Passive Goldmaking in BfA, part 2
If you want to actively make gold in Battle for Azeroth, go farm some herbs.
If instead you want to kinda kick back and get a couple hundred gold a day for doing not much at all (assuming you played in these expansions), then stick around.
Garrison (Warlords of Draenor)
Oh how the mighty have fallen. Mostly.
Back in the day, your Garrison was printing gold every day with missions worth thousands of hard currency. All of that has been stripped out, to the point where even opening those salvage bags rewards gear that vendors for 5 copper. But here’s the thing: there’s still gold in them there hills. You just have to dig a little deeper.
Mission Table: Medallion of the Legion
If you have a level 3 garrison with full followers, there’s still the possibility of lucking into one of those missions that rewards a Medallion of the Legion. This is a reputation consumable still in high demand because it allows you to get that much closer to unlocking WoD flying. On Sargeras-US, the current price is 8222g but I sold one a month ago for 15,000g. It’s not consistent money, but it’s something worth checking out on occasion.
Garrison Resources
You will naturally accumulate up to 500 Garrison Resources (GR) every ~ 3 days per character. Additionally, if you have high-level followers and Garrison overall, there is the possibility of landing missions that reward up to 1650 GR by themselves.
Why does this matter? If you build even a level 1 Trading Post, you can turn GR into a few trade goods that still sell for a pretty penny. Those include:
- True Iron Ore (15.26g)
- Sumptuous Fur (8.82g)
- Raw Beast Hide (11.94g)
- Sometimes fish meat
With the best trader (changes daily), you can get 1 good for every 16 GR traded. If that good is worth 8g on average, then each individual GR is worth 50s. This means that the 500 GR you receive every few days is worth 250g, and those big GR missions can net the equivalent of 825g. This is not as lucrative or consistent as a MoP farm, but considering you likely have Garrisons on all your toons already, it’s decent coin for doing nothing other than logging into characters twice a week.
Hexweave Bags
Guess what? Hexweave Bags are still a thing. Somehow.
If you have a Tailoring alt, have them endure a loading screen or two and pump out a Hexweave Bag every 2-3 days. According to this Reddit thread, at peak efficiency the material cost is 116 Sumptuous Fur (1023g), 16 Gorgrond Flytrap (12g), and 10 Sorcerous Earth (98.5g). That’s 1134g in mats for something that still sells for ~1900g or more.
Incidentally, stop buying Hexweave Bags. Sell them, don’t buy them. Deep Sea Bags are also 30-slot bags, and at Rank 1 the material cost is 30 Deep Sea Satin (910g) and 15 Tidespray Linen (296g) and 9g in thread. Deep Sea Bag prices are crashing down currently, and sell for 1250g less than 1k gold (!!!) on Sargeras-US. That’s barely above Rank 1 material costs, but the bags are great for leveling up Tailoring, and the Rank 3 material cost is ~210g cheaper.
These prices are high because Tidespray Linen is almost 20g per cloth on Sargeras-US. That’s likely because a lot of the hyper-farms in BfA have been nerfed in the past few days, but I expect prices to lower over time naturally. This will drive down the costs for making Deep Sea Bags. Which appear to have zero bearing on the price of Hexweave Bags, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Primal Spirit Vendor
Have a bunch of Primal Spirits laying around? Convert them to gold, vendor-style!
Primal Spirits are BoP crafting materials that you used to earn in WoD content, much like Blood of Sargeras in Legion. Whether you have an unknown stockpile of them on one of your alts, or if you end up running Garrison Missions that have them as rewards, 25 Primal Spirits can be traded for a Savage Blood, which can be traded back to a Trading Post vendor for a bag which always contains ~50g and some change. So, in other words, each Primal Spirit is worth about 2g minimum.
You can technically trade Primal Spirits for other things, including BoP crafting materials like Hexweave Cloth and the like. However, the conversion rate is fairly abysmal for anything but the Savage Blood route. Technically, converting 500 Primal Spirits into one Hexweave Bag is an improvement – whatever Hexweave Bags are selling for vs 1000g – it it is not usually worth the hassle. And besides, who has 500 Primal Spirits hanging around? It’s much more likely to convert any of those “30+ Primal Spirit” Garrison Mission rewards.
Goblin Glider
No engineer? No problem! You can still craft Goblin Gliders with just the engineering hut active in your Garrison. The material costs are:
- 8 True Iron Ore (122g)
- 5 Sumptuous Fur (44g)
Since you receive 5 Goblin Gliders per craft, that comes out to be 33g per Glider. And you can currently sell them on the AH for… 30g. Oops.
Still, Goblin Gliders are worth checking out as a revenue stream once the prices of True Iron Ore and/or Sumptuous Fur come down. If we look at the median prices of these mats instead of their current prices, each Glider costs around 28g to make. That’s… still not even close to being worth it.
In any case, that’s that. Definitely not as good as the MoP farm, IMO, but it’s likely that you have a stable of alts with high-level Garrisons already, including a free hearthstone. As always, you could earn a lot more per hour by farming herbs or whatever in BfA zones. These “passive” income streams don’t require any thought however, and can easily fit into your warm-up or cool-down routines while playing.
Passive Goldmaking in BfA, part 1
If you want to actively make gold in Battle for Azeroth, go farm some herbs.
If instead you want to kinda kick back and get a couple hundred gold a day for doing not much at all (assuming you played in these expansions), then stick around. I might just blow your mind.
Sunsong Ranch (Mists of Pandaria)
Did you unlock all 16 slots in your MoP farm back in the day? Congrats on your free money.
Easiest/Quickest Sale: Spirit of Harmony (avg 480g/day)
Right now on Sargeras-US, one Spirit of Harmony is selling for around 300g apiece. If you plant Songbell Seeds in all the plots, you will generate 1.6 Spirits of Harmony per day, per character. A bag of Songbell Seeds has 10 “charges” and costs 30g, so your outlay is 75s per node (30g / 40) or about 7.5g per Spirit of Harmony.
Overall, you should be earning the equivalent of 480g without much thought or particular effort.
Medium-level Effort: trade in Spirit of Harmony (avg 707g-793g/day)
Keep in mind that Spirit of Harmony can also be exchanged for various other things, which can potentially be sold for more. The vendors will be in your faction hub in Vale of the Eternal Blossoms, and they sell things like this:
Most of these are not worth it, for the record.
For example, it’s possible that 20 Ghost Iron Ore (or 10 Ghost Iron Bars) will be worth more than a Spirit of Harmony by itself. On Sargeras-US, the price of Ghost Iron Ore is 22.1g apiece, so turning the Spirit of Harmony you just farmed (or bought on the AH) into 20 Ghost Iron Ore will net you 442g with six Motes of Harmony left over. Or looked at another way, each Mote of Harmony is worth 2 Ghost Iron Ore, so you should average 707g (32 * 22.1g) a day, assuming these prices.
To kick it up another notch, check the prices of Ghost Iron Bars. Right now, they are at 49.57g apiece on Sargeras-US, so having a Miner who can smelt bars will turn that haul into an average of 793g (32 / 2 *49.57g) a day.
Maximum Profits: Snakeroot Seed (avg 1016g-1428g/day)
Can we go deeper down the rabbit hole? Yes, we can. Specifically, Snakeroot Seed-deep.
Instead of planting Songbell Seeds, you plant Snakeroot Seeds. Now each node you harvest will result in 1 Trillium Ore (black or white) and 0-2 Ghost Iron Ore. The results are highly random: sometimes you will get 8 Trillium of each color, sometimes you will get 16 of one color. The total amount of Ghost Iron will also be random, but I typically net between 7-17 Ghost Iron Ore.
So, again, Sargeras-US figures:
- Black Trillium Ore: 91.5g
- White Trillium Ore: 53.96g
- Trillium Bar: 359.8g
- Ghost Iron Ore: 22.1g
- Ghost Iron Bar: 49.57g
Assuming a worst-case scenario, with the least-profitable outcomes: 1,016g (16 * 53.96g + 7 * 22.1g). If you achieve balance in all things, you can see 1428g (8 * 53.96g + 8 * 91.5g + 12 * 22.1g)
You may note that Trillium Bar is currently selling for well below material price (it takes 2 Trillium Ore of each color to smelt one bar). That’s because Alchemists can transmute 10 Ghost Iron Bars into 1 Trillium Bar all day long, with zero cooldown. That method is also below material cost, but it’s augmented by the fact that Transmute specialists can get Trillium Bar procs.
I’m listing Snakeroot Seeds last despite them being the most profitable because it’s inherently more risky. Spirits of Harmony is something that can be turned into all sorts of other things, as needed. The demand for them is constant, and high. Golden Lotus is selling for 188g apiece, for example, so you can technically turn that 300g Spirit of Harmony into 376g of Golden Lotus pretty quick. Meanwhile, it’s hard to tell who is buying Trillium Ore at these prices.
Bonus Round: Sky Golem (avg 2613g/day)
If you’re curious as to why people still need any of these materials, it’s probably because of Sky Golems. One of the required mats is an Engineering daily (x30) “transmute” which requires 10 Ghost Iron Bars. The other required material is Living Steel x30, which is a daily Alchemy transmute of 6 Trillium Bars (or 3 Trillium Bars and 3 Spirit of Harmony, with no cooldown).
If you bought everything off the AH, that would mean:
- 300 Ghost Iron Bars (14,871g)
- 30 Living Steel (55,730.1g)
- or 180 Trillium Bar (64,764g)
Considering the current price of Sky Golems are hovering around 149k, that is a tasty profit margin. Unfortunately, there is no way to speed up the Engineering transmute cooldown, so the Sky Golem can only be crafted after 30 full days. However, if you want to be a do-it-yourselfer, then a Snakeroot Farm will actually give you all the materials you would need to craft the Sky Golem from scratch. Eventually. I wouldn’t recommend it though, unless you don’t have the starting capital laying around.
…which you can certainly start accumulating by working your farm. Or actively farming BfA mats.
Warfronts Sinkhole
Very clever, Blizzard. Very clever.
I had a post all queued up to go on a rant about how terrible professions have been designed this expansion. I still feel that way, actually, so let me just say it: professions in Battle for Azeroth are a lazy copy & paste job from Legion, including all of the mistakes. Well, most of them: at least alts aren’t as punished by needing mythic dungeons or whatever for Rank 2.
One of the principle sources of my ire however, were all the useless crafts and crafting materials.
Remember Unbroken Tooth in Legion? Well, the functional equivalent of that is Calcified Bone in BfA, which is selling for an average of 6 copper on my server. It’s supposed to be a higher-tier material, but all it does is displace the actually-useful Blood-Stained Bone material in Skinning – which will be relevant all expansion due to people crafting and scrapping leather wrists for Expulsom. So why have Calcified Bone at all? Why not split Blood-Stained Bone off and make Calcified Bone the crafting material needed for mail gear or whatever?
There’s not a good reason other than the lazy interns tasked with designing professions. But they’re going to get away with it because of Warfronts.
Basically, Warfronts are going to be item sinks for the entire expansion. The Horde have the turn-ins this week, and they include things like Great Sea Catfish and Straddling Viridium. Before this week, Great Sea Catfish was absolute garbage. Not only did you catch it in fresh water (huh?), you could only cook it into non-buff food. It’s greatest claim to fame was setting the floor price for Aromatic Fish Oil. Now you need 60 of them to get 500 Azerite Power and some reputation.
Meanwhile, while the 3% movement speed gems were nice in the first three days of the new expansion, I had bought several for below vendor price in the past few weeks. Now? There was about ~6 hours in which they were selling for 400g apiece. It says a lot about the game that people were willing to pay nearly 6000g to get 500 AP, but whatever, I just supply the things.
Guild Wars 2 has a similar “solution” for its own terrible loot system, in that the Mystic Forge lets you throw 4 (stacks of) items into a hole, and sometimes get a goodie out the other side. It kinda makes up for the fact that you accumulate an astronomical amount of debris in your inventory, and Warfronts provide a similar sink.
It’s all a bandaid, of course. The fundamental issue is that Blizzard regrets the existence of professions, and doesn’t know what to do with them. Should they be the source of the best gear in the game? “No, that should be raids.” Should they give better gear than WQs? “Also no, we need people out in the world.” Should they give gear that invalidates dungeon gear? “No, unless it requires dungeon drop materials, in which case we’ll allow it.” Should crafted gear be a catch-up mechanism? “Sure, that sounds fine.” You do realize that as soon as you put on crafted gear, then WQs will start immediately offering upgrades, right? “Working as intended.”
But, whatever. Warfronts are a thing now, and I just made 60,000g in a single day because of them. Mostly from Coarse Leather Barding and Prospecting Platinum Ore for gems. Next week should be much the same, up until people stop caring about maxing out AP. Which, given how the anti-alts philosophy Blizzard had in Legion has dropped, might not be for a while.
Waycrest Manor
I completed my first dungeon in Battle for Azeroth, which was Waycrest Manor.
The first boss was the Queue. The average time to get in was 8 minutes as DPS, and I waited 45 minutes. While I waited, I fished out in the Horde area, as a level 112 Demon Hunter. The only reason I was doing a dungeon at all is because Anchor Weed Rank 2 required running said dungeon. With Anchor Weed currently selling for 550g apiece, it felt worth doing. The fish being 50g-100g apiece was bonus.
Forty-five minutes is a long time though.
Once inside, I was immediately reminded of that one dungeon in GW2, which was also inside a mansion. I was going to look it up just now, but does anyone care what it’s actually called, even if they play GW2? The bottom line is that Waycrest Manor reminded me of that other one because they are both terribly designed. You can’t have an MMO with a floating camera and then do a bunch of interior houses. It’s dumb, players can’t see shit, and you fight the camera more than the mobs.
The dungeon run was successful, but that was either because our healer was god-like or the tuning was low, even by LFD standards. More than once, I accidentally pulled extra groups of mobs trying to utilize Fel Rush, especially since my Azerite Powers boosted it. This included accidentally pulling one of the bosses (Raal). Somehow we muddled through it all – probably because the healer was a Monk – and I got my Anchor Weed book and we defeated the final boss.
My druid is another herbalist, and I’m debating whether or not to try and knock out the quest sooner or later. Respeccing as a tank would certainly help with queue times, but I’m a bit leery of the dungeon in general. And, you know, getting back on the saddle in terms of tanking.
Or I could just farm leather/herb for another 45 minutes while sitting in the queue and not worry about respeccing at all, trying to change Azerite Powers, etc etc. Hmm. Tough choice.
Leveling Punishment
C.T. Murphy recently wrote:
Leveling, as in playing the game, is still a lot of fun in World of Warcraft. Leveling, as in playing a roleplaying game where you expect your character to advance and evolve, has never been worse.
When you level up in Battle for Azeroth, you get nothing. No talents, abilities, or anything of any kind of merit whatsoever. Everything scales now too so there isn’t even a sense of “being able to go places I previously couldn’t”. Outside of padding, I don’t understand why they added more levels in the first place.
This is 100% accurate with my own WoW experience currently.
We are approaching three weeks since the expansion launched. I was on vacation for a week in the middle there, but the fact remains that my first toon hit level 113 on Thursday. It’s not that the leveling is slower, it’s that there isn’t any point to it. WoW fully embraced the TES: Oblivion conceit of punishing players for leveling up. At least, that’s how I feel about it right now.
Seriously though, think about it. Everyone talks about how the stories and quest-lines in BfA are excellent. Okay… are any of them gated by level? I don’t think so. Maybe the War Campaign? In which case it might actually be better to turn off XP at level 111 and just complete all your questing with your uber Legion gear (including Legendaries) and breeze through the mobs. You get nothing but weaker during the leveling process. That’s literally insane game design.
Of course, once you finish all the story bits, the actual endgame is still gated at level 120. And it would certainly suck if you ever changed your mind and had to gain 9 levels with zero questing opportunities. But the mere fact that this almost sounds plausible is blowing my mind.
As it stands, my primary purpose in logging in is checking the AH, and doing some light farming based on the prices of the day. The questing is fine, but it’s literally worse than doing quests at max level, considering how your character gets weaker each time they level up. So, I would rather run around hitting resource nodes and fill up my gold bar than my XP bar.
At least the former will make my gaming experience feel better.
Disposable Professions
As of Battle for Azeroth, WoW professions have become almost entirely disposable.
I noticed this last night as I was puttering around on some of my alts. Three of them wear leather armor, so I was hopping onto each one trying to remember which had Leatherworking. As it turns out, none of them did. So, without much thought, I dropped Skinning on the rogue and then… paused. “Leather is cheap, but those Blood-Stained Bones are relatively expensive.” Then I decided that my druid would likely be more efficient at AoE farming for leather anyway, so I logged onto her and then dropped Enchanting without a pause and gave her Skinning.
If you have not been keeping track at home, Blizzard had been moving towards the Single Expansion Relevance model for a while now. Professions used to start at 1, and you would need to dedicate tens of thousands of gold/hours farming to level them up to 300+ just to get near where current-content gear was. If you kept up, you were sitting pretty, because everyone else just coming back from a break or brand new players had a huge grind ahead of them.
It was not a particularly elegant model, but it still felt… reasonable. Plus, the constant need for old-world mats for newly profession-ed characters meant that lowbies had a good shot at become rich by just gathering herbs/ore as they leveled. There was a whole micro-economy that existed there, including the savvy Auctioneers who were able to throw together a “profession kit” that would allow someone to max out to current content within 30 minutes. The dedication needed to remain in your own professions would inspire people to level alts just to have additional options, who then needed to be leveled and geared and fed a diet of AH materials, and so on, and so forth.
Then things started to change.
The first steps were allowing players to harvest current-expansion nodes even as a starter herbalist/miner. Blizzard made sure that the product extracted was basically junk, or 1/10th of the normal result, but you could at least tap the node. And that was reasonable, especially for the gathering professions, as it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to force high-level characters to be scouring old Azeroth for Tin nodes.
Then came the gimmie recipes for crafters, which allowed them to use current-expansion resources to rank up 400+ levels. One would think that such a feature killed off the old-school profession kits, but all it really did was set a price ceiling at which it was cheaper to just buy new herbs/ore. This was especially true at the beginning of an expansion, when the latest herbs/ore were selling for hundreds of gold apiece.
Somewhere in there, Blizzard also introduced profession books, which would allow you to “relearn” all the recipes you had lost when abandoning a profession.
With BfA, the circle is now complete. Professions are entirely stratified into expansion-specific tiers. Profession bonuses, which were the bane of hardcore raiders, were watered-down and diluted into irrelevance. Once a part of your character’s identity and story, professions are, at most, a (temporary) economic decision. Hell, in the heady days of a new expansion release, it can sometimes be worth the 1000g fee to relearn a profession if you can make ten times that amount in a night of being a temporary whatever. Blizzard helpfully removed most of the dungeon requirements for 3-star ranks, so the barriers has never been lower.
And all of that is probably for the best.
I sat here a while, exploring my feelings on the matter, before coming to that conclusion. I am a huge critic of any game design in which someone can lose on the character select screen, and WoW’s profession bonuses combined with the grind back up to max rank was just another form of that. That is on top of the ~5%/month churn rate which could see your entire MMO population turn over every 20 months. A new expansion is usually released how often, again? It’s just not a good design IMO to require people to pump out thousands of useless pieces of junk to increase a number to a sufficient degree to get to starting line.
Nevertheless, yeah, there is a part of me that had fond memories of the old system. My namesake paladin has been a Jewelcrafting/Alchemist since 2008 and none of that matters. I spent hundreds of hours leveling up a fleet of alts to cover every profitable base each expansion, and now the same thing could be done by one toon and a willingness to drop 1000g.
I am sort of waiting for the day when Blizzard just goes full GW2 and lets you buy extra profession slots for real money and otherwise just be done with the restrictions altogether.
P2Emote
Clash Royale has veered into an interesting monetization direction.
The game has always had built-in P2W-lite elements, and still does. Specifically, you can buy gold and special treasure chests, both of which can accelerate your progression well above the curve. Will it be a permanent advantage? No. Eventually your overleveled troops will carry you to enough victories to place you where your power-level and skill levels indicate. That the system is (eventually) self-correcting does not diminish the fact that you bought wins, but nevermind.
These days, Supercell has fully committed to… emotes. Lots and lots of emotes.
It’s been about two years since Supercell initially double-down on the emote trolling, only to back down three months later. The “backing down” required you to specifically mute your opponents every single game, but at some point they allowed the setting to stay on. However, one of the downsides was that muting emotes then muted them from your own teammate. There really wasn’t much communication possible via emotes, but it was sometimes useful to be able to “complain” about your partner’s inanity.
Towards the end of June of this year, Supercell released the new Goblin emotes. At first, I thought this seemed a bit silly. I mean, they were sold in $25 bundles that included a bunch of gold and cards which effectively made the emotes “free,” but it’s hard to imagine a company selling a sort of cosmetic item that anyone can just disable entirely. Later on, Supercell went on to just sell packages of emotes for $5, and mix and matching the types of bundles.
The funny thing is… I turned emotes back on. And I am somewhat serious about wanting to buy a certain combination of emotes.
The specific scenario I want to be able to communicate via emote is when my own 2v2 partner does something unbelievably fucking stupid. Like, every person I get matched with is supposed to be around my own skill level, right? So how can they be so dumb? It’s one thing to be interrupted while playing the game. It’s something else entirely to place troops poorly, or not at all, or basically get flustered and do random shit.
Goblins have a “roll eyes” and “this is fine (burning building)” emote and I want, nay, need to be able to communicate this to my opponents. Not my own teammate, because they either already know they fucked up, or are too stupid to comprehend it anyway. Just something a bit more… precise than simply the default “angry” emote plus sending a Fireball to the King Tower – the nigh-universal “I give up” action.
I didn’t think emotes could possibly work as a monetization strategy, especially when you can turn them off at will, but here we are. Supercell surprises me again.
The Quick & Dirty Guide to: State of Decay 2
I’m going to assume you have played through the State of Decay 2 tutorial and have a general idea of basic game mechanics. This Quick & Dirty guide is meant to take that baseline knowledge and advance you to the mid-game without needing to waste energy on trial and error.
General Tips
One of the best tips in the game.
- Blood Plague is only contracted when the Infection meter fills up all the way. If you cycle your characters regularly, Blood Plague shouldn’t really ever be a concern.
- Keep an eye on any AI-controlled partners though, as it’s tougher to notice when they take a lot of Infection damage.
- You can Dodge (“C” on PC) in any direction, and can pass through zombie models.
- Dodge backwards through zombie behind you, immediately grapple and execute.
- Dodging forward too early can result in still taking damage.
- If you park a vehicle in a base parking spot, you can transfer duffel bags in the trunk by pressing “T.”
- Save duffel bag turn-ins for characters that need the Standing gains.
- Scoped weapons can zoom in with “Z.”
- In single-player Offline mode, Exiting to Main Menu will despawn Freaks in the vicinity.
- Shooting a Bloater in the head will reduce the toxic gas emitted, but the body still acts as a landmine.
- Juggernauts can almost be meleed to death within the duration of one Smoke Grenade.
Base Selection/Planning
There are several different types of bases available, and the exact configurations of them are different between the different maps. Don’t stress too much about picking the perfect base the first time, as you receive a 100% refund of all resources when moving bases. The Facilities themselves will need to be rebuilt, but they are built faster for the first day, post-move.
That said, there are some things to keep in mind:
- A Workshop, Infirmary, and Garden/Hydroponics are pretty much required in every base.
- Each survivor eats 1 Food/day, and generally you’ll need 2 Medicine/day to heal.
- Bases often come with “built-in” Facilities that cannot otherwise be replaced. Make sure you can take advantage of them, else they are wasted slots.
- Dismantling a Facility results in a 100% refund of resources.
- There is no reason to keep certain Large-slot Facilities around once you craft their specific items.
- For example, get rid of Auto Shop after you craft Vehicle Upgrade kits.
- No reason to keep Forge around once you crafted several melee weapons.
- The Staging Area Facility can get extremely lucrative as you upgrade other Facilities – the one in my base “generates” +5 Materials per day by itself.
Pictured: Staging Area pulling its weight.
It is possible to optimize the configuration of your base and Outposts to essentially achieve perfect homeostasis eventually. Don’t spend too much of your time worried about that, however, as it will require looting specific mods and recruiting survivors with good skills. What you should focus on is getting to a point where you can last several days without critically running out of specific resources – having a -2/day deficit of a resource is nothing if you already have 20 of that resource.
Outposts
Don’t worry too much about picking the “perfect one.” There are no special outposts – the list of possible benefits are standardized:
- +1 Food/Fuel/Building Materials/Medicine/Ammo
- +2 Beds
- Base-wide Water (costs 1 Fuel/Day)
- Base-wide Electricity (costs 1 Fuel/Day)
- Morale Bonus
- Morale Bonus + Espresso
- Artillery Strike
In other words, there are no Outposts that give +2 Ammo, or +4 Beds, ect.
Ideally, you will want to have Outposts evenly distributed around the map, rather than bunched up in one part of town. That way, there will be an Outpost nearby at all times, so you can offload non-Duffel Bag loot and/or swap out a tired/injured character.
I should really move one of those Outposts into the circled areas.
If you can afford to, having one empty Outpost slot can take your looting game to the next level. As your inventory fills up, claim whatever building you are in as an Outpost and then offload your gear. Then, through the Base screen go ahead and abandon the Outpost. You get 100% of your Influence back when you abandon an Outpost, so you lose nothing by doing this, other than the opportunity cost of not getting +1 whatever.
Survivor Management
The key thing to understand is that not all survivors are worth keeping around. You should absolutely recruit every single person you can, but only because it’s easier to check their Skills/Traits that way. There is no penalty, Morale or otherwise, for Exiling a member, so be sure to do so when necessary (and after stripping them of all gear). You can have a maximum of 10 survivors at your base – nine would be better, if only because you lose the ability to recruit anyone once you have 10.
Pictured: someone who won’t long survive the zombie apocalypse.
There are generally three things you want to look for in a survivor.
First, do they have any negative Traits? If they have something like “Lacks Boundaries” (-5 Morale to everyone), then think rather long and hard as to whether they have any other redeeming value.
Second, do they have any Skills without 7 (blank) stars? If so, it means that that particular Skill cannot be upgraded to a specialized version. For example, I had (emphasis on had) a survivor with the Used Car Salesman Trait, which meant that their Mechanics skill was permanently limited to three stars. That still counts enough to build an level 3 Workshop, but not enough to specialize in Automechanics and unlock the Auto Shop. Since the specialized skills can actually grant really good bonuses, there really isn’t a reason to keep any of these limited survivors around.
Drop these useless survivors like they’re hot.
The only exceptions, on a case-by-case basis, would be those with 1-star skills. Sometimes those provide unique bonuses that can make it worth it.
The final consideration for survivors is their 5th skill slot. If that area is blank, then great! A blank slot will allow you to teach the survivor any particular skill you have a book for, giving you the opportunity to plug any skill gaps in your base. If not blank, make sure it’s actually a skill you need.
As a bonus note, new survivors start out with the Recruit rank. After earning enough Influence, they become Citizens, which then tells you what bonuses they provide should they achieve the Hero rank. Some of these bonuses are so-so, like +3 Morale. Others are straight-up bonkers, like Tough Negotiator granting +30% Influence gain. Which, by the way, affects how much Influence you get by selling things – Bulk Plague Cure goes from 500 Influence to 650. So, if a particular survivor is borderline, it’s worth sending them out long enough to hit Citizen level, and check their Hero bonus.
Recruiting survivors
If you’re looking for more people, there are basically two ways to get them. First is helping survivors out in the world, e.g. answering all those inane radio messages every 5 minutes.
The second method is recruiting directly from Enclaves. Talk with each member of an Enclave, and look at their stats by choosing “Learn more about Survivor.” Their specific Traits will be hidden, but their Skill list will not. If you find one you like, keep in mind that recruiting them will effectively disband the Enclave. There will always be more Enclaves popping up, but you’ll need to help them out again and the bonuses they provide aren’t always the same.
Skills
As your survivors level up, they will have the opportunity to specialize their Skills. At a minimum, you always get two choices. One key note about Skills is the fact that they have a “hidden” bonus effect once you max them out. Sometimes that is enough to make or break your decision.
There aren’t many Wikis out there at the moment, but here’s the best I could find.
Some specific notes:
Cardio–>Powerhouse is incredibly strong. While it grants the ability to Drop Kick right away, once you hit 7 stars you unlock the ability to Grapple from the front. This move not only interrupts zombie attack animations, it essentially allows you to chain kill entire mobs of zombies, given how you get a few invincibility frames performing the move.
Fighting –> Endurance grants you the Slam move right away, which will vastly increase your survivability. Basically, the Slam move interrupts zombie attack animations, and leaves them on the ground behind you for an easy execution.
Shooting –> Gunslinger is unique in that “Aim Snap” basically allows you to instantly and perfectly track the head of zombies (at the cost of Stamina). Note: it is currently broken as of patch 2.0.
Wits –> Stealth is better than it sounds, and certainly better than Scouting. Stealth allows you to sprint while crouched, and silently open stuck doors.
Gaining Influence
For the most part, gaining Influence is a slow, incremental process. You get some for completing quests, but most of your gains will be from killing zombies:
- Kill X zombies = +5
- Kill Screamer = +5
- Kill Bloater = +10
- Kill Feral = +20
- Kill Juggernaut = +50
I’m not 100% sure of those values, as I have a +30% bonus to Influence gain from a survivor, so I’m working backwards.
Beyond that, you can get Influence from selling things. The absolute best gain comes from crafting and selling Bulk Plague Cure, which defaults to +500 Influence (or +650 with bonuses) from spending 20 Plague Samples and 8 Meds. This means each Plague Sample laying around is worth about 25 Influence by itself, considering Meds can be produced by a Garden. So, yeah, pick them up.
Somewhat surprisingly, traders actually care about those random notes you can occasionally loot. If you bothered holding onto them, they will sell for 10-15 Influence apiece. Backpacks are also nice items to sell, especially as you cycle through survivors and slowly upgrade them to 8-slot ones.
Taking Out Plague Hearts
e.g. beating the game.
While scary at first, Plague Hearts are almost comically easy to destroy. You will essentially handle them the same way you (eventually) handle all zombie groups.
- Get a visual on the target, preferably from outside the building.
- Toss a roll of Firecrackers near the target.
- Toss 3-6 Fuel Canisters/Molatovs at target.
- ???
- Profit.
This isn’t the only way to take them out. You can get fancy by crafting some C4, sneaking in to plant it, then blowing it up. Regular grenades technically work, but not as well as fire. If you happen across a 50-caliber rifle, several shots (recently nerfed to 6) from that will kill it too. Entire clips of gunfire will work in a pinch as well, but there’s no such thing as a Plague Heart “pinch” – just leave and come back with molatovs, because the Plague Heart isn’t going anywhere.
Missed the Plague Heart though, because it was in the back.
One of my favorites though? Drone Strike. Get a survivor with Computers –> Programming. Spend 25 Parts and wait ~20 minutes for drones to come online. Spend 75 Influence to get the targeting smoke. Toss the smoke near the outside wall closest to the Plague Heart, then run away. Instant death, +150 Influence. The blast ignores walls and is fairly large, although not quiet large enough to hit a Plague Heart at the back of a house if the smoke is on the front porch. The smoke doesn’t register indoors, by the way, so don’t toss it too close to the eaves either.
Drone strikes are a great way to clear hostile Enclaves too, without needing to put yourself at risk.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Has anyone else felt like Battle for Azeroth is a bit… familiar? Like Legion 2.0?
The situation didn’t really strike me until last night. I do not have a character at max level – I have been just gathering and crafting pretty much nonstop – but I have progressed enough to unlock the Garrison. Or War Table. Or whatever the hell it’s called now. It’s pretty much exactly the same interface as the one in Legion, up to an including the same art assets. The same chance for bonus loot. The same method of collecting resources. World Quests are the same. Emissaries are the same… I think. Rare mobs and treasure chests peppering the map are the same.
On the one hand, this is great. These systems work. Remember Daily Quests? We had those since TBC and everyone was sick of them. World Quests on the other hand, feel materially different despite providing the same function. Artifact Power got a bit goofy near the end of Legion, but overall design structure of having steady progression over the life of an expansion without incentivizing mindless grinding worked (crazy mythic raiders excluded). So we have Azerite replacing AP without even needing to replace the term “AP.” Double efficiency!
On the other hand… I dunno.
There is a lot to be said about the penchant of Blizzard devs to throw out the baby, bathwater, and kitchen sink simultaneously, between releases. How many times have warlocks been overhauled, even mid-expansion? At the same time, I feel like the devs have perhaps hewn a bit too close to what came before with BfA. Where are the “Aha!” moments? Where are the game-changers? Where are the elements that justify an 8.0 instead of a 7.4? Is a bunch of new maps enough?
The launch of BfA was so smooth because there was no demarcation between it and Legion.
I suppose we should be happy, yeah? Less absurd content droughts, more design systems that clearly work instead of wild experiments. Any yet, my brow is furrowed. What is Blizzard doing with all that time they saved? No new talents, no new classes, no new races (Allied Races are reskins, IMO), no new systems. Maybe the island battles with the “advanced AI” will change things? Am I missing something else?
I remember when Farms were introduced in MoP, and it blew my mind. Or the rare elite mobs that dropped cool (and functional!) toys to use. Then Garrisons in WoD. Of course, the Garrison wasn’t necessarily good design insofar as they kept people locked in a personal instance all the time, but from a player perspective they were really compelling (and rewarding). To this day, I still have several characters doing chores around the Garrison, crafting bags and such.
Then there were the Artifacts in Legion. To this day, it blows my mind how much content Blizzard packed in there. Like, do you guys understand how much class-specific content was added in one expansion? There was some recycling when it came to unlocking some of the spec-specific weapons – I groaned every time I got sent back to Karazhan on alts – but everything was basically brand new per class. It’s a real shame alts were actively punished so much during Legion, but I may end up going back at some point to finish the class campaigns just for the lore. My jaw hit the floor when my Death Knight started taking orders from the Lich King, for example.
Now, in Battle for Azeroth we can be excited for… uh… hmm.
I’m not looking to be buried under 2+ full skill bars, or DPS rotations that require an addon to perform. I don’t necessarily even want something that will compel me to spend 10 minutes maintaining it every day, three expansions later. But I do very much enjoy a new puzzle to wrap my mind around and optimize. And I’m not seeing anything remotely like that in Battle for Azeroth thus far. Just a lot of reused, recycled systems with new numbers to the right of the plus sign.
That is what character progression MMOs are about, of course. Usually, there’s more spice though.
In An Age 
Battlefield V is Awful
Sep 7
Posted by Azuriel
Holy shit is Battlefield V some hot garbage.
The open beta just came out, so you can go play it for yourself. It’s roughly a 12GB download, and I regretted it almost immediately.
You will note that I am not saying that the one specific map is hot garbage, even though it is. No, I am talking about the entire Battlefield experience. We have known from previews and the like that DICE was radically changing the mechanics, but it wasn’t until I actually sat down and played it that I realized how terrible they all were.
Ammo is severely limited. You have two, maybe three clips of ammo. See some figures running around in the distance? Shoot at them for a few seconds, reload, and… oh, hey, you have 30 bullets left. This change was supposed to make the Support class more useful, I think, but the reality is that no one is Support because you die instantly and can’t shoot anyone as Support.
Oh, and by the way, as Support you have infinite respawning ammo pouches to give other people, but you cannot resupply yourself. I ran around for five solid minutes with 15 bullets left in my mag, throwing ammo pouches left and right. I could only toss them when aiming directly at teammates – no throwing them at your feet and getting ammo yourself. I suppose they assume there will be two Support classes resupplying each other? This may or may not be alleviated once you unlock the actual Ammo Crate, but I have no idea.
Health is severely limited. While you start with 100 HP, there are breakpoints at which you cannot auto-heal past. In other words, if you get shot down to 10 HP, you will automatically regain HP up to like 65 HP or whatever. To heal yourself further than that, you need a Medic. In isolation, this is a change I’m kinda in favor of. It’s frustrating getting a few good shots into a target, only to have them hide and come back out at full health. But it’s a problem when…
Time-to-Kill is 0.00000001. Okay, that’s a bit exaggerated, but for the most part you will be dead before you realize that you are getting shot. In the case that you aren’t immediately killed from random gunfire, hiding will cause you to only heal up to 1/3 or half health, beyond which you will be instantly killed by any sniper tagging you in the foot.
All of the above combines into a bitter, shit stew of disappointment.
Spawn in somewhere. Run around, get shot a few times, now you’re at 10 HP. You heal up as best you can, but now you’ll be one-shot by any sniper in the area. Or maybe you kill a dude before getting shot yourself. You’re in a good position on the field, but… you only have 20 bullets left. Well, you may as well charge into the building and hope for the best, right? Kill a dude, go down yourself, then miraculously get revived by a medic. Except now you just have your pistol, and you get killed by the enemy as they retake the site.
I’m not entirely sure what I expected. Probably not a worse Battlefield 1, that’s for sure. But it’s hard to fully grasp how terrible this series has become, and for what possible reason. In Battlefield 2, Battlefield 3, and Battlefield 4, the game was about 64-player matches in which you did crazy-cool things with tanks and planes flying everywhere, dropping out of helicopters, and so on and so forth. Then DICE put out Hardline and it flopped. Then came Battlefield 1, which didn’t flop, but was oppressive as shit, and not at all fun to play. Now we have an even-worse set of gameplay systems, and less vehicles to boot.
It’s not hard, people. Just let us have fun shooting things. If I wanted an oppressive battlefield environment in which I had no individual agency, had to rely on teammates that failed to deliver, and was barred from doing any cool things, then… I would just go back to work. Like I do every day.
Luckily, DICE can fix these things. There’s still time to just give everyone two additional magazines, let Supports and Medics supply themselves, and bring up the TTK numbers. Now, whether DICE actually does so before launch or only after BFV sales flop, that’s up to them.
Until said changes are made though, I’m sitting this Battlefield out.
Posted in Commentary
3 Comments
Tags: Battlefield, Battlefield V, EA, Game Design, Hot Garbage, Time To Kill