WoW

As I wrote before, this turned out to be a very close call. August 2nd (a Tuesday) is probably the last day for EU people to get AOTC, and we’re not sure if we’ll get a raid together this Sunday or on that Tuesday, but… we did it!

Last night at 21:40, so 20 minutes before the scheduled raid end, we had a really good try with less deaths at the start and actually killed him just after the 9 minute mark. AOTC number two done, I’m so relieved. We’ll try to grab another ID and do a rekill on Sunday for one of our tanks, who missed this night, probably one of 2-3 nights this whole tier :/

Not completely happy with my damage (46 Green parse, 35 adjusted for iLevel, 97% active), but didn’t die and 7th place out of 11 in a single target fight.

Wipe counter for Sepulcher of the First Ones Heroic:

• Jailer 61
• Rygelon 57
• Lords of Dread 25
• Halondrus 36
• Anduin 24
• Pantheon 13
• Lihuvim 15
• Xy’mox 18
• Dausegne 3
• Skolex 7
• Vigilant Guardian 0

Rygelon didn’t turn out to be a big problem after the nerf, so he fell on like the 5th pull on that Sunday raid, since then we’ve been working on the Jailer, but some raid nights had to be called off for tanks missing, and even more people missing. I think we’re down to 38% – when the adds come, but not very consistently. I guess we have 2 raid nights left, if they happen – then it’s over, AotC or not. Not happy.

Oh boy, again forgot to post about this and need to try to puzzle it back together from logs…

Sunday the 5th Anduin fell, then we continued extending but still sometimes killing Pantheon for the Trinket if time allowed.

Week 16 on Tuesday we managed to kill Lords of Dread, getting up to 9/11 Heroic.

Just before Blizzard announced that Season 3 (and with it the AOTC achievement) would only last until August 2nd, we kinda cancelled our Tuesday raid for lack of interest. This is a bit of a shit timing in my opinion. Like many others I was kinda looking forward to Season 4 as a fun diversion, but only after we got AOTC – and announcing there’d only be a month left for this kinda hard tier was a bit of a letdown.

Week 19 saw us continuing progress on Rygelon, best try is 36% with 17 people in the raid, but unclear if Tuesday would happen, at least it was put back on the menu and not outright cancelled.

Tuesday was a bit of a letdown, with some nerfs announced for tomorrow we voted close to 50/50 to raid at all, despite 16 people there. In the end we tried Rygelon for an hour, went to 20ish percent and then called it after the break and did two M+ groups instead to get a few people more Great Vault chests. Not a waste of time, but I would’ve preferred to raid.

Let’s see what Sunday brings, we’ll have 4 full weeks now it seems and two bosses are missing.

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.

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.

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).

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! 😀

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…

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.

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.

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.

Just dinged 50 on the Zandalari Troll and the “I want to get those levels” project is done for now.

• One of every class on the Alliance side to 60
• One of every class on the Horde side to 60
• Unlock every Heritage Armor currently in game

So this leaves me with 3 Rogues, 3 Hunters, 3 Paladins, 3 Death Knights, and 2 of every other class at 60, and then 2 more Rogues, 2 more Warriors, a Paladin, and a Priest at 50 – that’s 28 max-level chars and 6 at the last max level and I barely want to type it out… and 28 is such an odd number, kinda makes you want to make it a round 30, doesn’t it?

Gear on the other hand is a joke. On my old Alliance server (with 10 of the classes at 60, missing the two that I transferred) the average gear level is 185 – that’s below Season 1 Raid Finder. The Horde server (12 chars) is even worse at 141 average and a single one at 186. But sure, you could easily send them a full set of 226 ZM gear, but what for?

On my current server the three toons without Legendaries are at 240-243, but I’ve not put a ton of effort except doing some ZM.

Guess I need new goals, except for the M+ mount for this season…