World of Warcraft

[Totenkindly]

So I'm part of a WoW mount collection group on Facebook, and a few people run regular achievement / raid / world boss nights to help people acquire legacy mounts. I haven't gotten to participate much, but I did get the warbear a few months back for killing all the alliance bosses in the capitol cities. On Monday, I participated in the WotlK raid against Yogg-Saroth (sp?) for Mimiron's Head.

The guy had a raid lockout that would take you right to the last boss, and he would just invite people to individual instances, one after the next, for about 150 minutes. I think the drop chance is 1% nowadays.

I have about 16-18 alts I use for mount farming, so I took an hour to run many of them ahead of time up to Storm Peaks outside the raid.

Went through all my alts that were there without getting the mount (although I got some xmog stuff I did not have), which was a bummer.

At that point, it was nearing the end of the time and my last alt failed -- and I knew I had one more alt left I didn't have time to fly up earlier, so I got her and flew her all the way up to the raid in the last minutes of the event -- and unbelievably got the mount drop on what was going to be my last run of the night.

 

[Totenkindly]

So most people will take an interest in sports and watch that. The only sport I ever watched on occasion was tennis, really, that i remember.

I ended up putting on the live stream in YouTube to watch the MDI finals (mythic dungeons WoW), it's down to four teams I guess. I like it because I've played +15's so I actually know what they are doing and it's fun to watch to learn new things.

Kind of interesting in team composition too, no real surprises. the two teams currently competing (Echo versus Womegalul) are using similar team comps: One has DK Blood tank, priest heal, hunter, shammy, and lock, the other is DH vengeance tank, priest heal, hunter, lock, and rogue. (Not sure which priest spec is being used, I just started watching a short while ago, they're about to restart now).

they give you a free title for watching for two hours.

It's almost as much as fun as reading all the stupid comments scrolling up on YouTube. There's apparently 23K people streaming this right now.

EDIT: Looks like Theater of Pain now, they are using DK Blood, Priest, Lock, Monk, and Hunter.

Kinda fascinating -- Echo is strategically pulling the Wo Drifter buff mob away from the boss so they don't accidentally cleave it to death, in order to get the speed buff closer to the boss's death and speed to the next encounter -- apparently it lasts long enough you can skip an entire wing and run straight to the wing boss. They actually had the warlock mob tanking it somehow off to the side, and they keep pulling it away from the boss. I guess this is why they are world championship level play at that high key level. Watching the rest of that +22 run, it was pretty crazy. They were pulling mini-bosses upstairs to kill with top-level trash for ToP and then actually pulling in the final boss and it looked effortless.

For some reason Halls of Atonement is getting banned. I don't know the game enough to know how the brackets work or how the dungeons are picked. Halls is a pretty flat open dungeon, it is one of my favorite. I'll have to look for the rules/strategy for how the dungeon selection works. They are running PLaguefall (uggh) on +25 now! Damn, the whole open of that dungeon sucks. So sick of poison. // Both teams pulled trash + the first boss against the back wall. Never seen that before. Fascinating.

Okay, so I think they set five dungeons up in order with affixes, then you can veto a dungeon blind. Both teams just happened to ban the same one. You only need to win two, I guess? Because Echo just won the lower bracket with two wins.

 

[Totenkindly]

Made a lot of progress on Back from the Beyond expansion achievement. There's only a few things left to do:
- Sanctum of Domination: 2 wing, 3 wing, final boss (so three runs in LFR)
- Tower Ranger: Flawless 16's and Jailer's Gauntlet 4
- Shadowlands Dilettante: Pursuing Loyalty (Bastion covenant special)

The only one I am concerned about doing is Torghast Flawless 16's. Solo'ed through 15, and the highest I got a flawless on was a 13 even as well geared as I am. It might help with the Season 4 gear boost, but it's kind of ridiculous to flawless solo. Probably need a group. Also tried soloing Jailer's Gauntlet 4 again and just can't get past the second floor even buffed.

 

[Totenkindly]

Made a lot of progress on Back from the Beyond expansion achievement. There's only a few things left to do:
- Sanctum of Domination: 2 wing, 3 wing, final boss (so three runs in LFR)
- Tower Ranger: Flawless 16's and Jailer's Gauntlet 4
- Shadowlands Dilettante: Pursuing Loyalty (Bastion covenant special)

The only one I am concerned about doing is Torghast Flawless 16's. Solo'ed through 15, and the highest I got a flawless on was a 13 even as well geared as I am. It might help with the Season 4 gear boost, but it's kind of ridiculous to flawless solo. Probably need a group. Also tried soloing Jailer's Gauntlet 4 again and just can't get past the second floor even buffed.

Another weekend of working on this.

I finished Jailer's Gauntlet last weekend and did a Flawless 16 this week, so I just have five more of the latter to do, along with the Bastion covenant special.

Finished Wing 2 of Sanctum of Domination last weekend in LFR, finished Wing 3 today around 4pm after entering the queue at 1:30pm -- it took 75 minutes to get a group together. (Last week's Wing 2 run took about 60 min.) I was high DPS mainly because I was the most geared, significantly so (on the final boss, I was almost doubling DPS of #2 player). I was a little worried with the first boss (Guardian of the First One) due to slow damage happening, maybe we didn't have enough DPS; but we made the DPS checks for that boss. Fatescribe is the second boss and there are some mechanics throughout the fight that if you fail to do them, the entire raid will wipe; I expected the worst; the raid group actually must have known the raid and did the mechanics, thank god.

Then apparently one of the tanks did all he needed to do for an achievement, because he cheerfully said goodbye and quit the raidgroup -- right before Kal-Thazad (yeah, that villain shows up repeatedly in various expacs), the hardest boss in the pack and technically right before Sylvanas, the final boss (not in this wing).

[I gotta say, this pisses me off. DPS, not a big deal for someone to quit even if they don't need to complete the group of three; but for earlier seasonal content, where the queue takes an hour to fill, I think if you're a healer or tank you should commit to sticking with the raid and esp the tank, because you are likely damning the rest of the raid to failure if you bail because there might not be a replacement in the queue. The guy seemed well aware of this and was like, "Toodles," and seemed to enjoy the predicament. The deal is if the entire raid now fails because we can only get one tank in on LFR, then we all have to sit in the queue ANOTHER HOUR at some future point and rerun the ENTIRE wing again -- all because this guy just didn't stick it out for ten more minutes. Either that, or find/pay for a Normal raid slot just for one boss.]

We wiped three times altogether but thankfully after the second wipe a new tank straggled in and the DK dps could go back to DPS'ing. It was also clear with the extra mechanics that people were still learning the fight. I always watch videos ahead of time, but it's different to actually play the raid sometimes -- and this was one of those times. By the third try, I had a really good feel for what to do mechanically, and on the fourth try despite about 50% of the raid dying, the rest of us finished the lich off.

For achievements, I should probably just run these at the end of the appropriate season next time so the queue isn't so dead but everyone actually knows the raid decently.

 

[Totenkindly]

Season 4 starts today. System went down at 10am EST, was supposed to be up at 2pm. Then 3pm. Now it's supposed to be up at 4pm. ROFL.

Oh Blizz -- never change!

Next comes the situation when the whole system goes down repeatedly as people try to shove their way in when it's finally online again.

Killed Sylvanas last week, so officially have done a pass through Sanctum. Took three tries before the raid figured it out. Wasn't too bad, although it's in three stages and you do have to pay attention. It's worse on Normal and higher with additional mechanics to worry about, but there's room for flex on LFR.

 

[Totenkindly]

Season 4 for M+ was kind of lame because I didn't know 4 of the 8 dungeons and Lower Kara was so bad that they have nerfed it repeatedly since release -- and it's STILL got a bad rep, with one high level strategy (pretty common) involving just allowing a full party wipe right after the Opera boss to skip a bunch of terrible trash that would otherwise be unavoidable. To me, if your dungeon design sucks so bad that the group benefits from doing a full wipe on a timer, then you need to change your design.

Anyway, I miss the old SL dungeons already. I knew them really well. It took me a month just to get a sense of Kara + Mecha. I do remember Grimrail fairly well (although it's a bitch for melee in those cramped quarters, depending on affix), and my favorite dungeon of S4 is Iron Docks. It is my Halls of Atonement dungeon -- decent rewards including a few BIS items + it's all an open map, and the worst part is the first area which at least is pretty open and you can control the adds you pick up. By the time you get to the second boss, to me it's all smooth sailing, I find the rest of the dungeon pretty simple and repetitive and as melee I can just dump DPS like mad.

---

I ran BC timewalking on my elemental shammy. Damn, but ranged DPS is a lot easier than melee depending on dungeon. Obviously it's not all clear sailing because it was timewalking, and if I was going to develop my ranged DPS character, my next job would be to learn how to use dispels, bloodlust, and other utility powers appropriately, but most of melee time is spent dodging shit while trying to dish out DPS + be close enough for your interrupts to work. So much easier to distance interrupt! No wonder most of the high meta specs involve either ranged DPS and/or AoE intensive specs. Ret pally cannot compete unless they are geared well and totally on with their holy power spending and using their CDs perfectly. I am an inexperienced Shammy, and much of the time (around i260, with two legendaries and 4Tier), I was high DPS once I could start stacking quakes.

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I finished the intro campaign for DK over in Classic to get the Retail mount reward -- and promptly quit Classic again. I don't enjoy Classic, I find it irritating although some of that might be able to be ameliorated now by add-ons. I never cared to look much though. I had done the same intro questline in retail, so at least I had a faint memory of what to do. Some people did it in an hour, it took me about two, and the n00bs took a good three. But it's a decent protodrake mount, so...

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I have been doing my good deed in retail Fated Raids, every Saturday I help carry a group of n00bs through Normal Fated raids so they could get their jellycat mount. I benefited a bit because I also got my jellycat (since I was doing the raid as well) + got my three Normal raid tokens for free items, which got me a BIS Gavel of the First Arbiter, and I picked up Jaithys the Prison Blade for a xmog. I don't really benefit from a third raid item since my M+ dungeon items already are better, including trinkets, and I got my BIS #2 item from a jailer drop. The only way to upgrade this gear would be to run the raids on Heroic or Mythic, which I don't care about enough to do for a Season that will end in two months and no place to use the gear anyway..

It's been nice to feel like learning and running the raids is helpful to someone else, plus I actually am learning the raids without having to be part of a raiding guild.

This week starting, all three SL raids will now be Fated with expanded gear level drops. I am not sure how we're proceeding with the carries since I don't think I have time to help with all three every week or if we'll run all three in a week.

---

Despite having ordered the upcoming DF expac, as soon as I finish my KSM achievement/mount (probably today), aside from helping with the raid as I can, I will just try to complete Flawless 16's + the Bastion special to get my Veilstrider title and then I'm done with WoW overall. I can't be sitting all day and I can devote that time to going out and walking / moving around because my health has been pretty bad this year, and all the additional weight gain. I need to change what I am doing and not be as sedentary as I have been since COVID started.

I don't really care much for Dragons either.

 

[Totenkindly]

Well, I finally finished Back from the Beyond (Veilstrider title) last night. It was a hell of a big "total EXPAC" achievement list, covering just about every aspect you can imagine aside from maybe hardcore PvP play.

I got a resto Shammy and a Brewmaster monk (healer and tank, respectively) to help me with the Flawless 16's of Torghast (while I ran my pally as Prot -- basically the health of bosses drops by 33% if you only have tanks/healers in your party), so I finished a chunk last Friday, then finished the last two on Monday night.

I then spent last night solo-completing the Kyrian "Trial of Ascension." There are five levels of difficulty, Courage the first, Loyalty the next, etc -- and you have to defeat the first eight bosses on Loyalty. So I finished collecting the boss souls to put into the fighting simulation, then started working on it. It went faster than expected. It's a "vehicle" mini-game, you don't use your own character, you select one of the three Soulbind NPCs each with their own 5 abilities, to defeat a particular boss. Along the way, you can find blueprints and create both perma-equipment and 1-shot items to help you with the fights. I finished it much faster than I thought and ended up using Pelagos for all of them pretty much. There are a few more bosses I did not defeat yet + three more levels, but they were not part of the achievement; since there is no time limit on those, I might try them later to get more mounts and xmog.

So -- final look at Veilstrider Saelki for this expac. (I just got the gold xmog sword drop from high-level Torghast run yesterday.)

 

[Totenkindly]

For Retail:

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight Launch Date is November 28th

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight will be launching on November 28th!

www.wowhead.com

The Winds of Wisdom 50% Experience Buff Returns

Blizzard has announced that the Winds of Wisdom experience buff will be returning to Shadowlands in preparation for the upcoming Dragonflight expansion.

www.wowhead.com

 

[Totenkindly]

the 50%xp buff will probably run until 10/25. Already leveled my boomkin up to 45, should get her to 50 in a day or two.

Started running Argent Tournament in WotLK to get all the mounts I missed.

Once I figured out how jousting works, it's been pretty easy. Not only could I buy the last music roll for my WoD player (in my garrison), but now have Champion of Trolls and Blood Elves and working on Tauren. Also finished the Black Knight questline. Now I am basically pulling in about 12 tokens per day from dailies for about 15-20 min of play time, so eventually will be able to pick up the hippogryph. I already had exalted in all the Horde factions, so that's already done.

They changed up some of the TW dungeons. Pit of Sauron is out, it looks like the first one (Forge?) is back into the rotation. This is the case across all TW, I think -- and it's all fitting in with their overall plan to upgrade old dungeons to mythic. For the opening 8 dungeons for DF, only four are new, and the other four are pulled from Legion and Pandaria? I have mixed feelings, but most based on which specific ones get pulled. (I really don't feel like running Court of Stars, I just hate that whole puzzle midsection.)

 

[Totenkindly]

All you classic purists should be proud of me. Nope, I didn't start playing Classic... but I DID go FINALLY to Argent Tournament and committed to farming mounts (yeah, content from WotLK).

I'm kind of climbing the walls at this point, but yeah, I'm to the stage of farming my 14 Seals a day for a bit now. I should have all the AT mounts (including the pally exclusive) by the end of December if I don't skip days.

I have also gotten pretty good at the stupid jousting and totally kick AI ass in the arena. There's a method to the madness and how to time things. I was happy I already had all my rep as Exalted a long time ago, so I just had to become a Champion for five races to get access to the AT quartermaster. I think the only random quest I'm sick of doing is the stupid "hippogriff vehicle / throw spears at things in the ocean" because there's no quick way to do it, you just gotta ride it out. Everything else is easy, and I no longer have to fly to a different area of Northrend for the stupid frog-kisser / ice-thawer / sword lobber faction quest.

I will do anything to increase my mount total. I'm up to 577 now, and have about 15-20 I know how to get that I just haven't bothered with yet (that are not random rare drops).

 

[Totenkindly]

How adding a playable dragon race to World of Warcraft brought a 10-year-old loot system to its knees

The tale of the 28 hours that broke the MMO and its players.

www.pcgamer.com

Nicely done article.

My one quibble is I don't think the drop rate is 1%, based on my involvement in a mount farmer's group with a large population. They changed the drop rates on the Big Five (from Pandaria and WoD -- Nalak, Oondasta, Galleon, Sha, and then Ruhkmar). I only needed two of them at this point, and got Nalak the first week of the change, but I'm still farming Galleon with 50 chances per week (so I'm already nearing 200 tries since the change).

I don't know how I feel about it. I think the main issue, regardless of who got what drop in a timely or late manner, is that the mounts no longer feel special to me. It's like trying the luck gods and feeling special if you got something, and now that it's just being handed out to people who barely invested any time, the mounts themselves are just average mounts. It was kind of depressing the first week watching people who never even bothered with the mounts get these "rare" mounts, when I've been farming them for months, and still don't have them all.

I mean, these mounts had become things of legend. they were still being discussed and tried for 10 years past initial release. Now after the initial glut of hopefuls, barely anyone talks about them anymore. Most of them aren't even great mounts. Probably the Solar Spirehawk (from Ruhkmar) and Heavenly Onyx (from Sha) are great looking mounts; Oondasta's triceratops is nice, but we barely use ground mounts unless you are in a grounded zone, and Nalak's drop is one of the less interesting in a whole slew of dragon models from Pandaria, and again Galleon's mount is more just a "hey, increase your stable collection by one" mount.

The value of these mounts was mostly in the legend and the futility of trying but hoping beyond hope maybe you'd get lucky. I could see putting a cap on efforts (so after a certain number of tries, you have a greatly increased chance), this seemed kind of uncool -- although some people did manage to exploit the bug in the few hours it was available.

I think the rarest mount (drop wise) left is the X-24 Heartbreaker (aka the Love Rocket), but they were talking last year about changing drop rates since it is only available for two weeks a year. And then there is the Infinite Timewalker, which drops potentially from any boss in a timewalking dungeon, but those events occur usually once a month for a week at a time, and you can farm endlessly.

(I got really lucky on Rocket and Sha -- a little over 200 tries on each -- and about expected on Ruhkmar --536 out of a 1/500 chance -- and then still generally lucky on Oondasta -- 486 out of 1/2000. But not on Galleon. I just created 1900 tries on a 1/2000 chance, despite the rate change.)

And I guess there are a few similarly rare grind mounts like Golden mane, gotten very rarely just by grinding weak mobs in a region... but those are AH ready, tradeable, and you can grind as much as you like.

 

[Totenkindly]

I guess I am Team Arthas now. So long heroes.

 

[Stigmata]

View attachment 28077

I guess I am Team Arthas now. So long heroes.

Russell Crowe as Uther?? I would pay an obscene amount of money to see this happen.

 

[Totenkindly]

All-Hands Meeting at Blizzard Entertainment Undermines Concerns and Frustrates Employees

Employees are left frustrated and demoralized after an all-hands meeting in which Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Ybarra addressed controversial subjects including stack rankings, reduced profit sharing, and an upcoming return to office mandate.

www.wowhead.com

 

[Totenkindly]

Ret Pally got a hell of a revision with patch 10.0.7 a few months ago. It was a good one. In fact, after getting screwed for years on end, Ret Pally became a temporary FotM. And in fact all pally specs are sitting high at the moment. I think there was a raid group that cleared content that was all pallies shortly after that patch. And I was in a M+ run last week (Vortex Pinnacle) that was all pallies for heal, tank, and dps, and it was easily successful. Pretty crazy, huh? They shored up ret pally defenses, let us keep decent DPS, and we have some utility.

For a bit, we peeked at the top of the raid charts. Now for the Season 2 raid, we seem to be firmly middle of pack again in terms of DPS, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing -- it protects us from ban hammer while meaning we are still decent, and we're no longer excluded from keys for M+ due to spec.... in fact, we're favored in some ways. Yay, us? I feel some surprising vindication for my love for ret pal, I played it for a few expansions when it was struggling or downright sucked, and so I'm not one of the posers who came back to it when it got good.

The forgotten reaches patch was a catchup patch to gear up alts quickly. It was good at that, but pretty much nothing else.

Season 2 showed the gearing change. Instead of valor, you earn bits of different types of crests that can be used to better four different levels of gear along with the generic currency. While this system sucked to learn in the first few weeks, now it seems better in some ways and rewards doing higher content rather than having top players farm low keys for valor repeatedly. I would say the Cavern area was cool for about 2-3 days and now is a joke, it's not even as doable as Reaches was. So now it's back to M+ and Raid. The Raid seems easier in some ways (note that the race to Mythic First seemed MUCH easier than SL stuff) and there were a lot of people earning KSM achievement in M+ after just 1-2 weeks of play due to starting with higher gear and maybe easier dungeons. I don't find it super-easy honestly, I'm still learning some of the dungeons, and how the affixes play with them. Sometimes they play bad -- like this new Afflicted affix that demands you cleanse periodic spirits is taking away attention from stomping worms/ticks in Underrot, which means if you don't somehow do both at once, the tank gets swarmed and everyone dies. Maybe I'm just not a top player, although i think I am decent.

I'm at 1700 for the season so far. I have one tier piece, am forced to use my S1 4-tier set until I have the full S2 set, one decent trinket, a decent weapon, and otherwise am scrounging for gear. I don't get people who claim they already have all 4 tier, both BIS trinkets, weapon, and high set... but I guess they (1) are tied into high-level groups/players and (2) spend a LOT of time running things repeatedly at high levels to get high gear. I can only imagine the poor people who don't have as much skill and/or time to run for gear.

 

[Totenkindly]

My idea of laughs now is daily reading the Blizzard support/comment forum where whiny and bitchy people gripe about the game and trolls/snotty people cut them down, and it gets into a butthurt crapfest.

Why did you kill my spec??!
Why can't they use the currency panel instead of sticking more patch-specific loot in our bags omg
I quit a +12 key that the healer had already died 20 times on before first boss, AITA because people reported me???
The trading post is great/sux!!!
This dungeon/boss/raid/quest is too hard vs GET GUD BRO
Why [pallies] should be nerfed cuz it's not faiiirrr.... i can't play this game anymore
Why isn't the game balanced around PVP cuz obviously that is all I ever play
OMG YOU GAVE AWAY A MOUNT THAT I PAID $2K FOR A TCG FOR, BLIZZ YOU ARE THE SUCK
The game caters to n00bs!
The game caters to mythic raiders!
The game doesn't give a shit about the mythos
Developers are evil and never play the game
Worst expac ever it's absolute shite, how dare you like any of it!
ogod i want this expac to bend me over a rail and have its way with me it's so goooooood!

Hours of entertainment -- I'm telling ya

* some of those example topics are literally the example, not fabricated

 

[Totenkindly]

With the 50% rep buff ending tomorrow, I spent the last 4-5 days grinding for the Insane in the Membrane achievement -- so I could earn the "Insane" title. I already had the goblin reps at mid honored and Ravenholdt at Friendly, but it was still a mind numbing grind. I turned off WoW music and literally played the RWBY season1-8 soundtracks on loop because they are such high energy.

I probably spent 6-8 hours finishing the goblin grind, then 2 hrs getting RH to revered, then 6-8 hours with my rogue stealing junk boxes in lower spire dungeon for my pally to trade, and finally grinding bloodsail to honored.

That last grind was really fast -- hated to honored in about 40 min max -- and it was fun getting swarmed by bruisers who were still one shottable. (Nothing like running into the Booty Bay Inn swarmed by hordes of goblin thugs, then dropping an aoe that drops everything in the building!)

It's unfortunate I hadn't done that first.. my entire goblin grind rep is gone, but I already had done so much, it wasn't worth starting over.

It was so worth doing with the buff up. For reference, with DMF in play as well this past week, I only had to steal 875 junk boxes instead of 1350 or so. And the goblin grind would have taken additional hours.

The grind was intense enough I had dreams about it the last night or two.

I did get a bunch of grey/green xmog + a few purple items and/or scrolls.

 

[Totenkindly]

Wow. There's a link to Asmongold interviewing a guildie too.

WoW Classic troll obliterates max-level hardcore raiding team in 'legendary and degenerate' act that truly belongs in EVE Online

Always beware someone who calls themselves a Tinyviolin.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Totenkindly]

My journey has come to its end. 216 attempts, and thank god I will never run ICC again.

 

[Totenkindly]

The Most Iconic Events and Incidents in the History of World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft (WoW), Blizzard Entertainment's legendary massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has not only been a world of epic quests and magical realms but also a theater of unforgettable incidents that have shaped its lore and captivated players for nearly two decades...

obscountdown.com