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Shadowlands Complete
Not complete complete, of course, but I successfully leveled up to 60, saw all the story zones, and spent a week doing dailies/world quests. Just got to repeat that last part for two years, and that’s a wrap.
In case you’re curious, I broke down and just plowed through the story on my Guardian druid. The tipping point was the fact that the herbs in Bastion had came down to 30g each, but the ones from later zones were still selling for 120g apiece. Under normal expansion scenarios, I would just head over to the new places even if I were underleveled, and just hope to find a few farming spots with neutral mobs. Unfortunately for me, Shadowlands is locked up pretty tight. “Fine, I’ll just do the story quests and nothing else.”
As it turns out, you can just do the story quests and sail into the endgame pretty quickly. I’m not quite sure how things would have worked out had I not been gaining supplemental XP from picking herbs, but I was quite pleased that optional quests were optional.
I concur with just about everyone that Blizzard stumbled with the beginning zones in Shadowlands. The Maw “tutorial” is a drag and never actually gave me any impression that it was as terrible a place as it was portrayed. The Maw at the endgame though, that feels hostile and properly hellish. In any case, going from the Maw tutorial into Oribos and into Bastion was just an incredibly weak, underwhelming transition. There’s a point where a quest giver says something like “this might not look like much with the drought, but see how it used to look,” and then they show you… the same sterile landscape with some white light beams in the sky. I seriously questioned whether a bug or something was preventing the “vibrant” Bastion from appearing. Nothing drives this more home than when you eventually see Elysian Hold, which was actually impressive.
I will further agree with everyone that things flip 180 degrees when you drop into Maldraxxus. It’s textbook “Show, Don’t Tell” right from the start. The entire zone experience is so well-crafted that you have to wonder if it was really designed by the same team. Maybe it wasn’t? From previews of the zone I was a bit worried that a sort of plague/undead zone in an afterlife setting would be boring, especially when you already have the Maw. And, you know, pretty much that exact zone motif in every expansion going back to Plaguelands in Classic. Instead, it felt just right that the final resting place of warriors is a sort of destroyed wasteland battle royale, with bugs, slimes, necromancers, and literal warts on the landscape that you can skin for leather.
As for the remaining two zones, they were okay. Ardenweald started to become intriguing, but ran on just a bit too long for my tastes. I’m a sucker for “everyone you helped earlier marching alongside you at the end” though, so it got some late points. With Revendreth, I think the zone layout was made bad on purpose, and that annoys me – the map is all but useless at assisting you to navigate the severe verticality. I also had an issue with a particular “reveal” about the anima drought that made no sense. I don’t know what counts as a spoiler, so I’ll just post this link, which basically sums up my confusion.
So that is that.
My plans, for now, is to continue doing some basic chores in the form of Callings, herbing, and whatever Covenant stories I manage to unlock. Aside from that, I will be focusing on… perhaps the Warlock, getting them to the level cap and otherwise doing some random BGs for giggles. Once Raid Finder difficulties unlock, maybe seeing how those things go. And then? Letting the sub lapse again, most likely. I have already managed to get 3 WoW Tokens between selling old mats and grinding new ones, so that should cover me for a while.
Unprepared
I am not prepared for Shadowlands.
Given how I only restarted playing WoW on a whim after a two year lapse, it is debatable how prepared I should be at this point. And yet I have been playing daily since then. Know what I have been doing? Perhaps leveling up on the Horde side? Leveling my characters to 50? Deciding on which character is my (new) main?
Nope. I was working on unlocking flying in BfA. Because that’s a priority… for some reason.
Like so many things, I started with good intentions. I created a Horde druid to experience BfA from the other side and to unlock Vulpera eventually. Thing is, the lack of mobility is a huge drag, especially with the way the main Horde hub is set up. Since I was on a new server, I did not have spare gold to even purchase Goblin Glider kits. “This would be a better experience with flying.” So off I went back to the Alliance Demon Hunter, the only level 50 I had.
In fairness, I did get at least two other classes to 50 in the meantime. But most of my playtime has been emptying banks full of outdated crafting material at bargain-basement prices and doing Tortollan and Champion of Azeroth dailies, as I did two years ago. I think the fact that all the necessary reps were already into Honored territory lulled me in a false sense of security that I could achieve the Achievement in a reasonable amount of time. Which I did!
…Pathfinder Part 1, anyway.
Alas, even though Blizzard’s philosophy has changed in Shadowlands, they decided not to drop reputation requirements to BfA flying. At least, not yet. So after spending a few weeks grinding one set of reputations, I unlocked the need to grind two more, right before the release of an expansion that makes it all moot anyway. All for what? The ease to experience quest text at slightly faster pace? I try to optimize many things in the course of playing videogames, but I recognize that sometimes it spins me off in absurd directions.
Or perhaps I was just subconsciously rebelling against the fundamental task. I am referring to experiencing the Horde side of things, but it might very well be playing an MMO casually at all. Think about how many polished single-player games I could have experienced in that same amount of time.
On the other hand, IRL work has picked up significantly and sometimes I just want to turn my mind off and plow through some meaningless but achievable, repetitive tasks. And there ain’t many things better than WoW for those.
Also, I’ll be paying for Shadowlands and another two months of gametime (if necessary) exclusively via WoW Tokens. There really isn’t a better time to make bank than the release of a new expansion, so I kinda don’t want to miss that. You know, setting up for the expansion after this one.
Two Days
My WoW subscription expires in two days, and I think I’ll let it.
This isn’t particularly Big News or anything, but experiencing the internal process has been interesting to me. I have been cashing out my gold for the past several weeks, to the point where I keep around 200k liquid gold, one WoW Token in the bags, and applying Blizzard Balance to the rest. Even now I could just right-click the WoW Token and be good for another month.
But what am I even doing?
Well, making gold. I still make Hexweave Bags because they still sell for 1400g despite current-expansion 30-slot bags go for 800g. I still do the MoP farm on one character, because those mats sell daily for around ~1500g. I herb whenever I run around on the Demon Hunter doing dailies (towards unlocking Pathfinder, Part 1), and that pulls in a couple extra grand. All told, I log in every day to the tune of 5k-10k a day. Peanuts to any serious goblin, but since I’m not seriously doing anything, getting paid $30-$45/month to play WoW seems pretty good. Especially when there is a spike in demand when the Warfront Contributions come around.
But… that’s it. There’s a bit more involved than the Garrison days, but I’m essentially logging in to collect my gold, muck around a bit to see if there are new markets to explore, and then logging off. That was good enough to justify things last month. Not so sure it still holds up this month.
Yeah, it’s probably for the best to let things lapse. I’ll check back in patch 8.1. Maybe. Fallout 76 beta should be in the next three weeks, so who knows.
Verdict
It was a bad stick of RAM.
No, seriously.
In retrospect, a kinda “duh” moment. I mean, I had never before knew that bad RAM could make your PC just hard shutdown and (presumably) burn a graphics card. At the same time, I did get Furmark and a CPU tester to run for 15+ minutes using my 560ti card without a crash for a while there, with all temps being normal. Plus, I replaced the PSU and the PC booted up (before crashing later). All that was really left was a RAM issue.
I declined the $30 labor costs to install new RAM, but went ahead and spent $60ish to get the Microcenter guys to remove my liquid cooler on the CPU and install a mid-line fan. I’m a parsimonious miser for most things, but even I have my limits – possibly squirting liquid coolant all over my machine or having to disassemble my own rig to prevent that, is one of the lines.
As mentioned though, the 970 card is definitely still dead. I just submitted an RMA request and we’ll see what they say. It’s within the 2-year warranty period, but I’m a “worst-case scenario” kind of guy when it comes to corporations. I’m guessing this will be a 2-3 week process, at best.
In the meantime… well, WoW works perfectly fine with the 560ti. And isn’t crashing anymore. Which has allowed me to convert all but 100k or so of my in-game gold into $180 Blizzard credit.
So yeah. There’s that.
WoW Tokens = Blizzard Cash
Blizzard finally did it. You can turn WoW Tokens into Battle.net Balance:
The end and the beginning.
I actually resubbed to WoW (using a token) just for the ability to quickly capitalize on the process. I say “quickly” for two reasons. First, because I almost couldn’t believe that Blizzard went with a $15 per token rate. Considering that 30 days of game time is already $15, there isn’t actually any reason not to just convert them all straight away.
The second reason is because the gold price of these tokens would skyrocket. And they have:
Up and down.
In fact, there were no tokens available for purchase last night; I kept getting an error message each time I tried. Which makes sense, considering that all of the goblins of the world finally have an outlet for their millions of gold. Blizzard has enough fingers in genre pies these days to cover most of the bases – DotA, ARPG, MMO, FPS, CCG, etc – so there is probably something for everyone.
Luckily (or unluckily depending on when you bought some), the price has since dropped down. Not all the way back down, but nearly 30k gold. The fun part of that graph from WoWtoken.info is how it exposes Blizzard’s pricing algorithm. As demand skyrocketed, the price of a token never exceeded +3.04% per hour. Conversely, as more tokens entered the market, the price never decreased faster than -2.98% per hour. At least, that’s what the graph shows.
As for me, my $120+ balance is likely to be spent transferring characters from the dead server of Auchindoun-US over to the high-pop server my “main” is on. At current rates, I could move… four. Out of ten. Considering that it costs Blizzard nothing to do this automated process, they are essentially capitalizing on the removal of future financial obligations (e.g. game time) for free.
Hmm. Perhaps I shall wait until another one of those 50% off sales on character transfers…
Cyber Black Fronday
This past Thanksgiving break was actually the busiest I’ve had in years, so I have not had much time for anything other than commutes and carbs.
The Haul
Pretty much the only thing I’ve bought during the various sales was Battlefield 1 for about $30. It was the physical edition, because retailers collude with the game industry to keep digital sales nonexistent, so I won’t actually receive it until sometime this week.
Time will tell whether BF1 will keep my attention for as long as BF2/3/4 did. A lot of people talk about how much better it is when there aren’t 37 people with lock-on rocket launchers running around, but I liked being one of those guys with the niche loadouts to harass the pros who otherwise get 70-1 scores with the goddamn attack helicopters. So we’ll see where I fall in the BF1 department.
Perhaps more than what I bought, it’s interesting as to what I didn’t purchase. For example: Titanfall 2 for $28. One, I thought it a bit silly to buy both Titanfall 2 and BF1 at the same time. Two, I’ve kinda already learned my lesson from last time. It’s not so much the prognostication regarding the PC population as it is concerns about matchmaking in general, the fact that some game modes already struggle to pop, and the wirehead nature of the gameplay. I dunno. Perhaps the bottom line is that my breakpoint on this game is not $28. Maybe $20.
There were some particularly good deals on things like the PS4 (an Uncharted bundle for $212), but I passed for the same reason I always pass on consoles: I don’t end up playing them. I still have a backlog on the PS3, let alone getting a new console. I feel like if I get back into couch gaming, I’ll have to upgrade the TV to make it the same equivalent size to my current monitor, or bust out the projector again, but that’s way too much work. Much easier to do nothing.
WoW Projects
I officially unlocked Draenor flying.
Whew.
So, what now? Well… I dunno. I have been logging on, doing some of the more lucrative dailies, and most recently running some old raids for transmog gear. I’m pretty sure WoW is going to fall to the wayside once Battlefield 1 arrives, and then we’ll see. I mean, I can’t really level any other characters, and I want to see where this WoW Token Battle.net balance thing goes besides.
ItsHappening.gif
- TOKEN_CONSUMABLE_DESCRIPTION_30_DAYS_BALANCE (New) – Use: Adds 30 days of game time to your World of Warcraft account or %s to your Battle.net Balance.
Time will tell how much the WoW Tokens convert into. Many seem to think it will convert into a standard $15 amount, same as a normal subscription. That makes a sort of elegant sense. I was kinda hoping that it converts into enough to cover an entire Server Transfer (currently the outrageous $25), as that means moving two toons would require four Tokens with some remainder, or perhaps three and a $5 bill thrown in. Of course, that’s not going to happen given they went the Battle.net balance route, unless Server Transfer costs go down.
Anyway, when I got wind of the WoW Token update, I quickly bought up as many Tokens as I could:
Pictured: Blizzard cutting me off.
I have five WoW Tokens on the druid now, and presumably five more somewhere. Current prices?
Nearly a 6000g discount.
Of course, it’s always possible that Blizzard doesn’t make current WoW Tokens “backwards compatible” with their new functions. In which case… shit. I guess I have 10 months of free WoW time? That said, I’m pretty sure Blizzard isn’t going to confuse the issue by having very similar but different functioning Tokens. I imagine the Fiscal department over in Irvine would prefer getting WoW Tokens out of players’ bags via Account Services rather than needing to defer possible months’ worth of subscriptions anyway.
So, we’ll see how it shakes out.
More BlizzCon Impressions
I neither went nor watched the BlizzCon festivities, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express read MMO-Champ. So here are all the tidbits from the coverage that I was interested in:
Patch 7.1.5 is coming
The first thing that I found amusing about the Patch 7.1.5 news is that it was described as a “small” patch. If you want to see a small patch, check out 6.1, eh?
In any case, the Panderia Time-Walking dungeons might be good for some people, but the bigger news is that the Brawler’s Guild is returning. I kinda missed the feature entirely when it was released, and only recently got interested after they took it back away. It’s goofy side content from what I understand, but hey, I have two quests for it already, so let’s bring it back.
The other intriguing change in 7.1.5 is that Artifact Knowledge will be “purchasable” at least up to level 10, if not higher. This is huge news for alts, whom have otherwise been hosed this entire expansion. Time will tell what form this “purchase” takes – Order Resources, Blood of Sargeras, gold? – but whatever it is should be relatively easy to overcome with a main running WQs.
Finally, Blizzard mentioned that 7.1.5 will be going on the PTR immediately after BlizzCon, then Live soon after. How soon is Soon(tm)? I want to say “not soon enough,” but honestly Nighthold is not even active yet, and that’s in the current patch. Will all these changes be rolling out before LFR even gets the last Nighthold boss unlocked? It certainly sounds that way. Which is kinda weird.
Patch 7.2 is coming
Biggest news is, of course, that Flying is getting unlocked in 7.2. I have already jumped through the Legion Pathfinder, Part 1 hoops, so I should be in good shape for whatever nonsense is required in Part 2. Word from Blizzard is that it won’t require any group content, but that doesn’t mean it won’t still be tedious.
The Tomb of Sargeras raid will open up, with Kil’Jaeden being the confirmed last boss. Which is interesting for all sorts of reasons, which I will touch on later.
What is definitely interesting to me is the introduction of “PvP Brawls.” The concept was first introduced in Hearthstone and then Overwatch later, and now we see it migrating to WoW. In short, Blizzard is finally letting its hair down and introducing more free-form experiments in game modes. 15×15 Arenas? Tarren Mill vs Southshore? Bring them on.
This is a fairly big deal because it allows Blizzard to essentially playtest these game concepts without their typical perfectionist straight-jacket. Things not work out? Oh well, it’ll rotated out next week. Blizzard has used this test bed to good effect in Hearthstone, as it resulted in Discover – by far the best card effect introduced since the game’s release. Perhaps we’ll eventually see that Arathi Basin bridge deathmatch mode that we have all wanted for years.
Patch 7.2.5 is coming
We haven’t heard much about 7.2.5 other than it will exist. Which is nice to know. Especially since it appears that we have another bombshell waiting in the wings:
Patch 7.3 is coming?
MMO-Champion just sort of teased the news, but Legion will legitimately have a patch 7.3 and we will legitimately be heading to Argus, according to a Polygon interview with Ion Hazzikostas. And then he had this to say:
“It felt like the right time,” Hazzikostas said. “I don’t know if Argus would hold up as an expansion in and of itself. We could make up a whole lot of ecologies and things there, but at the end of the day, it would feel like a very one-note, alien expansion.”
Instead, he explained, the developer decided to make Argus the climax to the current expansion. Players will head to the demon world to try to push back this massive force once and for all. He compared it to the ending of one of his favorite games of all time.
“It’s kind of like the end of Mass Effect 2,” said Hazzikostas. “We’ve been fighting on our end. Now we’re going on our suicide mission, because this is the only way to save ourselves.”
That… is pretty fucking cool. I haven’t been this excited about the WoW plot since Wrath.
For those that might not be up on the lore, Argus is the original homeworld of the Draenei, and the Velen, Kil’Jaeden, and Archimonde triad. It is, in fact, considered the “beating heart” of the Burning Legion and its de facto capital. Going there is Big News, and has been speculated for a while to be the location of WoW’s “final” expansion, insofar as it is the most likely place one would encounter Sargeras himself.
The interesting thing is the fact that we are facing Kil’Jaeden in the Tomb of Sargeras in patch 7.2. Argus is supposed to be ruled by Kil’Jaeden personally, which leads to two interesting scenarios. First, perhaps we are invading Argus specifically because it temporarily loses its leader in the 7.2. raid. No sense attacking Kil’Jaeden at the seat of his power, right?
But there is another possibility. Remember how demons, elementals, etc, don’t actually die unless they are killed in the plane they are from? What if part of the reason we head to Argus is to kill Kil’Jaeden again, this time permanently?
Technically, I think Archimonde was sent back to the Twisting Nether after Mount Hyjal, and the jury might still be out regarding what happened to him at the end of Draenor (was he in the Twisting Nether during the final phase?). But still, I find it odd that we’re heading to Argus after Kil’Jaedon’s (presumed) defeat in the Tomb if we aren’t finishing the job. There aren’t any Old Gods on Argus and I find it unlikely that we’ll be facing Sargeras himself – at most, I expect us to sacrifice all our artifacts to keep Sargeras from showing up. So… if not Kil’Jaedon/Archimonde, and not Sargeras, who are we fighting? A bunch of no-name demons?
I was skeptical along with the rest of the universe when it came to Blizzard promising that Legion would actually get supported content through the entire life of the expansion. And honestly, it still might be the case that there is a long content drought after 7.3 and before the next expansion. But, I gotta give credit where it is due: Blizzard is busting some ass. The bar is embarrassingly low for a billion dollar franchise, granted.
But I could get used to this. And certainly am, four WoW Tokens later.
Biggest News from BlizzCon
Let me just lay it on you:
- They’re looking into making the WoW Token be able to be used for other services as well like Character Transfer, Faction Change, or Battle.net Balance. (source)
You can watch the specific part on Youtube, but the bottom line is that this is coming in the “very near future,” there won’t be different Tokens, e.g. the ones you currently have will work, and this entire thing was what they had planned from the start but wanted to start slow to make sure the system worked.
This news is both incredibly good and probably bad for me. Good because I have a lot of toons trapped on Auchindoun. Bad because I don’t know when this system will be implemented. But because it is, that means I shall leave them trapped until it is implemented. Definitely don’t want to be a chump spending $25 two weeks before I could buy a dozen moves with in-game currency.
More BlizzCon impressions to follow.
In An Age 