Nogamara

Topics, games, WoW

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I’ve written many times that this is not a WoW blog, just a blog by someone who has played WoW for quite a few years (started in 2005, some short breaks until 2014, then mostly subbed since 2019 again) – but in the last year or so I think 90% of the posts have been about WoW. I do play EVE Online, and at times more than WoW, but I find it very hard to write about, so not many posts. I’ve been slowly progressing through Diablo IV but this is the second post mentioning it, without it being the main topic of the post. (Yes, it’s still fun but not awesome, but I’m still in the story part). And then there are other games. I’ve basically zero interest in Baldur’s Gate III, but all the talk made me wonder if I should replay the original Baldur’s Gate or Planescape: Torment. I probably shouldn’t.

Anyway, after a few weird months (see posting frequency since April) I should probably be happy to have some topic to write about once per week, even if it’s just a small blurb on how the raid went, even if I don’t want to exclusively write about WoW. But then again, there’s nothing drawing me to FFXIV or SWTOR or GW2 at the moment and that list of upcoming games for 2022? Yeah well, I played Gamedec and it was good and then the reviews for Redfall were abysmal and the ones for Forspoken were mixed or worse, Nightingale hasn’t released and so on…

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Aberrus – week 6 & 7

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Tuesday of week 6 was the first time I’d missed a first kill on Heroic since… I don’t know, maybe since I’ve been raiding with this guild (that would be 2 years) but RL called to do other stuff and so they killed Magmorax without me, and Zskarn as well, I think.

Sunday of week 7 was really good, we skipped Normal for the first time and straight up breezed through with only 2 wipes or so, everything including Echo of Neltharion is down, so that would be a full evening of Sarkareth pulls ahead on Tuesday. Tuesday: Soo, not sure what to make of it, but we got into P3 relatively consistently and then it broke down, like 12-13 tries in total. That will be a piece of work.

My “iLvl %” parses seem really good, but of course overall some 0f my fellow raiders are miles ahead with an average of 12 iLvl higher, that is basically a full tier. Can’t complain, if you have no time to put into gearing but a little annoyed how it could be a lot better.

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Aberrus – week 5

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Oh wow, the end of a raid week and I manage to post. Nothing spectacular, but we’re 6/9 Heroic now after some grinding of teeth on Zskarn and again only 15 people. (Last week it was 5/9 with I think 4 new ones) – and we had done Normal again at the start, so that’s actually 9 bosses in 4h, weirdly quick for our usual pace.

Anyway, still raid logging and probably having to continue to do that for most of July, but at least I get to play. For some reason my DPS numbers seemed pretty stellar last week, now they’re back to “Oh I’m undergeared relative to our top DPS and thus can’t compete”. Maybe I should investigate, or maybe I shouldn’t…

Still no time for M+, but with 2 Heroic drops from the Vault that should be ok. I managed to get my MH upgraded to 437 last week and thus could upgrade my OH basically for free and now I can still upgrade my belt and also buy some more upgrades, maybe I should try to get that done before the next raid…

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June in review

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Oh wow, a second one of these posts. For several reasons June was probably my month with the least amount of gaming time in a long while and July doesn’t look much better with some plans.

I did end up buying Diablo 4 and starting the campaign, and it’s fun, but I’m not particularly far – taking it slow but I kinda wanna see more.

June 4th was my (and our) first raid day, cleared 8/9 Normal that week (Sun+Tue as usual) and then my next raid was the the 25th + 27th when we ended up at 5/9 Heroic. Tbh not completely sure what the guild did in the 2 weeks that I missed, I think they were on 9/9 Normal 1/9 Heroic.
Still at zero M+ and didn’t log in a lot, but at least I managed to get my gear in shape, in relation to my online time – 423 iLvl, where 424 is the max iLvl in Normal. But I guess if I can not totally fall behind with just raid logging I’m happy enough, and I got my 4 set bonus via Catalyst and a bit of rolling luck. Oh, and I’m back to playing Fury. Guess it goes hand in hand with this low-stress season where I couldn’t really be motivated to learn a new class and/or even gear it beforehand in our break between the seasons.

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May in review

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Ugh, May has been wild and I’ve neither had the time nor any real incentive to play WoW. I think I finished the 10.1 story line so far but didn’t even begin to grind out gear etc.

We only start raiding on the 4th of June (if we even get the people) – it’s been a weird transition from “ok, patch soon, everybody relax” to… no one logging in, no signups going up, or I just missed them because I wasn’t on a lot. Haven’t done a single M+ either, we’ll see how it will work out in that raid week, but I’ll be on vacation soon after.

I did play quite a bit of EVE though, but as usual I find it hard to write about that. I did have fun though.

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Diablo IV – Server Slam

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I’ve not preordered Diablo IV and was originally unenthusiastic, but last weekend was the Server Slam, some kind of beta server test event, and while I didn’t take part, I did have a look over someone’s shoulder for a bit.

My original assessment of D4 was “this does not look like enough of a graphical update over D3, 11 years later” – but when you play it it actually does look nice. A bit too dark at times, but ok.

I’m a little more interested now, the “MMO features” I’d read about didn’t seem so very prominent in a Level 1 to 20 journey anymore, the story seems ok (queue “at least there is a story now”) and it seemed pretty solid. Leveling was about as slow as in D3 with your first char in a season, maybe a little slower, but the combat feels ok I guess.

We’ll see if I’ll bite in June.

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Season 28 after 48h

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So that stationary Hydra build with a Wizard is kind of the worst combo with a completely speed-fanatic Demon Hunter build, also my Ring of Royal Grandeur won’t drop.

Anyway, after 48h I’m very close to Paragon 200, can do Torment IX bounties solo without a problem and have not gone for Rifts a lot. But we got some secondary chars to 70 and maybe I can manage to grab a set on my Demon Hunter and that suits me more. I’ve often lost interest in Diablo III pretty soon and I’m not saying it’s already happened but I’m not so happy with the Wizard but I’ve also not put too many hours in, maybe 5 or 6.

Something that surprised me is that you can’t do the Set Dungeon with the set you get for free from Haedric’s Gift, so in order to finish the Slayer part of the Season Journey (after Chapter IV) you need to farm a complete 2nd set anyway, so this time no real use sticking to the char I rolled first. It’s weird.

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Back to Diablo III

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A certain someone had pre-ordered Diablo IV and felt the urge to play Diablo, so III it was and I was recruited as well. If we can believe Blizzard this will be the final Season for Diablo III, probably ending when Diablo IV launches in June, so it’s a good chance to get a last session in, as I don’t even remember when we last played outside of the season. Many years I guess.

As usual I was waiting until I could get a quick boost to 70 instead of leveling myself, then it was on to tick all the check boxes for the Season journey up to Chapter IV (but of course I had to do the GR 20 solo).

So after one evening I have a Wizard now, Paragon 76, and need to level a gem, do a GR 30, and do a Set Dungeon. Let’s see how this will work out, this Hydra spec does not play like I had imagined and the combo ultra fast Demon Hunter plus stationary Wizard also seems bad.

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Vault of the Incarnates – weeks 13 & 14

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Week 13 nearly didn’t happen, but we did have a few tries on Tuesday that did not go very well.

Week 14 Sunday was actually promising, everyone seemed to be out of their chocolate egg induced raid coma and we got one really good try at 5% in the last phase. Also for the first time we consistently managed to even get to the phase with the two large adds. So there is still hope we will make it in time, but it will be close. The Tuesday raid was interesting as Raszageth just died on the 5th pull of the night and the 60th overall (14th this week), so we didn’t even have to do our break and just stopped after one hour, culminating in a raid break until 10.1 Normal opens (or maybe a week later).

In M+ news, I finally did it! I got my Keystone Hero on Friday, with a timed +18 Temple of the Jade Serpent, but the really lucky run that saved me about 2 others was a +19 Ruby Life Pools we two-chested 2h before that. Someone from a Discord community took me in despite the warning that I had only timed it +17 before, but it worked. The other two DPS did more damage but I didn’t mess anything up (one death very late on the last boss, they could’ve easily finished those 20 seconds). So, that was it for M+, and only AOTC was left for the Season but I already stopped stressing out with M+, the Warrior’s gear is basically perfect for what I have done (might just try to run one +20 SBG or CoS for having the max level Vault loot just once) and I’m now only running when I’m in the mood or someone needs help, not because I have a goal I desperately want to reach.

Soo… this is kinda weird now to have reached both long-standing goals in one week, and now it’s only about deciding what class/spec to use for raiding in 10.1, it will most probably not be Enhancement Shaman, but maybe Rogue, or Druid, or Warlock. Or maybe Warrior.

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