Apparently we had a little bit of guild drama and that’s one of the reasons I had to tank a lot more on progression the last 2 weeks, interesting to find out so long after the fact.
I’d finally got up and just ground out the remaining Soul Ash on the weekend so I could craft my Level 4 Tank Legendars, Reprisal (recently buffed with 9.0.5) and use that 235 item instead of my 235 DPS pants, and it felt really good, esp in the Denathrius fight where I can actually charge in P1.
Sadly there wasn’t a lot of progression, we got P1 finally down to 90% survival rate but we didn’t enter P3 with everyone alive a single time last night, but we started with only 10 and made it to 14 by the end, a month or two ago we were always raiding with 25 people… but we lost a few once we had cleared normal, so apparently that was enough and I can’t blame them. But I really, really, really want to get him down, and very preferably also get the Ahead of the Curve achievement, with buffed 9.1.0 gear it will be kinda pointless I guess. Still making too many errors myself, but I’m mostly tanking out of necessity and trying to improve, but the fight isn’t great for a Prot Warrior in P2 – a ton of magic damage and a lot of movement through the mirrors where the boss can hit you in the back.
Also I got a slight headache and we have our Layer 8 of Twisting Corridors scheduled for tonight, when the guild decided yesterday to run M+, so that will be fun either way, I guess.
Actually wanted to run my 2 wings of Torghast last night because I want to craft the new Level 4 Tank Legendary, but I got a migraine and went to bed early. I think this also might be the second day since Shadowlands launch that I didn’t log into WoW at all.
So I got up before 8 today and started my first run with ~65 minutes until the daily reset (not sure if it’s also the Torghast/weekly reset on Wednesdays) and made it out the second wing with ~7 minutes spare.
I usually don’t play games before work, as I’d much rather start work early and not stay longer, but sometimes… and in this case it’s the second week in a row. Let’s see if I manage to get my 2 runs in tonight…
I’m not even sure I had heard about Magic Legends before, but I heard about it yesterday. The Open Beta has started a few days ago and there’s supposed to be no wipe until the real launch, and it’s Free To Play, that sounds interesting!
A little bit of back story, I learned about Magic: The Gathering in highschool in 1994 or 1995 and quickly became a huge fan. Homelands and 4th Edition were when I started, then came 5th Edition and Ice Age, and I played roughly until the Mirage Cycle (Mirage, Visions, Weatherlight) in 1997, with a bit of Rath Cycle iirc (Tempest, Stronghold, Exodus). Then I didn’t play for many years with new stuff, just grabbing the old decks once in a while and playing. Around ~2014 I tried to play my old stuff against a coworker with current decks (and mechanics) and he blasted me away without a chance. That’s when I stopped playing. Also I really, really dislike card games on the computer so anything Magic was completely uninteresting for me. Magic Legends sounded like a Diablo-like ARPG with cards/spells, but not a card game. So I downloaded it.
First of all you choose one of five Planeswalkers (according to the five colors of mana). While still knowing full well what each color means and what to expect, I was a little let down by the character descriptions, not sure why. In the end I chose a Red Mana Geomancer.
The game looks ok, but I wouldn’t call it overwhelming. I’m usually not one to criticize non-flashy graphics, but it’s a new game and it doesn’t look better than Diablo 3 (which is 8 years old) in any way, which is a little sad. Also the first cutscene/ingame RP was a little janky with the mouth movements and I’m not loving the voice work. Like, not at all. None of them.
Newbie Geomancer, no zoom available
So I’m Level 4 now, after following the story a bit, quests, doing a random event that popped up and a mini dungeon with 3 others. It’s all ARPG stuff like you’d imagine, but it all seems a little… unfinished. I know, I know, Open Beta. But I was trying to walk over some sort of walkway and I couldn’t spamclick because I was rubberbanding a little and pathing wasn’t exactly spot on. When in a town my toon was behind a wall/building with an NPC and I couldn’t see either.
Using Fast Travel isn’t very intuitive, you have to stand on the waypoint and then open the world map to use it. Or maybe you don’t even have to stand on it, but why can’t I interact with the waypoints, anyway?
Actually these are all very superfluous criticisms and I guess I could just ignore them or get used to them, but I think this game is not for me, for a completely subjective reason. The way combat works is like this: Left click is my default attack (in the Geomancer’s case it fills the shield by hitting enemies), Q and W are “unlimited” abilities with a short (5s?) cooldown, so far so good. But where it diverges from Diablo is that you don’t for example choose 4 skills from your “class list” and use those, but you use spells as in playing Magic, with your deck. So for example I use a Fireball and some sort of Pyroclasm (spells are on the digit buttons, 1,2,3,…) but if I used them they’re gone (for now) and after some time (not sure yet) some new cards(spells) are drawn from your deck and put into slots 1,2,3,4. So basically you can’t learn a rotation, but you need to “play the card” that you drew, and I hate it.
Maybe I’m actually terrible at games and need a proportionally long time to get my fingers used to some sort of controls (I am actually surprised I can play so many different classes in MMOs, but I always need a little time to concentrate when I switch), so having different spells on 1,2,3,4 every few seconds completely confuses me and I noticed I’m glancing down (while fighting) and trying to guess which spell exactly it is (they’re all kinda… red-orange-ish, except the creatures) and then hope for the best. Some have cones to target, some have circles, some are instant-cast point-blank AoE. I like the idea, really, it’s something fresh. But this is not something for me in real time, I could totally live with this sort of spell usage in a round-based game, but realtime clickfest and not knowing which spells are available? Difficult for me, very difficult.
I’ll surely try to play a little bit longer and also try another Planeswalker, overall it’s a really well-made game I think and it’s fun to see spells and creatures you know from the card game. But spontaneously it didn’t really click with me, so I don’t have high hopes for me continuing this game. Bummer.
Nothing too exciting happened in the last week, mostly a really good Wednesday raid with 9/10 Heroic down without overtime (despite me offtanking again) and then 2 nights of banging our heads against Sire Denathrius, if I heard it correctly we’re at ~115 wipes, far too many in P1. There was even some grumbling and blaming at the end of the last night, which is really uncommon for my guild. We’ll see how that develops this week.
In other news, I have 6 characters at Renown 40 and for 2 more I just need to hand in one of the 2 weeklies, I was simply too lazy last week. My Horde Rogue is at 33 and needs a little more focus, I really want to have all factions to Exalted on him, but I might wait for 9.1 to do that. Moonkin Druid is 55 and I’m still running a random daily dungeon whenever I have time.
Most alts have transitioned to “log in once per night to run some adventures, log in once per week to do the world boss and fill up to 1000 anima”, which is nice and relaxing. Sure, sometimes a calling, but mostly focusing on Warrior, Paladin, and Shaman now. I got my “Fun Gal” title on the Warrior for getting Marasmius to Exalted, and I learned that it’s a very boring “Mycologist” in German WoW clients, guess they couldn’t translate the pun at all.
I’m actually just waiting for Heroic Denathrius to drop then I might actually skip a raid (so far I have 100% attendance since we started mid-December) not because I am completely burned out or annoyed, but that was my goal and I really want to play some more EVE and not have 3 fixed evenings occupied per week. I’ve never been a huge fan of farming instances (except to get gear to be stronger to progress), but I think I want to complete my Heroic Plate set for transmog.
Oh and we had to move our Saturday Twisting Corridors run, so only did Layer 6 last night, uneventful and Arcane Mage with the right perks is the secret weapon. I’ve also been blasting through Layer 8 Torghast solo as Fury, I simply don’t understand if they changed it again since my failures in Layer 4/6 or if it was simply the most unlucky combo of wing + perks ever for me and I formed a wrong opinion…
Yep, we’re still raiding. We got Stone Legion Generals down not long after I posted about our first tries in February, actually just 2 days later and since we’ve been working on Sire Denathrius (not extending, doing a full clear of Heroic and a skip clear of normal still). Like on Normal , we’re not really good at phase 1, and until last week Phase 2 was also still hard. But something clicked and in a very small raid of 10 people last Sunday we actually saw Phase 3 for the first time. Then a few latecomers joined and by the end of the night we were at 25%. Very far from a kill, but not always failing in Phase 1, which is nice.
Today at ~23:00 I finally gave in and tried Layer 7 (Upper Reaches) of Torghast. Yes, I know, with my 215 iLevel it should be a joke but I still remember how much it sucked on Layer 4 as Fury and then Protection Layer 4 and 5, then failing at 6. Now this was a real walk in the park, just as most people have told me it is. So after that I went into Layer 8 of Mort’regar and that also wasn’t a problem. So maybe my Layer 6 try was so early that it was before the nerf or I don’t know. Weird experience. Anyway, nearly at 2k Soul Ash now and I guess I can just plan 2 Layer 8 runs in the coming weeks until I have enough for a Level 4 Tank Legendary.
About the Army of Alts: My Rogue (and Warrior Main obviously) is at Renown 40, and I have 6 more classes at 39, so will hit 40 next week I guess (Getting the 1000 anima together is just about how much effort I can muster for most of them). Paladin and Shaman are above iLevel 200, 4 of them are at 195ish and the Priest is lagging behind at 185 but I didn’t bother buying all the Covenant set piece upgrades. My Horde Rogue is close to Renown 30 and at 175, I want to get LFR done once for the achievement, otherwise no real plans to play Horde at the moment. Oh, and I’ve been leveling my Druid as Moonkin via 1-2 random dungeons per day when I have time while reading stuff during the queue time. It’s fun to play but I have no grand plans for her once she hits 60. That would be 9th class at max level already, 4 months into the expansion – missing Mage, DK, and Monk.
Overall I’m still not 100% sure I’ll keep the warrior for the next raid tier. Fury is absolutely fun to play on most fights, you bring some amount of utility (or even a lot on some fights), but I am so not happy with my damage output. Of course it doesn’t seem to be the class, I just don’t seem to be really good at it. Looking at Warcraftlogs it’s mostly green parses, some grey even, and on Normal only blue and never purple :/ At least I’m not dying all the time and I’m usually straight in the middle of our guild’s dps rankings, and I can offtank and usually not mess up moving seeds or other specialty tasks, that’s at least something. Still very unhappy as I was pretty much used to topping the damage meters on my Rogue in my old guild, or at least competing for the top 3 with others, depending on boss and raid.
Reading Shintar’s blog post about WoW TBC Classic and the mention of the pre-patch enabling people to already start a new Draenei or Blood Elf character made me think about what changes in WoW really mattered to me personally (and although I had heard about this change at the Blizzcon panel already, reading about it again gave me the idea for this post).
So let’s start with the Vanilla patches, because some of them brought some important things, although I was such a newbie that I probably didn’t even notice most of the important changes…
Patch 1.9.0 (January 2006)
Ahn’Qiraj raids (I went to the 20man one later)
Linked Auction Houses
Multiple Battleground Queues
Gates of AQ (read about this, didn’t take part)
Patch 1.10.0 (March 2006)
Weather effects
New Final Destination Flight Paths
Patch 1.11.0 (June 2006)
Naxxramas raid (not for me though)
The cost to unlearn talents will now decay over time
Temporary item buffs (e.g. poisons) will persist through zoning
Detect Traps is now a passive skill – Swirly Ball 🙁
Patch 1.12.0
Cross-Realm Battlegrounds (I was still doing a lot of PvP back then)
After writing the list I actually do remember a few things, the linked AHs were huge, especially as a newbie. Also the BG queues and being able to use the flight master and go AFK.
On to The Burning Crusade – the first expansion! In Europe it launched in early 2007 and I’d already played long enough to be actually excited and I’d been actively waiting for it.
Release (January 2007)
New races: Blood Elves & Draenei
Alliance Shamans & Horde Paladins
Flying mounts
New profession: Jewelcrafting
Arena
Patch 2.1.0 (May 2007)
Druid Epic Flight Form (Druid was my main alt)
Ogri’la & Nether Drakes – my first long grinds
The Black Temple raid
Patch 2.2.0 (September 2007)
surprisingly… nothing?
Patch 2.3.0 (November 2007)
Zul’Aman 10man raid
Guild Banks!
Vendor Discounts based on Rep
Blue exclamation marks for dailies
Patch 2.4.0 (March 2008)
Sunwell Isle zone & raid
While I didn’t immediately start a Paladin, many people did and it made complete sense to have both classes on both sides. Jewelcrafting shaped the meta a lot, depending on the expansion (not so much nowadays). Guild banks were a very welcome addition to the game and the dailies have been a staple since TBC. For Druid players flight form was huge.
Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion is next:
Release (October 2008)
New class: Death Knight (never was a fan)
51-point talent system revamp
Rogue Poisons don’t need reagents anymore
Achievements!
New profession: Inscription
Barber Shop!
Focus Frame
Pets & Mounts are spells/casts now
Patch 3.1.0 (April 2009)
Ulduar raid
No more dismounting in water
Patch 3.2.0 (August 2009)
Trial of the Crusader Raid
Raid IDs can be extended
25man raids are no longer called Heroic, it’s 10+25 N+H now
Rogues can use 1h Axes now
Uninterruptible casts have the shield icon now
Patch 3.3.0 (December 2009)
Icecrown Citadel raid (one of my alltime favorites)
(Cross-Realm) Dungeon Finder
The first new class, being added to a 4 year old game. Some QoL improvements for Rogues. Focus Frame is so important in high-level play these days. Another new profession. Extending raid IDs is a big thing and the shift to less server identity in full swing here. Also achievements. Overall pretty much important and good changes.
On to Cataclysm, the third expansion:
Release (December 2010)
Revamped zones
New races: Worgen & Goblins
New race & class combos:
Dwarf Mages, Shamans, Warlocks
Gnome Priests
Human Hunters
Night Elf Mages
Blood Elf Warriors
Orc Mages
Tauren Paladins, Priests
Troll Druids, Warlocks
Undead Hunters
Reforging
New profession: Archaeology
Guild levels & perks
3 new raids: BWD, BoT, Tot4W
Patch 4.1.0 (April 2011)
nothing?
Patch 4.2.0 (June 2011)
Firelands zone & raid
Dungeon Journal!
Patch 4.3.0 (November 2011)
Dragon Soul raid
New Legendary: Fangs of the Father
Raid Finder in its current form was introduced
Transmog! & Void Storage
Darkmoon Faire moved to Darkmoon Island
This expansion has the second key point why I though this post would be interesting, the new race / class combos, my Shaman is a Dwarf and I had planned to change my Blood Elf Paladin to Tauren for ages, but ultimately didn’t. Many people were in love with their Troll druids as well. The Dungeon Journal is immensely helpful and I love it and use it a lot. Also as a Rogue main of 5ish years I was very happy to get my Legendary Daggers, as we didn’t get any Warglaives.
And of course, most importantly I guess, Transmog! I had dutifully kept all my Tier sets from Vanilla, TBC, and WotLK and could finally display them.
And then Mists of Pandaria, the fourth expansion and my final one as a regular player:
Release (August 2012)
New race: Pandaren
New class: Monk
The big talent revamp with 6? rows with 3 choices each
Account-wide Achievements, Mounts, and Pets
AoE Looting
Cross-Realm Zones, further nullifying server identity
Poisons are changed again: Lethal and Non-Lethal
Dungeon Challenge Modes
Pet Battles
11 Character slots per server
Sunsong Farm, the first weird type of housing
Patch 5.1.0 (November 2012)
Brawler’s Guild
Patch 5.2.0 (March 2013)
Isle of Thunder zone & Throne of Thunder raid
Patch 5.3.0 (May 2013)
Raid loot: Choose a specialization
Patch 5.4.0 (September 2013)
Siege of Orgrimmar raid
Flex Raid difficulty
Timeless Isle zone
Proving Grounds
Connected realms
Of course I tried out a Pandaren Monk like everyone else, but I never loved the class. It felt a bit like a gimped Rogue, despite being powerful. Account-wide achievements & mounts were huge for me, and the expanded character slots. Proving Grounds were fun and much better than Torghast, strictly optional and quick.
Wow, that was quite a list. As I stopped actively playing in early 2014, at the time of 5.4.0 and the Siege of Orgrimmar raid, I’ll also finish this post here. That’s nearly 10 years of WoW changes already! (although only close to 8 years for me personally). And this all started when I was thinking about how Blood Elf Paladins were introduced in TBC…
Giving the contents here a last hard look I’d categorize the bullet points into these categories: Rogue changes (incl Legendary Daggers), UI changes (Focus), Dungeon/Quality of Life changes (LFR, Dungeon finder, char slots per server), non-game-breaking awesome changes (Transmog, Pet Battles, new races & combos), and game-breaking changes 😛 (raid sizes, talent revamps, new classes).
I only included the new raids because that’s how I mentally sort my timeline (Expansion X, Raid Y) and only then can backtrace what year it probably was and which guild I was in, etc.pp.
For some reason I felt the need to change a few things around this morning while I am afking in Ardenweald because I actually wanted to do one of my Stitchmasters weekly quests there…
Oh well, I split off most of the MMO content from the About page into its own page: MMOs & Me and rewrote parts of both.
Also added links to Twitter and the Blaugust Discord because that’s where I usually talk to real humans about gaming stuff instead of shouting into the void here.
I also reintroduced the Blogroll on the right side again, in a slimmed down version with only the blogs I check daily in my feed reader, for now. I guess I’ll expand it again but I’ve not been diligently reading blog posts the last few weeks and the unread count is huge – sorry to the others who didn’t make the cut, I’m still reading your blogs and I’m not one to easily click “mark all read”, but I will usually catch up at some point, just not very timely. (Also why does the WordPress Custom HTML widget tell me to “please indent with tabs and not spaces”?).
Bit late to the party but I saw the twitter thread and after reading Belghast’s epic story in 5 parts (part 1) I thought I’d least double-check the list I am keeping on my About page.
So here’s the list of MMOs I played a ton, from months to years:
World of Warcraft (many years)
Final Fantasy XIV (maybe a year)
EVE Online (2-3 years of subs spread over 7 years)
WildStar (2 years?)
Star Wars: The Old Republic (3 years?)
Guild Wars 2 (a lot)
Ragnarok Online (years)
Lord of the Rings Online (not sure)
Marvel Heroes (probably 2-3 years)
The Elder Scrolls Online (a month?)
Warhammer Online (several months?)
Pokémon Go (several months)
Ingress (2-3 months)
Then there are ones where I at least made an account and/or checked it out:
Runes of Magic (can’t remember how long, also been pressured)
Anarchy Online (surely many weeks but not months I think)
EverQuest 2 (Demo, Trial, pretty sure it was pre-launch)
Dungeons and Dragons Online (1 day with coworkers…)
Project Gorgon (very briefly)
The Division (1 or 2, a week?)
Lineage II (honestly not sure if I tried it out myself or just watched in person…)
Tantra Online Beta (some sort of Asian Fighting MMO, not Leisure Suit Larry Online)
Stuff that can be seen as an MMO, but many people don’t:
Destiny (for me it’s a solo shouter with emergent group game play)
Diablo 3 (played a ton, but only with the same <10 people…)
So on that first list I only forgot Pokémon Go, because it’s such a different beast and I played it intensely in some short bursts, and after I was finished I remembered Ingress… On the second list I was missing DDO, Project Gorgon, EQ2, and The Division.
Not as interesting of a trip down memory lane as for other people, but I think it’s still quite a list.
Although the verdict is really clear – if I like a game, I will stick to it for many months and even years, or at least come back to it.
We’re still raiding and we actually got Sludgefist on Heroic down last reset and we’ve been pretty consistently quickly clearing Heroic (with some hiccups at Darkvein this week) kinda fast and only doing normal with the skip now (aka Shriekwing, Sludgefist, Generals, Sire). Friday was a bit of a clusterfuck and so we only killed Sludgefist for a second time yesterday, still using Vantus runes and many wipes.
But let’s start at the beginning, our offtank wasn’t available and our #1 dps didn’t quickly shout so I stepped up and properly tanked for the first time. I had done Shriekwing normal the week before because our second tank was late, so I’ll not count that. But last night I actually did Shriekwing, Sludgefist, Generals, and Sire on normal, then Sludgefist Heroic and then we tried to get Generals down. Didn’t kill it but it wasn’t my fault, I actually only messed up a bit on one try, so pretty happy with my performance. My mainspec gear is 213 and in tanking gear I’m 210, which isn’t too shabby. It was pretty fun, except Sludgefist as a Warrior offtank because our main tank is like 13 iLvl higher (DH in PvP Vers gear…). Your only job is to stand on the main tank and not die. This is harder than it sounds because Rage isn’t exactly easy to come by. Shield Slam and Thunderclap to gain Rage, Shield Block and Ignore Pain to mitigate. Rinse and repeat. Anyway, at some point he fell and Generals is a lot more fun to tank. Manageable and not complete chaos, unlike it is for DPS and healers it seems 😛
I didn’t write about it at the time but last Sunday was the first time since I played WoW when I was close to smashing something out of frustration.
We set out to do the Twisting Corridors of Torghast as a duo, Protection Paladin and Arcane Mage and everything went kind of fine until we got to the last boss. To cut a long story short, we wiped a few times and did not finish. Just underlines my hate of Torghast.
So Saturday night we were meeting friends for a chat on Discord and when we got to WoW as a topic we heard they also failed on the 18th floor. Because all of us didn’t have anything planned we switched to WoW and made a group. Protection Warrior, Resto Druid, Arcane Mage, Destro Warlock. So we went to the Twisting Corridors and surprisingly breezed through and nuked the last boss (I’ve heard stories of people saying 5man Torghast can be pretty hard, so we were a bit wary). Then we made plans to come back for Layer 2 next Saturday, maybe there’s a chance to get the mount after all. On the other hand playing with friends makes everything better, especially if it replaces a stupid “I need to get this done although I hate it” chore, which Torghast 100% is for me.
