Nogamara

Guild Wars 2 and grouping

As I wrote a while ago, we started doing Living World Season 4 and I am completely unhappy with it. On the weekend one part of a story instance didn’t properly complete for me (someone else’s instance) although we made sure were close together and waiting when going for a next step and now I guess I have to repeat a (long) part, this has happened for the third time now. So basically in all three acts we did I had to repeat a very lengthy part now and I don’t see how much more attention I have to pay, maybe having both computers next to each other and actually listening to the audio of the instance owner before wandering off for as much as a few steps.

I’m literally still pissed, I was looking forward to finally not having to play solo anymore and now we’re bordering on 2h wasted just to repeat something. People on the subreddit told me it shouldn’t be bugged per se, but I don’t know how much more coordination you can do… The story is nice, the rewards are good, but man do I hope needing to rerun it instantly because it bugged out…

For now we’ll probably stick to me starting the instances so that at least not always the same person who needs to repeat everything. Also if it was only a short part I wouldn’t even complain. But the three parts where it happened (The First City, The Road to …, Forearmed is Forwarned) are really long. Bah.

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Keystone Master in Season 3

Totally forgot to post about this when it finally happened – but I managed to sneak my way past 2500 M+ rating and have got my mount.

Yay!

Many thanks to my guildies who brought me from a nervous trainwreck when joining a key to playing a +17 relatively casually. I don’t want to say carry, I think I needed about 2 runs per dungeons with detailed instructions (like what is different and important in higher M+ than in low keys where you can ignore everything) and then I felt like doing things in a normal way, in the end actually topping the meters from time to time. Feels good! So I’d say until 1800 rating I was either trained or carried, however you want to phrase it, but the rest of the time I simply played – sometimes helping out when they needed a stronger DPS when going on alts as they’re in the +20 range on their mains now, something I’m currently not really interested in.

It was an interesting experience anyway. In season 1 we were mostly dying our way through finished a single +10/+12/+14 over time for a chance at Vault loot and now for the last 8 weeks or so I’ve managed to do 4 +15s most weeks, at least 1 every week and even doing 8 of them in 2 weeks. I think I’ve never actually been that close to the iLvl cap for a tier/season.

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Back in New Eden – 2022 edition

Resubscribed to EVE and have been logging in and undocking again daily. I’m a bit rusty, but it’s slowly coming back.

Was a bit meh on the price hike but when they did the 3 month Omega + 3 month MCT again I caved in – actually had been eyeing to resub for a week or two before that but glad I held off, but there were actually different reasons for waiting. So now I’m on two Omega accounts instead of three and we’ll see how that will play out.

I hadn’t properly played since October if zkill is to be trusted, and realistically, for my playstyle that’s accurate.

Big patch landed yesterday, r/eve is mostly meh as usual but apart from a few graphical glitches and the Mumble Overlay not working with DirectX 12 I’m good.

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Path of Fire complete

Not too long ago I finished Path of Fire after rejoining with my leveling partner after a few years 😛

I liked the expansion and it was fun, although it was actually a little too easy with two people. Maybe we’re still a little traumatized from Heart of Thorns at launch where we’d regularly die to a single pack while just trying to get to a pojnt of interest…

Only the final boss fight is really annoying and we died a lot, but I wouldn’t say it’s ‘hard’ hard, just.. bad? Maybe you can find out how to position yourself better and to kill what in which order, but it’s not very intuitive. I had the feeling I was always standing in something on a melee char if I wanted to hit something, the Mesmer had it slightly better.

Also what’s with the story instances and only the main person being able to click anything?

Anyway, we also found out that you can get the Jackal if you don’t have the third Skimmer skill yet (higher jumps) if a Mesmer gives you a portal to get onto the ledge so you can run up to the Heart quest (or teleport to friend also works, I guess?). I was so looking forward to this and now I’m happy.

Jackal Mount

Next up is Living World Season 4 that we plan to tackle as a duo next week, then probably try to catch up with the story, but I haven’t thought End of Dragons yet and I think we have Season 4 and Icebrood Saga to go anyway.

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Not what I wanted, but I’ll take it

Didn’t play much properly this week, but I’m still going to Tempest Keep for my T5 Rogue Chest.

Didn’t drop, of course (on Rogue one of two doing this).

Ashes of Al’ar

But I’m not complaining this week.

Edit: it’s the next morning, 12 hours later, and I ran again with the Human Rogue and it actually dropped! Deathmantle is complete, no more Tempest Keep! 😀

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New goals in WoW

Guess it doesn’t take long until I find myself some new goals in the form of boxes to tick.

Not sure how much sense it makes, but I’ve been pushing a lot more characters through the Zereth Mortis story now, and also leveling up the Cypher for gear, doing the World Boss every week and so on.

Just got my legendary belt on the Mage, which makes her the 11th toon to finish the story line, only Monk and Priest missing. Incidentally she also hit Renown 80, also the 11th. Which means there would technically be 7 classes where I’ve not brought the Cypher to Level 6 of 6, so there would be 252 gear drops from WQs and dailies. That is a thing I am not sure how long I can stomach, but the first 2 alts (besides my main) don’t need anything from ZM anymore (just Trinkets below 252/or part of 246 Tier set pieces) and two more only need one item each, so on those I’m only filling the weekly bar, doing the puzzle daily WQs (or other very quick ones) and going for a 252 weapon. “Only”, still a ton of stuff to do but right now it’s soothing and maybe my brain needs the rest and the mindless grinding away.

I’ve also done a few more M+ on my Shammy, healing and going Elemental. After the lucky 275 Main Hand and completing the 4 set Tier bonus it’s now only down to practicing… and on my main I’m now 90ish points away from the mount, slowly edging myself closer with 10 points here and there until I can get one of the two missing keys in a Fortified week…

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WoW Addons in 2022

For no particular reason besides the whole CurseForge/Overwolf Launcher thing (and Wowup stopping to work) I recently dug deeper into my list of installed addons, something I’ve not done since Shadowlands launched.

So here’s a list I guess, and while writing down and sorting it I’m hoping to get rid of a few. Maybe it works.

  • Prio 1: UI and stuff I simply can’t play without
    • Bartender4 (Bars)
    • PitBull4 (Unit Frames)
    • Bagnon (one bag that works just like I want it to work)
    • BagBrother (where are all the items on alts?)
    • BugSack (no error popups)
    • MoveAnything (move stuff around, esp. the talking heads)
    • Prat (chat)
    • Scrap (sell all grey items)
    • SexyMap (cleaner minimap)
    • SimulationCraft
    • StatBlock_ZoneText (where am I?)
  • Prio 2: Raiding and still very important
    • BigWigs (raid warnings)
    • Details (damage meter)
    • Examiner (inspect people!)
    • ExRT/MRT/MythicDungeonTools
    • Grid2
    • HandyNotes + HandyNotes_Shadowlands
    • Mapster (better map)
    • Masque/Masque_Caith (this is just how my WoW has to look)
    • OmniCC (better cooldown display)
    • Quartz (could be replaced by some WeakAuras)
    • WeakAuras
  • Prio 3: I’d hate to lose this
    • Altoholic
    • Bazooka (a bar at the top to collect icons and show info)
    • Broker_PlayedTime
    • Broker_XPBar (Fan update) (I like it while leveling)
    • LittleWigs
    • nivBuffs (Masque skin + better time display for buffs/debuffs)
    • Quester (coloring completion of quests)
    • TomTom (sometimes stuff is hard to find and Wowhead has coords)
    • VenturePlan (not a fan of the command table)
    • WorldQuestTab (just a quicker overview over World Quests)
    • BetterWardrobe (a bit undecided on these 3, but I hate to lose out on missing transmogs)
    • CaerdonWardrobe
    • CanIMogIt
  • Prio 4: Nice to have
    • AstralKeys
    • ChampionCommander
    • GoGoMount
    • MasterPlan
    • MazeHelper
    • NomiCakes
    • StatBlock_Coords (they’re on the minimap after all)
  • Prio 5: Not strictly necessary, I might just get rid of them now
    • Ara_Broker_XP
    • SavedInstances
    • StatBlock_XP
    • WorldQuestList

Yes, that’s a big list. After playing this game for over 15 years I have opinions on how stuff should look and where it should be on the UI though. Also some choices of the default UI just drive me nuts. And some systems are just not fun without some addons (command table and its predecessors in other expansions).

Then again I wouldn’t classify too many of them as really complete modding, or immersion-breaking. IF this was FFXIV I could get rid of the most important ones, Bartender, Bagnon, MoveAnything, and PitBull. And Altoholic because not every item is strewn across 20 alts.

Also this is not a recommendation, it’s just how I run. Interestingly I am not 100% sure if the above list is correct, because a lot of addons put multiple folders into the Interface\Addons directory, so I might as well have missed a few, especially the DataStore ones. After cleaning out it should be around 42, such a nice number.

Obligatory screenshot how it looks

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Diablo Immortal

Everyone knows (I hope) that mobile games have a bad reputation for being money sinks, but if only half of this is true (and I have zero reason to think that not everything is true) then Diablo Immortal might be the worst pay2win/money grab I’ve ever had the displeasure of hearing about:

“Preach Reacts to Bellular’s Diablo Immortal Video”

Also small disclaimer: Usually not a huge fan of reaction videos, but in this case it’s kinda “watch one video and get the opinions of three people I value without having to watch several videos”.

Wow, it’s bad.

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WoW, the near future, and some soul searching

Last night I wanted to log into WoW and the launcher helpfully said: “14 minutes of subscription left”, which ended my three month experiment of using WoW tokens bought with ingame gold. I still have around 750k-1m, but spread over 3 factions on 2 servers, so I actually resubscribed with money again because I don’t want to go out of my way to grind or feel even a little pressure to save up money from callings or other weeklies. I wanted to go three months first, but then I chose six, I’m having fun right now, raidlogging through the summer is a feasible way of playing (as I found last fall/winter in out in 9.1) and it’s a buck less per month, also a free mount that I forgot to look at yesterday 😛

The more devious deal is that they have 8 character transfers for 80 EUR on sale right now – one is typically 25 EUR, which is complete bonkers, but it’s often marked down to 17.50 EUR and there’s a 3 for 35 deal I haven’t seen. So the thing is, since I transferred my Warrior main and Shaman alt last summer I’ve not really logged back in to the old server, I only ran three toons through Zereth Mortis last week. And while I did talk to my old guildies again for the first time I don’t really feel I belong there anymore, so I could take this chance to move the bulk of my chars to the new server without breaking the bank or rerolling even more.

I have 5 60s in decent gear here on the new server and so there would be 7 missing classes, which is kind of a good match as well, I only regret leveling and gearing a new Paladin, but I like my new Hunter more than my old one 😛 I could also finally move my original classic Rogue off of the server with all my Horde toons, but I already have a Rogue on the new server. So in any case a few toons would stay behind, but that’s not a problem. 50 Void Elf Rogue (for Heritage), 60 Dwarf Hunter I don’t have a huge connection to, said 60 Dwarf Paladin which could still get the last free ticket… It’s a hard choice! DH, Druid, DK, Mage, Priest, Monk would be a given. Not 100% sure about the Mechagnome Warlock (I regret that race choice a bit) and the Paladin, but she used to be my main in BfA. Then again it wouldn’t be completely unreasonable to have 2 Paladins and 2 Rogues, right?

Also some guildies wanted to run M+ with us on their Horde toons and despite some “who can invite whom because of BattleTag” that also worked flawlessly (not only getting randoms from LFG) and it’s really nice, my old guild also started a “WoW community” so people could join on their Horde toons for cross-faction communication outside Discord, also a nice feature – now if only they’d done that many years ago!

With the 13 Plaguefall we did last night I edged ever closer to the magical 2500 rating, with a bit of luck we can do a 12 De Other Side tonight, then I just need Streets and hopefully that’s enough, otherwise there’s next week where I have a choice of like 5 dungeons that could bring a few points if we time it – I love this new system where it’s not “you need everything at +15” but “oh, you have timed a few at higher than +15, so you can slack off with the others”, but I never really looked at the old system, it just sounded less lenient.

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Raiding Sepulcher – weeks 9-13

Why did I not post this for a few weeks? no idea.

Week 9 saw us killing Skolex, Xy’mox, and Pantheon, week 10 was Lihuvim. Then no “kill” progress in week 11 and 12, and last Sunday (week 13) we finally got Halondrus, and on Tuesday we got to 41% on Anduin, so now we’re gonna extend more and hopefully that will help.

Last week was also kinda slow in M+, only got one +15 done, but today after reset I managed to heal a +14 Mists (over time though, and a lot of deaths) and then we timed a +18 Spires with exactly 3s spare.

The Vault gave me a 278 chest, so that means I have 5 slots of the absolute maximum iLevel – and then 5 more fully upgraded at 272. Feels weird if you’ve never really done M+ before and it’s not just a single lucky drop from the Vault, but the majority of your gear. Then again, no luck with weapons at all.

And the “Let Horde and Alliance play together” patch finally went live today, we already had some Horde randoms in a +7 Spires.

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