world of warcraft – Page 12

All The Things

I’ve recently returned to World of Warcraft after quite a few months away – and I’m attempting to get caught up. The problem is, I swap “mains” frequently, and no one character has done everything in ‘The War Within’ let alone prior expansions. This time around I’d like to change that, I think. Of course things may change – again, that’s just the nature of my nomadic gaming.

I’m playing my Monk – it has been quite some time since I played her. In fact if I take a look at WoWThing, it looks like the last time I played her with any sort of consistency was Battle For Azeroth. She has bits and pieces completed from other expansions, but nothing of any significance. I’ve at least kept up with her professions (Inscription and Engineering).

I’ve got her on a roleplay server, and I’m actively looking for a community there. It’s refreshing to be back in game, I think I returned at a good time and I’m VERY excited about the future of Warcraft, with player housing just around the corner. For now the stats are:

All The Things Total: 41.32%

Isle of Dorn: 28.51%
Dornogal: 20%
Azj-Kahet: 18.76%
Siren Isle: 3.26%
The Ringing Deeps: 17.81%
Undermine: 4.87%
Achievements: 5.88%
Quests: 6.83%

I’m tracking all of the expansions, but for now I’m going to continue with The War Within until I’m at a comfortable percent, then I’ll start working backwards a bit and pick a new expansion to work on. We’ll see how long that lasts!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Let’s Talk about the Single Button Assistant (spoiler alert, I LOVE it)

Blizzard recently implemented a controversial mechanic to World of Warcraft, where you can attack & cast abilities with a rotation by pressing only one button – but your global cooldown of abilities will be 25% slower thus you’re going to lose some DPS. For example, after looking at some parses, it was a 7% loss in dps on my hunter who uses GSE, an addon that does almost exactly this but also requires a lot of maintenance.

I LOVE this feature. I absolutely love it. This allows people who have disabilities to play. This allows people who are reluctant to try new classes because they don’t know how to play them, a chance to jump right in. Are people going to be rushing M+ with these? Probably, but since they do less dps, it’s going to be painful. Those who are interested in the min/max side of the game won’t use this feature, because it will be a downgrade.

More people in the game is a good thing. More accessibility, also good. Less barriers to playing new classes, amazing.

Don’t like it? DON’T USE IT. No one has to, it’s completely optional. Whether or not someone else is using it has absolutely zero impact on my gameplay – unless I’m doing a high level M+ and in that case I would expect them to be able to keep up with the group no matter what system they’re using, and if they CAN’T keep up in competitive gameplay then I might have an issue.

World questing? Looking for raid? Timewalking? Fantastic.

Does this mean I’ve wiggled my way back into Warcraft?

Well, yes and no. I’ve recently started playing on my EU account – the account that does NOT have all the mounts, pets, or other fun things that my main account has. Why? It has been something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. The time zones are more to my play style, and I have a lot of EU friends. I also gifted the account some game time and the shop sold auction house mount some time ago. While I can’t share bnet balance or gold between EU/NA, I can gift items to the account (has to be a completely separate bnet account). Of course it does make me miss everything I have on my main account so there’s no telling if I’ll actually stick with it (spoiler alert, I won’t) but it has been a lot of fun returning and it feels like a comfortable time to be back. I’m also excited about the future with player housing and all of that good stuff. I’ll just have to take it day by day, and see how things go.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Ding, 77

I’ve been slowly meandering my way through the new zones of The War Within, not doing absolutely everything (yet) but taking my time and just doing things casually. I have to admit, the graphics are absolutely stunning, for Warcraft, at least. This is one of the best expansions I’ve seen as far as graphics go. They stay true to Warcraft, but you can see so many amazing looking vistas, and the skyboxes are astounding. I often just fly around taking screenshots, I’m that in love with the look of everything.

I’m not a huge fan of the nerubian race, spiders are not my favourite creature and since these ones are so incredibly well done I spend a lot of time being grossed out all together. I have upgraded all of the old gear I was wearing from Dragonflight, and I’ve gotten to the point where I needed to put my paladin into her protection spec rather than retribution because she was dying to trash fairly easily. This is something I normally do when a new expansion comes out, tanks may kill slower, but they’re almost impossible to kill.

I also picked up my fishing rod and started fishing my way through this expansion. I haven’t done anything fancy yet other than reach 300 in the skill, but I’ve looked into what can drop – I managed to land a few cosmetic pieces which is always nice. I have not figured out professions yet, I haven’t even started working my way through them or leveling any sort of reputation in a dedicated way. I imagine I’ll get to 80 first, and then work on unlocking whatever it is I need to unlock, along with working on reputation gains. There’s lots of talk in the Economy Discord about all things gold making related, but at this point in time a lot of it simply goes over my head.

The goal? Short term, reach 80 – then work on professions (and alts) from there. I’m debating whether or not I want to level everyone up with pet battles like I normally do. It might be time to just work on them in a traditional way.

As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself.

A Return to Warcraft

It was only a matter of time before I found myself back in World of Warcraft and joining the ranks of those leveling and exploring through the most recent expansion, The War Within. The first thing I had to do was settle on a character to level – I have a lot of characters, but eventually decided that my paladin should be the first one to reach 80. I’ll (hopefully) get things unlocked and started on her, and then move to other characters as time goes on. I have a ‘core’ group that I’m using with my warband, I collect recipes and attempt to complete the main story with these 4 characters, but as always, nothing is set in stone.

I completed my first dungeon (I ran it with NPC which was much less stress and gave me an opportunity to learn the dungeon) and right now I’m questing in the Ironhaul Station area. I love the aesthetics of the expansion, so far the graphics are beautiful and though I’m only level 72 (part way through at the time of this post) things seem to be moving along quickly.

I also completed my first Delve, which reminded me a lot of the mini game solo dungeons from prior expansions. In specific the Niffen ones from Dragonflight. People seem to be enjoying themselves, and that’s always good to see. Is it enough to keep people playing long term? Well, I guess we’ll just have to see! For those of us who enjoy partaking in the various meta games that Blizzard offers (collecting, gold making, etc) there’s at least always something out there to go after.

As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself.

Day 1 of TWW Pre-Patch is ROUGH

Well, after a lengthy downtime World of Warcraft is back up, welcoming in The War Within pre-patch. Except not really. There are SO many bugs at the moment. Here’s a short list of the ones I’ve personally experienced so far.

Public craft orders have a blank screen (using default UI with zero addons)
The Warband bank is disabled until further notice (even though it’s one of the main features being promoted)
The login screen is now basically useless for anyone who has characters with the same name, or more than 30 characters. We can’t sort by any anything, and when I manually set my characters to an order, the game just changed it around.
There’s currently a fishing exploit involving the DF nets that was fixed months ago and it’s back in game
You can’t trade cross realm any more right now
You can’t remove gold from your guild bank

That’s just the small amount I’ve had to deal with. There are other changes that have taken place that are not bugs, but have greatly decreased my personal QoL – one of them is the latest changes to macros. I normally use an addon called GSE to create combat macros, which is easier on my hands when I’m suffering from a MS relapse. Macros now have incredible limitations and new rules to abide by, and GSE in specific has to be completely changed. Thankfully, I have found an active developer who worked on the retribution paladin macro, so I am up and running on that one character at least, but the others will have to wait.

There’s also the matter of raw gold being tuned upwards – is this intended? Who knows! It’s there though, so get farming before it isn’t. After a break away from game, I did the warband bank quest chain (the rest of the story arrives at a later date) and then wandered around admiring all of the bugs. Which ones have you come across? What are you doing to entertain yourself in this pre-patch? Let me know in commends! As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.