Ready for Raiding! (Soft of)

Over the course of the last few days, I checked off my "to do" list for Strev:

- Finish Mage Quest. This was actually a serious let down and felt appallingly dull and tropy (Surprise! The good guy-turned-bad was mind-controlled!), but it was nice to revisit the Oculus.

- Obtain the Artifact Fishing Pole. This will warrant a separate post later, as the story of its acquisition was all the fun, pain, and heartbreak that was missing from the Mage quest line.

- Gear up! Strev is now rocking at item level (ilevel) 836, which is more than enough to get in at the ground floor anywhere. For scale, 850 is the current cap.

My guild has been looking for the team to get up to i820 for normal raids, which release on Tuesday, but that's destined for failure from a beat-the-boss standpoint, but should be decent for letting the team start to gel and see how everyone starts to work together. Heck, the LFR version that will release a week after requires 825 minimum and it will feature the usual crippled fight mechanics that will let a handful AFK through most of it.

As a side effect of my lust for the fishing pole, I have a massive stockpile of semi-fresh fish that I have no idea how to cook. Now that raids are finally kicking off, there will be a great demand for enchantments, feasts, potions, and all of the raw materials that go into making raider consumables. Up until now, demand has been lackluster at best. Tonight will be the last night to buy up under-priced raw materials for flipping tomorrow. Time to shine, starlight!

In other news, I dusted off Anyth and started her through Pandaland, this time as a Marksman hunter, on the basis that Icy-Veins says they outclass the other specializations. As a petless hunter, she gains a straight bonus to DPS and doesn't have to fiddle with pet aggro and control. I'm not sure I like it. I mean, if I'm doing petless RDPS, I may as well be playing Strev and at that point the only real tacit advantage that Anyth has is that she only feigns death twice a minute.

Still, tooling around the starter zone, I was surprised at how much detail I remembered from the quests and quest lines years later. I also noted with some amusement that mining a node of "Ghost Iron" gave more experience than 20 mob kills with rested bonus. They really want you to level by questing/dungeons. If I cared enough, there's expensive potions that will triple xp gain for an hour, but it seems like a ridiculous waste of resources at the current 20k price tag. Remember: each 10k spent is equivalent to $5 actual dollars, based on wow token prices. I've found thinking that way is usually enough to keep me from making stupid purchases, excepting for the fishing one I'll relay next time.

Finally, because I really, REALLY hate myself, I spent my 100 Boost I got when I bought Legion. If I care to repeat the process again, the boost tokens sell for a straight $60 in the cash shop. The lucky recipient was probably one of the least likely suspects: Onsunshine, my worgen druid. I figure that when I get sick of DPSing, I should have a good healer to fall back on and everyone appreciates a resto druid more than a mage for dungeon runs, raids, children's parties (Look, Mommy! A MOONkin!), and pretty much everything. The fact I totally suck at it will just have to be a bitten bullet.

The "Poof! You're 100!" was actually much, much cooler than I expected. On the character selection page, it forced me to pick a damage spec (balance or feral) for the upgrade. Ok. When the dust settled, it upgraded my skills (Herbs, Skinning, and First Aid) to 700 and replaced all of my gear with a pretty matching set of basic i640 greens.


The first and only time her gear will ever match.

I would find out later that every last thing that was previously worn or in my inventory was moved to my mailbox, but it was nice having uncluttered bags for once. After login, I was put in a training scenario on a skyship, where Admiral Someguy mansplained "how to feral", giving basic pointers on what skills to use when and then sample combat with a training dummy and a few of his less-popular men.



"That's it? COOL!"

Basically, with knowledge of how to use 4 cat skills, I was told to leave the ship when I was ready to start the Legion intro scenario. "Check out your spellbook for a complete listing of your skills." *click* "Oh, God."

All right, we're going to Strev it to hell and back. I'm GOING to play a resto in the upcoming scenario, regardless of not having any healing addons or any idea what my skills do, a hazy grasp on the whole transform into different animals, and gear that is all agility and no intellect. I should have said "balance". Live and learn. Rawr! After best guessing and playing with the training dummy for a couple of minutes, I descend into hell.

So, how did it go? Turns out I was the only healer in the scenario, therefore I was the best. Yes, someone at some point screamed "WTF? Don't we have ANY healers?" Yes, people died, but to my credit very rarely. Yes, there was suffering, but we survived and I FELT GREAT! This is going to be exciting.

Gnome Man's Land

The past couple of days have been sort of "establishing an evening routine", around optional activities. In the old days, this would be "go to hub a, b, or c" and do all the dailies until you're ready to stab yourself in the eyes with a [sparking fork of the feverflare] or something. (It doesn't really matter what you're gouging your eyes out with, as long as it is epic.)


What a purple fork might look like

The "must do" list for me is:

- Scout the World Map looking for quests that will give item upgrades first and foremost. If time permits, also target missions that give Warden reputation, artifact power, and order resources (which fuel my follower's stream of missions and are used to purchase upgrades for my class set of gear)
- Run around the zone Suramar collecting Mana Crystals, the "currency" of choice for discerning mana addicts.
- Feed said crystals to all of the addicts in my Suramarian outpost for tasty, tasty Nightfallen reputation.

I have no love for the Nightfallen, a group of elves who have sold themselves out to the Legion in return for mana. Without a steady supply of mana, they revert into mindless Withered, husks of rage and hunger-- basically making them 28 Days Later zombie-elves. The drug metaphors are stupidly in your face here and frankly I could easily have done without all of it, but their reputation is needed for everything from completing your class set to getting the achievements which will someday perhaps give expansion-wide flying. Right now the best you can hope to unlock is "faster horse speed" through a ridiculous amount of achievement hunting, but I can't imagine they won't eventually let us use our flappy things.

Dungeon running is just as painful now as it was a few years ago. Queue times of about 45 minutes for a DPS that eventually lead to mute groups filled with chainpulling psychotic tanks, healers that don't, and facepulling, firestanding DPS that value damage meters over common sense. So at least I had that familiarity working for me. The fact that EVERYTHING sends you to dungeons is a little annoying: profession quests, world quests, your class quests, campaign quests. I put these off to weekends when I have larger uninterrupted blocks of time.

By and large most of my time goes into the world questing. I can't emphasize how much I love this.
- As your item level increases gear rewards scale upwards
- Reputation is earned based on the zone doling out the reward
- There's no pressure to "do it all!" or hitting some daily mission cap.
- It keeps the zones populated with players constantly. I can only imagine how exciting that must be on PvP servers.
- The dynamically-scaled content means you get all 5 zones to play in, instead of one zone or a few lackluster hub areas.

Otherwise I spend time picking off side missions I discover as I explore the edges of the map, sit around doing AH market research, or just run around and fish for a while. ( ><> FEEESH! ><> ).

I've heard there's an Artifact fishing pole. I now have a character goal.

Completely Unprofessional

Over the course of the past week I finished out the leveling content in the four world zones dedicated to it. I really appreciate the way Blizzard has done their dynamic scaling, so not only are the zones themselves more non-linear, but it is no longer "do this zone and then that one" throughout the experience. Yes, you'll want to ride every ride in the theme park, but there's no longer a sense of "if I don't do this NOW, I'll have out-leveled it and the rewards will be crap". I have almost nothing but praise for the dynamically scaling monsters and loot offered. "Almost nothing?", you say. The only drawback I see is there's little sense of "Look how powerful I am! *STOMP STOMP STOMP* RUN, MORTALS!" If anything I felt I was barely keeping pace with the content which was, after all, the point of it.

In the midst of it all, I joined the guild "Impractical Jokers" by virtue that their GM chatted with me directly when I randomly ran into him questing, as opposed to spamming me with a generic message using an addon that hunts for non-guilded people. (By and large, Mature Content was the worst offender there. I think I was pinged and auto-invited somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen times.) This would be the second time I've joined a guild whose name was based on a TV show I'd never seen or heard of until that point. (The first being 'Fairy Tail' in Tera.) Nice people; it should be a positive experience.

On a more economic note, it seems the value of gold has dropped significantly since my last run through and a few hundred thousand gold is no longer the fortune it was. Not entirely unexpected, but now that I have my first character at max level, I'll need to start up my auction house goblining properly. Just screwing around for a bit, flipping a couple of bracers needed for a questline and buying greens to disenchant netted me around 30k profit. I see why they upped the max gold limit to 10M. It's good to have goals.

Strev's professions are Inscription and Enchanting and at this point I'm thinking Inscription may be a terrible waste. Enchanting has always been (and continues to be) a steadfast moneymaker, but with the major/minor glyph system removed from the game since The Old Times, I'm not really sure how scribing measures up against simple gathering skills, particularly since I'll be out in the field more doing world quests. I've been collecting recipes as I find them for both professions, but so far there's been nothing worth the component cost to make. More research will be needed.

The alt brigade may fare a little better, but I dread re-learning a second class before I get the mage properly in gear. I'm still outputting mediocre damage in normal dungeons and I find myself running through mana faster than I should; extended fights are terrible. Again, research is needed.

For We Are Many

Jumping headlong into Legion meant saying farewell to my budding Garrison, returning to Stormwind, and beginning an assault on the Broken Shore, a giant landmass in the ocean presumably no one noticed until now, which is serving as a base of operations for a demonic invasion of our world. So, you know, a Tuesday. After a suitably epic scenario that played out with a 4-group team of Alliance paired with a like-sized Horde, we were left with a very dead king and a righteously pissed off Jaina Proudmoore. With Anduin's butt back on the throne in Stormwind, I'm sent to Dalaran in Deadwind Pass to "bear witness" to it being teleported to the Broken Isles.

Apparently I missed a lot, because I was damn sure I had left Dalaran floating somewhere in Northrend. In fact, a quick teleport to Dalaran confirmed this. I wound up having to return to Stormwind, and then leave for Dalaran through a different portal so I can go to the "right" Dalaran, which was allegedly floating somewhere above Kara. Not feeling particularly compelled to jump off the edge to check, I took their word for it and met old familiar faces as the Kirin Tor ported the Island, which was being bombarded by Star Destroyers to someplace presumably more dangerous. I'm not going to even bother to wonder about it. Because seriously, I would think that Star Destroyers three zones from Stormwind would be a tad more important than securing an island somewhere in gods-cares-where.


Hell, they would have had to go over Duskwood just to get there!

As an aside, my teleportal spells still specify I can travel to "Dalaran - Northrend" and there's no conceivable way I can justify that as being an alternate universe. I'm half-tempted to fly to Kara and see if there really is a floating Dalaran there just so I can say there's now an f'in archipelago of floating cities, all named Dalaran. I've been given a standard-issue Dalaran Hearthstone, but I'll still gripe about the continuity a little.

Otherwise I'm pleased to see Dalaran returning as a central hub. Aside from the nostalgia factor, it's only as large as it genuinely needs to be without feeling cramped and nicely laid out. After running through a few "oh hai, Strev!" missions, I'm left in my "class hall", which replaces my garrison. It's a bit jarring moving from a walled fortification to what is, essentially, what looks to be a disused room at Hogwart's. I suppose I should be glad I hadn't gotten comfy at the old place. After admiring the mess, I'm told I can begin pursuing an Artifact Weapon. There's one for each main spec, so picking the one for arcane didn't exactly take hours of careful option weighing.

To my surprise, the questline for the weapon took me to Northrend, where I found myself barely holding my own against the critters. The clutch point came when I was given a solo dungeon inside Nexus which had me face off against enemies out of my league. This was a roadblock because I couldn't start Legion without the artifact. That's when I realized my failures were due to (a) not actually remembering all of the skills at my disposal and (b) clawing at the content with green crap from the mid 90s.


A visual representation of what green crap from the mid 90s might have looked like.

Well, the first thing I could handle by actually going through the spellbook and seeing what was missing from my hotbar. Ah yes, Frost Nova to root things and that spell to shield me from damage. Frankly I'm a little shocked I got as far as I did as quickly as I did without them. Now for the gear problem. I tucked my tail and went back to Draenor with a renewed sense of purpose to gear up properly before retur-- just kidding. I dropped 2k at the auction house and boosted my gear like 100 levels and went back.

It turns out I need not have bothered. Inside the instance, any damage done stays dealt as long as you don't leave the dungeon. No respawns. Die with a critter left at 1%? It stays at 1% until you sneeze on it. Ugh. At any rate, in short order I smoked the quest and bore my prize, Aluneth, an intelligent staff that occasionally comments on things and feeds on channeled energy from arcane sources automatically when I wander close to them. This last effect took me a bit by surprise as it happened and I noticed that "feeding my staff" gave me a little damage buff that lasts a good half hour. Monsters randomly drop "artifact chow" that lets you level the artifact up, giving it additional perks and bennies as it goes. I noted with some wry amusement that the artifact's skill tree is now more complex than my own.

So with stick in hand, I returned to Dalaran and my class hall to find it renovated and populated with a few other people. Oh! Apparently this isn't a private instance. With the "Map o' Legion" unlocked, I was able to pick a zone and begin questing there (more on that later) and when I popped back in at level 101, I was given another short quest in Dalaran and now the class hall is practically bursting at the seams with mages.

I note they've retained the Garrison's "pick a follower and send it on an off-camera mission" side activity, so that'll be a thing to do. The concept of spending resources to send followers out to do things which level them up and get more resources for you was done better in Skyforge, of all games. Skyforge let you handle all of that micro-management directly from the web. It plays like an app/browser game anyway, might as well go in whole hogger.

[Edit: several hours after posting this, I discovered that Blizzard 'one-upped' things by having a mobile app for Legion that lets you do all of the Class Hall stuff offline. Damn your attention to detail, Blizzard!]