing one activity instead of another.  These are purely logical constructs.  Say I take a day off work to do some renos at home… I may be saving money by not having someone do it for me, but I’m losing a day’s pay.  Different for everyone.

I had an interesting conversation with my father in law on this topic, related to the costs of renting vs. owning.  In North America, home ownership is the pinnacle.  But if you spend money every year on upkeep, and the housing market isn’t super, then you are actually losing money.  In the most logical sense, someone who buys and doesn’t invest a penny until they are ready to sell will have the best return.  They’ll live in a house that’s in disrepair, but they’ll make more money.

Back on topic.  WoW Tokens are at about 170,000g on US servers.  These are by far the cheapest of all prices, and each gives you a month of playtime.  That means that to keep playing “for free”, you need to make 170,000g + your regular expenses.  This is to save you $15US.  Or just under $19 igloo-dollars.  Right.  It’s nearly 10,000g for $1.

Let’s math it out a bit, in USD to keep it simple.  The US minimum wage is $7.25.  It’s certainly higher in some places, but let’s take the bottom level because it works out to 2 hours of work for 1 WoW token (for 1 month play).  But that’s gross, not net (taxes after all).  So let’s say a 30% tax rate (which is high for this pay rate), which would give ~2.5 hours of work for $15.  This is again ignoring that people need to eat/live on that money, and certainly for some $15 is a lot.  That is the contextual piece.

More context, what else is ~$15 a month?

  • a coffee every other day
  • 2 beers + tip
  • Netflix + Spotify
  • One uber ride
  • A week of bus rides
  • 2 lunches
  • A day’s parking

True Cost

A side effect of playing WoW is accruing way more gold than you could ever use in normal play.  There are gold sinks (to remove WoW gold from the economy) but they are all optional.  Gone are the days where you were short on gold to get something (TBC in order to buy flying was the last time for me).

Syp is running some work on this and he points out some good items to make some cash.  They are all active ways to gain gold, yet they are all tied to activities he’d do anyways.

Let’s say it’s 15 minutes a day to sort out Order Hall missions.  There only purpose of these is to unlock quests.  The rest is for artifact powers / gold gains, which can be accrued at much higher volumes elsewhere.  But 15 minutes.. and even doing it on a mobile device is a decent thing.  Especially if it nets you 1500g a day.

Some people make money with pets, others with crafting, others with trading.  Each requires some amount of time, and the activity presented must be valuable in itself.  So while the cost of doing world quests might be an hour a day, if you were already planning on doing them the cost is actually slightly above zero (since you’ll pay closer attention).

True cost = cost of an activity to make gold – the cost of an activity to have fun

Token Cost

I mentioned earlier that there are regular costs to just playing.  Either you craft items to use, or you take flight points, buy pets, repair gear.  Whatever your monthly costs are, you need to make even more than that to get a token.

And if we break it down into play chunks, let’s go casual and say you log in 3 days a week (argue that if you want).  That’s 12 days to make 170,000g or just over 14,000g per day that you need to make as profit.  That’s a high number.

Opportunity

Remember, you are competing against 2.5 hours of real-world effort to make this WoW gold.  That’s a need to make 70,000g per hour in-game spent doing things you wouldn’t do otherwise.  Maybe it’s an extra 5 minutes on world quests.  Maybe an extra 10 on class hall missions.

Or maybe, just maybe, the act of getting the gold is itself the goal, rather than just filling up the coffers – and then you are not spending any time not having fun.

 

Catching Up

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I haven’t paid a monthly sub to WoW since month #2 of WoD.  The WoW tokens have been easy enough to acquire to meet my needs.  (There’s a post on opportunity cost on that topic later).  With the recent patch changing the leveling game, I decided to dip the toe back in.

Can I say how poor WoW is at welcoming old players?  Or maybe it’s just all MMOs. Guild is gone, can’t understand trade chat, there are quest markers everywhere.  One of the nice things of FF14 is that that main quest line (MSQ I think it’s called) has a different icon, and there’s only ever one.  Long story short, it took about an hour for me to figure things out again on my Monk.  Then another hour of clean up.  Usually at the end of an expansion I just drop every quest item and sell my entire bag contents.  This is not one of those times and I’m sure as rain that there are items in there that I need.

Goals

My original goal was to level up some of my alts.  Monk, DH, Rogue, and Paladin are all 110.  Druid, Hunter, and Shaman are all over 100.  That leaves a DK, Mage, and Warlock that are between 60 and 100.  Then my slow friends the Warrior, and Priest under level 20.  I will have you notice that the classes with the most amount of roles are the ones I tend to play the most, with the exception of the Rogue who dates back to server start date.

The Warrior was a small test before my last time off.  I wanted to give a shot to the one class that I have never been able to bite into.  I can clearly recall it killing everything it touched in a single stroke, feeling more like a cheap Diablo clone.  After 1 session I was done.  Priest has never worked for me either.  I’ve preferred the Warlock approach to damage.

Back on topic.  I decided to give the DK another shot –  a dual role tank that can solo pretty much anything.  Rune management is why he’s been benched for years.  He was 94 (from the Legion pre-launch event) and had yet to unlock WoD content.  I am not a fan of WoD, for reasons explained many times on this blog.  But to level up, I know that Shadowmoon + part of Gorgrond is usually enough.  But wait, what about flying to make things ultra easier?

Flight Paths

Above point about not being in love with WoD = not having unlocked flying on Draenor.  I also left Legion before unlocking that flight mode.  Let’s take a look see what’s involved…You can check that out here – Flying Pre-check tool.

Quest lines – ok.  Treasure collections – that’s fine.  Exploration – done.  Reputation – ugh.

There was a time I loved reputation grinds.  I remember the centaur clans in Vanilla, lots of fun.  Blizzard has taken many approaches over the years.  Pure enemy grinds, daily quests, weekly quests, boosts, rare drops…you name it.  And the differences between WoD and Legion are enough to make me question my sanity.  (Irony – meet Insane in the membrane)

Legion requires you to have completed the Suramar questline, which was actually pretty neat, and at the time a great source of gear/power.  There’s a single part where you need to LFR and kill Xavious, but that was a quick romp.  Most of it dealt with launch-era things, which is good.  The real kicker is the faction amounts.  You get that from a long quest chain, or through the World Quests at 75 rep a pop.  It adds some variety to it all, but it’s not something that will be done in 2 or 3 days.

WoD is based almost entirely on Tanaan, which was added late in the cycle.  Same general requirements which are just fine.  Then there are 3 factions to max.  2 of them take about 15-20 days, depending on your luck.  One of them can be done in a day, but only if you grind out elite mobs.  So I can spend a month or so unlocking flying for content I won’t spend more than 1 or 2 sessions playing through.  In an expansion that was designed for ground travel.  I’ll make due.

Side note, in the recent patch all flying pre-WoD was combined into a single skill, which is great for leveling and saves some cash.  There are even 2 heirlooms per faction to unlock all the vanilla zone flight points.

Next Steps

So the plan is to work on the flight plan in Legion since I have many characters in that content and the rewards are relevant to some of them.  Also to upgrade all my heirloom items to at least 100 that provide an exp boost (helm, back, chest, legs).  That’s 500g for the level 60 item, then 1000g for 90 upgrade, 2000g for 100 upgrade, and 5000g for the 110 version.  I already had some portions of this done, but the entire investment for a level 110 is 34,000g.

The good news is that since stats are spec-specific, I can use any piece of plate instead of DPS plate.  The bad news is that since 7.3.5 enemy HP now scales, meaning that I can’t have 1 super set of cloth from 1-100, ignoring the benefits of armor.  Dreadmist for everyone is over with.

From there, I’ll work the DK up through to 101 in order to unlock the basics of Legion.  I figure I’ll hit 100 before Shadomoon is half way done.