WoW

Somehow this week was bad. Didn’t sleep well, wasn’t enthusiastic about anything, not a lot of progress.

I guess the biggest downer was opening the Great Vault chest on Wednesday after work and, surprise, no Head or Chest piece so I could complete my 4-set Tier bonus. Got some nice 278 Boots but they’re a 114 DPS upgrade according to the sim. I already ranted on Twitter how not fun gearing is if a jump from 252-non BiS to 278 (max iLvl)-non-BiS is a mathematical 1% increase in DPS, especially if your class simply doesn’t seem to click with you this raid tier.

See tomorrow’s raid post for details.

What was a little more positive that I’ve been running some old raid instances for transmogs again for the last three weeks and last night I actually managed to get the belt for the Warlock Corruptor’s set, the last missing piece! Still trying for the Rogue Deathmantle T5 chest from KT in The Eye on 2 Rogues per week… And a Plate belt from Morchok in Dragon Soul, and one Paladin item from Trilliax in Nighthold…

Curiously for all the time I’ve been playing WoW (10-13 years since 2005) and all the time I’ve been writing here (since 2009) I’ve never actually written a post about a WoW expansion announcement. I did it for other games.

Sure, sometimes there are mentions of the upcoming expansion, but always when it’s already in the Alpha, or Beta, or in prep for the launch – but never when it was announced. Looking at my RSS feeds, it’s all over the place and quite a few people seem cautiously optimistic or even more positive, that’s good.

As I wrote in a comment on Belghast’s blog… I don’t even remember when (or if) I was ever hyped up for an expansion. My (maybe realistic) guess is that I was excited for TBC (as the game was still new to me at < 2 years and it was the first expansion) and WotLK (because I want to say TBC+WotLK were my peak of WoW enthusiasm). Cata and MoP I’m not so sure anymore and then I stopped. WoD was meh in prospect and meh in hindsight and I only played one month. Legion seemed ok but I still vanished after around 3 months. Not sure how I would count BfA,I wasn’t expecting it I think, I wasn’t really hyped, but I ended up a playing a lot, it was a bad time at work and then the pandemic hit. I was absolutely looking forwards to Shadowlands, but not because of what was announced, just that it would be a new expansion and I could level up and raid at the start.

I think I enjoyed most of the expansions in their own way, but only after I had actually played them. I know I’m easily excited about things on a small scale, but usually not one to eagerly anticipate anything that will launch in the future. To me it wouldn’t matter if they announced ANY info on a new expansion just a month before. I guess I would actually prefer that because then I could decide short-term if I would invest my time in a few weeks in the future. Maybe I’m just overall bad with long-time planning.

So, three long paragraphs and nothing about the actual expansions? As Preach put it so nicely, “there’s nothing I hate about it”, which is always a good first smoke test. I’m not a fan of ranged classes in general, so the Evokers are nothing I am specifically looking forward to. If it’s ingame I will try it out and level one, simple as that. Then I will tell if I liked it. The professions revamp sounds nice, the question is whether they will pull it off. Talent trees? Dunno, I’ve always been a “use optimal cookie cutter for raid” person and for alts I’m just questing with I mostly use a “good” spec and adjust single talents to my liking, usually anything with travel speed (or sometimes survivability) over damage. The dragon-riding looks fun and I hope there won’t be any weird borrowed power, that’s about it. My optimistic prediction for a launch would be Christmas 2022, but maybe February 2023, not later. (Shadowlands Alpha begun early April and it launched in that year.)

Also those big reveal presentations are not for me. I started to watch it and had to switch it off after a bit and just looked at the MMO-Champ updates because it was just so scripted and cringe worthy.

As I wrote a while ago I’m in the process of leveling all my Horde toons to 60, 7 are done now, one is at 56, and 4 are missing. I wanted to start the Mage today (one of the 50s) to get the ball rolling on catching some daily random dungeons.

The problem was just that his gear was so shit that I couldn’t even queue for a random Shadowlands dungeon, and the XP rewards (and probably wait time) of the BfA ones weren’t worth it. Easy fix – go to the AH and buy a few pieces. The thing is just that Aggramar is a really low-pop server, close to being dead. Every piece of Level 50 cloth gear was 2-3k gold. For something I’d replace in an hour or three. So what I did instead was log all of 8 toons I had leveled and cleaned out their bags and banks and finally all that gear they accumulated while leveling. And lo and behold, there were actually just enough pieces to get him to iLvl 81 or something and I could queue. Then also checked the other toons, but both the Priest and the Demon Hunter were actually at 80 or 81 and for the Druid I just had to find a weapon. Still really annoying. I leveled these to 120 (now 50) the normal way in one of the earlier patches, so not even 8.0 – it must have been 8.1. And their gear level is too low to queue for a 9.0 dungeon. I’ve done so many of them now and the chance is actually 50/50 that you will have 60s running their friends through or raid-geared toons that just blast through normal. You can actually 3 man them, because often enough someone dies, doesn’t get a rez, and they just continue. Like today in Mists of Tirna Scythe where the 60 tank just pulled half the instance, people died in the unavoidable AoE, I wasn’t quick enough and didn’t get the quest done. Thanks, asshats. It’s been a while since I added people to the ignore list (in hopes to not get matched up again) but today was the day.

Anyway, I also sold a metric ton of old food and I’m thinking of cleaning out my banks now. I’ve been happy to fund my last 2 months of WoW with WoW tokens and if I can get rid of the stuff in the banks on the faction/server where I’ve not played in earnest in a while doing that – all the better.

Week 5 had us clear the first 8 on Sunday, then 2 more on Tuesday and then a few bad tries on the Jailer.

This week we cleared from Anduin up to the Jailer and wiped there 5 times on Sunday – no great try but some good ones.
Last night we did some weird skipping and did the Tier bosses, Pantheon, Lihuvim, and Halondrus. Then we used another id, killed Guardian, reset, used the teleport to the Jailer and killed him. Then we oneshot Guardian on Heroic.

I have honestly track of the raid id shenanigans and I suppose we’re mostly going Heroic soon, just need another Anduin kill for the skip.

It has been a little slow (we cleared Sanctum in week 4, after extending), but it’s a fun tier. Just the age old “my damage sucks”, although I got my Tier legs today, so I have a 2 piece set bonus now.

When I said I was “done” with Zereth Mortis two weeks ago, I still had some slots with item level lower than 252, so there were still upgrades to be had – this opportunity for backup gear has now been made irrelevant because the +12 M+ I mentioned gave me nice 272 bracers. I’m still wearing 5 pieces of 252 ZM gear though, 2 Legendaries, 1 M+ drop, 6 drops from Sepulcher (one of them a Tier piece) out of 26 bosses killed and 3x Great Vault (is that a good or bad ratio?), and 2 Sanctum drops, one of them even Non-Heroic 233. Never got a better trinket, which is a little sad.

Last night I spent my last cypher drop currency items (whatever name they have) and got the achievement to have researched everything in the Cypher of the First Ones. Well done Blizzard, I subscribed on March 2nd and I finished it on March 30th without excessive grinding, I was basically doing my round of dailies and World Quests dutifully every day, sometimes staying a few more minutes, but nothing I would call actually grinding. And I have 2 days spare that I could’ve taken off – so if you sub for a month then you can do it, which I think is a fair grind. I am not sure though if those items ever dropped in the raid and I’d have to retroactively calculate how much rep I got in the raid, so maybe you’d need to spend more than 29 days to get to Revered + Cypher done, but I guess I’m too lazy for that. It worked for me and I’m not even unsubbing.

So what’s left now is the grind to Exalted and killing those last 5-6 Rare Mobs I’ve never seen so far, then checking the achievements tab if there’s anything else to do, otherwise I might be slowly shifting to doing the dailies on my Ele Shammy now as long as they’re not annoying me and let the Rep on my main pile up while raiding and killing bosses.

On my old server I’ve been very slowly leveling 5 Horde toons from 50 to 60 at the same time. Log in, queue for random dungeon, do some Threads of Fate stuff like quests or WQs while waiting for the pop (usually 5-10 minutes), then run the dungeon (which often also only takes 10-15 minutes because there are so many 60s running their friends through or doing it for gold maybe?) and then sometimes finish the quest I started, sometimes just directly log out again. Takes about 60-90 minutes per day and gives me more than half a level five times (some days I skip one or more toons when they are not well-rested). Once this batch is done I can rotate in another four of them, we’ll see how long I am in the mood. I also shouldn’t forget buying the 40 Renown catchup item before starting like I did with the first two. After that there’d still be my four Allied Race toons but the main priority is to get one per class to 60 on the Horde side.

So yeah, kinda busy in WoW and riding the wave as long as I am having fun.

And again I forgot to post a summary of the raid last week, great.

Last week we did the first six on Sunday and then killed Halondrus on Tuesday, at least that’s how I remember it, and we even had a few tries on Anduin, but we only managed to get to the wall phase once or twice and never saw the last phase.

This week we managed to kill the first seven on Sunday and that left us a whole night for Anduin on Tuesday. But one of our healers had toddler aggro so we started a little late and on the last try we killed him, a few minutes after the normal end of the raid, so that was on point. It’s kind of a nasty fight in my opinion. So from next week on we’re gonna skip, but they have devised some scheme of bringing an alt and still doing the tier bosses, I just have not fully grasped how.

Even after getting both Legendaries to 291 and seeing a 252 MH weapon upgrade I am still very much on the low end of item level in our raid, at 254 equipped and it shows in the damage numbers. One of the other Fury Warriors (who is admittedly a much better player) has a full 11 item levels more, but he’s constantly running M+ and is only after Tier pieces in the raid.

In other news, I got roped in to do a +10 Halls last night and of course I was completely nervous and not playing well, as it was the first M+ since the 9.1 launch week for me. But we made it in time easily and I didn’t mess up. When they wanted to continue they were lacking a fifth so I stayed and we timed a +12 Spires. I was much more relaxed in that one, but it was close. With a few deaths and a wipe on the last boss I think we didn’t have more then 30s left. And of course the only drop I got was a 265 cloak (which could be useful for tanking), but maybe I am lucky with the chest tonight.

So, I just reached Revered with the Enlightened faction in Zereth Mortis, which is an important milestone for Legendary stuff, and I have finished upgrading my Cypher to Level 6/6 which means I can now get 252 items from World Quests and bosses there.

I got quite some gear upgrades the last 3 weeks, but most of my items are still below 252, so with some lucky stats there could be some interesting things. I can now also buy the item to upgrade my conduits to 239, but the grind to get the faction to Exalted isn’t really important. My “mandatory daily” phase is done because I’m not counting on drop luck for these maybe-an-upgrade items, but the daily round in ZM didn’t feel as much as a chore as Korthia did, so I might continue, just not every day.

Now I just need to find out how Dual Legendaries actually work because I’m still wearing my useless 262 Covenant cloak with 239 Epic pants, whereas I could switch to 252 Cloak + 235 Legendary Pants, which should be an upgrade, but maybe not…

OK, that was easier than expected, I could refund my Soul Ash and Soul Cinders of the 262 Cape by handing it in, buying a new 292 Cape for 70k gold and crafting a 292 Deathmaker Legendary. Now I have a spare 235 Leg Deathmaker that I could destroy as well, but it would only give me Soul Ash, as it’s Level 4. Not that hard once you grasped it, but still a little convoluted. At least there are refunds! Equipped Item Level is now 250, nice.

Despite invites starting at 1945 lately we hardly manage to start before 1958, but at least that. Sunday saw us doing Guardian, Dausegne, Pantheon, and Lihuvim, then Skolex on Tuesday and a first kill of Xy’mox, then a few tries on Halondrus but no kill. Still feels a little harder than last tier with at least one wipe per boss on the reclear. Doesn’t help that we’ve been having different tanks on all the nights, maybe it will improve this week. As usual I don’t really care about loot, but I guess with my 239 main hand it’s simply impossible to put out decent damage, so getting a 252+ MH is my top (or only) prio right now.

Sunday, March 7, the first “progression” raid since our Sylvanas Heroic kill in early December, quite a few in the guild had stopped playing, according to all the hello and welcome back on Discord. Starting out was a bit slow, discipline and routine lacking a bit. First boss (Vigilant Guardian) on the second try, fourth boss? (Dausegne) on the third try, fifth boss (Prototype Pantheon) on the second try, and then three wipes on the sixth boss (Lihuvim), no kill. So it seems we skilled the second (Skolex) and third one (Xy’mox again), which is a bit weird, but I remember doing something like this last tier, so people only coming on Tuesday also getting some loot. Lihuvim seems a little harder but doable I think, so I’m kinda curious about Tuesday. My damage was bad, but that’s not surprising – everyone except two people have 4-11 iLvl more and they didn’t take a 3 month break. Still means I need to step up a bit, I don’t want to be in the lowest spots – but I guess for normal it’s not the end of the world.

Some random things I noticed: the login screen shows if your char has mail, that is really nice and I have no ide when they added that. Addons were still good to go after a quick update after 3 months.

Also, the longer I am there, the more I like Zereth Mortis. There’s a lot to discover and some neat things. There could be more portals though.

So, Tuesday we went back and killed Lihuvim on the first try of that night. It was actually kinda easy with the proper tactic and not just chaos. Interestingly we had huge problems with Skolex, the nominal second boss. Five wipes with tanks dying or everyone dying. The secret was stacking every second Retch and paying attention to the taunt rotation.

Then in the end we tried Xy’mox and wiped for six times, only once getting to the second add phase – so that one seems to be a bit harder for us, it wasn’t some “come on, this should be easy” as with Skolex.

Anyway, it was pretty fun to raid again with my WoW guild, and at the moment I’m inclined to add another month, but I’m also not completely sure if I want to do Heroic again. We’ll see.

Oh, and of course I forgot all the kill shots, so here’s my Pirate Pocopoc: