Monday, May 5, 2014

Monday Random Thoughts

- Played a little more often this week being I was doing some PvP.

- But seems like my life as a PvPer might come to a quick end.

- Two of the people that were helping me learn the ins and out and were well geared decided to faction change because they got sick of alliance groups.

- And this is why alliance does so poorly at PvP.

- Whenever someone gets good at it, they get sick of losing and switch to the side that wins.

- It is also the reason why you see horde heavy servers and alliance heavy servers.

- No one likes to be on the losing side.

- I did try to keep myself active however.

- Still checking golden lotus every day for that one quest I need to do to get the achievement for not getting hit.

- I saw that quest once this expansion, at the beginning, before I was worrying about the achievement.

- I've never seen it since.

- I only need that one half, have the other half.

- But no, they will not make it the daily.

- It is the only achievement under the quest header I am missing.

- It must be a murphys law sort of thing.

- Whenever I look it isn't there, which means whenever I don't it probably is.

- I am going to have to remember to check every day.

- Did some leveling this weekend on my newest DK.

- Went from 77 to 81.

- Yes, I still actually level even if I can just buy a 90.

- Hey, I like to level even if they did kind of ruin the leveling process.

- Feels weird going from wrath to cata content, always has.

- From a fresh questing character with mostly 138 to 174 gear and getting 272 gear from quests just does not seem right.

- I know why they did that, so the raiders could feel like they were getting upgrades while questing.

- Hey, blizzard, let me clue you in on something because you seem clueless.

- Raiders just care about getting to max level.

- Getting upgrades while questing is more of an inconvenience than it is a "fun" part of the game.

- The next upgrade I get from my SoO gear should come from a level 100 heroic dungeon.

- I do not need gear while leveling, so do not make it an item level to appeal to me.

- The game would go much smoother as well when things get old if they did not do those stupid jumps for no reason.

- I would not be replacing my 138 ring with a 272 one.

- Admittedly, blizzard has never actually been very good about balancing things, so why should we expect that they will balance things from expansion to expansion.

- But you would think after so many expansions they would have gotten better at doing it.

- Well, we thought wrong.

- Not sure what I think about professions bonuses being gone.

- On the one hand, I love that I can be whatever I want to be.

- On the other hand, I hate that I lose my engineer burst.

- And then there are other questions, like will alchemy still have double length on flasks?

- It was not really a performance bonus.

- It was more of a saves gold bonus.

- I hope that stays because I drink flasks like they are going out of style.

- I like the longer time.

- I started to do some spring cleaning on my characters.

- Listing massive amounts of auctions.

- Still trying to sell all those enchanting recipes that I made when I powered leveled a mail enchanter and a leather enchanter so I take full advantage of the rain of sha crystals coming from the timeless island.

- Still getting around 70 gold a piece for them.

- Nothing to shake a stick at.

- And I still have nearly 700 sha crystals left.

- Oh, and lots and lots of timeless gear left to disenchant that I am just keeping around for if I level another character.

- I have 8 mails of 12 pieces each of mail gear alone that I am bouncing between 2 hunters.

- That is 108 pieces that means 108 more sha crystals and that is not even considering procs.

- And that is only mail, not counting the cloth, leather and plate.

- Or the rings, cloaks, trinkets and necks.

- And if anything I have used more mail pieces than I have any others because I have gotten another hunter and shaman to 90 after they were released.

- So if I had to make an inaccurate, but probably close, guess I would say I have well over 1200 sha crystals rolling around.

- So much so that I had stopped opening more chests on the island because I did not want more junk I needed to bounce between characters.

- But spring cleaning got a lot done for me.

- Bounced a lot of timeless pieces and got them together so they are bouncing between the right people.

- Actually put on gear that had been collecting in my bags for many characters.

- Put 6 pieces on my druid.

- I had not put them on because there is just so much maintenance that needs to be done to them.

- I got sick if the need to regem, reenchant, rereforge every time I got one single piece for an alt.

- They are an alt, there should not be that much maintenance in keeping them up to back up potential.

- I already tanked all of SoO without those pieces on, so it is not like I needed them.

- But doing spring cleaning means I needed to clear out bag space and that meant putting that gear on and getting it done up.

- I thought my druid was my worst offender of gear they had not put on yet out of all my alts.

- And it was, until I decided to do my rogue.

- My rogue had 5 pieces in his bag, less than my druid, but I ended up with a few more before I did it.

- I decided to do the world bosses before I added the new gear, just to see if I could get more to do at the same time.

- Celestial was a bust.

- Ordos was a god.

- I won 2 pieces off of ordos and not only that but they were two things I really needed.

- Bracers which replaced a timeless island burdened bracer and legs which replaced 502s.

- So now my rogue was adding 7 pieces.

- I figured, might as well make it 8.

- I sent my rogue a leather timeless helm from my leather timeless catch all character and used a burden on that.

- It replaced a 502 helm with a 535, not bad.

- And the helm had crit and haste too boot, awesome.

- So 8 new pieces on my rogue and I went from a 525 item level to a 548 item level.

- Now to just get rid of that damn 502 weapon.

- My rogue does have the legendary cloak too, so that is why his item level appears better than it really is for a character with bad gear over all that I rarely play.

- While spring cleaning I had to do a lot of bouncing around.

- I had so many pets that I needed to learn but had 3 of each pet.

- So I have a bank alt on a server where the entire bank is my pet collection for selling.

- I am not selling mists pets, I am waiting until later when they will become rarer as they are not being gathered all the time in current content.

- So I would pop on my pet alt, cage some, throw them in the bank, go back and learn them.

- Sunreavers, Gahz from the barren line (yes some characters still had a bunch in their bags), the zandalari dinos, the durehorn runts, azure crane chick, etc.

- They are all over the place now but next expansion they will not be popping up all over and should sell for more.

- Or so I hope.

- I put all the timeless island "goodies" in my banks.

- I sent a lot of my characters back to thunder isle too.

- Had to use all those incantations I had in my bags.

- It is not in me to just throw away things.

- Got a lot of goodies from there.

- Those coffers sometimes contain things that sell for a fair deal of gold.

- And they contain elder charms which can be traded in for troves which can have lots of stuff that sells well too.

- See, I can not throw away one of the incantation, it is like throwing away gold, and I can't do that.

- My priest had 8 coffers in her bag but was full on charms so I could not open them because she was not exalted with them to spend the charms to buy the trove.

- So I did the dailies on her to get rep and the last quest got me to exalted.

- So I traded in, opened up, and got lots of gold to boot.

- And of course every character I sent there got themselves a key for later use.

- At 300-600 gold per run I get the keys whenever I am there and maybe one day when I am bored or need gold I will spam run it.

- Currently I have 87 keys over my characters.

- Would have lots more if thunder island was not so far away.

- I do not have the time to sent 18 or so level 90s over there every week.

- But if ever I am near there I always stop in a grab one.

- Like I said, 300 to 600 gold per run.

- Who out there would not stop for a second for 300+ gold?

- Well, I sure would.

- Would love to say that I did everything I wanted to do with my clean up.

- But not even close.

- Doing world bosses on my rogue, quests on my priest, other little stuff just to clean thing up, takes time and I ran out of time.

- It is amazing how with an army of alts like I have, even more since connected servers, how much junk you accumulate.

- So even if was not raiding, not PvPing, I was keeping myself busy and in game and doing something that, oddly enough, I like doing.

- Organizing things.

- For as great an expansion as mist was I think it will always end up being remembered for its end.

- This time we are in now.

- Where the game basically sucks.

- I think blizzard made a mistake saying the expansion might not be out until as late as december 20th.

- We would have been better off not knowing, hoping and thinking about it instead of knowing it was not coming for a long time.

- A very very very long time.

- Really, what were they thinking.

- Hey people, we are not putting anything out for over a year, feel free to take a break and unsubscribe, you won't miss anything.

- Giving us the date was the worse thing they ever could have done.

- As soon as they released that data my guild went from running a 25 man and 2 10 mans to not even having enough for 1 10 man most nights because everyone just quit or took a break.

- And the ones that did not take a break left the guild for a more active guild that was running more often like we normally did.

- Normally did that is, before blizzard told everyone to unsubscribe.

- Seriously, what were they thinking?

- What business tells their customers that there is no reason to buy their product right now.

- Blizzards business plan amazes me.

- It is as if they want to kill off their cash cow.

- Have a great day.

18 comments:

  1. Heh. I had a maintenance day myself yesterday, spent more of the day (yeah...) cleaning out mailboxes, DEing a bunch of stuff, dealing with tons of cloth, gemming/enchanting/reforging gear that I hadn't bothered to earlier, smelting thousands of ore (I think I spent about 2hrs smelting... good times... WTB faster smelting perk), moving some stuff to banks (which in some cases required cleaning out those banks a bit first), etc. I've been slacking on the maintenance for the past couple of months so I had quite a bit to do.

    Upside, that's probably the bulk of what I'll need to do pre-WoD... I still need to finish clearing out banks and bags but I've run through the majority of my mats, I've sold off most of my saleable items (except bags, they continue to move slowly and I have many (many) left) and I've mostly stopped accumulating new stuff to deal with.

    It was a good day. I'm sure not everyone would think so but for me, it was a good day. :)

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    1. We are different people I would say. I too enjoy the organizing and cleaning up but I'd be willing to bet that the majority of players hate it.

      I still have a lot to do really and one day I want to start clearing out some old "stock" I have saved up that I do not think I will use.

      I still wonder why there are such steep requirements to get the extra guild bank tabs. An actual guild does not need 8 tabs but a guild bank does. So it is easy for an actual guild to get the 8th tab but impossible for a guild bank to do so. Where exactly is the logic in that.

      A friend told me that they read that any guild that only has 1 player in it will be deleted come 6.0. I can not find any reference to that, might you have heard anything on that? Would really suck. I have 2 solo banks that would be lost.

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    2. Been MIA for a while, maybe back for a bit.

      I haven't heard anything about that but I wouldn't think I've seen anything like that mentioned. Also no clue why they would even consider doing that, bank guilds are popular.

      And yeah, one person getting that last slot is just a tease. I just ignore it as best I can.

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    3. Welcome back.

      Blizzard does some strange things for strange reasons.

      I want my 8th slot. If blizzard added something like that to their store, where for 20 bucks you can buy it, I would. lol

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    4. Honestly, with the significantly larger stack sizes and the indication that they're giving us a large dedicated bank tab for reagents, not only might I not miss the 8th guild bank slot, I may be able to avoid mailbanking in the future. I didn't see that coming... and it'll be glorious.

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    5. I knew they said something about adding an additional space for crafting materials and making the stack largers, but this is a huge amount of space, even more so when you think almost everything stacks to 200.

      I just wonder what will happen with the profession bags being we will not longer need them. I have many characters with multiple profession bags in the bank. Now it will become wasted and unusable because I would not need it any more.

      Maybe they will change them into real bags like they did with the ammo bags, quivers and the soul shard bags when they removed those from the game.

      Delete
  2. Good to see you posting again. I do have a question. With valor gear gone, how will we get gear outside of raiding? Will it be the new heroic dungeons that offer gear slightly better than LFR loot? Or will it be level 100 quests or areas similar to the Timeless Isle that offer items close to what drops in raids?

    Also, what do you think about LFR now not offering tier sets and great trinkets and lesser quality loot? Do you think Blizz finally realizes it is meant just as a tourist mode? And will this make people who only knew about LFR actually want to try to get into normal raiding? I'm happy about this decision though.

    One other thing, I am curious about how this new group finder addition. I think I read it will be similar to OQueue. Do you think this will help those who can only raid say one night a week easily find groups in WoD?

    I must say, even though this expansion is taking longer than expected, I am getting somewhat excited about some of the possible changes and additions.

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    1. Regarding gear:
      Heroic dungeons seem to be better than LFR. Hopefully that means close to Flex.
      Challenge Modes will potentially also provide loot bags with epics. Same with Garrison quests.
      Other than that, we don't really know.

      Group finder will probably help with flex pugs after things are more settled in. I don't know it will really help otherwise though. Flexible Normal and Heroic will probably help more since guilds won't need strict raid rosters.

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    2. As jaeger said heroic dungeon gear will be better than it is and LFR is finally becoming what it was supposed to be to begin with, super easy. In theory at least.

      Still, I do not agree with the no valor gear option. They need to bring valor gear back. Any game without a system to get gear that is not completely luck based is a bad game in my opinion and it is why I think mists ended on a bad note.

      As for the group finder, it is already in game. Not used as much and not advertised. But I use it to do Ordos and celestails each week. Click the social tab, then last tab for raids, then click other raids, and you can enter your name to look for a group for something.

      It is working well, but not many use it because not many know it is there. If they give it more support and advertise it and put it in a more prominent place it might be good for group making next expansion. For now it is good for world bosses only really.

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  3. -Did world bosses (no loot)

    -Solo'd BT again. One more partial run and I'll be exalted.

    -Also, did some Warbringer hunting. Found one. Killed it. No mounts...

    -Looked through the remaining achievements that I have but nothing jumped out at me to try and work on it...

    -I keep hearing people leveling a toon to 60 and then boosting it to 90 with profs... That's just so dumb in my opinion. You can level two profs in a few hours, whereas leveling from 1-60 takes a lot longer.

    -Agree that the lvling gear for each expansion is messed up. The greens have much higher ilvl but are seriously inferior to epics, so it makes no sense. I was in full heroic epics at the end of cata and kept that gear until 88-90. I really only replaced them since I was getting the end of zone blues from going for loremaster.

    -I love that prof bonuses are gone. They were never balanced properly.

    -Based on the recent interviews with Watcher, it seems like something during the WoD development process caused a major setback/unexpected delay. It really seems like the release will be after Blizzcon.

    -And played ESO. I'm going slowly so I'm up to lvl 36 of 59 (technically it goes to 49 and then Veteran Rank 1-10)

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    1. I am running out of achievements I can go after solo myself. Just that one quest one really.

      I think profession bonuses should be changed, not removed. They should all give something, it adds flavor. Like leave the alchemy 2 hour flask thing, but what would you give other professions on par with that?

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    2. I have several solo achievements left, but few that would seem fun to accomplish. For example, I have 9 quest achievements left: the vehicle timer dailies from BC and Wrath, a couple daily related ones from Mists and the roach one that can't be done solo.

      That's the problem with professions. I can't really think of flavor-only bonuses either, so it's just simpler that they remove the bonuses.

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    3. Some of those timer ones are not easy, or were not. The one when you have to kill things on the dragon took me a long time to get.

      But I like my double time on my flask. lol

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  4. I have something to report, too.

    I was waiting for you to post your experiences on PVP and in the meantime got some good memories of arenas and that itch to maaaaaybe resub again. I was mulling about resubbing in my head for several days, then went to watch the streams to pump myself up a bit. Well. Glad I did that, because it became very clear very fast that the arenas didn't change one iota - same setups, same tricks, same issues, same boring dead-ends, same, same, same. After an hour and a half I thanked myself on being patient enough not to resub right away, punched part of the inner voice that was whispering into my ear to resub in the face, and went on to do something else.

    Also. My prediction for the subs for tomorrow (there's an earnings call): 500k-1000k down.

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    1. All that said, maintenance is fun. I love sorting things out, juggling them between alts trying to optimize everything - space / money / time for profs, etc. Spring cleaning is great!

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    2. I would not be surprised to see if subs dropped 2M or more. I know it is not really something to base things on, but as soon as they announced Dec 20th as the date within 2 weeks my guild went from there being 30-35 on during the average evening to there now being 3-5 people on during the average evening.

      It is sad to see a guild get ripped apart like that so quickly and not because of drama, but because of blizzard and their horrible release schedule. I do not think they realized the impact of telling people there will be nothing coming out for so long. I am sure that not only my guild suffered from the "fuck that, I quit" mentality that happened after blizzard announced, screw the customers and what they want, we are not releasing anything for a year.

      You are one of the few that that enjoy organizing like I do. It does feel like you accomplished something when you get it all done.

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    3. They had to give a date since they opened up pre-orders. They should have just held on until later though. Open pre-orders when Beta is announced or something.

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    4. They had to give a date for stockholders. That is more what it was about.

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