I might be emotionally scarred from the amount of Horrific Visions and accompanying assaults I did in 8.3. They were neat content, and I really enjoyed the challenge of pushing myself to play better on multiple classes, but I also felt completely burned out by the end of the patch.
By completing both the Horrific Vision of Orgrimmar and Horrific Vision of Stormwind solo while all five masks are activated (the hardest version), you earn the Mad World feat of strength, which rewards the title, The Faceless One. I found that it was significantly harder to do this on cloth characters than any others. I really pushed myself to master my mage and warlock, while it felt like the other classes came easier. In the end, I earned Mad World as a discipline priest, demonology warlock, retribution paladin, elemental shaman, and balance druid. Five classes down!
I also managed to save up the 100,000 corrupted mementos from Horrific Visions to purchase the Wicked Swarmer, shown at the top. It’s a really great mount I think. The color looks good, it’s a cool model, and it’s small enough that it isn’t annoying when using it. I decided to save up for it on my warlock so that my priest, my main, could spend the corrupted mementos on sockets.
The Glacial Tidestorm is guaranteed to drop twice off mythic Jaina in Battle for Dazar’alor, which is fairly easy to do with people who follow some simple directions. Mooglegem got the drop on her first try when I showed her the strat. Here she is with her Glacial Tidestorm, Squishy (her water elemental), and Aborius, the elemental fury in Nagrand!
It took me a lot more runs, but I got mine too! I got on my frost mage for the screenshot so we could have maximum water elementals!
We had to visit alternate Draenor as well of course!
Hertz Locker is a Feat of Strength achievement that can be earned by completing Mechagon with all hard modes and without anyone dying.
We only tried three different nights and ended up earning it last night – the last night before it became unobtainable when the Shadowlands pre-patch hit. We had a few hiccups because for some reason, despite being able to do 15s no problem, we still learned of new mechanics that would cause a death – on trash! I’m looking at you shrink ability that can cause someone to get trampled by their friends.
Two Sides to Every Tale (the achievement for doing all the 8.1 quests on both sides basically) gives a horse to the Horde and a wolf to the Alliance, which seemed strange at first until I paid attention. The reward for the achievement is, in lore, a stolen mount.
Alliance get the Ironclad Frostclaw: “Captured in the snows of Alterac Valley, this bloodthirsty hunter now roars for the Alliance.”
Horde get the Bloodflank Charger: “Stolen from the Arathi Basin stables, this fire-hearted charger now steeds for the Horde.”
This is an achievement for completing Zandalar Forever!, A Nation United, and both Tides of Vengeance achievements. So basically, do the Horde zones and their culminating storyline, do the Alliance zones and their culminating storyline, and finish both sides of the 8.1 war campaign. I did one Alliance zone before completing the A Nation United part, so I’m not sure if they changed in a later patch or just made it easier to for alts. (I’m still working on Drustvar and will do Stormsong Valley last.)
While I liked the wolf, I thought the horse was a bit of letdown until I realized it was stolen. Now I like it!
Before talking about the raid, check out that skybox in Ny’alotha! It’s really gorgeous!
The five of us who have been actively pushing m+ were geared and had our Ahead of the Curve already but wanted to be sure the rest of the guild could get it too. Carpe Flux Capacitor has a lot of people who have been in and out this expansion (some fairly geared from pushing through +10s) as well as one friend of mine who just recently came back to WoW and was a hard carry. Plus even the five of us had some bosses we still needed. I had never done Vexiona (besides LFR) even.
We did it over the course of three nights. The first night, we cleared the first few bosses without much issue. Unsurprisingly, Dark Inquisitor Xanesh and Vexiona gave us the most trouble. We eventually pushed through Xanesh, which I thought would be the hardest boss, but then we hit a brick wall with Vexiona.
Night two we descended into that pit to defeat Shad’har the Insatiable, Drest’agath, and Il’gynoth. Again, not too much trouble. And we managed to get Vexiona down as well!
On the third night we tackled Carapace of N’zoth and N’zoth himself. It was a lot of fun to be coordinated again in a group. While I’m enjoying m+ and prefer it to raiding now, raiding is a different beast and scratches an itch I’ve had for a while. Everyone did really well, and even my friend who was a carry in regards to his gear had execution down.
Here I am on my Uncorrupted Voidgwing, which now most of the active guild members have too! As fun as it was, getting the group together also reminds me of the most stressful part of raiding – organizing 10+ people.
Hopefully we can follow a similar path next expansion: pushing m+ primarily but then looping back to try the raid before the end of the patch. This patch has been a blast!
Last week my mythic+ group finished our last +15. This was for the Battle for Azeroth Keystone Master: Season Four achievement, which awards the Awakened Mindborer mount.
Here’s our mythic group! It makes me feel gross! Matt had already finished the achievement before the rest of us but was still helping the group push. It seemed like last week was our best shot because the affixes got harder this week, and we were running out of time.
The hardest part was getting the key we needed. Our final key was Siege of Boralus. We actually had a 16 of it. Besides little issues here and there with our run, our tank disconnected for a bit. We were fairly confident though, because even if we fail on +16, we’d be able to try again on +15. We were just about done with the boss, and the timer was close. We pushed hard and accidentally went just a couple seconds over – and that’s when we realized that by finishing it overtime, our key would change. We meant to walk out and reset. There goes our SoB key.
From that point, our group split up into PUGs. Sometimes a few of us went together, but usually we were pugging alone. Matt continued to try to run his own keys in an attempt to generate the SoB key, which was unlikely. It took forever trying to get into good PUGs, but eventually we all did it! While the end was stressful, m+ was a blast and felt very rewarding!
Last week I finally finished the war campaign as a Sylvanas loyalist. Since my warlock, Voidgazer, is Forsaken and keeps the Gift of N’zoth, he felt like the perfect candidate to be a Sylvanas loyalist. I know it doesn’t offer much that’s different from the war campaign when siding when Saurfang, but it was still fun to see.
I stitched together the campaign in the above video. The cutscene at the end is the most interesting part with some dialogue between Sylvanas and Nathanos. It’s easy to look it up on YouTube, but it couldn’t hurt to record myself as well!
After completing the war campaign while siding with Saurfang, completing it on an Alliance character, and completing the loyalist war campaign, I can say that I don’t think I’ll play through the war campaign ever again!
After performing a solo 5-mask run in the Horrific Vision of Stormwind last week on both my shadow priest and demonology warlock, I did a solo 5-mask run in Horrific Vision of Orgrimmar this week. This was a big goal for me, and while I’ve been working toward it for a while, I’m also kind of surprised that I managed to do it. Now I have my Mad World achievement and “the Faceless One” title! Later in the week I’ll give it a go on my lock!
Last week I managed to solo a 5-mask Horrific Vision of Stormwind for the first time! There was something about the madnesses that week that made me think that was the week to do it. It did take my shadow priest a few attempts (maybe 4 or so), but I managed to do it. There wasn’t really any magic trick or breakthrough, although I did use Potions of Unbridled Fury and drums for lust. My priest was ilvl 466 in shadow when I managed to do it.
Next I set my sights on my warlock. My demonology warlock is only ilvl 460, and I don’t play it as well as my priest. This took a lot more attempts and a lot more breakthroughs. I think I ended up trying 8 times last week. Like with my shadow priest, I used pots and drums. This isn’t really some big innovation, but I didn’t use those when I wasn’t seriously thinking I’d be able to solo 5-mask.
I also really struggled with Umbric. My first time on Umbric, I use an orb on pull, so not only was I at max sanity, but I stayed at max sanity for the first few seconds of the fight while in the orb. I still lost all my sanity during the fight. I get polymorphed and then wander in circles, leaving void zones on the ground and walking through them. My felguard’s stun wasn’t so helpful. I also tried using the felhunter for silences. What I found worked best was using my imp. It removes harmful magic effects on a very short CD, so it can break me out of polymorph. That was the ticket to defeating Umbric!
And then I went back to felguard for Alleria and lost to the same problem. On my successful run, I had to use my imp on both Umbric and Alleria, and I had to be sure to have my self-resurrect for Alleria. You can see it activate near the end of the fight with Alleria in the above video. Glad I had it!
These were challenging, and I’m not super confident that I’ll be able to do it this week in Horrific Vision of Orgrimmar. I’ll give it my best shot though!
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!
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.
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.
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?
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!
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!
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 :)
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.)
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!
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.
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:
The Broken Isles
Level 110
Honor system 3.0
Artifact weapons
Class Order Halls
The Emerald Dream and Emerald Nightmare
Demon Hunters
Queen Azshara
The invasion of Azeroth by the Burning Legion
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
This post contains significant spoilers for the legendary quests in 6.1! Keep in mind that this builds off the current story of Warlords of Draenor, so if you missed other major lore moments or cutscenes, those could be spoiled a little too.
I recently finished the 6.1 parts of the legendary quests, which are fantastic. Obviously, there was a lot of grinding and killing raid bosses repeatedly, and that’s not included in my videos. I’ve recorded turning in the quests, picking them up, talking to Khadgar, and all the non-repeatable content.
I broke it into two videos because the final quest, the culmination (that is seriously awesome), is a lot longer. Sure, that probably has to do with me failing repeatedly, but I think it’s interesting to see failures as well sometimes.
What an awesome cutscene. It got a little choppy near the end because I stupidly ran low on disk space on the drive to which I was recording. Whoops. You can always search for the cutscene on YouTube if you want.
There’s an achievement called Time is a Flat Circle that awards a monument of Khadgar fighting Gul’dan. It’s description reads, “Everything we have ever done or will do, we are going to do over and over and over again.” It seems like we’re going to see that even with all the meddling of beings from our timeline, this timeline wants to naturally progress to the same state.
The cutscene at the end of the chain also leads up to the next raid that was recently announced – Hellfire Citadel, complete with the Legion’s Archimonde and the Iron Horde presumably now under control of Gul’dan. I can’t wait to find out what happens to Grommash Hellscream. Can I build by shipyard and launch a naval assault on Tanaan Jungle yet?
I recently finished collecting my Primal Gladiator’s gear, the conquest gear for Warlords Season 1. Because I usually do arenas or rated battlegrounds, I think this is the first time I’ve finished by conquest set. Thanks, Ashran!
Ashran is actually very fun. Hopefully I can finish killing gnomes and pandaren so I can get that title!
The Iron Assembly, the third wing of Blackrock Foundry’s Raid Finder, opened Tuesday. Wednesday night are raid was cancelled, but I ventured into the new wing. I’d already done Beastlord Darmac on normal, but I’d never seen Operator Thogar or The Iron Maidens.
I have mixed feelings about The Iron Maidens. I think I’ll learn to dislike that fight only because LFR will struggle with it (and it’s a long ass fight). It was honestly kind of fun once I got into the swing of dodging bombs. That’s great the first week of LFR, but I know I don’t pay close attention in LFR usually. This will grow to annoy me.
Operator Thogar is an awesome fight! According the the Dungeon Journal, he “oversees the operation of the Grimrail.” The fight takes place on train tracks. Periodically trains come into the station with additional troops or weapons. It’s a cool looking fight and fun too. Again, who knows how I’ll feel in a month, but I was pretty happy with it last night!
Of course, there had to be a douche taking selfies in the middle of the fight.
Last night we attempted Hans’gar and Franzok for the first time, taking the fight onto their huge treadmills. After a few attempts, we were able to handily defeat the cardio bros.
We pushed deeper into Blackrock Foundry, stopping to struggle against Flamebender Ka’graz. This took a decent number of attempts, but we bent the Flamebender so out of shape that she dropped and gave us her loot.
Our new raid progression was celebrated with selfies! Hopefully next week we can down Kromog!
We made some more progress in Blackrock Foundry last night! Gruul went down without too much of a fight, but then we spent the majority of the night on Oregorger. The problem was just execution, but I think we got it now.
Our night ended with us slaying Beastlord Darmac. Last week we hit a bit of a wall, so I’m glad we managed to progress with two new kills this week. I got some new loot, too!
Rum ham! Treasure!
earthwormgem
Peter (Devee)
