world of warcraft

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.

What Happened to Playing WoW?

I’ve been playing WoW almost exclusively for the past 8 years, and prior to that, off and on. I love the market, and collecting mounts/toys/pets would keep me logging in each day.

Unfortunately I’ve been less-than-enthralled with the course the game has been taking. First with the ‘fortnite-esc’ Plunderstorm event, and now with the Pandaria Remix announcement. My major issue with these events is the time-gated nature of them, and the fact that they remove players from the general world / server and place them in a closed off system. I don’t get to play any of my already established characters, and I feel no connection to them because they are quite temporary, used simply to grind through content and pass it on to my main.

I know a lot of people are very excited about this content, and that’s wonderful. It’s just not for me. I’m also currently in The War Within alpha, but I haven’t nosed around too much yet. Aside from logging in for market reasons, I haven’t really found the desire to play, and I haven’t attempted S4 at all (which is unusual, I eagerly reached 2500+ rating in the prior 3 seasons). I know this feeling of stagnation will pass, it always does, but in the meantime I’m just not spending that much time in Warcraft. I log in each day to list/relist and then I log out. Of course spring has also FINALLY arrived, so I’m spending lots of time outside with the minions and getting the garden ready. This year it went from winter->summer in the span of a week, something I’m slowly getting used to as being the new ‘norm’.

In any case, I just wanted to let my WoW readers that I am still around, keeping an ear to the ground on what is happening out there – and I still love the game, but it’s a good time to take a little break before the fun starts again in TWW.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Er, OK?

I’m not really sure how it happened, or why, but someone that I’m not familiar with randomly sent me 300+ items. It’s a character I don’t advertise, I don’t talk to anyone else, and I just use for auction house sales. I wrote them a letter back and said this must be a mistake, and I returned all of the mail to them in case this is some weird plot involving nefarious schemes in Warcraft. I honestly have no idea.

Anyone else have a strange interaction like this? Just odd Warcraft things I guess!

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!