World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth is definitely the best expansion, and it’s easy to see why – alpacas! Check out the cute song in this quest. Adorable! It’s from the quest On the Move in Vol’dun.
Here’s another quest about alpacas – Alpacas Gone Wild. It’s not nearly as cute, but I thought I’d include it too.
Posts on Kor’kron 501st have continued to become less frequent. I feel like I just haven’t had as much to say, and I’m also playing less frequently. In past years, WordPress has provided a report on the year’s activity, but they didn’t do it this year. I suppose I’ll have to look at my stats myself.
I only published 10 posts in 2016 – less than any other year, including 2011, which was the year I started the blog in September. Here are the views by year:
The majority of readers are from the US, but France, Germany, and Brazil accounted for the second, third, and fourth most readers. Most of my views continue to be from search engines, but Blessing of Kings comes right after the search engines. Thanks for the referrals!
Val’sharah has a pretty evil quest that honestly feels like a mistake to me. Rylissa Bearsong gave me Frenzied Furbolgs, tasking me with killing eight Smolderhide furbolgs. They’re in a “frenzied rage.” Okay, fine. That seems reasonable enough. As I approach their location, I saw Elder Sookh standing to the side offering Littlefur. He tried to flee the village with his nephew when the rest of the furbolgs were afflicted with some kind of wrathful curse. He made it out, but his nephew is still there. After killing some furbolgs in the village, I found Littlefur. He told me that he knows the cause of what’s happening; a totem is giving the Chieftain power and causing the madness. With Totemic Call tasking me to destroy it, I was off. I did destroy it, and lo and behold, the curse was lifted and the furbolgs were back to normal!
Of course, I still had to kill more of them. Rylissa Bearsong, Elder Sookh, and Littlefur are all within speaking distance. Elder Sookh could have explained things to Rylissa Bearsong. But that’s not how it works. I had to go slaughter some innocent furbolgs. If I ever play through on an alt, I’ll be sure to finish the kill quest before destroying the totem so I don’t have to kill any innocent furbolgs.
My next post was going to focus on my first few weeks of Legion, but some recent events are pushing the WoW Legion Companion phone app front and center in my mind. I was part of a sleep study from Monday through Thursday. It was a bit over 320 miles from my home in Irvine, and it was at approximately 12,500 feet. I was a subject in a study of sleep variations and cognitive abilities at high altitude. My trip isn’t really within the focus of this blog, but I’ll talk about it more on my personal blog in the future. However, it did mean that I was away from my PC for four days right at the same time the Legion phone application was released.
While I love WoW and have been enjoying Legion immensely, I wasn’t going to let a game stop me from participating in a fascinating study and fun trip. On the other hand, I was thrilled to find the Legion Companion app released. It meant I could still progress in Legion a bit even while away. Missions don’t require much attention either, so it was really perfect. The app works wonderfully, and if you haven’t tried it, I recommend it. You can see current world quests (which doesn’t matter to me yet because I haven’t hit 110), check your missions, recruit troops, and more. I only have two champions, but I kept them busy.
I returned home to find my HDD failing. My computer booted once but took forever and then was terribly slow. I found that no single application was accessing the HDD much, but my primary disk had 100% usage. In my experience, that usually indicates that read/writes are failing. I restarted to scan the disk, but the scans can’t complete. I keep everything backed up, but in the mean time, I can still send my followers on missions for me!
Legion launched at midnight last night, but the launch party started around 4:00 at the Esports Arena in Santa Ana. The room was filled with fel energy… or green lights. Blizzard suggested taking photos at the event to show you were in attendance “before all fel broke loose in Azeroth.” There was a store line so you could pick up as merchandise and a second line for the autographs. I went to the store first. I didn’t pre-order digitally because I wanted the physical collector’s edition. I have CEs of all the expansion as well as Diablo 3 and its expansion. I’m just missing classic’s. As a side note, I wish Blizzard would allow customers to pre-order digitally, then buy the physical CE and get the price difference added as game time. This expansion they let you buy both and gave you a key back you could give to your friend. All my friends have it already or were buying the physical CE. They don’t want a key.
Here I am on the right with gem (Mooglegem), who planned on meeting me there, in the middle. We ran into our friend Tram, on the left, who also happened to be there. Awesome!
The Azeroth Choppers were there as well. Of course the Horde motorcycle needs some spikes and tusks.
Even though I main Horde, I prefer the Alliance motorcycle. How sweet is that shield on the front?
Gorehowl made an appearance. Now is this primary universe Gorehowl or alternate universe Gorehowl? Hmm.
A Warglaive of Azzinoth was also there. This seems more appropriate for Legion.
Lots of the developers took polls on various subjects. Usually it was what class or spec we’d be playing first. Asking with what zone we’d start was also popular, as was the ever popular “Alliance or Horde?” One dev asked what role we played – hunter, caster, melee, healer, or tank. Here are the results when I reached him with melee in the lead.
While talking with the prop designers, I mentioned the pink stuffed dinosaur in Dalaran. The woman I was talking to said something like “oh yeah, she made that” excitedly and pointed to the prop designer next to her. How cool!
gem and I also made friends with the woman next to us in line, Kerry. Her husband is one of the developers, and we got to greet him too. It was fun having a new friend in line, and we exchanged e-mail addresses so we could be friends on Battle.net.
This woman was making awesome balloon props. She’s a murloc! I later saw that @worldofwarcraft on Twitter retweeted some photos someone took of her. Sweet!
A couple of the developers had autograph books on the table and were asking for fans to sign his book as well. That’s a neat idea. At the autograph line, there was also a wall for all the fans to sign. You can see mine in the middle of the above photo.
I think gem’s is cooler!
There was also some cool cosplay. We had to take a photo with this woman.
Here’s some more World of Warcraft cosplay!
Here’s the front of my box. There are more autographs on the sides and back, but most of them are here. This was a really fun event, and I think it was better and more fun than ones I’ve attended in the past. I’m also really thankful it started early. There’s no reason to wait for midnight when the game can’t be played before that time anyways. Thank you, Esports Arena and Blizzard!
Today’s the last day of Warlords of Draenor, although with the content Blizzard’s provided in the pre-patch, it feels like we’re already in Legion. I enjoyed Warlords, and now the pre-expansion content has me excited for Legion.
The Broken Shore scenario and accompanying cinematics were awesome content. If this is what’s in store for us now, what will the expansion bring? Quests given to us weekly to slowly give us more content leading into Legion was a great idea as well. It reminds me of the Garrison Campaign in some ways. I wish more content was released like this.
I took care of everything I wanted. I got all the pamphlets from the Doomsayers, and I terrorized Orgrimmar as a Dreadlord. I managed to unlock every reward from the invasions – all the weapons, all the armor, and the pet. Illuminnae, my paladin, doesn’t even seem to care about the invasion itself. Here she herbalizes while demons attack in the background. And I managed to hit 100 with her, which is only my second character to ever reach a level cap. I did some LFR on her as well to experience more max level content.
With the awesome XP from the invasions, I couldn’t stop at Illuminnae. Logrus, my Death Knight, also hit 100 with the invasions, ran some LFR, and even got the Pocket Fel Spreader on his first Dread Infiltrator kill.
I’ll leave you with a stuffed dinosaur I found in Dalaran!
While people were filing into an Overwatch panel on Ana, the newest hero, at SDCC last month, one fan played a bit of the Overwatch theme on his trumpet. When the panel started, the moderator mentioned the trumpet player and asked if he or she would play it again. The player did a great job, and it was awesome to hear. I can’t find a YouTube video of it, but I did find a tumblr post by Rose Red (roseredlife) that contained a video. Check it out here!
While I’m at it, here’s a fantastic parody video about Overwatch by Instalok, “Ana Said,” parodying Lukas Graham’s “Mama Said.”
Instalok makes some pretty fantastic videos. His last Overwatch video, “Can’t Stop The Healing” was also quite good. It’s a parody of Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” and I feel it’s even better than “Ana Said.” Of course, I also love playing those healers.
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Peter (Devee)