I recently joined Amazon Games as a technical writer on the Automation, Tools, and Insights team. We have an upcoming MMO called New World that I’ve been following for a couple years. I don’t want to talk about it too much to play it safe regarding public information, but here’s a recent PC Gamer story on it from March: Everything we know about New World, Amazon’s upcoming MMO.
I’m excited to join the team and to see more of New World!
This weekend I unlocked the Tauren heritage armor. It looks pretty cool, and it was a fun quest series.
I especially love that totem back piece!
The video above shows the unlock quests! Now, I need to work on Blood Elf!
Sleepypaw, my Alliance monk, hit 120 on Thursday!I’ve been leveling him a lot during the double XP event. Now that he’s hit 120, I have a max level character of every class. I owed a lot to Korrak’s Revenge during the anniversary event, which I talked about in Leveling in Korrak’s Revenge.
I dinged 120 in Warsong Gulch by returning the Alliance flag. Woo!
People have been loving his transmog. I’ve received messages in dungeons and battlegrounds, but more importantly, Marc really liked my transmog!
I particularly enjoy Anduin bringing his lumberjack / baker with him to assault Lordaeron, and what does this pandaren do but drink on the job.
It’s weird to have a max level character of every class. I’m glad I have a lot of options moving forward, and I can check out different Order Halls easily now. Or… I could start working on more races. Hmmm.
Time for an update on horrific visions! Last week I did a full clear of the Horrific Vision of Orgrimmar for the first time. I’ve been sitting on a lot of Coalescing Visions recently but just hadn’t had the time to keep running Horrific Visions. Also, I took Matt’s advice and switched to shadow when running these with gem (frost mage). It went much, much faster as shadow!
We also earned Mail Muncher mounts from the mailboxes in horrific visions!
I’m disappointed that there isn’t mail stuck to him or something, but oh well – still cool!
I befriended the Friendly Alpaca in January but never posted this video! I’ve been very excited about alpacas being in WoW, and I now have two of the three.
For this alpaca, you have find the Friendly Alpaca in Uldum and feed it Gersahl Greens for the Alpaca It Up quest. This can be done once per day, and once it’s done 7 times, you get the quest Alpaca It In. This one rewards the Reins of the Springfur Alpaca so you can bring this friendly alpaca with you on your adventures!
Isn’t she cute?!
I spent a lot of time during the anniversary event leveling characters in Korrak’s Revenge. I love battlegrounds, and I’m slowly working toward the 250,000 honorable kills achievement. This seemed like a good time to do a ton of battlegrounds thanks to the increased XP rate. By level 60+, you gained a level per battle or so!
I already had three classes as 120 – priest, hunter, and warlock. I leveled an additional 8 to 120 with the event! The first I leveled to 120 with Korrak’s Revenge was Death Knight. Logrus, my frost DK, was a lot of fun to play. Compared to my main, a healer, it felt like enemies really melted.
My fifth class to hit 120 was my Demon Hunter, Faiella. Like my DK, I found Demon Hunter was great at killing. Movement is incredibly fun with Demon Hunter as well.
Next up, my sixth toon to hit 120, paladin! Here’s Illuminnae standing next to gem’s paladin, Melantho. I’m glad I finally got Illuminnae to max level. It’s nice to have a really heroic-looking plate wearer. I envision her wearing full suits of armor always, as opposed to many other characters that I have in robes or other lighter-looking armor. I played her as ret, but I’d like to learn holy eventually.
This is Spritzi, my little goblin rogue. Stealthing was a lot of fun, but I don’t feel like rogue ever really clicked with me like the other classes did. Diko, gem’s priest, is cheering for her!
Here’s Sotiros, my shaman. He was the third character I ever thought of as my “main.” I created Devee thinking Devee would be temporary, yet Sotiros quickly got pushed aside and I focused on Devee ever since. Now Sotiros is finally max level. I played as resto, and wow, how fun. Chain Heal is amazing in battlegrounds (at least when there are a lot of players together). I enjoyed standing on top of towers and targeting the one Horde character in range with Chain Heal over and over so it could hit the others.
Here’s Mooglepete, my Blood Elf frost mage! I never knew just how much mages are glass cannons. He died easily, but he killed easily too! Here he is with Diko.
I named him after Mooglegem, gem’s mage. Here we are together with our Water Elementals.
Tyyrse, my Zandalari druid, was my next character to his max. Druid was difficult. I wanted Zandalari because I wanted the dino druid forms, but I felt like I wasn’t being “loyal” to Tyrse (one ‘y’), my Tauren druid who I use a bank alt and is lower-level.
But the dino forms! This is Tyyrse in the middle in the tank form dancing with Lafayette, gem’s druid. Awesome!
Lastly, I leveled my Mag’har Orc warrior, Mostymush. I named him in honor of Mushkin, the coolest warrior I know. My friend Matt plays Mushkin and a character named Mostydead, so I combined the names. Warrior is awesome! Heroic Leap gives such fun mobility, and I feel so powerful playing the warrior. Mostymush is my 11th character to hit max level. All I’m missing is monk! I leveled him as a tank, which was insanely fun.
All in all, I played 198 matches of Korrak’s Revenge and won 158 of those. That’s a win rate of 79.8%! I leveled 8 characters to 120 with it. Thanks Korrak’s Revenge!
Memories of Azeroth, the special raid celebrating the 15th anniversary of WoW, was quite different than the LFR version of Molten Core that was part of the 10th anniversary celebration. Having three wings instead of one long instance is huge in opening it up to more players, and I think that’s a good thing. Molten Core LFR was tuned too difficult in my opinion: casual players should be able to experience an anniversary celebration. The tuning on Memories of Azeroth felt very much in line with LFR. There were wipes, but groups could consistently finish it.
The idea behind the raid was pretty fantastic. Three wings, each featuring one of the first three expansions in World of Warcraft. As far as I know, this is the first time WoW has had a sort of boss rush too. In each wing, all three bosses had to be downed without wiping. However, you only see certain phases of the bosses and not all. Between bosses, all CDs are reset, and anyone who died is rezzed.
What seemed off to me was that some fights were so boring and easy that I never saw a wipe on them.
Memories of Fel / The Burning Crusade: Lady Vashj, Kael’thas, Archimonde. This was the easiest wing. I’m not sure I saw a wipe on Lady Vashj or Kael’thas. If so, I didn’t see many.
Memories of Frost / Wrath of the Lich King: Heigan, Anub’arak, The Lich King. This was the weirdest difficulty. Heigan should be incredibly simple. The “dance” of the fight is to simply stand in the one safe quadrant, moving with the group. The safe quadrant shifts in order. But there were wipes. Then there’s Anub’arak. Not only were there definitely no wipes, but there was no challenge at all. That fight is incredibly boring. And then we get to The Lich King, with many, many wipes to defile. Aw, the memories. Wiping is frustrating, but adding some challenge made it fun, and calling out defiles and teaching people was satisfying. Anub’arak was the worst part of this wing. It felt like a waste of time.
Memories of Fire / Cataclysm: Cho’gall, Nefarian, Ragnaros. This wing mirrored the last one pretty closely, except Cho’gall is much easier than Heigan. I’m not sure if we had wipes on him or not. But Nefarian… I don’t even think I saw any mechanics because it was so simple. However, the room filling with lava and later draining made a fun sort of timer so we could be in a DPS race with out past selves in an effort to do better than last time. Ragnaros was challenging for some people, and I don’t mind some wipes as people learn an encounter.
It was a nice stroll through past memories and it makes me long to see full versions of some of those fights. Complex, multi-phase fights felt gutted. I miss the rest of Arthas! Memories of Azeroth makes me with we had more timewalking raids – but broken into wings so I don’t have to do them in one go like Black Temple or Ulduar.
And for my trouble – an Obsidian Worldbreaker! Who wouldn’t love a Deathwing mount of their own? It’s pretty cool!
The best part of patch 8.3 releasing last week is the availability of three alpaca mounts! I obtained my first last night, the Elusive Quickhoof alpaca. Look how cute it is when it does its /mountspecial animation, bouncing in a little a circle. I’m pretty happy with it! Now I’m still farming the second one :)
I hope everyone had a happy Feast of Winter Veil! This is me as Tyyrse on the left and gem as Diko on the right getting festive in Korrak’s Revenge.
We also visited the snow globe in Orgrimmar. This was me as Faiella and gem as Melantho but under transformations anyways.
The sleigh was a nice addition to the holiday this year, but the Horde version stopped early. It wasn’t spawning at all on the last night even though the on another server where I play Alliance was spawning in Ironforge still. This was the best picture I have riding it – me on Tyyrse and gem on Diko.
Here’s me as Kavax and gem as Xanau (and my awesome bear, Albert) meeting Greatfather Winter in Ironforge.
Seriously, she’s embarrassing.
Happy Winter Veil!
A couple months ago, my main focus in WoW had been questing through the Alliance perspective. I created a new 110-boosted Worgen hunter to see the other side – I’ve mentioned him in a couple previous posts. Here is with his bear pet, Albert, and a lost alpaca from a quest. I just wanted to share a couple screenshots in this post.
My pet, Albert, is on the very left. Next to him is Rupert the… dog. At least, this quest giver and Rupert’s owner thinks he’s a dog. So cute!
Albert is a master of stealth!
Xanau looks to be enjoying that little toy rocking seahorse.
I didn’t even get one Kul’Tiran zone finished, because I focused on the War Campaign.
On my way to Orgrimmar to attempt to take out Sylvanas!
Here’s me and Xanau with some of the Alliance and Horde leadership. I love how Shaw leans against the building!
I’ve finished the War Campaign on both sides now. After the 15th anniversary event, I think my focus will be back to doing the Kul’Tiran zones on my hunter!
I completed Unfathomable, the achievement for completing the Nazjatar story, two months ago. I really enjoyed doing Nazjatar. The mix of dailies, one-time quests, and increasing the ranks with your bodyguards felt fun to me. However, once I completed Unfathomable and switched to working on Mechagon, Nazjatar felt worse. My primary goal is usually to finish main story beats, so going for extra things in Nazjatar wasn’t a high goal. After experiencing Mechagon, maneuvering through Nazjatar felt like such a chore.
Last month, I completed Battle for Azeroth Pathfinder, Part Two, unlocking BfA flying. This is the first time I’ve been able to fly in current content since Mists of Pandaria, and wow is it nice. I do really like the pathfinder system despite not flying in WoD or Legion. I do think it should be relaxed once a new expansion is released though.
You can see me on my Wonderwing 2.0 mount and Mooglegem on hers in the above screenshot. That’s the mount that’s given as a reward. And all of a sudden, Nazjatar is no longer a headache! It’s a much more beautiful zone when I can fly through it!
As a bonus, I love this dialog between Urt the Bridgeholder and Urd the Heavy.
Urt the Bridgeholder: Too heavy!
Urd the Heavy: Who say that? Bridge can talk now?
I don’t have anything terribly insightful to say, but I wanted to share some screenshots of Zandalar. I love that we can jump on these big boys to ride around the zone. I’m on the far side, and Mooglegem is closer to the camera.
These direhorn are just so cute!
This shows the citizens of Dazar’alor at Rastakhan’s funeral.
Here’s another look at citizens assembled.
Brewfest, along with Hallow’s End, is one of my two favorite in-game holidays in WoW. I enjoy doing some of the activities even without consideration of rewards. Although I admit I miss the colored steins we used to get.
I purchased the new rewards available this year – the Bottomless Brewfest Stein, Tabard of Brew, Brewfest Reveler’s Hearthstone, and the Garland of Grain as well as a dress I missed last year. I didn’t play my alts as much previously and probably didn’t care about a dress with my main being a male.
This is my paladin, Illuminnae, with the dress, the Garland of Grain that looks like a pretzel on her head, and the new stein.
I also really loved the new Brewfest Chowdown minigame – a sausage eating contest! Plus, the trophy you get for winning five times, which can be seen above, makes everyone near it drunk!
I hope Hallow’s End gets something new this year too!
I accidentally changed some graphics settings in WoW recently that resulted in the game looking like an old SCUMM adventure game – or rather a modern game inspired by those old graphics. I suggest you click the image to get a bigger view. Doesn’t this remind you of The Secret of Monkey Island? How perfect that I’m even on a ship! It makes me a bit nostalgic for the time in my life when I was first playing those point and click adventure games.
Maybe I need to try that leaked Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, eh?
Back in 2017, my friend gem (usually referred to as Mooglegem on this blog) took me to an animal sanctuary called Lions Tigers & Bears for my birthday where I fed Albert peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I love bears, and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.
Albert passed away this week. In honor of Albert, I tamed a bear on my hunter and named him Albert. The real Albert was so patient and gentle as I fed him. According to Lions Tigers & Bears, he loved to swim and splash in the water. I’ve been pretty sad, but it’s good to know that Albert had a happy life at the sanctuary. RIP Albert.
I’ve been leveling Voidgazer, my Forsaken warlock, recently in an effort to earn the Gift of N’zoth. The Gift of N’zoth is a buff that gives you an eyeball on your forehead at the end of a quest series about finding Xal’atath (the shadow priest artifact that was discarded in lore). Having the buff allows you to see other people who also have it; those who don’t have the buff won’t see it on you either. There’s a quest to remove it, but it seems appropriate that Voidgazer keeps it.
Voidgazer thought he’d get to spend more time with this babe he just me, but she took off right away.
I love his expression as he receives the gift.
Now Voidgazer can truly gaze into the void! Leveling him to 120 also earned me Dynamic Duo, the achievement for reaching maximum level with two different classes. I’m not sure how much I’ll play him, but it’s fun to have a second max level character!
I finally got around to unlocking the Nightborne recently after the long trek through the Suramar questing. The experience in Suramar was great and yet at the same time, it really seemed to drag on too long. I enjoyed that it had a cohesive story and that the zone changed with the progress, but I think it would have been better if it was shorter.
As for the unlock scenario, I really enjoyed seeing more story surrounding the blood elves. I realize the scenario was arguably about the Nightborne, but I was too distracted by the Sunwell, Lor’themar, and Lady Liadrin. And Alleria. Come to think of it, was this scenario even about the Nightborne?
I finished the death knight campaign from Legion last month, and it was as excellent as I heard. I know this is content from last expansion, but I should note that this post will have spoilers.
Over the course of the campaign, the Knights of the Ebon Blade work with Bolvar, the new Lich King. In exchange for the Lich King directing the death knights to two artifacts, helping with the third (reforging the shards of Frostmourne into the twin Blades of the Fallen Prince), and keeping the Scourge contained, the death knights agree to act as Bolvar’s vengeance against the Burning Legion. Bolvar asks the Deathlord, the new leader of the Ebon Blade and the player character, to raise new Four Horseman.
The first, Nazgrim, is my favorite. I loved Nazgrim. Seeing him develop from a Sergeant in Wrath to a Legionnaire in Cataclysm to a General that we defeated in Mists was a great experience that made the world feel much more alive. Plus, he’s responsible for “Thrall’s balls!” And now he’s one of the Four Horsemen.
The second is Thoras Trollbane, who was a king of Stromgarde. Honestly, I don’t really care about this much.
The third is Sally Whitemane, who was High Inquisitor of the Scarlet Crusade. This is another cool callback.
Finally, Bolvar sends the Knights of the Ebon Blade to Light’s Hope Chapel to raise Tirion Fordring as the leader of the Four Horseman.
In the finale of the campaign, the death knights invade the Sanctum of Light, a secret underground order hall beneath Light’s Hope Chapel. It serves as the paladin order hall for the Knights of the Silver Hand, although the scenario is instanced so you don’t see players. After defeating Lady Liadrin, the Light itself stops you from resurrecting Tirion. Highlord Darion Morgraine uses a deathgate to escape but is killed in the process. Back in Acherus: The Ebon Hold, you resurrect Morgraine as the fourth horseman.
This was a fantastic finale to the campaign, and I loved experiencing the darkness after playing through the priest campaign. The priest campaign was really boring, and it never really felt like we did anything cool. In fact, the end of the priest campaign had the order hall, Netherlight Temple, get attacked by a dreadlord and the Knights of the Silver Hand come to save them. I like kicking some butt as a death knight over getting saved by the paladins. Although now that I think about it, I guess the paladins were the ones who really won!
I ran into The Caterer while questing. Before I could kill him, he yelled “It’s a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake!”
Well, I agree, Caterer. “If the way is hazy, you gotta do the cooking by the book. You know you can’t be lazy.”
The auction houses of Orgrimmar and Stormwind were overcome with the party spirit for Winter Veil and New Year’s Eve. Logrus, my orc death knight, is shown above in his gimpy clubbing finery.
Take a look at the party in the above video! Not too happy with the app I used, so I’ll have to switch it up in the future. And to see some quick screenshots of the outfits I put together for my characters, see below.
Devee, my troll priest and main, went with the Winter Veil sweater and some matching clothes.
Faiella still wanted to show off her blood elf demon hunter tattoos.
Illuminnae, my blood elf paladin, was sad that she didn’t have more revealing plate. Also, I didn’t even recognize her when I took her helm off. I usually keep her in a full plate set.
Voidgazer, my forsaken warlock, isn’t usually into the club scene. He’s more metal.
Spritzi, my goblin rogue was… you know what? Goblin women are pretty thicc.
Tyrse the tauren druid and banker extraordinaire just wanted to get silly.
Giving my alliance alts some love, Kavax the worgen hunter practiced his disco moves.
Sleepypaw, my pandaren monk was feeling extra jolly.
I was pretty impressed with the scandalous gnome mage transmog for Mooglepete.
I really didn’t have much for Petros, my night elf warrior and very first character.
I hope everybody had a happy Feast of Winter Veil, happy real life holidays, and great New Year!
Rum ham! Treasure!
I wanted to see how far I’d get if I levitated off the Sword of Sargeras!
Seriously, I love random stuff like this in WoW.
The end is the best, 2:50 and on:
Holyhelper-Hyjal: dis human centipede?
Blindzurem-Tichondrius: no we are a horse
Blindzurem-Tichondrius: idiot
I finally did it! As of 10/29/18, I never have to run the Headless Horseman again! I’m happy to finally obtain one was my most desired mounts in the game :)
Time for a pirate fashion show! It’s hard to decide which costume makes me look my best.
I loved Dolly and Dot the alpacas so much that I had to share this later quest starring them. (If you haven’t heard the song, please see this post.) This is from the quest Knowledge of the Past in Vol’dun. There might be minor spoilers if you’re avoiding those!
No alpacas were harmed in the recording of this video. (They’re okay.)
The Trial of Style was last week, and I participated for the first time. It was a lot of fun! You can see my first place “Fun & Flirty” outfit above along with gem’s third place entry.
Here’s a better look at my “Fun & Flirty,” haha. I just went with lots of pink and some booty shorts!
This is my second place “Winter” outfit.
Here’s one of gem’s second place outfits.
This is gem’s first place “Tabard” outfit.
My first place “Zen” outfit was pretty unoriginal.
My first place “Tabard” outfit was based on the tabard we got a few years ago during the Olympics.
I had a lot of fun with the Trial of Style, and it wasn’t hard to earn all the rewards. I’ll definitely be participating next time!
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.
With the 7.0 system patch hitting WoW, the fact that I can’t use Curse has become a huge problem. First, it wasn’t launching. I tried reinstalling it, but the installer was giving me an error. I deleted a particular folder as Curse’s support suggested, got to install, and found Curse would just freeze before actually launching. I even tried reinstalling .NET and still couldn’t get things to work.
I gave up and found a better way.
I installed Curse on a second computer, mapped WoW as a network drive, and updated my addons over the network. Maybe that’s not the most elegant solution, but I don’t want to mess with Curse; I just want to play WoW.
This happened a bit ago now, but I still want to share some screenshots. When The Force Awakens opened, guards in Orgrimmar Grunt and Stormwind Guards held some new, nifty weapons.
It seemed like a cool homage to the movie!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
It feels weird to see that 2015 contained a post about beginning Warlords raiding, while at this point I’ve been inactive for a long time and don’t plan on raiding in Legion.
Also, thanks to Blessing of Kings for most of my referrals!
While I started off the year blogging strongly, I dropped off. I made 34 new posts here in 2015 counting this one.
My views per year are as follows. I’m not including 2011 because it was only partial.
I forgot that I was getting so many views for a while. Neat.
World of Warcraft: Legion, the next WoW expansion, was announced last week at Gamescom. After having a few days to think about the information, I wanted to talk about my initial thoughts. I’ll admit, I might not have anything completely novel to say, but I think it’s important for the community to be vocal. Plus, I enjoy the writing too!
Here’s a brief recap of what Legion’s offering:
And we can’t forget this teaser:
Story
The tomb of Sargeras is opened, and Azeroth is faced with the largest invasion of the Burning Legion ever. Okay, that’s cool. I don’t really have a strong reaction either way to the Broken Isles themselves, and while I would have preferred to fight the Burning Legion on a different world, this works too. Throwing Queen Azshara and the Emerald Nightmare into the mix seems like overkill a bit, but I assume it’ll be integrated nicely. I’m honestly a little surprised, but Blizzard has been getting better at running concurrent stories. In Warlords, I felt like we had separate stories that pieced together for a single narrative, and I predict (and hope) Blizzard’ll be even better at it in Legion.
Honor system 3.0
The new honor system is kind of strange. You gain honor to move from rank 1 to 50, unlocking PVP abilities. This allows PVP to be tuned separately from PVE. That’s cool I suppose, but does that mean that I’ll have abilities on my bars that only work in PVP? That kind of sucks. The ones I’ve seen have all replaced current abilities or are passives. If that’s the case, I’m good with it! It also introduced prestiging. Once you reach rank 50, you can prestige, earning cosmetic rewards while resetting your rank to 1. I like that system in general, but I wonder how that’ll change competitive PVP players. If you do arenas, you can’t really prestige back to being weak, right? That doesn’t matter to me, but I’m sure it matters to a lot of people.
Artifact weapons
Artifact weapons are special, lore-heavy weapons that every player will get. There’s one for each spec, and there will be no other weapon drops. You can increase their power through the expansion through something that looks reminiscent to the Path of the Titans (and to Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid). This actually sounds fairly exciting to me, but it has some interesting ramifications. In Warlords, I was the commander and eventually called a general by Vol’jin. In Legion, I’ll wield some powerful lore weapon. What happens next? Does this keep getting upped? Some examples they gave were frost DKs using the shards of Frostmourne to build two swords, ret paladins getting the Ashbringer, and enhancement shaman using the Doomhammer. Um, why isn’t Thrall carrying the Doomhammer? Why doesn’t Tirion have the Ashbringer? Are these characters going to die? Also, I have to add that Matticus on World of Matticus brought up the idea of priests getting Fearbreaker. Yes, please, please, please! That’d be pretty awesome.
Demon Hunters
I’m not all that excited to be a Demon Hunter, but I’m pretty excited to see their story. Of course, that means playing through their intro, so yes, I’m excited to play them in that sense at least! I think the Demon Hunter lore is pretty interesting, and Illidan has always been a fan favorite. This should be really awesome, I think.
Class Order Halls
Class Orders are the most exciting part of the expansion so far. Each class will get a class order hall, sort of like Acherus: The Ebon Hold was for Death Knights. It’ll be shared, but in the story, the player character will be the leader of the Class Order. This sounds incredibly neat and will really give flavor to each class. I love being a priest, and I never really felt like I had Horde priest lore figured that my character would respect and strive to emulate. I guess now that figure is me. While garrisons had way too many followers and only a few that seemed cool, Class Orders will have far fewer and much more important followers. Each class will have a different name for their “followers,” with champions being the paladins’ followers for example.
This seems like the progression of garrisons, although maybe more accurately the progression of Vol’mar and Lion’s Watch. Vol’mar is a shared location, but inside, the NPCs treat me as their leader. Regardless of how you see the evolution or whether you see them as related, Class Order Halls are what they are, and they sound fascinating.
Class identity is supposed to play a much bigger role in Legion, and I’m all for it. Even spec individuality is going to be explored. I think this is a fantastic idea, but one small thing seems odd to me. During the discussion of the new PVP system, Blizzard said that when you think disc priests, you think dispels – or something along those lines. If that’s the the most iconic part of being a disc priest, I wonder in what direction they will take discipline. To be fair, if many specs are getting overhauls, I’m not against the idea of switching to holy. We’ll see!
It really sounds like they’re giving us a lot. They’ve already dumped a lot of other interesting information that I didn’t even mention – Dalaran run by Khadgar and now floating over the Broken Isles? I’m really hopeful and expectant that the story is going to come together better than ever, and I can’t wait to see it unfold.
Now, where’s the dance studio?
It’s been a few weeks since patch 6.2 released, and I’ve been pretty happy with a casual consumption of the content. Overlooking the idea that the Horde and Alliance somehow forgot how to build shipyards and ships, the introduction quests were exciting and well done.
Once in Tanaan Jungle, the new daily system works well in my opinion. The focus is still on assaults on various locations with a progress bar that fills by performing various tasks. I liked these in Warlords first launched, and I still like them now. You go to the location and can space out and take care of things, whether in a group or alone. It’s nice that I can very easily drop from the group in the middle, stop playing, come back, and pick up another group. There’s no start or finish for the group as a whole. While there are a couple other objective-based daily quests, they can be done alongside the assaults and don’t seem overwhelming.
As for Hellfire Citadel, I’ve done the first six bosses in the first two wings of LFR. For some reason, the aesthetic doesn’t really stand out to me. Hellfire Assault, the first boss, tasks players with using the Blackfuse company’s Hellfire Cannons against Hellfire Citadel itself. Sounds cool, but it wasn’t so cool when I did it. The Iron Reaver fight is interesting mostly because I think the boss looks cool – a bit like Samus Aran. I liked taking out Kilrogg Deadeye eventually! My favorite fight so far is the disgusting, glutinous Gorefiend. Going into his stomach and dealing with the souls of draenei that he devoured? Awesome.
Everyone has different goals, and I had a few for this patch.
Draenor’s Last Stand – Complete the Tanaan Jungle daily objectives.
In Pursuit of Gul’dan – Complete the Garrison Campaign.
Legendary Chapter IV: Darkness Incarnate – Complete Khadgar’s legendary quests.
Hellfire Citadel – See the fights through on LFR at least.
Things have gone pretty fast so far, and I admit that I like the pace. Draenor’s Last Stand and In Pursuit of Gul’dan went quickly and were fun. Obviously I don’t really even need to think about Hellfire Citadel LFR; it’ll happen as soon as it’s all released. As for the legendary, I’m working at it. On that subject, if anyone chooses to comment on talk about it, I avoid spoilers, so I don’t know what happens in the legendary quests and don’t want to know until it’s revealed.
We’ll see how everyone else feels about patch 6.2 and if it lasts long enough for them. As for me, I don’t like it when I get overwhelmed with too much. I know I don’t have to do it all, but I prefer when it feels manageable. I’m also fine completing all my goals and then not playing WoW for a while, but that’s just my opinion. Right now, WoW feels very leisurely for me, and I like that!
I was too amused by my hopping to actually contribute to combat.
Lantresor of the Blade is so badass that he doesn’t even use a pick. He just punches the rock until it gives up its ore.
There were rumors of a bovine invasion this weekend, but “Management” was quick to give notice to the Citizens of Sanctuary that the rumors were unfounded.
…while the idea of some sort of “cowpocalypse” (as one terrified farmer has taken to calling this) is udderly ridiculous, it is worth noting that one can never be too careful. And so, after consulting with our local Horadrim chapter, we have elected to issue an advisory… it is also recommended that you avoid entering any strange portals that may or may not lead to alternate planes of existence. This activity cud be potentially hazardous to your health and, in the opinion of this humble civil servant, is a veally bad idea in general.”
Debunking the Cowspiracy, Management, Diablo III Blog, 5/14/15.
After about an hour of searching, I found a Herald to the Queen. Moogle joined me, and we explored the portal together.
Leads to a place that does not exist. The Burning Hells are not responsible for events that transpire there. If you claim to have been to this place, you will be called a liar. Void where prohibited.
We defeated The Cow Queen, met the Ghost of the Cow King, and killed hordes of hellbent bovine.
…except that never happened because the place doesn’t exist, of course.
Also the music was excellent.
As soon as I saw the card back from the April season, I wanted cupcakes. If Hearthstone was going to inspire me to make cupcakes, I might as well make Hearthstone cupcakes.
I obviously took a little liberty with them. I enjoyed the sprinkles on the card, but I didn’t really have a “background” to the real cupcakes. I opted to put the sprinkles right on the cupcakes. The colors don’t match perfectly and blah blah blah, close enough.
At least I have cupcakes.
I don’t remember any extra exciting quests in this zone, but at the same time, I seemed to have enjoyed it before I recently finished. Maybe it’s simply because my druid is growing on me. I liked seeing Naralex and Mankrik again, although neither did anything too interesting.
I’ll have to trust that when I went through my screenshots a few days ago, pulling some out for posts, this truly was the only one worth posting. It doesn’t seem so worth posting when I look at it now.
Now it’s time for Dustwallow Marsh.
When do we get a permanent centaur mount?
I recently finished Desolace on my paladin. I have mixed feelings about it. A lot of it was uneventful, but I like seeing what happened to the centaur clans from classic.
I never played this character in vanilla and wonder if our centaur faction choice from classic would alter the experience any now. Somehow I doubt it, but it would have been cool.
In the end, I got to help some centaurs, kill some demons, and take a selfie.
I got some sweet new followers recently. First, here’s Garona. I know pretty much everybody got her through the legendary, but she’s still cool. It’s nice to have someone who’s good in every situation.
Next up is Harrison Jones. I don’t hate him quite as much now that’s he’s a follower. When someone is sent with him, they’re scaled to his level and ilvl, making him fantastic for training.
Lastly, here’s Cyril Fogus, accountant extraordinaire. If you didn’t realize, he’s an Archer reference. For some reason, it was really difficult to get a picture of him.
Now I want some Stir-Fryday. But more importantly, I want Lana as a follower.
I’ve been wanting one for a while, and I finally purchased a Spectral Tiger on the Auction House. I’m pretty broke now with a total of 8873 gold across all my characters, but the only thing for which I really needed gold was this, and it’s mine now!
My druid was actually the first to mount it. Looking good there, little feral druid.
The Spectral Tiger is still significantly cheaper than the Swift Spectral Tiger. I wonder if there’s some ingrained sense that epic versions are better even though they’re the same speed now. I actually prefer the Spectral Tiger because it has less armor, so yay for me.
Hm… what gold sink is next?
I’ve earned a couple monuments recently that I didn’t mention. First, I earned the Master Draenor Crafter monument for crafting 50 epic items with an ilvl of 600+. There was one thing I could craft – the gun through the engineering building.
I also earned the Master of Apexis monument for collecting 100,000 Apexis Crystals. Now I have three distinct monuments, so each pedestal can display a unique monument. I think the Mythic Draenor Raider monument is far away from my goals, and I don’t have any max level pets, so Draenor Pet Brawler is out of my immediate reach as well. My eye’s on the legendary ring monument for next patch though!
Today’s Mooglegem’s last day with an active account. In fact, by this time the subscription has already lapsed. She just doesn’t have the time to play. She raided during Highmaul, but never even had a chance to finish questing let alone enter Blackrock Foundry. Last night she wanted to make the final push toward the Nagrand finale.
There were a few quest lines she hadn’t completed in Nagrand, but most importantly, Thrall was offering her “And Justice for Thrall.” She was so close this whole time. I was happy I got to witness her witnessing such an amazing moment.
I made her do this emote, heh.
She also went through her bags a little. There were a lot of old memories. One included a letter from my bank alt.
Dear Mooglegem,
Thank you for the stuff. How are you? I heard you were far away, south of here. How is it there? I’ve never left Mulgore. I live at Thunder Bluff.
I guess I liked RPing in letters.
Or how about this one I sent to her hunter?
The fight against the Lich King is slow but progresses well! I look forward to the day when we put him down for good!
Congratulations on reaching Outland! I hope you’re enjoying Nagrand; it really is quite beautiful. I’m surprised [Nesingwary] remembered me! Someday you’ll surpass him as a hunter, I’m sure.
Chompsky and Sumo are both very cute. Give them my love! Mooglegem says hello too.
Hope to see you in Northrend soon!
It’s been a while since we’ve really played together, but it’s weird to have her account inactive. On the plus side, she got to see the Nagrand finale. Afterward, I summarized the events of Highmaul, Blackrock Foundry, and the legendary quest, and then I showed her the finale of the Garrison Campaign and the 6.1 legendary cutscene. At least she’s caught up on the lore!
Hurry and come back, Mooglegem, so I can take you on a tour through Ashran and we can slay Alliance like old times.
I wrote this to post on Game Boyz, where I’m the iPhone editor (and only active poster for over the last year). However, the site appears to be down. Because it was already written, I decided to post it here, even though it’s not the type of writing I usually do here. Note that Game Boyz reviews are required to have sections for introduction, graphics, sound, gameplay, and conclusion.
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is Blizzard’s online collectible card game based in the Warcraft universe. Fans of Warcraft should be familiar with a lot of characters and themes in the game, while fans of earlier CCGs should be familiar with the game mechanics. It reminds me of a simplified and more fun Magic: The Gathering set in the Warcraft universe.
Hearthstone was first released on PCs in March of 2014 and before that time was in an extensive beta. The iPhone and Android phone version of Hearthstone is very similar to the PC version but uses smaller graphics and a condensed interface. It’s very playable, and I have no problem switching between the two versions.
Graphics
The graphics are still great even on the smaller screen. In both the PC and the phone versions, you can select cards to get a closer view of them. Because of this, you don’t really lose much graphically. The game boards on PC have interactive parts in each corner. For example, clicking the hanging sign on the house on one board enough times causes it to break. On the phone, two of these have been removed to make room for the interface. I miss clicking on them mindlessly, but they’re not vital.
Sound
The audio is still excellent in this version of Hearthstone. There are a ton of sound effects in the game. As far as I can tell, each card has a unique sound, and they’ve all made the jump to phones. If you play enough, you might know what card’s being played just based on the sound. It’s a high level of polish.
Gameplay
Hearthstone is Hearthstone, regardless of platform. You’re still using the same account with the same people playing because it’s completely cross-platform. Hearthstone is free-to-play, but you can spend real money as well. Everyday you get a quest. It might ask you to win three games as a mage, deal 100 damage, etc. Completing a quest earns you gold that you can spend to purchase adventures or card packs. You can also spend real money in place of gold.
To save space in the mobile version, your hand is tucked into the corner in the bottom-right. When you tap on it, it pops up into the center on the bottom so you can select one to read it in full. It’s a good way to save screen real estate and is very smooth once you start using it.
Card packs contain additional cards with a chance at rarer cards, similar to buying cards in traditional CCGs. Expansions add many new cards. So far, one expansion has been released – Goblins vs Gnomes. Adventures on the other hand are single-player challenges. You fight against NPCs using decks that might not be completely balanced for every class. You’ll usually need to make custom decks to beat them. In addition to a normal mode, they also contain a harder, heroic mode as well as class challenges. Adventures follow stories from WoW and contain voice-acted introductions. They reward cards as well, although adventures introduce less cards than expansions.
Curse of Naxxramas released in July, but Hearthstone just got something new. Blackrock Mountain was released April 2 of this year, making this the perfect time to get into (or back into) Hearthstone. It has five wings – Blackrock Depths, which contains the Grim Guzzler, Dark Iron Arena, and Emperor Thaurissan; Molten Core, which contains Garr, Baron Geddon, and Ragnaros the Firelord; Blackrock Spire (releasing April 16), which contains Highlord Omokk, General Drakkisath, and Rend Blackhand; Blackwing Lair (releasing April 23), which contains Razorgore the Untamed, Vaelastrasz the Corrupt, Chromaggus, and Lord Victor Nefarius; and the Hidden Laboratory (releasing April 30), which contains Omnotron Defense System, Maloriak, Atramedes, and Nefarian.
Conclusion
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has always been an excellent card game, and now it can finally be played on phones as well. I’ve never spent money in the game and have still had a blast with it. Whether you’ve played the PC version or not, I highly recommend you download Hearthstone on your iPhone or Android phone. Getting in a quick match in bed before going to sleep is a new perk that I really enjoy. For the Horde!
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