Baud Attitude

Well, obviously I didn’t BEAT WoW, but I did get to level cap, which took almost exactly a month.

I could have done it much more quickly, but there is just something irresistible about going back to old content and stomping raids, even if I have zero nostalgia for the days when the raids were current content.

Getting from 100 to 110 was a very different experience from my path to 100, because one of the big changes Blizzard made for the Legion expansion was to dramatically reduce dungeon XP.  If you want to get to 110, you are going to be running quests.  (Or doing PVP)

There’s a lot of player power locked behind the questlines, as well.  One of the neater features of this expansion are “Order Halls”, which are little pieces of the world carved out for, and accessible to, only members of the class you’re playing.  They’re very busy places, and it’s pretty neat to be seeing dozens of versions of what you once were / what you could have been / what you still could be run past you.  Every one also comes with its own questline, gated by levels and reputation and quest completions, and they’re all designed with enough annoying time sinks to ensure that you will be working on the quests for several weeks.

So, it was a big change for me.  Less “get four other players, follow them through a dungeon keeping the bars full, get loot, repeat” and MUCH more “go kill ten harpies, because harpies need killing”.

I lucked out in one very important aspect of timing, however.  Last week was what Blizzard calls “timewalking”, where you and four other people get scaled back to make you effectively level 70 and then tossed into a level 70 dungeon.  As you get loot in the dungeon, it’s actually loot for your character at their “real” level, so I got to very quickly gear up after reaching level 110, well past what normal dungeons would provide.  In theory, I’m already at the gear level to start running Legion Heroic dungeons – in practice, I should probably wait until I’ve run them all at normal difficulty.

So, basically, in my “pancake batter” MMO model, I’m past the long slow drip of batter from the mixing bowl and on the griddle where it all spreads out and cooks.   This is also right about the point where stuff can either still be fresh and exciting, or where I realize that I’ve seen everything, am only logging on to make the numbers bigger and should probably log off again until there’s another expansion.  So far, I haven’t reached that last point.

No achievement spam today.

(Well, maybe one.)

Soloing the Dragon Soul raid – taking on Deathwing, the final boss of Cataclysm – is apparently dead simple for any level 100 character.  I did it at 95, and it turns out that even being ten levels above the intended level for a raid isn’t always enough to make up for not having the other nine guys with you.

What I’m saying is, I died more than I’d like to admit.

But, it ended with a nice cutscene where all of the dragons I DIDN’T kill told me how awesome I was, so good times all around.

When I wasn’t butting heads with old raid content, I was burning through levels 91 to 100 by running Warlords of Draenor dungeons, and managed to wrap up all of the non-heroic ones.  Had some spectacularly-competent groups, some less-competent groups, and some beautiful drama along the way.

My favorite, I think, was in a group for Iron Docks, one of WoD’s early instances, where we had a paladin tank who just didn’t quite seem familiar with the zone and was having a bit of trouble with aggro, but the group was willing to work with him…

…right up until the point where he admitted he didn’t know how to change from a dps mode to tank mode.  That was followed by one of the quickest group kick votes I’ve ever seen.

Eventually I got to level 100, ran all of the level-100-minimum dungeons and trotted my butt over to Tanaan Jungle to get some gear upgrades (and I’m playing a Draenai, a race of space goats, so “trotted” is the appropriate verb).

Space.  Goat.

As an aside, WoD introduced a feature that I’m absolutely in love with – lots and lots of overland enemies you can kill that drop nice items, but only the first time you kill them – so, while they’re basically loot pinatas, they discourage farming the same ones over and over.  They’re even helpfully pointed out on the map with pretty yellow stars when you get close enough to them.

Sadly, that is the only nice thing I can say about WoD overland zones.  While the expansion had some great dungeons, the outdoor zones are frustrating as all get out when you’re on foot and unlocking flight is a massive undertaking.

Anyway, freshly kitted out in the spoils of my farming, I went back to Stormwind and started the quest chain taking me to Legion, the most recently-released expansion.  Considering I’ve only been playing for a hair over three weeks, that is a fast catch-up by MMO standards.

One of the Big Features in Legion is the Artifact Weapon Quest, which gives you a sword or dagger or bonky stick that you will be upgrading over the course of the expansion – there are no other weapons dropped in the expansion.  It has me flashing back a bit to LotRO’s terrible, terrible Legendary Weapon system, but hopefully Blizzard will handle it better than Mythic did.

I rather expected the whole process of going through the Legion intro story and earning my Artifact Weapon would take a while, so it was quite surprising when it took barely over an hour before I was triumphantly holding my new shiny weapon aloft.

Now, I’ll be grinding and upgrading the thing for AGES, but at least it wasn’t too painful getting to this point.Next up – I need to gear a little before I can start Legion dungeons, and then I can actually run Legion HEROICS once I’m done with those, and then there are MYTHIC versions after that, and old raids and zones to bash, and more leveling to do and……well, this could keep me busy a while.

Ok, so a little preamble:

Normally when I talk about a game, I try to see both sides even when I’m not a fan, try to find the good in the bad, that kind of thing.  I strive for balance.

In today’s post, there is no balance.  There is unfocused, inchoate rage about a game I hated playing.  If you are a fan, please understand that I had a really awful experience and do not give me helpful advice about how I could have had more fun.

So, with that said, on with the show!

I did not install Hearthstone with the intention of playing it for its own sake, and that may have been my first mistake.  I installed it because, well, if you win three Hearthstone matches, you unlock an achievement that gives you a mount in World of Warcraft.  Blizzard, insasmuch as they own some of PC gaming’s best-loved franchises, does a fair amount of this sort of cross-game promotion.

Anyway, it’s free to play and – I understand – immensely popular, so I downloaded it on my lunch break and figured I’d give it a go.

I played Magic: The Gathering for several years before getting hooked on Everquest, so I have a little history with CCGs, and the tutorial levels in Hearthstone were a good refresher on the sorts of mechanics that are common to the genre.  I even got a little chuckle when I started the last tutorial mission and it came with a warning message:

And it was tough!  But I did manage to beat it on my first go and felt pretty good about it.

Anyway.  When you play through the tutorial, you unlock your first hero, that being Jaina Proudmore.  As much as I’m cued into Warcraft lore (not very much), she’s a total badass.  Ex-girlfriend of the Lich King, military and political leader, takes no guff from anyone.

In Hearthstone, she’s just total ass.  Not in a hey, skimpy fantasy outfits for fans of life and hometown, but just bad.  Awful.  I did not understand this, at first, because my first match (in Hearthstone’s “casual” mode) matched me up with another player who was ALSO using Jaina and who was using most of the same cards I had.  I won that match, but it was close – I was down to 20% health and it could have gone either way if my opponent had gotten a lucky draw or two.

My SECOND casual match pitted me against someone with a deck full of cards I didn’t recognize.

I got curbstomped.  Utterly rekt, as they say.  And, the same thing happened with my third, fourth, fifth and sixth matches.  Look for opponent, find opponent, opponent is playing a class I don’t know and just pulling out power card after power card, I am a smoldering crater in no time at all.

I was not in a happy place.

I thought about my options, and decided that I would simply concede every match where the other person was not playing Jaina, because obviously if someone else was playing the same hero they were likely as much of a newbie as I was.

A dozen, maybe more, conceded matches later, I hadn’t seen a single Jaina.

I went online to see if I could figure out what the heck was happening.

It turns out that Hearthstone’s matchmaking in causal is beyond redemption, and will cheerily toss anyone who dares enter into the meat grinder with all of the veteran players who use casual mode as a way to grind up experience without risking their rank in ranked mode.  If you want to play against other newbies, you need to play in ranked mode, where you are somewhat shielded from the bottom-feeders.

I also discovered that Jaina is universally considered horrible and that I needed to play the practice mode of the game to unlock other heroes.

So, I went into the practice mode, and lost a disturbing number of matches against the AI in the process, but eventually managed to unlock all of the heroes.  I am still not in a good state of mind at this point, mind you.  I am angry with the game in a way that I have not been angry with any game in YEARS, and I remind the reader at this point that I have played every single Soulsborne game without losing my temper.

Anyway, I looked at the heroes I’d unlocked, and picked the warrior hero as the one who had most easily crushed me during my foray into causal mode, and chose “ranked” mode, and the capricious gods of the matchmaking service saw fit to pair me up against someone playing Jaina.

It went very quickly and I had my second win.

The next match paired me up against the exact same player, and this time they got the upper hand – so it’s not ENTIRELY the hero.

Then I got killed by a few people playing a variety of heroes, and then Hearthstone tossed another Jaina at me.  After a few turns, they conceded and I had my third win AND the achievement I’d been hoping for…

…and the mount in-game, as well…

…AND a deep and lasting hatred for the *censored* who designed the matchmaking algorithm in this godawful card game.

So, that experiment didn’t go well.  Back to grinding my way through WoW’s FIFTH expansion, Warlords of Draenor, which is fast becoming my favorite of the various expansions.  More on that later.

Finished up my run through Pandaria’s dungeons with the last of the non-heroics last night, and reached another leveling milestone in the process:

Mists of Pandaria was a weird expansion to run through doing only dungeons.  It took basically no time at all to get to level 90, but it was plenty of time for all of the dungeons to overstay their welcome.  Temple of the Jade Serpent in particular is on my Least Favorite Dungeons ever list, because it is full of ground effects that kill parties, and some of them are a really pretty aquamarine color that doesn’t really scream DANGER.

This lead to a cheery exchange with a particular rogue who couldn’t seem to avoid the lovely blue splashes.

Only my second snarky dps in 90 levels, though (the first was in Deadmines back at level 15, of all places), so it didn’t kill the mood too much.

Fortunately, once you get past that dungeon, the ground effects are appropriately nasty-looking.  Lots of yellow goo and black smokey circles and stuff that just screams DO NOT TOUCH.  I had a much easier time healing in those, because I was usually only healing the tank and the occasional careless melee character.

Putting the dungeons aside, however, I did need to do an overland quest chain to get into the expansion’s hub city, and this is where Pandaria shines.  It’s an absolutely beautiful landscape and you can tell that the modelers really loved their job designing the architecture and the terrain – some of the mountains seem copied straight from antique silk paintings.  It’s just a shame that there really isn’t any reason to hang out in it once you pass level 90.

I also tried my hand at soloing a couple of Wrath of the Lich King raids and got a neat mount out of one of them:

And then my wife and I went and stomped Onyxia and Malygos and the Firelands and a bunch of other old raid content in search of pretty cosmetic gear and mounts, with lots of the former and none of the latter to be had.

The joy of steamrollering old raids is just one of those things that transcends games – standing in front of a boss that used to take 25 people to defeat and yawning in its face as you mush it into goo is one of the best payoffs of mudflation.

Making the jump from Pandaria to Warlords of Draenor is going to take running through the intro quest of WoD, so that’s tonight’s mission.  Unlike every expansion up to this point, I’ve been able to hit the previous level cap and then immediately queue for the new dungeons, but Blizzard did a huge gear reset with the launch of WoD and anyone who wasn’t tip-to-toe in Pandaria raid loot needs to get caught up through a 20-or-so quest chain before any instances can happen.

So, some good progress in WoW over the last couple of days.  Got to level 86 and ran all of the normal-mode dungeons from the Cataclysm expansion along the way, then got started on Mists of Pandaria content.  Some rants along the way, but first it’s achievement screenshot time!

I also actually started running the Cataclysm questline while waiting on particular instances – more on that in a second – and completed the first zone of the storyline:

…and all in all, it was good to push me over another level milestone:

This is all great, but it exposed a bit of an issue with Blizzard’s LFD and LFR tools, which are the biggest draws to me as a player.  If you, like me, just like running dungeons with four other people, WoW has that DOWN.  Log in, press the “I would like a dungeon” button, wait a bit and you will get a dungeon to run.  It occurs to me that I’m playing WoW much closer to something like Destiny or Borderlands, but I’m having fun with it so I don’t think I’m playing it “wrong” by any means.

That said, there are some really weird decisions in the LFD and LFR tools.

For example, when you hit level 80, the end of the “Wrath of the Lich King” expansion, you unlock three new dungeons, all connected, in which your group storms the Lich King’s castle and confronts said Lich King at the end.  I’m not particularly invested in WoW lore, but that sounded GREAT, so I put myself into a LFD queue for those instances and went off and actually ran quests while I waited on a group.

…and waited, and waited, and waited.  I couldn’t quite figure out what was taking so long, because these sounded neat and I couldn’t imagine people not wanting to queue for them, and then I hit level 81 through questing and the option to queue for them vanished from the dungeon finder tool.

So, there are these three dungeons that are supposed to be the payoff for the Lich King expansion, but you have access to them only for the tiny window of time where you’ve hit level 80 but haven’t progressed, which is a vexing design choice to say the least.  Fortunately I have a very patient wife who has a stable of high-level WoW characters, and she dragged me through them:

And they were, for the record, really neat.  It was one of the first times I was actually invested in what was going on with the story, as opposed to just “hey, there are some guys over there with things I want and I will kill them for it” which has been my personal narrative thus far.

Then she asked if there was anything else I wanted to do, and the topic of the raid finder (“LFR” tool came up, because that had just unlocked for me at level 85 and I wanted to get my raid on but wasn’t meeting the equipment (iLvl) requirements to use it.  I was at iLvL 325, it wanted iLvL 372, I needed to poke my nose into some of the heroic instances and get gear from those before being able to raid.

So, we headed over to some of those dungeons, and ran a three-part heroic dungeon involving time travel and alternate versions of WoW’s past (another very fun storyline through these three dungeons, as an aside), and I got some loot that was pushing me really close to that magic number of 372, and then I leveled to 86 and the raids I needed to get 372 for disappeared from raid finder because suddenly I was too high leveled.

So, that’s my basic rant about WoW today – there is a ton of very neat content, but there are certain breakpoints where you have a tiny window of opportunity to access the content, and your option if you miss those windows of opportunity is to get up to level cap and then come back and stomp it.

It really shows in Cataclysm because it was only a 5 level expansion, and I suspect it will be the same in Mists of Pandaria which is another 5 level expansion.

Oh, right, Mists of Pandaria.

…two dungeons down, more to come.  So as much as I may rant about missing some of the side content along the way, I AM enjoying what I get to see.