News: WoW 4.3

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Today is the big day for WoW I've been waiting for. Transmoging!

Honestly, I haven't paid much attention to other things that will be added with this patch. I didn't even realize they were adding some new dungeons. Probably because I have barely played the older cata dungeons. Only yesterday did I finally try out ZG/ZA.

Sadly I still don't have all my transmog gear. Basically the same as listed in my last post. I still need pants and chest. And while I did get the Moroes dagger this week, and the opera event was R&J, that dagger that I actually wanted didn't drop. I'm hoping along with this new cross realm random raid finder, that I'll be able to raid older dungeons with other realm friends. It's been my plan now for several weeks to finish out my set, but honestly I have no idea if things will even work like that.

While in theory I wouldn't be terribly interested in new dungeons when I have barely played the current ones, I love the caverns of time dungeons. So I hope I can get my ilvl average up enough to do them very soon, whatever ilvl their going to require. Mines about 351 atm. I just got about 4 epic upgrades the past couple days, but that's been it. Of 17 slots I have 7 Epics, 6 Blues, 4 Greens.

However, I'm not to interested in the new raid dungeon. Just the Rogue Legendary quest. But I still don't have a guild, so sadly its looking like I wont be getting that too soon. I have the 10k! But doubt I'm getting in a pug for it with my ilvl, let alone past 3 bosses to pickpocket something.

 Also, not that anyone cares, but I know I said I was going to try to post more. My free time the past couple weeks has been full thanks to WoW, Skyward Sword, Skyrim, and the past few days teaching myself 3d modeling with Blender. Hopefully I'll get around to posting some personal reviews of those games, or even some 3d modeling project worth sharing.

News: More WoW

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Well, that's another week down back on WoW retail again. It really has been a bland week. I just run my 25 dailies each day, and farm old heroics and raids when I'm bored.

I did finally get the last transmog piece I needed from Karazhan after the weekly reset. Just need gruul now, at the least, and hopefully mag too. I got some dagger upgrades along with a couple other pieces. I even got enough BoE gear to sit in my bank to raise my ilvl average up enough to do ZA/ZG if I wanted now.

When I'm bored and want to kill time, I've been farming to try and complete my enchantment list. Most of what I need still is world drop outland stuff that was to expensive to ever buy in the AH before. But there are a few things I can farm for still. Mostly BC exalted rep rewards, MC boss drops, and some from Magisters Terrace. Only 1 more to go from the latter. I need some from AQ40 too, but when I tried before my dagger upgrade, killing the first boss just wasn't happening. It would probably go better now, but I doubt it would be enough still.

It is nice though that I have now completely soloed MC with my crapy mix of greens blues and a few purples. As well as everything in Karazhan except Nightbane, the Prince and the animal bosses. Well. technicly not all 3 of the opera events too. I need Romeo & Juliet for that still. lol. At of all the times Ive gone through Karazhan over the years, I've only seen R&J and Big Bad Wolf once each. It's insane how much Oz comes up. I hope to get the dagger from R&J for transmoging, but given that and its lower drop rate, I likely wont get it for a long while. If I'm bored before the next reset I may go back in and try Prince and maybe Nightbane for the hell of it. Soloing chess though its just annoying, or I would have tried already this week.

As people are probably well aware of, Skyrim was released a few days ago. I played it for about 1 hour, and sadly, I wasn't impressed. It really seems like a minor improvement over Oblivion. Just more modern graphics and that's it. The non-human models are hideous still, controls are only marginally better. UI changes are still confusing, though probably better. It's pretty dull to me, but I guess I wasn't that interested in it anyway due to it lacking the 1 thing I thought Oblivion needed most. Online co-op multi-player. In this gaming era, I just don't see how a game like this could be made without it. I waited for years for homebrew Oblivion multi-player mods to get finished, but sadly they never were done to a point to be actually useable. Maybe Skyrim will be different in that regard, or maybe they will actually release a patch to add it. Not going to hold my breath though.

I can't even enjoy the graphics very much either, since my comp is getting out of date. I don't even think I can run Oblivion with anything near max settings. But really, as a true gamer, I care about graphics a ton less then gameplay. Graphics don't get me to play something, which is why I don't/won't own a crapbox 360 or lamestation 3. I'm still interested in WiiU having more modern graphics, and will definitely enjoy it if I get one, but if I do get one it will mostly be because I know the gameplay quality of the 1st party games will be there as always. I just hope more 3rd parties sign on this time around. They talked like they were. But they did that with Wii too, and look at the crap 3rd party support for that.

Changing topics a bit, I have a few un-posted posts typed out now. They are mostly rants on different topics. I'll likely comb over them each a bit more and refine them before I post them. Additionally I would like to hopefully try and post less multi-topic posts by posting more often. This one itself went off into its own rant about a different topic. So hopefully I'll start posting at least 2 posts a week here instead of tryig to maintain 1 as a minimum.

News: First Week Back

Wednesday, November 09, 2011

I've been back on WoW retail for more then a week now. I got my Rogue to 85 a few days ago, and haven't really been doing much since. I'm not really interested in doing dungeons without a friend along, for reasons of fun and I'm lazy and prefer to have a friend brief me on encounters over vent, rather then just look them up.

I've mostly fallen back into my old routine of just doing dailies, except now I do a full 25, and have to leave out many that I'd want to do. After my dailies are done, I usually just log, or maybe sit around Org for a bit raising enchanting and/or tailoring. It's a pretty bland playstyle, but I will likely have enough fun with it until my reps are maxed, and I have all the Quartermaster gear I want.

I did start planning and farming for my transmog set this week. I have about 5/8 pieces now. I had to do some farming in Kara to get it. Kind of surprised myself at how easy it was to kill all the bosses I cared to try. At 80 with a 264 ilvl average and 2x extended Evasion I couldn't even solo the first boss. Now in big part thanks to Recuperate, him and others can barely even move my health down, with my normal Assassination spec, the mix of greens, a few blues, and 2 purples I have. I guess why I was surprised was that as I leveled, I'd check my DPS on a training dummy each level. And despite getting higher level and a few pieces of gear upgrades each level, my DPS went down each level. I blame the horrible deign of crit chance lowering as you level. I had 52% at 80, and now about 15% at 85. I guess I understand the reasons for it, but its stupid and doesn't make any realistic sense. You gain more experience in battle but get significantly worse at your ability to aim for sweat spots on a target? If anything, it should be the other way around. But WoW fails to make sense at a lot of things like that. Large bulky metallic shoulders that would probably weigh 75lbs on a class that's supposed to be agile to the point where he can sneak around people undetected? I could go on and on, but I won't. But it seems the increased HP and avoidance of the 5 more levels was enough to make the difference, which as a Rogue I generally don't care about. As a Rogue, what more levels should mean to me is killing things faster, not things killing me slower. Oh well.

Unlike what it seems most Rogues will be doing, I won't be using Bloodfang for my transmog set, nor any complete set at all. Mines a custom mix of various pieces. Mostly from BC. It will however feature 3 pieces of the Netherblade set. That set looks horrible like a lot of gear blizz makes. But it looks significantly better without the mask and shoulders that seem like a bad joke. I'm using the BP, legs and gloves. The BP still sucks, but its the best of the worst, as no other BP in the entire game seems to match my set as well as it does. I hate tabards, but maybe I can find one that will go well with it all. Ebonblade is the best I know about, but even that's to bright. I seriously think blizz had something against ever making a set of armor that was pure black, or just very dark. At best, theres a few things like black whelp tunic and such that are kind of a dull greyish black. But it just amazes me how they can have Rogues in game and make armor for them for so many years, but not one single good solid black or dark armor set? Heck, even the best Rogue hood in the game isn't even Rogue useable. The DK greenie starter hood. Archerus Knight Hood I think it's called. They don't even have a single solid black cloak that I could find. Everything just looks like someone stole someones ugly table cloth or curtains, and put it on their back. Blizz just never understood that sometimes simple is better. They have to always try and make something elaborate and end up making things that just look silly. That's how we end up with the popular opinion about the each gear set getting worse and worse each time, to the point where this transmog feature was demanded enough to finally get implemented. I know I come from a viewpoint of a D&D type Rogue, or more accurately a Thief. That's what I want to play in an MMO, a Thief. But instead everything just uses a Rogue instead, seemingly to me just so they can have an excuse to use when they mess things up. "It's not a Thief, its a Rogue. So the thievly abilities and armor and general design you would want don't apply." That's the kind of a response I'd expect about this, and it's generally something I have to live with. But I wish MMO companies would try a bit more at least. Even EQ wasn't that great at it, but at least they weren't idiotic like blizz.

Thankfully, as I like to be unique, it seems most Rogues will be going for sets not like mine. But sadly I do expect Rogues to see me once, and just copy my gear. So I wont go into all its details. Another blizz rant I have is the lack of ability to keep things private. Everyone can just inspect you, see exactly what gear your wearing, enchants your using, gems, and as I completely expect, most likely transmog gear. And if your not around to inspect? Oh, they can just go to the armory and get all the info they want from that. The Armory was one of the worst ideas ever, strait from the start when not having the ability to hide your profile from public view at all. That should be a choice, not forced. Same goes for inspect too really. But instead the game devolved into this state its been in since were you may not even be able to get into a pug raid purely because some 14y old idiot thinks your gear isn't good enough, or to put it another way, because you actually need the gear that drops there. Thankfully I have had very few occasions that even resembled that.

Enough about that. I still need the boots, BP and legs for my set. I could live without the BP for a few weeks, thanks to the Ebonblade tabard. Possibly even the boots, instead using some other pair. But without the legs, the set just wont look right and won't be worth using yet. I'm highly skeptical, but hopefully I will be able to solo grull and mag for the tokens for those pieces. I'll probably give it a shot later tonight or sometime this week.

Later Addition:

Soloing gruul and magtherdion didn't go so well. I didn't try very hard, but I couldn't get past the first boss in gruuls. Going at it with a strategy may help, but I just think I can't do it. Far as Mag, I gave that several tries, but couldn't get a single one of the 5 channelers killed. Damn Dark Mending heal. I think my gear/DPS is just a little to low to do it atm, without serious luck. I'll try again when I get some 400+ DPS daggers to replace my 305 DPS daggers. Which will likely happen after a couple weeks more of rep grinding from dailies, or if I can get someone to help me with the ring quests in TH.

News: Changes, Bye bye Emberflame and Hell has frozen over!

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Well, after a few days of thinking, while I'm not decided on everything yet, I have made some decisions. As a few may notice, I have changed the blog a little and it will now be less about just projects. When I have a project I'm working on, or an update to one I will still post it just the same. But now I'm preparing myself more to post things about non-project related topics. Maybe something about progress I've made in an MMO. Maybe specific game reviews. Who knows. I'll figure things out as I go.

I figure expanding as such will draw more visits from google searches. Maybe not very much, but its something. And when approaching the blog like this, it will remain more active in times where there's not much going on project wise.

Lets get things started now. I have basically completely given up on the Emberflame WoW emu server. It's horrendousness has pushed me back into playing retail. The server was pretty nice at the start, outside of just my personal crashes that happened frequently in the first week I was there. But there was a 3 week rollback last week. Insane right? I got deleveled from 74 to 47, had to farm for and raise my enchanting all over again, and even after I got back to 74 I was down gold compared to what I had before. But in the past couple weeks, due either to server growth, incompetent devs, or both, the server crashes about 10 times a day during prime hours. Sometimes staying down for up to 3 hours. To make things worse, recently a queue was added. That was one of my major reasons for choosing this server. The lack of a queue. It was added to help with the server stability, which I guess I can understand. The thing is, it didn't help in the least, so now we just have 2x the BS to deal with.

It was this combination of BS that weakened me enough to be talked back into playing retail. I don't really have any plans there. Just take it one day at a time. I'm basically alone on my server now, but thanks to recent and upcoming cross realm changes, that will matter a lot less. It seems I got removed from the last guild I was in, so now I'm left to find a new one or make one myself. I don't know what I'm going to do for a guild yet. I've been leaning toward rejoining a guild I was in before that one, if their not bitter about me leaving when I did. I can understand if they are, as I became the top geared character in the guild, and was easily one of the best, most competent raiders. I could see them feeling like I just used them to gear up and go to a top guild, and in some ways see me just leaving them high and dry, and less able to accomplish things. But when I left I felt I wouldn't be missed that much, at least in the 10m's as there was another Rogue basically nipping at my heals to get in. He wasn't much worse then me, and was RL friends with a lot of the other raiders. So I didn't see that as much of an issue. But honestly, when I left that guild my choices were either quit the game, or quit the guild and try something else to see if I could still remain interested. Doing so bought me like another month on the game. 6 weeks tops, and then I was just as bored except now with a major headache every Tuesday.

I had little to no I'll will towards the members of the guild when I left. Granted, I was frustrated with spinning our wheels on 10m LK for 2 months, with zero progress from the first week to the last. But that is what it is. I was needing to progress to stay interested in the game. My Rogue was maxed out as much as I could get him. The addition of my Mage to my roster wasn't enough, and I wanted more from my Rogue. So I just did what I had to do to attempt to keep the game fun for me.

Enough about that. My other options are find a completely new guild, or make one myself. If I'm going to look for a new guild, its going to be hard. I don't see things the same way as the average WoW player. I would really want to find a guild that's perfect for me, but I doubt I can. The server population is even smaller then last year, making that likelyhood much worse. Making my own. Well, realistically that option is likely to be harder then my guild on the emu. It may be hard to explain all the details behind my reasoning on that, but I just don't see being able to find the same type of players I was looking for on the emu server. And the whole guild level thing. Worst idea ever blizz. I seriously doubt many new guilds are ever being made and joined on retail now.

I could just go guildless, and pug raids. But at some point like in the past, the failness of pug raids will annoy me to the point were I wont want to pug raids anymore at all. And I just feel naked without a guild tag. I'll just have to give it some time, and hope it will all work out.

Sadly, I will have to let my emu guild die. Sad because it was just starting to bring in players who sought out my guilds type. I maybe could have made it into the guild I planned on. Who knows.